GRGR (20) Special Topic: Is It OK to Be a Manichean?

[David Morris]

> My understanding of the "Shadow" was a manifestation
> of the trickster archetype as a part of a person's
> character, representing its small defects.  I don't
> know in what way you mean it was an "opposite." 

http://www.cgjung.com/articles/shadow.html
      
Articles in Jungian Psychology  
Shadow Dancing
Meeting Your Secret Self and Becoming Whole
by Robin Robertson
"A Jungian Approach to Unity with your Shadow Side"

There is nothing so frightening as facing the darkness
within, our inner shadow. We will do almost anything
to avoid having to look into the dark places of our
soul. And rightly so, the darkness contains much that
we mere humans can't face. There is evil, of course,
we're all too familiar with that, but there is also
much more that is neither good nor bad, but merely
beyond our human capacity to comprehend. Wonder and
beauty and all our future possibilities also lie
hidden in the darkness, and far too often in our
shortsightedness, we confuse them with evil. When we
start to automatically dismiss something as evil when
in fact it is merely outside our normal experience, we
should remember the words of poet/painter/religious
mystic William Blake: "Everything possible to be
believed is an image of truth."

There is no change that doesn't begin in the darkness
of the human soul. We first have to discover an
entrance into the darkness, then we have to light a
tiny candle in the dark, so that we can search for our
future self, and finally we have to join with it. And
that takes resourcefulness, and patience, and most of
all courage.
 
[and later]

The appearance of the shadow is in many ways a sign
that our picture of reality has become overly
simplified, too black-and-white, and needs more
shadings of grey. Any virtue carried too far can
become a vice, and any vice, if persisted in long
enough, can lead to virtue. In William Blake's radical
phrase: "The road of excess lead to the palace of
wisdom."

At the early stages of dealing with the shadow,
ambiguous but negative figures appear in our dreams.
Vampires and werewolves are common, as they are
half-human creatures of the night. At this stage we
are so set in our ways, that someone who represents
values we deny has to be seen as something less than
human. But remember that during the night, vampires
and werewolves have more than human power, and can
only be destroyed with great difficulty. Similarly,
these unwanted thoughts and feelings that are trying
to come to the surface are very powerful, and we will
have an increasingly harder time resisting them.


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