Carl Jung Shadow Quotes

Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

The best political, social, and spiritual work we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others.

Be silent and listen: have you recognized your madness and do you admit it? Have you noticed that all your foundations are completely mired in madness? Do you not want to recognize your madness and welcome it in a friendly manner? You wanted to accept everything. So accept madness too. Let the light of your madness shine, and it will suddenly dawn on you. Madness is not to be despised and not to be feared, but instead you should give it life...If you want to find paths, you should also not spurn madness, since it makes up such a great part of your nature...Be glad that you can recognize it, for you will thus avoid becoming its victim. Madness is a special form of the spirit and clings to all teachings and philosophies, but even more to daily life, since life itself is full of craziness and at bottom utterly illogical. Man strives toward reason only so that he can make rules for himself. Life itself has no rules. That is its mystery and its unknown law. What you call knowledge is an attempt to impose something comprehensible on life.

Maybe the only thing each of us can see is our own shadow. Carl Jung called this his shadow work. He said we never see others. Instead we see only aspects of ourselves that fall over them. Shadows. Projections. Our associations. The same way old painters would sit in a tiny dark room and trace the image of what stood outside a tiny window, in the bright sunlight. The camera obscura. Not the exact image, but everything reversed or upside down.

I am no longer alone with myself, and I can only artificially recall the scary and beautiful feeling of solitude. This is the shadow side of the fortune of love.

Carl Jung called this his shadow work. He said we never see others. Instead we see only aspects of ourselves that fall over them. Shadows. Projections. Our associations.

But the shadow is merely somewhat inferior, primitive, unadapted, and awkward; not wholly bad. It even contains childish or primitive qualities which would in a way vitalize and embellish human existence, but convention forbids!

The shadow can be realized only through a relation to a partner, and anima and animus only through a relation to a partner of the opposite sex, because only in such a relation do their projections become operative.

The shadow is a living part of the personality and therefore wants to live with it in some form. It cannot be argued out of existence or rationalized into harmlessness. This problem is exceedingly difficult, because it not only challenges the whole man, but reminds him at the same time of his helplessness and ineffectuality.

Unfortunately there is no doubt about the fact that man is, as a whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.

The image of God has a shadow. The supreme meaning is real and casts a shadow. For what can be actual and corporeal and have no shadows?

The secret is that only that which can destroy itself is truly alive. Life that just happens in and for itself is not real life; it is real only when it is known.

The great Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung was the first to say that everyone has a Shadow regardless of their accomplishments, talents, or appearance.

By not being aware of having a shadow, you declare a part of your personality to be non-existent. Then it enters the kingdom of the non-existent, which swells up and takes on enormous proportions…If you get rid of qualities you don’t like by denying them, you become more and more unaware of what you are, you declare yourself more and more non-existent, and your devils will grow fatter and fatter.

. . .modern people…are ignorant of what they really are. We have simply forgotten what a human being really is, so we have men like Nietzsche and Freud and Adler, who tell us what we are, quite mercilessly. We have to discover our shadow. Otherwise we are driven into a world war in order to see what beasts we are.

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other. —Carl Gustav Jung

the recognition of our shadow. ‘The best political, social, and spiritual work we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others.

The Hiding - A Haiku In shadows he dwells, Thinking is tough, he judges, Light reveals the truth.

Unless you learn to face your own shadows, you will continue to see them in others, because the world outside of you is only a reflection of the world inside of you

…this integration [of the shadow]…leads to disobedience and disgust, but also to self-reliance, without which individuation is unthinkable.

The hero, on the contrary, must realize that the shadow exists and that he can draw strength from it.

Our shadow is the pain we’ve forgotten about. It is a complex within us, a split-off part of our consciousness loaded with emotional weight. Our persona is what we most want to be seen to be; shadow is what we least want to be.

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other. —Carl Gustav Jung PART 1 RUSTLING WILLOWS Incredible coincidences without apparent cause are called synchronicities.

Unfortunately there is no doubt about the fact that man is, as a whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. –Carl Jung

In the name of the multitude he was expressing the fact that Western man is in danger of losing his shadow altogether, of identifying himself with his fictive personality and the world with the abstract picture painted by scientific rationalism. His spiritual and moral opponent, who is just as real as he, no longer dwells in his own breast but beyond the geographical line of division, which no longer represents an outward political barrier but splits off the conscious from the unconscious man more and more menacingly.

we have all, at some time or another, been guilty of mercilessness. Our own evil is a fact we often choose to ignore. Evil is not just "out there" but is the shadow Carl Jung described as lurking within every human. Whether we like it or not, it is our legacy, part and parcel of the human package. To step outside of our comfort zones and admit this takes courage, but without this sobering recognition we're more likely to lose our capacity for compassion, humility and forgiveness. If we lose our awareness of this side of our own nature, we risk becoming slaves to our own dark side. What goes unacknowledged in us has a tendency to grow larger. Tenderness and compassion are qualities we must cultivate and never take for granted. This alone would make the world a better place by far. We

The necessary and needful reaction from the collective unconscious expresses itself in archetypally formed ideas. The meeting with oneself is, at first, the meeting with one's own shadow. The shadow is a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well. But one must learn to know oneself in order to know who one is. For what comes after the door is, surprisingly enough, a boundless expanse full of unprecedented uncertainty, with apparently no one inside and no one outside, no above and no below, no here and no there, no mine and no thine, no good and no bad. It is a world of water, where all life floats in suspension; where the realm of the sympathetic system, the soul of everything living, begins; where I am indivisibly this and that; where I experience the other in myself and the other-than-myself experiences me. No, the collective unconscious is anything but an encapsulated personal system; it is sheer objectivity, as wide as the world and open to all the world. There I am the object of every subject, in complete reversal of my ordinary consciousness, where I am always the subject that has an object. There I am utterly one with the world, so much a part of it that I forget all too easily who I really am. "Lost in oneself" is a good way of describing this state. But this self is the world, if only a consciousness could see it. That is why we must know who we are." ―from_Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious_

I felt as if my own personality was changing shades or even as if I had no personality. I was a blank canvas and I let people paint their own shadows onto me freely. With what was left of my intuition I must have grasped the symbolism of it. This must be the explanation why when we were all asked by our literature teacher 'What animal do you indetify with?' I answered 'chameleon'.

The shadow exerts a dangerous fascination which can be countered only by another fascinosum. It cannot be got at by reason, even in the most rational person, but only by illumination, of a degree and kind that are equal to the darkness but are the exact opposite of “enlightenment.” For what we call “rational” is everything that seems “fitting” to the man in the street, and the question then arises whether this “fitness” may not in the end prove to be “irrational” in the bad sense of the word. Sometimes, even with the best intentions this dilemma cannot be solved. This is the moment when the primitive trusts himself to a higher authority and to a decision beyond his comprehension. The civilized man in his closed-in environment functions in a fitting and appropriate manner, that is, rationally. But if, because of some apparently insoluble dilemma, he gets outside the confines of civilization, he becomes a primitive again; then he has irrational ideas and acts on hunches; then he no longer thinks but “it” thinks in him; then he needs “magical” practices in order to gain a feeling of security; then the latent autonomy of the unconscious becomes active and begins to manifest itself as it has always done in the past.

One of Carl Jung’s notable contributions was to articulate the character of the shadow archetype: it is what the self is and includes, but denies and represses. Though it is repressed, the shadow will be heard and is invariably projected in harmful and perhaps insidious ways. Our mistreatment of animals for food is far and away our greatest cultural shadow. Our collective guilt drives us not only to hide the violence we eat but also to act it out: in our aggressive lifestyle, in movies, books, games, and other media, and in the violence we inflict both directly and indirectly on each other.

When one tries desperately to be good and wonderful and perfect, then all the more the shadow develops a definite will to be black and evil and destructive. People cannot see that; they are always striving to be marvellous, and then they discover that terrible destructive things happen which they cannot understand, and they either deny that such facts have anything to do with them, or if they admit them, they take them for natural afflictions, or they try to minimize them and to shift the responsibility elsewhere. The fact is that if one tries beyond one’s capacity to be perfect, the shadow descends into hell and becomes the devil.

we all have a shadow which we must get to know.

Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. —Carl Jung

Unfortunately there is no doubt about the fact that man is, as a whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. —Carl Jung

Along with becoming more conscious of the shadow, another integral aspect of Jung’s method of treatment was helping his patients find a meaning to their lives. For Jung believed that when stuck in a deep depression, or consumed by an anxiety disorder, to be cured necessitates discovering a “role as one of the actors in the divine drama of life” (Carl Jung, The Symbolic Life).

Carl Jung once said there is no coming to consciousness without pain. In life, the only true obstacle we face is ourselves. We must face our pain. Address our faults. Stop placing blame on others.” I stop, take a deep breath, and continue, “We must face our demons. Even if we know the process won’t be easy, we need to step forward from the shadows. The things that hurt us can also shape us into remarkable people. When I was a child, I was homeless

Stop Being So Nice Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. —Carl Jung

We live, however, in a grief-phobic and death-denying society. Consequently, grief and death have been relegated to what psychologist Carl Jung called the shadow. The shadow is the repository of all the repressed and denied aspects of our lives. We send into the shadow the parts of ourselves that we deem unacceptable to ourselves or to others, hoping to disown them. Doing this, we feel we may be spared the discomfort of having to face what has been declared unwelcome.

The thesis that we need to address the dangerous implications of the UFO and alien abduction phenomenon as a “psychic and symbolic reality,” as well as a “control system which acts on humans and uses humans,” contradicts certain trends in contemporary spiritual and New Age thought. These days, we find a strong tendency in many spiritual communities to focus single-mindedly on the power of positivity and affirmations of the light, based on ideas such as “The Law of Manifestation” or “The Secret.” The underlying belief is that each of us creates our own reality through our thoughts and intentions. Therefore, if we simply avoid anything dark or malevolent, nothing negative will be able to enter our field. But unfortunately, reality is not that simple, and this approach is a blatant form of spiritual bypassing. Paul Levy explores the idea that modern Anglo-European culture is infected by what the Algonquins call “wetiko,” a cannibalistic spirit driven by greed, excess, and selfish consumption. “Spiritual/New Age practitioners who endlessly affirm the light while ignoring the shadow” fall “under the spell of wetiko,” he writes. By seeking to turn away from and hide their darkness, these practitioners unwittingly reinforce “the very evil from which they are fleeing. Looking away from darkness, thus keeping it unconscious, is what evil depends upon for its existence. If we unconsciously react … to evil by turning a blind eye toward it – “seeing no evil” – we are investing the darkness with power over us.” The alternative is to permeate evil with awareness, “stalking” the shadow so we can catch and assimilate it. Carl Jung wrote, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” If the thesis developed in this essay has validity, then New Age spiritual practitioners will have to overcome their bypassing and confront the dark side of the psyche, reckoning with the occult control system. At the same time, political and ecological activists will need to interrogate their inveterate bias toward a purely materialist analysis, to acknowledge the existence of occult, hyper-dimensional, forces at work behind the scenes, influencing the course of events. And conspiracy theorists who believe in an incredibly evil, highly organized and intelligent cabal of human controllers working to bring about a New World Order surveillance society of enslavement will have to recognize that the controllers operating behind the scenes are not humans at all. Here and there, the Bible gets this right - as in Ephesians: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” If we aren’t aiming at the proper targets, we will never hit the mark.

None of us are as good as we like to think. We possess animalistic drives for sex and power. We have a cruel and aggressive side that can do great harm to others, and we tend to deny our flaws and weaknesses. But what we deny does not disappear, it sinks into the unconscious and congregates in what Carl Jung called the shadow.

As with Jekyll and Hyde, the shadow is our inner hostile sibling and represents what we are missing, and in that way it naturally affects our relationship to our own gender. What we admire or dislike in other men or women often reflects our own hidden face. That rejected part of ourselves is most often first encountered through projecting it onto others.

We live, however, in a grief-phobic and death-denying society. Consequently, grief and death have been relegated to what psychologist Carl Jung called the shadow. The shadow is the repository of all the repressed and denied aspects of our lives.

Carl Jung said that children do not distinguish between ritual and reality. In the world of childhood, toys are ritual objects with powerful meaning and resonance. To a child, a mountain of toys is more than something to trip over. It’s a topographical map of their emerging worldview. The mountain, casting a large symbolic shadow, means “I can choose this toy, or that, or this one way down here, or that: They are all mine! But there are so many that none of them have value. I must want something else!” This worldview shapes their emotional landscape as well; children given so very many choices learn to undervalue them all, and hold out—always—for whatever elusive thing isn’t offered. “More!” Their feelings of power, from having so much authority and so many choices, mask a larger sense of vulnerability.

From the beginning of time, humans have dealt with what Carl Jung called their shadow side—feelings of inferiority, self-hate, guilt, hostility—by projecting it onto an enemy. It has remained for Becker to make crystal clear the way in which warfare is a social ritual for purification of the world in which the enemy is assigned the role of being dirty, dangerous, and atheistic. Dachau, Capetown and Mi Lai, Bosnia, Rwanda, give grim testimony to the universal need for a scapegoat—a Jew, a nigger, a dirty communist, a Muslim, a Tutsi. Warfare is a death potlatch in which we sacrifice our brave boys to destroy the cowardly enemies of righteousness. And, the more blood the better, because the bigger the body-count the greater the sacrifice for the sacred cause, the side of destiny, the divine plan.

There are many follies now popular which derive from the doctrine of Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961). One of the most insidious is the New Age tactic of jettisoning any onus for honest analysis of setbacks in purported spiritual or therapeutic communities. 'We deny the existence of our shadow and project it onto others.' Thus the critic is evil; the criminal goes free, especially if he happens to be an alternative therapist.