The Shadow Eﬀect
Illuminating the Hidden P ower of Y our T rue Self
Deepak Chopra
Debbie F ord
Marianne Williamson
OceanofPDF .comContents
Introduction
 
Part I
The Shadow
Deepak Chopra
 
Part II
Making P eace with Ourselves, Others, and the W orld
Debbie F ord
 
Part III
Only Light Can Cast Out Darkness
Marianne W illiamson
 
The Shadow Eﬀect T est
 
About the Authors
Credits
Copyright
About the P ublisher
OceanofPDF .comIntroduction
The conﬂict between who we ar e and who we want to be is
at the cor e of the human struggle. Duality, in fact, lies at the
very center of the human e xperience. Life and death, good
and evil, hope and r esignation coe xist in every person and
exert their for ce in every facet of our lives. If we know
courage, it is because we have also e xperienced fear; if we
can r ecognize honesty, it is because we have encounter ed
deceit. And yet most of us deny or ignor e our dualistic
natur e.
If we ar e living under the assumption that we ar e only one
way or another, inside a limited spectrum of human
qualities, then we would have to question why mor e of us
aren’t wholly satisﬁed with our lives right now . Why do we
have access to so much wisdom yet fail to have the str ength
and courage to act upon our good intentions by making
powerful choices? And most important, why do we continue
to act out in ways that go against our value system and all
that we stand for? W e will assert that it is because of our
unexamined life, our dark er self, our shadow self wher e our
unclaimed power lies hidden. It is her e, in this least lik ely
place, that we will ﬁnd the k ey to unlock our str ength, our
happiness, and our ability to live out our dr eams. We have been conditioned to fear the shadow side of life
and the shadow side of ourselves. When we catch ourselves
thinking a dark thought or acting out in a behavior that we
feel is unacceptable, we run, just lik e a gr oundhog, back into
our hole and hide, hoping, praying, it will disappear befor e
we ventur e out again. Why do we do this? Because we ar e
afraid that no matter how har d we try, we will never be ableto escape fr om this part of ourselves. And although ignoring
or repressing our dark side is the nor m, the sobering truth is
that running fr om the shadow only intensiﬁes its power . Denying it only leads to mor e pain, suﬀering, r egret, and
resignation. If we fail to tak e responsibility and e xtract the
wisdom that has been hidden beneath the surface of our
conscious minds, the shadow will tak e char ge, and instead
of us being able to have contr ol over it, the shadow winds
up having contr ol over us, triggering the shadow eﬀect. Our
dark side then starts making our decisions for us, stripping
us of our right to mak e conscious choices whether it’s what
food we will eat, how much money we will spend, or what
addiction we will succumb to . Our shadow incites us to act
out in ways we never imagined we could and to waste our
vital ener gy on bad habits and r epetitive behaviors. Our
shadow k eeps us fr om full self -expression, fr om speaking
our truth, and fr om living an authentic life. It is only by
embracing our duality that we fr ee ourselves of the
behaviors that can potentially bring us down. If we don’t
acknowledge all of who we ar e, we ar e guaranteed to be
blindsided by the shadow eﬀect. The shadow eﬀect is everywher e. Evidence of its
pervasiveness can be seen in every aspect of our lives. W e
read about it online. W e watch it on the nightly news, and
we can see it in our friends, our family, and strangers on the
street. And per haps most signiﬁcant, we can r ecognize it in
our thoughts, see it in our behaviors, and feel it in our
interactions with others. W e wor ry that shining a light on
this darkness will cause us to feel gr eat shame or, even
worse, to act out our worst nightmar e. We become scar ed of
what we will ﬁnd if we look inside ourselves, so instead we
bury our heads and r efuse to face our shadow sides. But this book r eveals a new truth—shar ed from thr ee life-
changing perspectives—that the opposite of what we fear
we will e xperience is what actually occurs. Instead of
shame, we feel compassion. Instead of embar rassment, wegain courage. Instead of limitation, we e xperience fr eedom. If left unopened, the shadow is a P andora’s bo x ﬁlled with
secrets that we fear will destr oy everything we love and
care about. But if we open the bo x, we discover that what’s
inside has the power to radically and positively  alter our
lives. Then we will step out of the illusion that our darkness
will overtak e us and instead we will see the world in a new
light. The compassion we discover for ourselves will ignite
our conﬁdence and courage as we open our hearts to those
around us. The power we unearth will help us tackle the fear
that has been holding us back and will ur ge us to move
powerfully towar d our highest potential. F ar from
frightening, embracing the shadow allows us to be whole, to
be real, to tak e back our power, to unleash our passion, and
to realize our dr eams. This book was bor n out of a desir e to illuminate the many
life-altering gif ts of the shadow . In the following pages, each
of us will appr oach the subject fr om our own unique
perspective as teachers. Our intention is to pr ovide a
compr ehensive, multi-lens understanding of how the
shadow was bor n within us, how it functions in our lives, and
most important, what we can do to discover the gif ts of our
true natur e. We promise that af ter reading this book you will
never think of your shadow self in the same way again. In Part I, Deepak Chopra gives us a compr ehensive
overview of our dualistic natur e and oﬀers a pr escription to
return us to wholeness. A mind/body pioneer, Chopra has
transfor med millions of lives with his teachings. His holistic
approach to the divisive natur e of the shadow is both
grounding and illuminating. In Part II, I draw upon nearly ﬁf teen years of teaching and
leading The Shadow P rocess ar ound the world to oﬀer an
accessible yet in-depth e xamination of the birth of the
shadow, the r ole of the shadow in our everyday lives, and
how we can r eclaim the power and brilliance of our
authentic natur e.In Part III, Marianne W illiamson touches our hearts and
minds with a pr ovocative e xploration of the connection
between the shadow and the soul. A r enowned inter national
spiritual teacher, Marianne tak es our hand and guides us
through the bumpy ter rain of the battle between love and
fear. Each of us comes with years of e xperience and a sincer e
hope that we can illuminate the shadow once and for all. F or
if we do not counter the for ce of the shadow and integrate
its wisdom, it has the potential to continue to wr eak havoc
on our lives and our world. When we fail to admit to our
vulnerabilities and r ecognize our bad behaviors, we will
inevitably sabotage ourselves when we ar e on the ver ge of
some personal or pr ofessional br eakthr ough. Then the
shadow wins. When we act out of dispr oportionate anger in
speaking to our childr en, the shadow wins. When we
deceive our loved ones, the shadow wins. When we r efuse
to accept our true natur e, the shadow wins. If we do not
bring the light of our highest self to the darkness of our
human impulses, the shadow wins. Until we accept all of
who we ar e, the shadow eﬀect will have the power to
impede our happiness. If lef t unacknowledged, the shadow
will stop us fr om being whole, pr event us fr om achieving our
best-laid plans, and leave us living half a life. It is our hope
in writing this book that we will bring the shadow into the
light. Ther e has never been a better time to cr eate a new
lexicon, to illuminate the shadow, and to ﬁnally understand
what’s been so diﬃcult to see and har d to e xplain. Shadow work, as described in this book, is mor e than a
psychological pr ocess or an intellectual banter . It is a
prescriptive solution to pr oblems unsolved. It is a life-
altering jour ney that goes beyond any psychological theory
because it deems the dark side as a human issue, a spiritual
issue that all of us must r esolve in this lifetime if we ar e to
live a fully self -expressed life. W e will ﬁnally understand why
we ar e no better and no worse than anyone else r egardlessof our color, our backgr ound, our se xual orientation, our
genetic mak eup, or our past. Ther e is no one in the world
who doesn’t have a shadow, and when tak en seriously and
understood, the shadow can birth a new r eality that will
alter the way we feel about ourselves, the way we par ent
our childr en, the way we tr eat our partners, the way we
interact with our community members, and the way we
engage with other nations. I believe that the shadow is one of the gr eatest gif ts
available to us. Carl Jung called it a “spar ring partner ” it is
the opponent within us that e xposes our ﬂaws and sharpens
our skills. It is the teacher, the trainer, and the guide that
supports us in uncovering our true magniﬁcence. The
shadow is not a pr oblem to be solved or an enemy to be
conquer ed but a fertile ﬁeld to be cultivated. When we dig
our hands into its rich soil, we will discover the potent seeds
of the people we most desir e to be. It is our sincer e hope
that you tak e this jour ney, for we know what’s waiting
inside. Debbie F ord
OceanofPDF .comPART I
OceanofPDF .comThe Shadow
DEEP AK CHOPRA
Once people hear about the shadow, the dark side of human
natur e, almost no one denies that it e xists. Every life has
been touched by anger and fear . The evening news e xposes
human natur e at its worst, week af ter week, without letup. If
we ar e honest with ourselves, dark impulses ar e free to
roam our minds at will, and the price we pay for being a
good person—something we all aspir e to—is that the bad
person who might ruin everything must be k ept under
wraps. Having a shadow side seems to call for some kind of
intervention, maybe therapy or a pill, maybe a trip to the
confessional or a midnight soul confr ontation. As soon as
people acknowledge that they have it, they want to be rid of
it. Ther e are many aspects of life in which a can-do, let’s-ﬁx-
it attitude works. Unfortunately, the shadow isn’t one of
them. The r eason that the shadow hasn’t been ﬁx ed for
thousands of years—the whole time that human beings
have been conscious of their dark side—is totally
mysterious. It only mak es sense to unravel the mystery
befor e asking how to deal with it. Ther efore, I’ve divided
Part I into thr ee sections, in which I fall back on a physician’s
instinct to ﬁnd a diagnosis, oﬀer a cur e, and then honestly
tell patients their pr ognosis for the futur e:
The F og of Illusion
The W ay Out
A New R eality, a New P owerThe ﬁrst section (the diagnosis) describes how the shadow
came to be. I diﬀer fr om some in believing that the shadow
is a human cr eation, not a cosmic for ce or a universal curse. The second section (the cur e) deals with how you can
diminish the shadow’s hidden power over you in everyday
life. The thir d section (the pr ognosis) unfolds a futur e in
which the shadow has been dismantled, not only for certain
individuals, but for all of us. T ogether we cr eated the
shadow that now haunts us. Despite our fear and r eluctance
to face this fact, it tur ns out to be the k ey to transfor mation. If you and I wer en’t part of the pr oblem, we would have no
hope of being part of the solution. THE FOG OF ILL USION
If you cannot see your own shadow, you must go in sear ch
of it. The shadow hides in shame in the dark alleys, secr et
passages, and ghost-ﬁlled attics of your consciousness. T o
have a shadow is not to be ﬂawed, but to be complete. That’s a har d truth to confr ont. (Haven’t you tried to tell
people a candid truth about themselves, only to have them
snap back, “ Don’t psychoanalyze me,” or something of the
sort? The unconscious r ealm feels as danger ous as the
depths of the ocean; both ar e dark and full of unseen
monsters.) W e are all living with the wr eckage of failed
ideals that once seemed lik e perfect solutions. Each solution
matches a pictur e of what the dark side is all about. If you think that shadow aspects lik e fear, anger, anxiety,
and violence ar e the r esult of demonic possession, the
solution is to purif y the aﬄicted person. Demons can be
driven out with rituals, cleansing of the body, fasting, and
grueling austerities. This is not a primitive notion. Millions of
moder n people hold fast to it. Y ou can’t pass a newsstand
without seeing a glossy magazine that pr omises a new you
through some kind of puriﬁcation, whether it’s a diet thatwill over come your craving for bad foods or a checklist for
ﬁnding the right spouse by avoiding the wr ong types of
people. “ Clean up your act” is the moder n version of
purifying fr om demons. Akin to this e xplanation is the notion that cosmic evil has
been loosed in the world. If this is your e xplanation for the
shadow, the natural solution is r eligion. R eligion aligns you
with cosmic good in its battle against cosmic evil. F or
millions of people this war is very r eal. It e xtends to every
aspect of their lives, fr om se xual temptation to abortion, the
rise of godless atheism, and the decline of patriotism. The
Devil cr eates every for m of human suﬀering and wr ong-
doing. Only God (or the gods) has the power to defeat Satan
and r edeem us fr om sin. Y et it’s har d to settle whether
religion defeats the shadow or actually mak es it str onger by
arousing str ong feelings of sinfulness and guilt, shame and
fear about the tortur es of a hellish her eafter. Since we pride ourselves on living in an age when
superstition no longer rules our lives, these time-honor ed
explanations of the dark side ar e no longer the only choices. People can tur n their backs on cosmic evil and tak e personal
responsibility . The dark side has been updated as sickness,
a branch of mental health. Along this path lies a huge ar ray
of treatments. A ddicts ar e sent into r ecovery pr ograms. The
anxious and depr essed ar e sent to psychiatrists. Out- of-
contr ol rage-aholics wind up in anger -management classes
after ramming a car on the fr eeway when they can’t contr ol
themselves. Given all these e xplanations, each of which leads to a
deﬁnite solution, why is the shadow undefeated? This may seem lik e a gloomy pr ospect, but in fact the ﬁrst
step towar d dealing with the shadow is to acknowledge its
power . Human natur e includes a self -destructive side. When
Swiss psychologist Carl Jung posited the ar chetype of the
shadow, he said that it cr eates a fog of illusion that
surrounds the self . Trapped in this fog, we evade our owndarkness, and thus we give the shadow mor e and mor e
power over us. It’s no secr et that the Jungian appr oach to
archetypes quickly tur ns very intellectual and complicated. But the stubbor n power of the shadow isn’t comple x at all. I
ﬂicked on the television while taking a br eak fr om writing
this paragraph. The famous billionair e Warren Buﬀett was
being interviewed about booms and busts in the economic
cycle. “Do you think ther e will be another bubble leading to a
huge r ecession?” the interviewer ask ed. “I can guarantee it,” Buﬀett r eplied. The interviewer shook his head. “Why can’t we lear n the
lessons of the last r ecession? L ook wher e greed has gotten
us.”
Buﬀett gave a small mysterious smile. “ Greed is fun for a
while. People can’t r esist it. However far human beings have
come, we haven’t gr own emotionally at all. W e remain the
same.”
In capsule for m, ther e’s the shadow and the pr oblems it
poses. In the fog of illusion, we don’t see our worst impulses
as self -destructive. They’r e irresistible, even fun. Hence the
enormous popularity of r evenge dramas as entertainment,
whether in Shak espear e’s theater or a spaghetti W ester n on
the silver scr een. What could be better than unleashing all
our hidden rage, demolishing the enemy, and walking tall in
triumph? The shadow e xerts its power by making the
darkness seem lik e the light. The world’s wisdom traditions have spent most of their
energy and thought meeting the same primal dilemmas. Creation has a dark side. Destruction is inher ent in natur e.
Death inter rupts life. Decay saps vitality . Evil is attractive. No wonder the fog of illusion eventually seems lik e a nice
place to be. If you face r eality head- on, the dark side is too
overwhelming to bear . Yet ther e is a counterfor ce that has
steadily—and successfully—over come the dark side. Thewreckage of failed solutions k eeps us fr om seeing it. The fog
of illusion insulates us fr om it. Y ou would never guess,
dialing past the disasters and hor rors of nightly television,
that human beings have always had the power to ﬁnd
peace, e xaltation, and fr eedom fr om darkness. The secr et lies in the wor d “consciousness.” When people
hear this, a look of disappointment cr osses their faces. Consciousness is old hat. W e’ve hear d about consciousness-
raising ever since feminism appear ed, along with other
varieties of liberation. Higher consciousness is held out as a
promise by countless spiritual movements. Y ou might even
be tempted to thr ow consciousness onto the pile of wr ecked
ideals, because in the face of sincer e attempts to raise our
consciousness, the shadow plagues the world with war,
crime, and violence, just as it plagues individual lives with
pain and fear . We have come to a cr ossroads. Either consciousness
belongs with the other false answers, or it hasn’t been tried
in the right way . I’d lik e to suggest that the latter is true. Higher consciousness is the answer—the only lasting answer
—to the dark side of human natur e. It’s not the answer
that’s at fault her e—it’s the application. Ther e are countless
paths to healing the soul, just as ther e are countless
alternative tr eatments for cancer . But no one has enough
time and ener gy to e xperiment with all of them. It’s vital to
pick a path that tak es you wher e you want to go . For that to
happen, a much deeper analysis of the shadow is r equir ed. If you appr oach the darkness superﬁcially, it will always
persist, because the shadow isn’t as simple an enemy as
sickness, a demon, or a cosmic devil. It’s an aspect of r eality
so basic to cr eation that only complete understanding can
successfully confr ont it. The T ruth of One RealityThe ﬁrst step in defeating the shadow is to abandon all
notions of defeating it. The dark side of human natur e
thrives on war, struggle, and conﬂict. As soon as you talk
about “ winning,” you have lost alr eady. You have been
dragged into the duality of good and evil. Once that
happens, nothing can end the duality . Good has no power to
defeat its opposite once and for all. I know that this is har d
to accept. In each of our lives ther e are past actions we ar e
ashamed of and pr esent impulses we ﬁght against. All
around us ar e acts of unspeak able violence. W ar and crime
devastate whole societies. P eople desperately pray to a
higher power that can r estor e light wher e darkness pr evails. Realists long ago gave up hope of seeing the good side of
human natur e over come the bad. The life of Sigmund F reud,
one of the most r ealistic think ers who ever confr onted the
psyche, came to a close as the raging violence of Nazism
devour ed Eur ope. He had concluded that civilization e xists
at a tragic cost. W e must r epress our wild, atavistic instincts
in order to k eep them in check, and yet despite our best
eﬀorts ther e will be many defeats. The world erupts in mass
violence; individuals erupt in personal violence. This
analysis implies a ter rible kind of r esignation. The “good
me” has no chance of living a peaceful, loving, or derly life
unless the “bad me” is shoved down into the darkness and
caged in solitary conﬁnement. Realists will concede that r epression itself is an evil. If you
try to smother your feelings of anger, fear, insecurity,
jealousy, and se xuality, the shadow gains mor e ener gy for
its own use. And that use is ruthless. When the dark side
turns on you, havoc r eigns. Last week I had a call fr om a woman who was desperately
seeking a place of shelter and safety . Her abusive husband
was a chr onic alcoholic. They had been dealing with the
problem for years. A fter periods of sobriety he would r elapse
and go on long benders that dis rupted work and family,
leaving him e xhausted and ashamed when they came to anend. He had r ecently disappear ed for a week, and this time
when he came back all his r emorse and contrition fell on
deaf ears. His wife wanted out. The husband’s r eaction was
to tur n violent. He struck her, which she said had never
happened befor e. Now in addition to all her frustration and
tears she was afraid for her own safety . In the short run, all one can do is hand out the best advice
about shelters and women’s support gr oups. But as I hung
up, feeling in myself the r esidue of her shatter ed emotions, I
thought about the long run. A ddicts who r elapse have
become a standar d featur e of the psychological landscape. But what do they r eally r epresent? I think they ar e an
extreme e xample of a common situation: a divided self . For
addicts, the separation between the “good me” and the
“bad me” cannot be r esolved. Nor mally, the tactics for
dealing with one’s dark side come rather easily . It’s not har d
to deny your bad deeds, for get your wick ed impulses,
apologize for getting angry, and show contrition for your
misdeeds. A ddicts cannot settle for these easy
prescriptions. Their dark er impulses pr eoccupy them without
the nor mal checks and r estraints. Even access to simple
pleasur e is denied. The demons inside under mine pleasur e
and spoil it; they mock happiness; they r emind addicts
repeatedly of their weakness and badness. Let’s say that this description is r oughly cor rect. I have lef t
out some important ingr edients. Habit plays a str ong part in
addiction. So do physical changes in the brain—substance
abusers have attack ed the r eceptors in the brain using alien
chemicals that in time destr oy the nor mal r esponses of
pleasur e and pain. Y et these physical aspects of addiction
have been gr ossly overstated. If addiction was primarily
physical, then millions of people wouldn’t be casually using
alcohol and drugs. Y et they do, with r elatively little long-
term har m and minimal chance of addiction. W ithout
entering the heated contr oversy over addiction and itscauses, one can step back and see it not as an isolated
problem, but as yet another e xpression of the shadow . Therefore, to tr eat addictions, we must appr oach the
shadow and disar m it. Since all of us want to do just that, let
me stay with the drunk en husband r eturning fr om a
weeklong bender . He will stand in for other e xpressions of
the shadow, such as a violent temper, racial pr ejudice,
sexual chauvinism, and much mor e. These may not seem to
be related at ﬁrst glance. A boss who practices se xual
harassment isn’t displaying the same out- of-contr ol
behavior of a gay basher committing a hate crime. Y et the
shadow pr ovides a common link. Whenever any aspect of
the self has been split oﬀ, labeled as bad, illicit, shameful,
guilty, or wr ong, the shadow gains power . It doesn’t matter
whether the dark side of human natur e expresses itself in
utmost violence or in mild, socially tolerated ways. The
essential fact is that a part of the self has been split oﬀ. Once split oﬀ, the fragment that is “bad” loses touch with
the central cor e of the self, the part we consider “good”
because of its seeming lack of violence, anger, and fear . This is the adult self, the ego that has adapted well to the
world and other people. The drunk en husband has a good
self, of course. He could have a much nicer and mor e
acceptable good self than nor mal. The mor e you r epress
your dark side, the easier it is to construct a persona that
shines with goodness and light. (Hence the r epeated
surprise of neighbors who tell the TV cr ews, in the af termath
of a mass shooting spr ee or other hideous crime, that the
perpetrator “seemed lik e such a nice man.”)
I knew fr om talking to the distraught wife that her
husband had been in and out of r ehab. Sometimes the
treatment work ed for a while. But even during his sober
periods, the man was miserable. He was constantly on
guard lest the monk ey jump on his back again. He fear ed his
next relapse, yet as har d as he fought against it, theprospect was inevitable. Even during a time of temporary
victory, the shadow had only to watch and wait. One time when her husband was in the thr oes of the DT s,
his night sweats and delirium became unbearable. The wife
ﬂed to a doctor, begging for a drug that would quell his
symptoms. But she happened to hit upon a doctor who was
a stubbor n realist, and he r efused. “ Let him hit r ock
bottom,” he said. “That’s his only r eal hope. Short of that,
you won’t be helping him by making this less painful.”
You and I might think of this as callous advice. But the
phenomenon of hitting r ock bottom is well known in
addiction cir cles. It can pose a ter rible risk, because when
the shadow’s bluﬀ is called, it r esorts to e xtremes of self -
destruction. Ther e is no practical limit to how much
suﬀering the unconscious can cr eate, and we ar e all fragile. Addicts—or any in the grip of shadow ener gies—ar e trapped
in a fog of illusion. Inside that fog, nothing e xists but craving
and the ter ror of not getting a ﬁx. When the perilous jour ney of hitting r ock bottom works,
the reason is that this fog clears. The addict begins to have
thoughts that ar e actually r ealistic: “I am mor e than my
addiction. I don’t want to lose everything. F ear can be
overcome. It’s time for this to end.” In such moments of
clarity, the power of healing comes fr om the clarity itself . The person smashes thr ough the allur e of self -destruction
and sees how ir rational it is. In clarity the self comes
together and sees itself without blinders. You have only one self . It is the r eal you. It is beyond good
and evil. The shadow loses its power when consciousness stops
being divided. When you ar e no longer split, ther e’s nothing
to see but one self in all dir ections. Ther e are no hidden
compartments, dungeons, tortur e cells, or mossy r ocks to
hide under . Consciousness sees itself . That is its most basic
function, but, as we will discover, fr om this simple function a
new self and eventually a new world can be bor n.The Collective Shadow
Jung’s naming of the shadow wasn’t his major achievement;
neither was his theory of ar chetypes. His major
achievement was to show that human beings shar e a self . “Who am I?” depends on “Who ar e we?” Human beings ar e
the only cr eatur es who can cr eate a self . In fact, we must
create one, because the self gives us a point of view, a
unique focus on the world. W ithout a self, our brains would
be bombar ded with a bewildering ﬂood of sensory images
that would not mak e sense. Infants lack a self and spend the
ﬁrst thr ee years cr eating it, fashioning their personalities
and pr eferences, temperaments and inter ests. Every mother
can testif y that the time her baby spends as a blank slate is
minimal, if it e xists at all. W e enter the world not as passive
receivers of sense data, but as eager cr eators. Once you
become a single self with needs, beliefs, impulses, drives,
wishes, dr eams, and fears, suddenly the world mak es sense. “I, me, and mine” e xists for one purpose, to give you a
personal stak e in the world. We all have a self, and we go to gr eat lengths to defend
its right to e xist. But our cr eation is fragile. W e have all
experienced personal crises, such as the sudden death of a
loved one or the discovery that we ar e seriously ill. Any
crisis that attacks our sense of well-being also attacks our
sense of self . If you lose your house or all your money or
your spouse, this e xternal event sends tr emors of fear and
doubt thr oughout the self . At any moment when you feel
that your world is falling apart, what is r eally falling apart is
the self and its conﬁdence that it understands r eality . After
any major trauma to body or mind, it tak es time for the
fragile ego -personality to r ecover . (We are very luck y that an
old adage is true: “Souls don’t br eak; they bounce.”)
Because we don’t know how we cr eated the self that we
cling to so desperately, the self can surprise and amaze us. Freud sprang a major surprise when he said that the self hasa hidden dimension ﬁlled with drives and desir es that we
hardly recognize. A fter becoming F reud’s most pr ominent
disciple, Jung r ealized that his mentor had made a mistak e.
The unconscious isn’t about me. It’s about us. When a
person has unconscious impulses and drives, they come
from the entir e history of humankind. Each of us, accor ding
to Jung, is link ed to a “collective unconscious,” as he called
it. The notion that you and I cr eated our separate, isolated
selves is an illusion. W e tapped into the vast r eservoir of all
human aspirations, drives, and myths. This shar ed
unconscious is also wher e the shadow lives. Some people ar e social, others asocial, but no one can
stand outside the collective self . “We” is a constant
reminder that no man is an island. Jung peeled away the
social surface to e xpose the hidden dimension of “ we.”
Calling this r ealm the collective unconscious made it sound
more technical, per haps, but the self you and I shar e with
everyone else is basic to our survival. Think of the ways you
fall back on the collective self . Her e are just a few :
When you need the support of your family and closest
friends
When you join a political party
When you volunteer for a charity or a community
When you choose to ﬁght for your country or
otherwise defend it
When you identif y with your nationality
When you think in ter ms of “us versus them”
When a disaster somewher e else aﬀects you
personally
When you ar e gripped by collective fear
It’s a fantasy to believe that you can opt out of “ we,” even
though all of us try to . We want to be seen as Americans butnot the Ugly American. W e sympathize with other ethnic
groups but also feel diﬀer ent, separate, and usually better . In a crisis we want our families as close as possible, yet on
other occasions we insist on being individu als with a life
outside the family . The coalition between “I” and “ we” is an
uneasy one. Jung made it even mor e uneasy . When it comes to the
collective shadow, people struggle to opt out. (Society will
never stop moving in ways we disappr ove of .) But this is
actually har der than opting out of a family r ole; indeed, the
family is only the ﬁrst unit or level of the collective self, the
one we tend to see fairly easily . At Thanksgiving you can
announce that you’ve changed, that you don’t deserve to be
treated lik e a spoiled ﬁve- year-old or r ebellious teenager . You may not feel that you ar e being hear d. Your family may
have too much invested in k eeping you inside your old bo x. Society, however, is even harsher and less understanding. Society has its invisible hooks in all of us. Y ou can become
a paciﬁst in times of war . That’s an individual choice. Y et it
doesn’t automatically e xtract you fr om the collective
shadow, wher e war is bor n out of rage, pr ejudice,
resentment, old grievances, and the dark underbelly of
nationalism. P erhaps the discr edited ter m of “ racial
memory” is viable, even though it mak es us feel e xtremely
uncomfortable. Y et millions of people ar en’t uncomfortable
making statements lik e “a typical male r esponse” or
“women drivers.” Gender has tur ned into a hotly contested
allegiance. The collective unconscious has you entangled at
this moment. On the surface Citizen X may be wildly
opposed to Citizen Y, but at the unconscious level they ar e
conjoined, lik e the two ends of a tug- of-war. The choice to opt in or opt out becomes the central issue
of the collective shadow . It gives rise to many questions in
everyday life:
What is my social obligation?What is my patriotic duty? How much should I confor m to or r esist society? How connected am I to other people? What do I owe to the less fortunate? Can I change the world? Asking any of these questions, your conscious mind
cannot give the whole answer—or even the truest answer . Beneath the surface, the collective unconscious is r oiling
with drives, pr ejudices, frustrated desir es, fears, and
memories that ar e part of you because “ we” is your identity
as much as “I.”
Where’s the Proof? For a long time the concept of the collective unconscious
remained an intriguing theory without much pr oof. No one
disputed that human natur e has a dark side, but was Jung’s
explanation actually useful or was it just a brilliant
intellectual invention? Only r ecently have bits and pieces of
proof been gather ed, and, if anything, they deepen the
mystery . For example, it has been known for decades that
when a person becomes lonely and isolated, as of ten
happens to widows in old age, the risk of disease and death
rises compar ed to that for people who have str ong social
connections. A happy mar riage mak es you healthy . At ﬁrst
this ﬁnding was har d to accept, because medical
resear chers saw no link between a mental state and the
body. How could the heart or a pr ecancer ous cell
somewher e in the body know how a person feels? It took the
discovery of so -called messenger molecules to show that
the brain translates every emotion into a chemical
equivalent. As messenger molecules str eam thr ough the
blood, cir culating to hundr eds of billions of cells,unhappiness or happiness gets transmitted to the heart,
liver, intestines, and kidneys. Suddenly mind-body medicine had a “ real” basis, because
nothing is mor e real than chemicals. But Jung was pr oposing
that unhappiness or happiness could be shar ed by whole
groups of people. Why does mass violence br eak out in Iraq
or Rwanda? W e can ﬁnd e xplanations in long-standing tribal
feuds and sectarian rif ts. Ar e these stor ed in the collective
unconscious, or do generations of par ents tell their childr en
to keep these ancestral grudges alive? It does no good to
shake our heads and mutter about uncivilized, barbaric
behavior . The gr eatest bloodbaths in history occur red during
the two world wars. Millions of civilized soldiers mar ched
into the jaws of death, men who wr ote poetry, played the
piano, knew Gr eek and Latin. A fterwar d, Eur ope look ed back
and called this slaughter insane, but eminently sane people
ran the war and died in it, and when conscientious objectors
protested, they wer e jailed or punished by being sent to the
front lines as medics, a tragic ir ony that killed many of the
people who hated war the most and wanted to pr event it. The unconscious has a goal, which is to k eep us
unconscious. Sometimes knowledge peeks out anyway . In a
famous social e xperiment at Stanfor d, psychologists
replicated prison conditions to try to understand how guar ds
treat prisoners. Under graduates wer e divided into two
groups, convicts and guar ds, and told to r ole-play any way
they wanted. The psychologists in char ge expected to be
able to see mark ed changes in the behavior of each gr oup,
and yet the e xperiment had to be cut oﬀ in a matter of
days. The students playing the part of guar ds began to
sever ely mistr eat the prisoners, to the point wher e
humiliation and se xually char ged abuse appear ed. This
stunning misﬁr e gave rise to the theory of “good apples in
bad bar rels.”
The old way of thinking had told psychologists that a bad
apple can for ce a gr oup to misbehave. Common sense saysthat a gang leader can induce his passive followers to
commit crimes; college hazing goes too far because a small
core of bad apples puts peer pr essur e on others. Y et the
Stanfor d prison e xperiment told the opposite story . All the
participants wer e good kids studying at a pr estige
university . Their misbehavior didn’t occur because they
were bad apples, but because they wer e in bad conditions
that allowed dark for ces to emer ge. What the psychologists
were seeing was nothing less than an incubator for the
shadow, and the conditions that give rise to gr oup violence
were catalogued. The shadow can emer ge when ther e is complete
anonymity, as of ten happens when, instead of being
individuals, people become faces in a cr owd. This loss of
individuality incr eases if ther e are no consequences of one’s
bad actions. The absence of law and or der ampliﬁes the
eﬀect, as does being given per mission to behave beyond
normal morality . If authority ﬁgur es ar e present to actively
incite bad behavior and pr omise a lack of punishment, the
shadow surfaces all the mor e easily . We don’t have to mak e
the bar rel even worse by adding poverty, illiteracy, and old
tribal ties, but they obviously taint conditions even mor e. So
does any kind of “us versus them” thinking. When I say that the shadow can emer ge, I mean any kind
of mass pathology can appear . The Stanfor d prison
experiment r esurfaced to e xplain the abuses at Abu Ghraib
prison during the Iraq war . But if we r ealized that ghettos
are also e xamples of “bad bar rels” in which ther e are “good
apples,” we wouldn’t r esort to thinking of the under class as
morally inferior, or worse. The destruction of the ecosystem
is a for m of violence against the planet, yet it too involves
good people doing very bad things because they have been
given per mission to and they face no punishment (e xcept
for the long-ter m har m that we all face, which can be
ignor ed, denied, or put oﬀ until tomor row). When people
wake up fr om their misbehavior, they seem dazed andconfused. The violence they perpetrated seems lik e a
dream, even though they actively participated in hor rors lik e
war and genocide. The shadow traps us, ther efore, in two
ways. It k eeps us unconscious and then erupts with
incredible power whenever it wants to . You may say, “What does this have to do with me?” Most
of us haven’t participated in an outbr eak of the shadow lik e
what occur red at Abu Ghraib. Instead of empathizing with
the soldiers who abused their char ges, we look for
scapegoats to punish, because the bad-apple e xplanation is
easier to live with. Y et when you do something as innocent
as drive your car, you ar e putting nineteen pounds of
carbon dio xide into the air, a gr eenhouse gas that is
imperiling the planet. As a society we could r ectify this bad
behavior in a few years, once we put our minds to it. The
solutions, fr om cleaner cars to mass transportation to
alternative fuels, alr eady e xist. Why don’t we e xploit them
fully? Because r emaining unconscious is easier . Skeptics have a right to point out that all of this still
doesn’t pr ove that ther e is a collective unconscious. Wher e
is the evidence that members of a society ar e invisibly
linked, without wor ds or peer pr essur e binding them? A new
ﬁeld of sociology is studying “social contagion,” a deeply
mysterious phenomenon that could change everything we
think about our behavior . We all e xperience how fads and
trends work. Out of the blue, everybody seems to be doing
something new, whether it’s te xting, ﬂeeing MySpace for
Twitter, or playing a new video game. F ads ar e contagious
behavior . You catch them fr om other people. Y et no one
knows how behavior goes viral. What mak es a gr oup of
people all decide to act the same way? This becomes a crucial medical question if you want a
group to stop doing something har mful—if you want to
persuade young people not to smok e, for e xample, or the
general population to stop getting obese. The most
advanced work on this question has come fr om tworesear chers at Harvar d, Nicholas Christakis and James
Fowler, whose new book, Connected,  was pr eviewed in a
recent New Y ork T imes  Sunday magazine article. Christakis
and F owler analyzed data fr om the nation’s biggest heart
study, which has followed thr ee generations of citizens in
Framingham, Massachusetts. They look ed into the behavior
of over ﬁve thousand people who wer e mapped accor ding to
ﬁfty-one thousand social connections with family, friends,
and cowork ers. Their ﬁrst discovery was that when one person gained
weight, started smoking, or got sick, close family members
and friends wer e around 50 per cent mor e likely to behave
the same way . This r einfor ces a social-science principle that
is decades old: behavior runs in gr oups. W e have all
experienced it as peer pr essur e or by observing behavioral
traits that seem to “ run in families.” The r everse is also true. If you run with a healthy cr owd, you ar e mor e likely to adopt
healthy behavior yourself . Not just health is involved; almost
any behavior can be contagious. In a dor m at college, if you
happen to r oom with someone with good study habits and
high grades, your grades ar e likely to impr ove by
association. But the second ﬁnding fr om Christakis and F owler was far
more mysterious. They found that social connections can
skip a link. If person A is obese and knows person B, who
isn’t, a friend of person B is still 20 per cent mor e likely to be
obese, and a friend of that friend is 10 per cent mor e likely. This “thr ee degr ees of connection ” holds good for all kinds
of behavior . A friend of a friend can mak e you pr one to
smoking, unhappiness, or loneliness. The statistics ar e ther e
to prove it, even though you have never met this friend of a
friend. The ﬁndings of Christakis and F owler suggest invisible
connectors that run thr ough a whole society . If their
resear ch holds up, think about the implications. The notion
of a collective unconscious was posed almost a century agoby Jung. Did Jung hit on invisible connectors long befor e
data came along to support them? That’s r eally a side
question to the main one: What kind of connections can
exist invisibly, without people talking to each other,
watching each other’s behavior, or even knowing about
each other’s e xistence? These ar e comple x issues, and I’m giving only a hint of
how mysterious they ar e. But the new r esear ch on social
contagion is e xciting, because it supports the notion that
there is actually one mind that coor dinates not just how
people catch on to fads or decide to imitate each other, not
just how distant brain cells know what other brain cells ar e
doing, but far -ﬂung phenomena lik e how twins separated by
thousands of miles suddenly know what’s happening to
each other . These invisible connectors ar e bringing the
collective unconscious into many, many ar eas of life. Social
contagion is making news because we all lik e to r ely on
data, but the possibility that we all participate in one mind
challenges r eligion, philosophy, and the meaning of life
itself. The shadow, then, is a shar ed pr oject. Anyone can have a
hand in building it. All you need is the ability to r emain
unconscious. Countless fear -mongers believe they ar e doing
good. Every defender of the homeland e xpects to be
honor ed and praised. T ribes war ring against other tribes
deeply believe that they must struggle in or der to survive. We resist our shadow and deny its e xistence because of
past indoctrination and the hypnosis of social conditioning. Childhood e xperiences cause unending later r eminders that
“this is good, this is bad; this is divine, this is diabolical.”
Such indoctrination is the way all societies ar e structur ed. What we overlook is that we ar e creating a shar ed self at
the same time. If childr en wer e taught to become awar e of
their shadow, sharing even dark feelings, for giving
themselves for not being “good” all the time, lear ning how
to release shadow impulses thr ough healthy outlets, thenthere would be much less damage to society and the
ecosystem. Creators of the Shadow
Even if you haven’t paid a moment’s attention to F reud or
Jung, you have inherited a diﬀer ent self because of them. They made it impossible to think about human natur e as
something other than a deep mystery . Like the tip of an
iceber g, only a fraction of who you ar e is visible in the
physical world. Unseen and of ten ignor ed, the human soul is
a place of ambiguity, of contradiction and parado x. And
that’s as it should be, because all e xperience in life, which is
the manifestation of the soul, is the r esult of contrast. Y ou
have no e xperience in the absence of contrast: light and
shadow; pleasur e and pain; up and down; backwar d and
forwar d; hot and cold. If you didn’t have these divisions,
there would be no manifestation. Consciousness would be
one vast ﬂat ﬁeld, lik e a desert. Y ou would be awar e of
everything, but nothing in particular . In order to have manifestation, you need opposing
energies. That is why e xplicit enemies ar e also implicit
allies. F or example, Osama bin Laden and Geor ge Bush
cocreated each other . On the surface they wer e enemies,
but under neath they wer e allies. It’s a general principle. Y ou
need your enemies to be who you ar e. Jung had the courage
to see that each of us needs a dark side to be who we ar e.
In fact, the collective unconscious is how the human race
evolved, by passing on every new discovery in invisible
form. These ar e primarily discoveries about the self . It’s a basic fact of physical anthr opology that in Homo
sapiens  a massive part of the brain, the corte x, is devoted
to higher functions. The corte x allows us to r eason; it gave
rise to love and compassion. R eligion was bor n in the corte x,
along with our concepts of heaven and hell. W ithout thehigher brain, we would never have developed r eading and
writing, mathematics and art. What a shock, then, to dig up the r emains of
Neanderthals, only to ﬁnd that not only did that species
have a huge corte x, but it was slightly bigger than ours. Y et
Neanderthals r oamed Eur ope hunting lar ge animals for four
hundr ed thousand years—twice as long as Homo sapiens
has been ar ound—using only one tool: a heavy spear with a
stone point tied to it. Despite their huge corte x,
Neanderthals never discover ed a second tool. They didn’t
even pr ogress to a lighter spear they could thr ow. Instead,
they used their heavy spears to attack their pr ey, such as
woolly mammoths and giant cave lions, at close quarters,
thrusting the stone point into the animal’s side. As a result,
almost every male Neanderthal sk eleton e xhibits multiple
fractur es. Those big animals fought back, and yet for almost
half a million years the Neanderthal brain couldn’t ﬁgur e out
that it would be much safer to mak e lighter weapons that
could be thr own fr om a distance. The evolution of human beings depended not on the
physical brain, but on the mind that used it. In the domain
of the unconscious, lear ning was taking place, silently and
out of sight. Homo sapiens  was able to use the brain for
much mor e comple x things than any of its ancestors. Once
the mind ﬁgur ed out how to mak e better weapons, life
became easier . Farming r eplaced hunting and gathering. As
life became mor e complicated, language ar ose so that
people could e xchange ideas. In other wor ds, Jung hit upon a secr et place wher e all the
action was. The collective unconscious is the mind’s library,
a stor ehouse of all past e xperience that we, in the pr esent
moment, can draw upon. The question “Who am I” never
has a ﬁx ed answer . The self is ﬂuid and constantly changing,
meaning your own self and the self you shar e with everyone
else. Studies have shown, for e xample, that the brains of
people who have master ed computer skills and video gameshave new neural pathways unknown in the brains of people
who ar e “digitally naïve,” as the saying goes. If we want to ﬁnd the true self, we must dive into the
shadow world and its constant ﬂux. This has seemed lik e a
danger ous quest, one that would cause all but the most
heroic to tur n pale. A t the beginning of his famous ﬁlm
Hamlet,  Laur ence Olivier placed these wor ds: “This is the
story of a man who couldn’t mak e up his mind.” Hamlet has
proof that his uncle killed his father in or der to gain the
crown of Denmark. He has every r eason to seek r evenge,
and yet he can’t. The perilous jour ney into the shadow,
wher e killing and r evenge ar e nor mal, thr eatens Hamlet’s
very e xistence, his nobility and civilized br eeding. Even so,
the prince does accept the perilous jour ney, and it leads him
into disgust, self -loathing, the loss of love, and thoughts of
suicide—typical r eactions when you face the monsters of
the deep. When he himself is ﬁnally mur dered, Hamlet
accepts his fate with r elief and unearthly calm. The wor ds at
the beginning of Olivier’s ﬁlm should have been: “This is the
story of a man afraid of his own shadow .”
It’s important, ther efore, to r ealize that the shadow is a
human cr eation. It was for ged in the collective unconscious. Hating an enemy (yester day it was Communists; today it’s
terrorists) isn’t the fault of human natur e. You and I
inherited the feeling of enmity . It comes fr om the shadow,
whose contents ar e of human construction. Speciﬁcally, the
shadow sets up the model of “them,” people who ar e alien
from “us.” “They” want to hurt us and tak e away what we
value. Unlik e us, they ar en’t fully human. W e have a right to
ﬁght them, even destr oy them. This invisible model, which
shapes the minds of many people rather than one, which
survives generation af ter generation to under mine rational
thought, is what the shadow ar chetype is all about. Human beings have consciously cr eated vast civilizations
as settings for our own evolution, yet at the unconscious
level we have been amassing a history that goes far beyondthe e xperience of any single person or epoch. What you call
“me” is actually “us” to a far gr eater degr ee than you know . The evidence can be found in your body . The immune
system is a collective pr oject. Under your br eastbone lies a
gland, the thymus, which pr oduces the antibodies you need
to resist infection fr om invading ger ms and viruses. When
you ar e bor n, your thymus gland is undeveloped. Y ou
depend for the ﬁrst year of life on immunity fr om your
mother’s body . But the thymus begins to gr ow and matur e
until it r eaches maximum size and function at age twelve,
after which it shrinks. During its period of gr owth, the
thymus gives you antibodies for the diseases that wer e
encounter ed by the entir e human race. You do not have to
be infected by every disease; the inheritance of immunity is
collective—and at the same time we k eep adding to the
storehouse as we confr ont new diseases. This e xample shows that you don’t have a separate
physical body . Your body participates in a collective pr oject,
a process that never ends. I could have pick ed other
examples, such as the evolution of the brain, but they all
come down to DNA . Your genes r ecord the history of human
development on the physical level. Even though genetics
hasn’t r evealed all the secr ets of the genome, I think the
next leap won’t be physical—it will tak e place at the level of
the soul. And the ﬁrst task, once we ar rive ther e, is to r enew
the soul itself . The era of the shadow can come to an end
once we choose unity over separation. The fate of the
divided self is in our hands. The Process Continues
Wher e did the shadow come fr om? The impulse for
separation cr eated the contrast—and the war—between
light and dark. When separation goes pathological, it
manifests as the shadow’s anger, fear, envy, and hostility .So the human soul feels simultaneously divine and
diabolical, sacr ed and pr ofane, saint and sinner . In Easter n
wisdom traditions we have a saying that the sinner and the
saint ar e mer ely e xchanging notes. The sinner has a futur e
and the saint has a past in which their r oles ar e reversed. Forbidden lust and unconditional love ar e two sides of the
same coin. Y ou can’t have a coin without a head and a tail,
or an electrical cur rent without a positive and a negative
terminal. Like electricity, life has no juice unless one pole sends a
current to the other . Once you understand this, the ﬁrst
thing you r ealize is that to have a shadow is nor mal. The
shadow is the separation impulse. But the divine impulse is
the impulse that seeks unity . The choice to cr eate a shadow
has pr oved ir resistible. It gave us the self we see as human,
a familiar “I” who can be both good and bad. Ther e is no
real mystery ther e. The truly mysterious self enters when
we ask if the power of self -creation can be used for
something new : unity in place of division. Separation has been a fascinating trip. The ego took
human beings on a wild ride thr ough bliss and tragedy . Our
soul, this place of contradiction, parado x, and ambiguity,
has constantly struggled between the two impulses, divine
and diabolical. W e see little r eason to give up one for the
other . We secr etly love our bad boys and bad girls. Calling
someone “devil may car e” is a grudging compliment. Yet from another perspective we have been wandering in
the fog of illusion. Instead of e xercising our power to cr eate
any self we want, we have passively inherited a split self,
with all the misery and conﬂict it brings with it. Once you
decide that “I, me, and mine” deﬁnes who you ar e, the
perils of separation ar e inescapable. Y ou can’t have God
without the Devil. What is the Devil? It’s the mythical shadow, the fallen
angel, but it was bor n divine. In fact, another way of
interpr eting the wor d “devil” is as “the divine not feelingwell.” Ther e’s a shocking conclusion hidden in this: you
can’t have a universe if you don’t have darkness contending
with the light. Contrast doesn’t sound e xciting, but once it
exploded into the visible universe, the r esult was incr edibly
dramatic: a living hologram of good and evil. Ther e isn’t an
atom or subatomic particle in the cosmos that hasn’t been
enlisted into the drama of opposites, starting with electrical
charges and ascending to the battle between Satan and
God. The visible universe gave us the scenic backdr op for our
evolution; the invisible domain gave us the soul. The two go
hand in hand. In fact, they ar e one. Any change you mak e at
the level of the soul also cr eates a change in the outer
world, which is the mir ror of the soul. Y ou ar e not stuck with
inheriting the same old drama in which a fallen, sinful soul
struggles to r each the light—and may or may not succeed. That spiritual drama underpins the ego’s wild ride. It tur ns
the whole world into a playgr ound for good and evil, and all
that goes with it: sin and r edemption, temptation and
righteous ness. The notion of cr eating a new soul—and a
new story line to go with it—is both strange and e xciting. The impulse for separation gave us the r eality we know . What impulse will give us a new r eality? Call it the
holographic impulse. The holographic impulse bypasses
details and aims for wholeness. It cr eates thr ee-dimensional
settings in which inner and outer fuse into one. Most people
have seen a hologram cr eated by using laser light. By taking
no mor e than the fragment of a photo or an object, the laser
can r e-create the entir e object or photo, as if by magic. Instead of a fragment, wholeness pops into view . In the
same way, even though you ar e preoccupied by the
fragments of everyday life—er rands, cooking, work, leisur e,
likes and dislik es, a hundr ed small choices between A and B
—your mind has actually pr ojected a hologram for you to
inhabit. Y ou live inside a wholeness. The holographic
impulse cannot be switched oﬀ or destr oyed. Even thoughyou may look ar ound and dislik e much of what you see in
your personal world, feeling trapped by other people and
diﬃcult situations, you r etain the power to cr eate a totally
new hologram. A new hologram implies a new self . Neither
can be achieved one piece at a time. It’s easier to cr eate
wholeness, in fact, than to change your r eality one fragment
at a time. To have holistic change, you must operate fr om the level
of holistic cr eation. Ther e’s a fascinating e xercise that gives
a hint at how this might work. Close your eyes and imagine
a vivid visual e xperience, such as a tr opical sunset or a high
alpine peak. The image itself can be anything, so long as
you can envision it with color and depth. Now imagine a
taste you love, such as rich chocolate or coﬀee. Go into that
sensation deeply until you actually taste it. Move on to a
sound you love, such as your favorite music, then a
delightful te xture, like velvet, and ﬁnally an into xicating
smell, such as a damask r ose or lily . Having imagined these vivid e xperiences in all the ﬁve
senses, open your eyes. Y ou will be startled at what you see. The or dinary world is vividly alive. Colors ar e brighter . A
vibrancy hangs in the air . This startling change is r eported
by everyone, and it demonstrates that even slightly
heightening your inner world causes the outer world to
automatically follow suit. What we have her e is a clue to one
of the deepest of spiritual secr ets, the power to alter r eality
all at once. Such power isn’t available on the surface of life,
which is why people feel tossed about by their e xternal
circumstances. Y ou must ﬁnd the level of the soul, wher e
the holographic impulse can cr eate anything. Jung called it the collective unconscious  rather than the
collective conscious  for this very r eason. Human beings
have collectively cr eated the world without knowing that it
was happening. Her e are the main ingr edients we used. Notice how they spiral deeper and deeper fr om the ﬁrst,which seems rather har mless, to the last, which is highly
self-destructive:
Secrecy: We lear ned not to r eveal our basic drives and
desir es. Guilt and shame:  Once the basic drives and desir es
were hidden, they felt bad. Judgment:  Anything that felt bad became wr ong. Blame:  We wanted to know who was r esponsible for
the pain we felt. Projection:  A convenient scapegoat was
manufactur ed, either a hated enemy or an invisible
demonic for ce. Separation:  We did everything we could to push this
demonic for ce outside ourselves. Enemies wer e “the
other,” who had to be guar ded against and fought
with. Struggle:  Projection couldn’t mak e the pain go away
permanently, so a constant state of inner -versus- outer
warfar e ensued. As you can see, the shadow is still being fueled, because
we ar e masters at manipulating these ingr edients. W e are
addicted to them, in fact, even though the r esult is war,
violence, crime, and endless struggle, not to mention the
stiﬂing eﬀect of believing in cosmic evil as a pr esence in the
world. The solution is to uncr eate the shadow . It’s not
Frankenstein’s monster, a hor ror that has gr own mor e
powerful than its cr eator . The shadow is a r egion of the
psyche. Nothing e xists in it that is beyond our power to
dissolve. Instead of allowing the shadow to victimize us, we
must seize the contr ol switch and r eclaim our true function
as cr eators.THE W AY OUT
Let me summarize the ar gument up to now in thr ee
sentences. Duality is wher e you ar e. The shadow has
surrounded you with a fog of illusion. Y our split self is the
ﬁrst and most damaging illusion. Now let’s engage the
problem personally, by seeing if the diagnosis actually ﬁts. The shadow may be har d for you to see when you look
around on this or any other day . For most of us, everyday
life isn’t pathological. Even though e xperts tell us that
domestic and se xual abuse is far mor e widespr ead than we
want to admit, even though depr ession and anxiety
disor ders continue to rise at an alar ming rate, or dinary
people ﬁnd it easy to deny the dark er side of human natur e.
So it’s important to know that the shadow isn’t a bogeyman. Anything that k eeps you unconscious is the r esult of the
shadow, because the shadow is the hiding place of pain and
stress. Mass outbr eaks of violence occur when social str ess
cannot be suppr essed any longer . Domestic violence occurs
when personal str ess cannot be contained. The price of
remaining unconscious is very high. Let’s mak e this mor e personal. The for ces that have been
employed over the ages to cr eate the collective shadow ar e
being used by you today . The unconscious may seem lik e an
amorphous sea, a dark chaos of impulses, drives, secr ets,
and taboos all jumbled together . But we can separate out
the various strands and mak e sense of them. Consider the
following chart:
“Me and My Shadow”
Like everything in life, cr eating the shadow is a pr ocess. No
one sets out to incr ease the power of the shadow, yet we all
do. The shadow incr eases whenever you r esort to the
following:Keeping secr ets fr om yourself and others . A
secretive life gives the shadow material to build
upon. F orms of secr ecy ar e denial, deliberate
deception, fear of e xposing who you ar e, and
conditioning by a dysfunctional family . Harboring guilt and shame . Everyone is fallible; no
one is perfect. But if you feel ashamed of your
mistak es and guilty about your imperfections, the
shadow gains power . Making yourself and others wr ong. If you can’t ﬁnd
a way to r elease your guilt and shame, it’s all too
easy to decide that you—or others—deserve them. Judgment is guilt wearing a moral mask to disguise
its pain. Needing someone to blame . Once you decide that
your inner pain is a moral issue, you will have no
trouble blaming someone else you feel is inferior to
you in some way . Ignoring your own weaknesses while criticizing
those ar ound you . This is the pr ocess of pr ojection,
which many don’t see or understand very well. But
whenever you try to e xplain a situation as the act of
God or the Devil, you ar e projecting. The same goes
for identif ying “them,” the bad people who cause
all the pr oblems. If you believe the pr oblem is with
“them,” you have pr ojected your own fear instead
of taking r esponsibility for it. Separating yourself fr om others . If you r each the
point wher e you feel that the world is divided into
“them” and “us,” you will naturally identif y your
side as the good one and choose it. This isolation
increases a sense of fear and suspicion, which the
shadow thrives on.Struggling to k eep evil at bay . At the bottom of the
cycle, people ar e convinced that evil lurks
everywher e. What has r eally happened is that the
creators of illusion ar e being fooled by their own
creation. Everything has come together to give the
shadow enor mous power . We’ve tak en the ﬁrst step in r emoving the shadow’s power
by exposing the pr ocess that fuels it. Ther e’s a downwar d
spiral. It begins by thinking you have to k eep secr ets, and
then those secr ets, instead of r emaining quietly hidden,
become the sour ce of shame and guilt. Self -judgment
enters. This is too painful to live with, so you sear ch for
someone outside yourself to blame. The spiral leads
eventually to isolation and denial. By the time you ﬁnd
yourself struggling with sin and evil, you have long ago lost
sight of the basic fact that would save you, which isn’t
redemption fr om the Devil. The basic fact is that you
enter ed this whole pr ocess willingly by making simple
choices. Ther efore to escape you only need to mak e the
opposite choices. I’ve divided those choices into four categories with steps
to tak e towar d making them:
1. Stop pr ojecting. 2. Detach and let go . 3. Give up self -judgment. 4. Rebuild your emotional body . The basic life choices ar e available to anyone. W e mak e
the opposite choices all the time. The shadow has
persuaded us to blame others rather than tak e
responsibility . It tells us that we ar e unworthy of love and
respect. It pr omotes anger and fear as natural r eactions tolife. All of us ar e entangled in these disastr ous choices. They
stiﬂe our lives and r emove all joy . So nothing is mor e urgent
than to tur n the pr ocess ar ound, and the sooner the better . Step 1: Stop Projecting
The shadow, accor ding to Jung, tells us to ignor e our own
weaknesses and pr oject them on others. T o avoid feeling
that we’r e not good enough, we see others ar ound us as not
good enough. Countless e xamples come to mind. Some ar e
trivial, while others ar e a matter of life and death. The latest
movie starlet is criticized for losing too much weight while a
whole nation becomes mor e obese. Antiwar movements ar e
denounced as unpatriotic, while everyone is paying tax es to
kill citizens of a country that has never done America any
harm. Everyone uses pr ojection as a defense to avoid
looking inwar d.
Realize that this is an unconscious defense. The template
of projection is the following statement: “I can’t admit what I
feel, so I’ll imagine that you feel it.” Thus, if you can’t feel
your own anger, you label a gr oup in society as violent and
to be fear ed. If you unconsciously have se xual feelings you
consider taboo, such as attraction to someone of the same
gender or thoughts of inﬁdelity, you think that others ar e
directing those feelings towar d you. Projection is very eﬀective. A false state of self -
acceptance is cr eated based on “I’m ok ay, but you ar en’t.”
Yet true self -acceptance extends to other people; when you
are okay with yourself, ther e’s no r eason to label anyone as
not ok ay. Are Y ou Projecting?
_OceanofPDF.com_The_Shadow_Effect_-_Deepak_Chopra.txt
Summarize the following text section accurately and concisely. Maintain specific details and numerical information, and use anti-repetition mechanisms:

        The Shadow Eﬀect
Illuminating the Hidden P ower of Y our T rue Self
Deepak Chopra
Debbie F ord
Marianne Williamson
OceanofPDF. comContents
Introduction
 
Part I
The Shadow
Deepak Chopra
 
Part II
Making P eace with Ourselves, Others, and the W orld
Debbie F ord
 
Part III
Only Light Can Cast Out Darkness
Marianne W illiamson
 
The Shadow Eﬀect T est
 
About the Authors
Credits
Copyright
About the P ublisher
OceanofPDF. comIntroduction
The conﬂict between who we ar e and who we want to be is
at the cor e of the human struggle. Duality, in fact, lies at the
very center of the human e xperience. Life and death, good
and evil, hope and r esignation coe xist in every person and
exert their for ce in every facet of our lives. If we know
courage, it is because we have also e xperienced fear; if we
can r ecognize honesty, it is because we have encounter ed
deceit. And yet most of us deny or ignor e our dualistic
natur e. If we ar e living under the assumption that we ar e only one
way or another, inside a limited spectrum of human
qualities, then we would have to question why mor e of us
aren’t wholly satisﬁed with our lives right now. Why do we
have access to so much wisdom yet fail to have the str ength
and courage to act upon our good intentions by making
powerful choices. And most important, why do we continue
to act out in ways that go against our value system and all
that we stand for. W e will assert that it is because of our
unexamined life, our dark er self, our shadow self wher e our
unclaimed power lies hidden. It is her e, in this least lik ely
place, that we will ﬁnd the k ey to unlock our str ength, our
happiness, and our ability to live out our dr eams. We have been conditioned to fear the shadow side of life
and the shadow side of ourselves. When we catch ourselves
thinking a dark thought or acting out in a behavior that we
feel is unacceptable, we run, just lik e a gr oundhog, back into
our hole and hide, hoping, praying, it will disappear befor e
we ventur e out again. Why do we do this. Because we ar e
afraid that no matter how har d we try, we will never be ableto escape fr om this part of ourselves. And although ignoring
or repressing our dark side is the nor m, the sobering truth is
that running fr om the shadow only intensiﬁes its power. Denying it only leads to mor e pain, suﬀering, r egret, and
resignation. If we fail to tak e responsibility and e xtract the
wisdom that has been hidden beneath the surface of our
conscious minds, the shadow will tak e char ge, and instead
of us being able to have contr ol over it, the shadow winds
up having contr ol over us, triggering the shadow eﬀect. Our
dark side then starts making our decisions for us, stripping
us of our right to mak e conscious choices whether it’s what
food we will eat, how much money we will spend, or what
addiction we will succumb to. Our shadow incites us to act
out in ways we never imagined we could and to waste our
vital ener gy on bad habits and r epetitive behaviors. Our
shadow k eeps us fr om full self -expression, fr om speaking
our truth, and fr om living an authentic life. It is only by
embracing our duality that we fr ee ourselves of the
behaviors that can potentially bring us down. If we don’t
acknowledge all of who we ar e, we ar e guaranteed to be
blindsided by the shadow eﬀect. The shadow eﬀect is everywher e. Evidence of its
pervasiveness can be seen in every aspect of our lives. W e
read about it online. W e watch it on the nightly news, and
we can see it in our friends, our family, and strangers on the
street. And per haps most signiﬁcant, we can r ecognize it in
our thoughts, see it in our behaviors, and feel it in our
interactions with others. W e wor ry that shining a light on
this darkness will cause us to feel gr eat shame or, even
worse, to act out our worst nightmar e. We become scar ed of
what we will ﬁnd if we look inside ourselves, so instead we
bury our heads and r efuse to face our shadow sides. But this book r eveals a new truth—shar ed from thr ee life-
changing perspectives—that the opposite of what we fear
we will e xperience is what actually occurs. Instead of
shame, we feel compassion. Instead of embar rassment, wegain courage. Instead of limitation, we e xperience fr eedom. If left unopened, the shadow is a P andora’s bo x ﬁlled with
secrets that we fear will destr oy everything we love and
care about. But if we open the bo x, we discover that what’s
inside has the power to radically and positively  alter our
lives. Then we will step out of the illusion that our darkness
will overtak e us and instead we will see the world in a new
light. The compassion we discover for ourselves will ignite
our conﬁdence and courage as we open our hearts to those
around us. The power we unearth will help us tackle the fear
that has been holding us back and will ur ge us to move
powerfully towar d our highest potential. F ar from
frightening, embracing the shadow allows us to be whole, to
be real, to tak e back our power, to unleash our passion, and
to realize our dr eams. This book was bor n out of a desir e to illuminate the many
life-altering gif ts of the shadow. In the following pages, each
of us will appr oach the subject fr om our own unique
perspective as teachers. Our intention is to pr ovide a
compr ehensive, multi-lens understanding of how the
shadow was bor n within us, how it functions in our lives, and
most important, what we can do to discover the gif ts of our
true natur e. We promise that af ter reading this book you will
never think of your shadow self in the same way again. In Part I, Deepak Chopra gives us a compr ehensive
overview of our dualistic natur e and oﬀers a pr escription to
return us to wholeness. A mind/body pioneer, Chopra has
transfor med millions of lives with his teachings. His holistic
approach to the divisive natur e of the shadow is both
grounding and illuminating. In Part II, I draw upon nearly ﬁf teen years of teaching and
leading The Shadow P rocess ar ound the world to oﬀer an
accessible yet in-depth e xamination of the birth of the
shadow, the r ole of the shadow in our everyday lives, and
how we can r eclaim the power and brilliance of our
authentic natur e. In Part III, Marianne W illiamson touches our hearts and
minds with a pr ovocative e xploration of the connection
between the shadow and the soul. A r enowned inter national
spiritual teacher, Marianne tak es our hand and guides us
through the bumpy ter rain of the battle between love and
fear. Each of us comes with years of e xperience and a sincer e
hope that we can illuminate the shadow once and for all. F or
if we do not counter the for ce of the shadow and integrate
its wisdom, it has the potential to continue to wr eak havoc
on our lives and our world. When we fail to admit to our
vulnerabilities and r ecognize our bad behaviors, we will
inevitably sabotage ourselves when we ar e on the ver ge of
some personal or pr ofessional br eakthr ough. Then the
shadow wins. When we act out of dispr oportionate anger in
speaking to our childr en, the shadow wins. When we
deceive our loved ones, the shadow wins. When we r efuse
to accept our true natur e, the shadow wins. If we do not
bring the light of our highest self to the darkness of our
human impulses, the shadow wins. Until we accept all of
who we ar e, the shadow eﬀect will have the power to
impede our happiness. If lef t unacknowledged, the shadow
will stop us fr om being whole, pr event us fr om achieving our
best-laid plans, and leave us living half a life. It is our hope
in writing this book that we will bring the shadow into the
light. Ther e has never been a better time to cr eate a new
lexicon, to illuminate the shadow, and to ﬁnally understand
what’s been so diﬃcult to see and har d to e xplain. Shadow work, as described in this book, is mor e than a
psychological pr ocess or an intellectual banter. It is a
prescriptive solution to pr oblems unsolved. It is a life-
altering jour ney that goes beyond any psychological theory
because it deems the dark side as a human issue, a spiritual
issue that all of us must r esolve in this lifetime if we ar e to
live a fully self -expressed life. W e will ﬁnally understand why
we ar e no better and no worse than anyone else r egardlessof our color, our backgr ound, our se xual orientation, our
genetic mak eup, or our past. Ther e is no one in the world
who doesn’t have a shadow, and when tak en seriously and
understood, the shadow can birth a new r eality that will
alter the way we feel about ourselves, the way we par ent
our childr en, the way we tr eat our partners, the way we
interact with our community members, and the way we
engage with other nations. I believe that the shadow is one of the gr eatest gif ts
available to us. Carl Jung called it a “spar ring partner ” it is
the opponent within us that e xposes our ﬂaws and sharpens
our skills. It is the teacher, the trainer, and the guide that
supports us in uncovering our true magniﬁcence. The
shadow is not a pr oblem to be solved or an enemy to be
conquer ed but a fertile ﬁeld to be cultivated. When we dig
our hands into its rich soil, we will discover the potent seeds
of the people we most desir e to be. It is our sincer e hope
that you tak e this jour ney, for we know what’s waiting
inside. Debbie F ord
OceanofPDF. comPART I
OceanofPDF. comThe Shadow
DEEP AK CHOPRA
Once people hear about the shadow, the dark side of human
natur e, almost no one denies that it e xists. Every life has
been touched by anger and fear. The evening news e xposes
human natur e at its worst, week af ter week, without letup. If
we ar e honest with ourselves, dark impulses ar e free to
roam our minds at will, and the price we pay for being a
good person—something we all aspir e to—is that the bad
person who might ruin everything must be k ept under
wraps. Having a shadow side seems to call for some kind of
intervention, maybe therapy or a pill, maybe a trip to the
confessional or a midnight soul confr ontation. As soon as
people acknowledge that they have it, they want to be rid of
it. Ther e are many aspects of life in which a can-do, let’s-ﬁx-
it attitude works. Unfortunately, the shadow isn’t one of
them. The r eason that the shadow hasn’t been ﬁx ed for
thousands of years—the whole time that human beings
have been conscious of their dark side—is totally
mysterious. It only mak es sense to unravel the mystery
befor e asking how to deal with it. Ther efore, I’ve divided
Part I into thr ee sections, in which I fall back on a physician’s
instinct to ﬁnd a diagnosis, oﬀer a cur e, and then honestly
tell patients their pr ognosis for the futur e:
The F og of Illusion
The W ay Out
A New R eality, a New P owerThe ﬁrst section (the diagnosis) describes how the shadow
came to be. I diﬀer fr om some in believing that the shadow
is a human cr eation, not a cosmic for ce or a universal curse. The second section (the cur e) deals with how you can
diminish the shadow’s hidden power over you in everyday
life. The thir d section (the pr ognosis) unfolds a futur e in
which the shadow has been dismantled, not only for certain
individuals, but for all of us. T ogether we cr eated the
shadow that now haunts us. Despite our fear and r eluctance
to face this fact, it tur ns out to be the k ey to transfor mation. If you and I wer en’t part of the pr oblem, we would have no
hope of being part of the solution. THE FOG OF ILL USION
If you cannot see your own shadow, you must go in sear ch
of it. The shadow hides in shame in the dark alleys, secr et
passages, and ghost-ﬁlled attics of your consciousness. T o
have a shadow is not to be ﬂawed, but to be complete. That’s a har d truth to confr ont. (Haven’t you tried to tell
people a candid truth about themselves, only to have them
snap back, “ Don’t psychoanalyze me,” or something of the
sort. The unconscious r ealm feels as danger ous as the
depths of the ocean; both ar e dark and full of unseen
monsters. ) W e are all living with the wr eckage of failed
ideals that once seemed lik e perfect solutions. Each solution
matches a pictur e of what the dark side is all about. If you think that shadow aspects lik e fear, anger, anxiety,
and violence ar e the r esult of demonic possession, the
solution is to purif y the aﬄicted person. Demons can be
driven out with rituals, cleansing of the body, fasting, and
grueling austerities. This is not a primitive notion. Millions of
moder n people hold fast to it. Y ou can’t pass a newsstand
without seeing a glossy magazine that pr omises a new you
through some kind of puriﬁcation, whether it’s a diet thatwill over come your craving for bad foods or a checklist for
ﬁnding the right spouse by avoiding the wr ong types of
people. “ Clean up your act” is the moder n version of
purifying fr om demons. Akin to this e xplanation is the notion that cosmic evil has
been loosed in the world. If this is your e xplanation for the
shadow, the natural solution is r eligion. R eligion aligns you
with cosmic good in its battle against cosmic evil. F or
millions of people this war is very r eal. It e xtends to every
aspect of their lives, fr om se xual temptation to abortion, the
rise of godless atheism, and the decline of patriotism. The
Devil cr eates every for m of human suﬀering and wr ong-
doing. Only God (or the gods) has the power to defeat Satan
and r edeem us fr om sin. Y et it’s har d to settle whether
religion defeats the shadow or actually mak es it str onger by
arousing str ong feelings of sinfulness and guilt, shame and
fear about the tortur es of a hellish her eafter. Since we pride ourselves on living in an age when
superstition no longer rules our lives, these time-honor ed
explanations of the dark side ar e no longer the only choices. People can tur n their backs on cosmic evil and tak e personal
responsibility. The dark side has been updated as sickness,
a branch of mental health. Along this path lies a huge ar ray
of treatments. A ddicts ar e sent into r ecovery pr ograms. The
anxious and depr essed ar e sent to psychiatrists. Out- of-
contr ol rage-aholics wind up in anger -management classes
after ramming a car on the fr eeway when they can’t contr ol
themselves. Given all these e xplanations, each of which leads to a
deﬁnite solution, why is the shadow undefeated. This may seem lik e a gloomy pr ospect, but in fact the ﬁrst
step towar d dealing with the shadow is to acknowledge its
power. Human natur e includes a self -destructive side. When
Swiss psychologist Carl Jung posited the ar chetype of the
shadow, he said that it cr eates a fog of illusion that
surrounds the self. Trapped in this fog, we evade our owndarkness, and thus we give the shadow mor e and mor e
power over us. It’s no secr et that the Jungian appr oach to
archetypes quickly tur ns very intellectual and complicated. But the stubbor n power of the shadow isn’t comple x at all. I
ﬂicked on the television while taking a br eak fr om writing
this paragraph. The famous billionair e Warren Buﬀett was
being interviewed about booms and busts in the economic
cycle. “Do you think ther e will be another bubble leading to a
huge r ecession. ” the interviewer ask ed. “I can guarantee it,” Buﬀett r eplied. The interviewer shook his head. “Why can’t we lear n the
lessons of the last r ecession. L ook wher e greed has gotten
us. ”
Buﬀett gave a small mysterious smile. “ Greed is fun for a
while. People can’t r esist it. However far human beings have
come, we haven’t gr own emotionally at all. W e remain the
same. ”
In capsule for m, ther e’s the shadow and the pr oblems it
poses. In the fog of illusion, we don’t see our worst impulses
as self -destructive. They’r e irresistible, even fun. Hence the
enormous popularity of r evenge dramas as entertainment,
whether in Shak espear e’s theater or a spaghetti W ester n on
the silver scr een. What could be better than unleashing all
our hidden rage, demolishing the enemy, and walking tall in
triumph. The shadow e xerts its power by making the
darkness seem lik e the light. The world’s wisdom traditions have spent most of their
energy and thought meeting the same primal dilemmas. Creation has a dark side. Destruction is inher ent in natur e. Death inter rupts life. Decay saps vitality. Evil is attractive. No wonder the fog of illusion eventually seems lik e a nice
place to be. If you face r eality head- on, the dark side is too
overwhelming to bear. Yet ther e is a counterfor ce that has
steadily—and successfully—over come the dark side. Thewreckage of failed solutions k eeps us fr om seeing it. The fog
of illusion insulates us fr om it. Y ou would never guess,
dialing past the disasters and hor rors of nightly television,
that human beings have always had the power to ﬁnd
peace, e xaltation, and fr eedom fr om darkness. The secr et lies in the wor d “consciousness. ” When people
hear this, a look of disappointment cr osses their faces. Consciousness is old hat. W e’ve hear d about consciousness-
raising ever since feminism appear ed, along with other
varieties of liberation. Higher consciousness is held out as a
promise by countless spiritual movements. Y ou might even
be tempted to thr ow consciousness onto the pile of wr ecked
ideals, because in the face of sincer e attempts to raise our
consciousness, the shadow plagues the world with war,
crime, and violence, just as it plagues individual lives with
pain and fear. We have come to a cr ossroads. Either consciousness
belongs with the other false answers, or it hasn’t been tried
in the right way. I’d lik e to suggest that the latter is true. Higher consciousness is the answer—the only lasting answer
—to the dark side of human natur e. It’s not the answer
that’s at fault her e—it’s the application. Ther e are countless
paths to healing the soul, just as ther e are countless
alternative tr eatments for cancer. But no one has enough
time and ener gy to e xperiment with all of them. It’s vital to
pick a path that tak es you wher e you want to go. For that to
happen, a much deeper analysis of the shadow is r equir ed. If you appr oach the darkness superﬁcially, it will always
persist, because the shadow isn’t as simple an enemy as
sickness, a demon, or a cosmic devil. It’s an aspect of r eality
so basic to cr eation that only complete understanding can
successfully confr ont it. The T ruth of One RealityThe ﬁrst step in defeating the shadow is to abandon all
notions of defeating it. The dark side of human natur e
thrives on war, struggle, and conﬂict. As soon as you talk
about “ winning,” you have lost alr eady. You have been
dragged into the duality of good and evil. Once that
happens, nothing can end the duality. Good has no power to
defeat its opposite once and for all. I know that this is har d
to accept. In each of our lives ther e are past actions we ar e
ashamed of and pr esent impulses we ﬁght against. All
around us ar e acts of unspeak able violence. W ar and crime
devastate whole societies. P eople desperately pray to a
higher power that can r estor e light wher e darkness pr evails. Realists long ago gave up hope of seeing the good side of
human natur e over come the bad. The life of Sigmund F reud,
one of the most r ealistic think ers who ever confr onted the
psyche, came to a close as the raging violence of Nazism
devour ed Eur ope. He had concluded that civilization e xists
at a tragic cost. W e must r epress our wild, atavistic instincts
in order to k eep them in check, and yet despite our best
eﬀorts ther e will be many defeats. The world erupts in mass
violence; individuals erupt in personal violence. This
analysis implies a ter rible kind of r esignation. The “good
me” has no chance of living a peaceful, loving, or derly life
unless the “bad me” is shoved down into the darkness and
caged in solitary conﬁnement. Realists will concede that r epression itself is an evil. If you
try to smother your feelings of anger, fear, insecurity,
jealousy, and se xuality, the shadow gains mor e ener gy for
its own use. And that use is ruthless. When the dark side
turns on you, havoc r eigns. Last week I had a call fr om a woman who was desperately
seeking a place of shelter and safety. Her abusive husband
was a chr onic alcoholic. They had been dealing with the
problem for years. A fter periods of sobriety he would r elapse
and go on long benders that dis rupted work and family,
leaving him e xhausted and ashamed when they came to anend. He had r ecently disappear ed for a week, and this time
when he came back all his r emorse and contrition fell on
deaf ears. His wife wanted out. The husband’s r eaction was
to tur n violent. He struck her, which she said had never
happened befor e. Now in addition to all her frustration and
tears she was afraid for her own safety. In the short run, all one can do is hand out the best advice
about shelters and women’s support gr oups. But as I hung
up, feeling in myself the r esidue of her shatter ed emotions, I
thought about the long run. A ddicts who r elapse have
become a standar d featur e of the psychological landscape. But what do they r eally r epresent. I think they ar e an
extreme e xample of a common situation: a divided self. For
addicts, the separation between the “good me” and the
“bad me” cannot be r esolved. Nor mally, the tactics for
dealing with one’s dark side come rather easily. It’s not har d
to deny your bad deeds, for get your wick ed impulses,
apologize for getting angry, and show contrition for your
misdeeds. A ddicts cannot settle for these easy
prescriptions. Their dark er impulses pr eoccupy them without
the nor mal checks and r estraints. Even access to simple
pleasur e is denied. The demons inside under mine pleasur e
and spoil it; they mock happiness; they r emind addicts
repeatedly of their weakness and badness. Let’s say that this description is r oughly cor rect. I have lef t
out some important ingr edients. Habit plays a str ong part in
addiction. So do physical changes in the brain—substance
abusers have attack ed the r eceptors in the brain using alien
chemicals that in time destr oy the nor mal r esponses of
pleasur e and pain. Y et these physical aspects of addiction
have been gr ossly overstated. If addiction was primarily
physical, then millions of people wouldn’t be casually using
alcohol and drugs. Y et they do, with r elatively little long-
term har m and minimal chance of addiction. W ithout
entering the heated contr oversy over addiction and itscauses, one can step back and see it not as an isolated
problem, but as yet another e xpression of the shadow. Therefore, to tr eat addictions, we must appr oach the
shadow and disar m it. Since all of us want to do just that, let
me stay with the drunk en husband r eturning fr om a
weeklong bender. He will stand in for other e xpressions of
the shadow, such as a violent temper, racial pr ejudice,
sexual chauvinism, and much mor e. These may not seem to
be related at ﬁrst glance. A boss who practices se xual
harassment isn’t displaying the same out- of-contr ol
behavior of a gay basher committing a hate crime. Y et the
shadow pr ovides a common link. Whenever any aspect of
the self has been split oﬀ, labeled as bad, illicit, shameful,
guilty, or wr ong, the shadow gains power. It doesn’t matter
whether the dark side of human natur e expresses itself in
utmost violence or in mild, socially tolerated ways. The
essential fact is that a part of the self has been split oﬀ. Once split oﬀ, the fragment that is “bad” loses touch with
the central cor e of the self, the part we consider “good”
because of its seeming lack of violence, anger, and fear. This is the adult self, the ego that has adapted well to the
world and other people. The drunk en husband has a good
self, of course. He could have a much nicer and mor e
acceptable good self than nor mal. The mor e you r epress
your dark side, the easier it is to construct a persona that
shines with goodness and light. (Hence the r epeated
surprise of neighbors who tell the TV cr ews, in the af termath
of a mass shooting spr ee or other hideous crime, that the
perpetrator “seemed lik e such a nice man. ”)
I knew fr om talking to the distraught wife that her
husband had been in and out of r ehab. Sometimes the
treatment work ed for a while. But even during his sober
periods, the man was miserable. He was constantly on
guard lest the monk ey jump on his back again. He fear ed his
next relapse, yet as har d as he fought against it, theprospect was inevitable. Even during a time of temporary
victory, the shadow had only to watch and wait. One time when her husband was in the thr oes of the DT s,
his night sweats and delirium became unbearable. The wife
ﬂed to a doctor, begging for a drug that would quell his
symptoms. But she happened to hit upon a doctor who was
a stubbor n realist, and he r efused. “ Let him hit r ock
bottom,” he said. “That’s his only r eal hope. Short of that,
you won’t be helping him by making this less painful. ”
You and I might think of this as callous advice. But the
phenomenon of hitting r ock bottom is well known in
addiction cir cles. It can pose a ter rible risk, because when
the shadow’s bluﬀ is called, it r esorts to e xtremes of self -
destruction. Ther e is no practical limit to how much
suﬀering the unconscious can cr eate, and we ar e all fragile. Addicts—or any in the grip of shadow ener gies—ar e trapped
in a fog of illusion. Inside that fog, nothing e xists but craving
and the ter ror of not getting a ﬁx. When the perilous jour ney of hitting r ock bottom works,
the reason is that this fog clears. The addict begins to have
thoughts that ar e actually r ealistic: “I am mor e than my
addiction. I don’t want to lose everything. F ear can be
overcome. It’s time for this to end. ” In such moments of
clarity, the power of healing comes fr om the clarity itself. The person smashes thr ough the allur e of self -destruction
and sees how ir rational it is. In clarity the self comes
together and sees itself without blinders. You have only one self. It is the r eal you. It is beyond good
and evil. The shadow loses its power when consciousness stops
being divided. When you ar e no longer split, ther e’s nothing
to see but one self in all dir ections. Ther e are no hidden
compartments, dungeons, tortur e cells, or mossy r ocks to
hide under. Consciousness sees itself. That is its most basic
function, but, as we will discover, fr om this simple function a
new self and eventually a new world can be bor n. The Collective Shadow
Jung’s naming of the shadow wasn’t his major achievement;
neither was his theory of ar chetypes. His major
achievement was to show that human beings shar e a self. “Who am I. ” depends on “Who ar e we. ” Human beings ar e
the only cr eatur es who can cr eate a self. In fact, we must
create one, because the self gives us a point of view, a
unique focus on the world. W ithout a self, our brains would
be bombar ded with a bewildering ﬂood of sensory images
that would not mak e sense. Infants lack a self and spend the
ﬁrst thr ee years cr eating it, fashioning their personalities
and pr eferences, temperaments and inter ests. Every mother
can testif y that the time her baby spends as a blank slate is
minimal, if it e xists at all. W e enter the world not as passive
receivers of sense data, but as eager cr eators. Once you
become a single self with needs, beliefs, impulses, drives,
wishes, dr eams, and fears, suddenly the world mak es sense. “I, me, and mine” e xists for one purpose, to give you a
personal stak e in the world. We all have a self, and we go to gr eat lengths to defend
its right to e xist. But our cr eation is fragile. W e have all
experienced personal crises, such as the sudden death of a
loved one or the discovery that we ar e seriously ill. Any
crisis that attacks our sense of well-being also attacks our
sense of self. If you lose your house or all your money or
your spouse, this e xternal event sends tr emors of fear and
doubt thr oughout the self. At any moment when you feel
that your world is falling apart, what is r eally falling apart is
the self and its conﬁdence that it understands r eality. After
any major trauma to body or mind, it tak es time for the
fragile ego -personality to r ecover. (We are very luck y that an
old adage is true: “Souls don’t br eak; they bounce. ”)
Because we don’t know how we cr eated the self that we
cling to so desperately, the self can surprise and amaze us. Freud sprang a major surprise when he said that the self hasa hidden dimension ﬁlled with drives and desir es that we
hardly recognize. A fter becoming F reud’s most pr ominent
disciple, Jung r ealized that his mentor had made a mistak e. The unconscious isn’t about me. It’s about us. When a
person has unconscious impulses and drives, they come
from the entir e history of humankind. Each of us, accor ding
to Jung, is link ed to a “collective unconscious,” as he called
it. The notion that you and I cr eated our separate, isolated
selves is an illusion. W e tapped into the vast r eservoir of all
human aspirations, drives, and myths. This shar ed
unconscious is also wher e the shadow lives. Some people ar e social, others asocial, but no one can
stand outside the collective self. “We” is a constant
reminder that no man is an island. Jung peeled away the
social surface to e xpose the hidden dimension of “ we. ”
Calling this r ealm the collective unconscious made it sound
more technical, per haps, but the self you and I shar e with
everyone else is basic to our survival. Think of the ways you
fall back on the collective self. Her e are just a few :
When you need the support of your family and closest
friends
When you join a political party
When you volunteer for a charity or a community
When you choose to ﬁght for your country or
otherwise defend it
When you identif y with your nationality
When you think in ter ms of “us versus them”
When a disaster somewher e else aﬀects you
personally
When you ar e gripped by collective fear
It’s a fantasy to believe that you can opt out of “ we,” even
though all of us try to. We want to be seen as Americans butnot the Ugly American. W e sympathize with other ethnic
groups but also feel diﬀer ent, separate, and usually better. In a crisis we want our families as close as possible, yet on
other occasions we insist on being individu als with a life
outside the family. The coalition between “I” and “ we” is an
uneasy one. Jung made it even mor e uneasy. When it comes to the
collective shadow, people struggle to opt out. (Society will
never stop moving in ways we disappr ove of. ) But this is
actually har der than opting out of a family r ole; indeed, the
family is only the ﬁrst unit or level of the collective self, the
one we tend to see fairly easily. At Thanksgiving you can
announce that you’ve changed, that you don’t deserve to be
treated lik e a spoiled ﬁve- year-old or r ebellious teenager. You may not feel that you ar e being hear d. Your family may
have too much invested in k eeping you inside your old bo x. Society, however, is even harsher and less understanding. Society has its invisible hooks in all of us. Y ou can become
a paciﬁst in times of war. That’s an individual choice. Y et it
doesn’t automatically e xtract you fr om the collective
shadow, wher e war is bor n out of rage, pr ejudice,
resentment, old grievances, and the dark underbelly of
nationalism. P erhaps the discr edited ter m of “ racial
memory” is viable, even though it mak es us feel e xtremely
uncomfortable. Y et millions of people ar en’t uncomfortable
making statements lik e “a typical male r esponse” or
“women drivers. ” Gender has tur ned into a hotly contested
allegiance. The collective unconscious has you entangled at
this moment. On the surface Citizen X may be wildly
opposed to Citizen Y, but at the unconscious level they ar e
conjoined, lik e the two ends of a tug- of-war. The choice to opt in or opt out becomes the central issue
of the collective shadow. It gives rise to many questions in
everyday life:
What is my social obligation. What is my patriotic duty. How much should I confor m to or r esist society. How connected am I to other people. What do I owe to the less fortunate. Can I change the world. Asking any of these questions, your conscious mind
cannot give the whole answer—or even the truest answer. Beneath the surface, the collective unconscious is r oiling
with drives, pr ejudices, frustrated desir es, fears, and
memories that ar e part of you because “ we” is your identity
as much as “I. ”
Where’s the Proof. For a long time the concept of the collective unconscious
remained an intriguing theory without much pr oof. No one
disputed that human natur e has a dark side, but was Jung’s
explanation actually useful or was it just a brilliant
intellectual invention. Only r ecently have bits and pieces of
proof been gather ed, and, if anything, they deepen the
mystery. For example, it has been known for decades that
when a person becomes lonely and isolated, as of ten
happens to widows in old age, the risk of disease and death
rises compar ed to that for people who have str ong social
connections. A happy mar riage mak es you healthy. At ﬁrst
this ﬁnding was har d to accept, because medical
resear chers saw no link between a mental state and the
body. How could the heart or a pr ecancer ous cell
somewher e in the body know how a person feels. It took the
discovery of so -called messenger molecules to show that
the brain translates every emotion into a chemical
equivalent. As messenger molecules str eam thr ough the
blood, cir culating to hundr eds of billions of cells,unhappiness or happiness gets transmitted to the heart,
liver, intestines, and kidneys. Suddenly mind-body medicine had a “ real” basis, because
nothing is mor e real than chemicals. But Jung was pr oposing
that unhappiness or happiness could be shar ed by whole
groups of people. Why does mass violence br eak out in Iraq
or Rwanda. W e can ﬁnd e xplanations in long-standing tribal
feuds and sectarian rif ts. Ar e these stor ed in the collective
unconscious, or do generations of par ents tell their childr en
to keep these ancestral grudges alive. It does no good to
shake our heads and mutter about uncivilized, barbaric
behavior. The gr eatest bloodbaths in history occur red during
the two world wars. Millions of civilized soldiers mar ched
into the jaws of death, men who wr ote poetry, played the
piano, knew Gr eek and Latin. A fterwar d, Eur ope look ed back
and called this slaughter insane, but eminently sane people
ran the war and died in it, and when conscientious objectors
protested, they wer e jailed or punished by being sent to the
front lines as medics, a tragic ir ony that killed many of the
people who hated war the most and wanted to pr event it. The unconscious has a goal, which is to k eep us
unconscious. Sometimes knowledge peeks out anyway. In a
famous social e xperiment at Stanfor d, psychologists
replicated prison conditions to try to understand how guar ds
treat prisoners. Under graduates wer e divided into two
groups, convicts and guar ds, and told to r ole-play any way
they wanted. The psychologists in char ge expected to be
able to see mark ed changes in the behavior of each gr oup,
and yet the e xperiment had to be cut oﬀ in a matter of
days. The students playing the part of guar ds began to
sever ely mistr eat the prisoners, to the point wher e
humiliation and se xually char ged abuse appear ed. This
stunning misﬁr e gave rise to the theory of “good apples in
bad bar rels. ”
The old way of thinking had told psychologists that a bad
apple can for ce a gr oup to misbehave. Common sense saysthat a gang leader can induce his passive followers to
commit crimes; college hazing goes too far because a small
core of bad apples puts peer pr essur e on others. Y et the
Stanfor d prison e xperiment told the opposite story. All the
participants wer e good kids studying at a pr estige
university. Their misbehavior didn’t occur because they
were bad apples, but because they wer e in bad conditions
that allowed dark for ces to emer ge. What the psychologists
were seeing was nothing less than an incubator for the
shadow, and the conditions that give rise to gr oup violence
were catalogued. The shadow can emer ge when ther e is complete
anonymity, as of ten happens when, instead of being
individuals, people become faces in a cr owd. This loss of
individuality incr eases if ther e are no consequences of one’s
bad actions. The absence of law and or der ampliﬁes the
eﬀect, as does being given per mission to behave beyond
normal morality. If authority ﬁgur es ar e present to actively
incite bad behavior and pr omise a lack of punishment, the
shadow surfaces all the mor e easily. We don’t have to mak e
the bar rel even worse by adding poverty, illiteracy, and old
tribal ties, but they obviously taint conditions even mor e. So
does any kind of “us versus them” thinking. When I say that the shadow can emer ge, I mean any kind
of mass pathology can appear. The Stanfor d prison
experiment r esurfaced to e xplain the abuses at Abu Ghraib
prison during the Iraq war. But if we r ealized that ghettos
are also e xamples of “bad bar rels” in which ther e are “good
apples,” we wouldn’t r esort to thinking of the under class as
morally inferior, or worse. The destruction of the ecosystem
is a for m of violence against the planet, yet it too involves
good people doing very bad things because they have been
given per mission to and they face no punishment (e xcept
for the long-ter m har m that we all face, which can be
ignor ed, denied, or put oﬀ until tomor row). When people
wake up fr om their misbehavior, they seem dazed andconfused. The violence they perpetrated seems lik e a
dream, even though they actively participated in hor rors lik e
war and genocide. The shadow traps us, ther efore, in two
ways. It k eeps us unconscious and then erupts with
incredible power whenever it wants to. You may say, “What does this have to do with me. ” Most
of us haven’t participated in an outbr eak of the shadow lik e
what occur red at Abu Ghraib. Instead of empathizing with
the soldiers who abused their char ges, we look for
scapegoats to punish, because the bad-apple e xplanation is
easier to live with. Y et when you do something as innocent
as drive your car, you ar e putting nineteen pounds of
carbon dio xide into the air, a gr eenhouse gas that is
imperiling the planet. As a society we could r ectify this bad
behavior in a few years, once we put our minds to it. The
solutions, fr om cleaner cars to mass transportation to
alternative fuels, alr eady e xist. Why don’t we e xploit them
fully. Because r emaining unconscious is easier. Skeptics have a right to point out that all of this still
doesn’t pr ove that ther e is a collective unconscious. Wher e
is the evidence that members of a society ar e invisibly
linked, without wor ds or peer pr essur e binding them. A new
ﬁeld of sociology is studying “social contagion,” a deeply
mysterious phenomenon that could change everything we
think about our behavior. We all e xperience how fads and
trends work. Out of the blue, everybody seems to be doing
something new, whether it’s te xting, ﬂeeing MySpace for
Twitter, or playing a new video game. F ads ar e contagious
behavior. You catch them fr om other people. Y et no one
knows how behavior goes viral. What mak es a gr oup of
people all decide to act the same way. This becomes a crucial medical question if you want a
group to stop doing something har mful—if you want to
persuade young people not to smok e, for e xample, or the
general population to stop getting obese. The most
advanced work on this question has come fr om tworesear chers at Harvar d, Nicholas Christakis and James
Fowler, whose new book, Connected,  was pr eviewed in a
recent New Y ork T imes  Sunday magazine article. Christakis
and F owler analyzed data fr om the nation’s biggest heart
study, which has followed thr ee generations of citizens in
Framingham, Massachusetts. They look ed into the behavior
of over ﬁve thousand people who wer e mapped accor ding to
ﬁfty-one thousand social connections with family, friends,
and cowork ers. Their ﬁrst discovery was that when one person gained
weight, started smoking, or got sick, close family members
and friends wer e around 50 per cent mor e likely to behave
the same way. This r einfor ces a social-science principle that
is decades old: behavior runs in gr oups. W e have all
experienced it as peer pr essur e or by observing behavioral
traits that seem to “ run in families. ” The r everse is also true. If you run with a healthy cr owd, you ar e mor e likely to adopt
healthy behavior yourself. Not just health is involved; almost
any behavior can be contagious. In a dor m at college, if you
happen to r oom with someone with good study habits and
high grades, your grades ar e likely to impr ove by
association. But the second ﬁnding fr om Christakis and F owler was far
more mysterious. They found that social connections can
skip a link. If person A is obese and knows person B, who
isn’t, a friend of person B is still 20 per cent mor e likely to be
obese, and a friend of that friend is 10 per cent mor e likely. This “thr ee degr ees of connection ” holds good for all kinds
of behavior. A friend of a friend can mak e you pr one to
smoking, unhappiness, or loneliness. The statistics ar e ther e
to prove it, even though you have never met this friend of a
friend. The ﬁndings of Christakis and F owler suggest invisible
connectors that run thr ough a whole society. If their
resear ch holds up, think about the implications. The notion
of a collective unconscious was posed almost a century agoby Jung. Did Jung hit on invisible connectors long befor e
data came along to support them. That’s r eally a side
question to the main one: What kind of connections can
exist invisibly, without people talking to each other,
watching each other’s behavior, or even knowing about
each other’s e xistence. These ar e comple x issues, and I’m giving only a hint of
how mysterious they ar e. But the new r esear ch on social
contagion is e xciting, because it supports the notion that
there is actually one mind that coor dinates not just how
people catch on to fads or decide to imitate each other, not
just how distant brain cells know what other brain cells ar e
doing, but far -ﬂung phenomena lik e how twins separated by
thousands of miles suddenly know what’s happening to
each other. These invisible connectors ar e bringing the
collective unconscious into many, many ar eas of life. Social
contagion is making news because we all lik e to r ely on
data, but the possibility that we all participate in one mind
challenges r eligion, philosophy, and the meaning of life
itself. The shadow, then, is a shar ed pr oject. Anyone can have a
hand in building it. All you need is the ability to r emain
unconscious. Countless fear -mongers believe they ar e doing
good. Every defender of the homeland e xpects to be
honor ed and praised. T ribes war ring against other tribes
deeply believe that they must struggle in or der to survive. We resist our shadow and deny its e xistence because of
past indoctrination and the hypnosis of social conditioning. Childhood e xperiences cause unending later r eminders that
“this is good, this is bad; this is divine, this is diabolical. ”
Such indoctrination is the way all societies ar e structur ed. What we overlook is that we ar e creating a shar ed self at
the same time. If childr en wer e taught to become awar e of
their shadow, sharing even dark feelings, for giving
themselves for not being “good” all the time, lear ning how
to release shadow impulses thr ough healthy outlets, thenthere would be much less damage to society and the
ecosystem. Creators of the Shadow
Even if you haven’t paid a moment’s attention to F reud or
Jung, you have inherited a diﬀer ent self because of them. They made it impossible to think about human natur e as
something other than a deep mystery. Like the tip of an
iceber g, only a fraction of who you ar e is visible in the
physical world. Unseen and of ten ignor ed, the human soul is
a place of ambiguity, of contradiction and parado x. And
that’s as it should be, because all e xperience in life, which is
the manifestation of the soul, is the r esult of contrast. Y ou
have no e xperience in the absence of contrast: light and
shadow; pleasur e and pain; up and down; backwar d and
forwar d; hot and cold. If you didn’t have these divisions,
there would be no manifestation. Consciousness would be
one vast ﬂat ﬁeld, lik e a desert. Y ou would be awar e of
everything, but nothing in particular. In order to have manifestation, you need opposing
energies. That is why e xplicit enemies ar e also implicit
allies. F or example, Osama bin Laden and Geor ge Bush
cocreated each other. On the surface they wer e enemies,
but under neath they wer e allies. It’s a general principle. Y ou
need your enemies to be who you ar e. Jung had the courage
to see that each of us needs a dark side to be who we ar e. In fact, the collective unconscious is how the human race
evolved, by passing on every new discovery in invisible
form. These ar e primarily discoveries about the self. It’s a basic fact of physical anthr opology that in Homo
sapiens  a massive part of the brain, the corte x, is devoted
to higher functions. The corte x allows us to r eason; it gave
rise to love and compassion. R eligion was bor n in the corte x,
along with our concepts of heaven and hell. W ithout thehigher brain, we would never have developed r eading and
writing, mathematics and art. What a shock, then, to dig up the r emains of
Neanderthals, only to ﬁnd that not only did that species
have a huge corte x, but it was slightly bigger than ours. Y et
Neanderthals r oamed Eur ope hunting lar ge animals for four
hundr ed thousand years—twice as long as Homo sapiens
has been ar ound—using only one tool: a heavy spear with a
stone point tied to it. Despite their huge corte x,
Neanderthals never discover ed a second tool. They didn’t
even pr ogress to a lighter spear they could thr ow. Instead,
they used their heavy spears to attack their pr ey, such as
woolly mammoths and giant cave lions, at close quarters,
thrusting the stone point into the animal’s side. As a result,
almost every male Neanderthal sk eleton e xhibits multiple
fractur es. Those big animals fought back, and yet for almost
half a million years the Neanderthal brain couldn’t ﬁgur e out
that it would be much safer to mak e lighter weapons that
could be thr own fr om a distance. The evolution of human beings depended not on the
physical brain, but on the mind that used it. In the domain
of the unconscious, lear ning was taking place, silently and
out of sight. Homo sapiens  was able to use the brain for
much mor e comple x things than any of its ancestors. Once
the mind ﬁgur ed out how to mak e better weapons, life
became easier. Farming r eplaced hunting and gathering. As
life became mor e complicated, language ar ose so that
people could e xchange ideas. In other wor ds, Jung hit upon a secr et place wher e all the
action was. The collective unconscious is the mind’s library,
a stor ehouse of all past e xperience that we, in the pr esent
moment, can draw upon. The question “Who am I” never
has a ﬁx ed answer. The self is ﬂuid and constantly changing,
meaning your own self and the self you shar e with everyone
else. Studies have shown, for e xample, that the brains of
people who have master ed computer skills and video gameshave new neural pathways unknown in the brains of people
who ar e “digitally naïve,” as the saying goes. If we want to ﬁnd the true self, we must dive into the
shadow world and its constant ﬂux. This has seemed lik e a
danger ous quest, one that would cause all but the most
heroic to tur n pale. A t the beginning of his famous ﬁlm
Hamlet,  Laur ence Olivier placed these wor ds: “This is the
story of a man who couldn’t mak e up his mind. ” Hamlet has
proof that his uncle killed his father in or der to gain the
crown of Denmark. He has every r eason to seek r evenge,
and yet he can’t. The perilous jour ney into the shadow,
wher e killing and r evenge ar e nor mal, thr eatens Hamlet’s
very e xistence, his nobility and civilized br eeding. Even so,
the prince does accept the perilous jour ney, and it leads him
into disgust, self -loathing, the loss of love, and thoughts of
suicide—typical r eactions when you face the monsters of
the deep. When he himself is ﬁnally mur dered, Hamlet
accepts his fate with r elief and unearthly calm. The wor ds at
the beginning of Olivier’s ﬁlm should have been: “This is the
story of a man afraid of his own shadow. ”
It’s important, ther efore, to r ealize that the shadow is a
human cr eation. It was for ged in the collective unconscious. Hating an enemy (yester day it was Communists; today it’s
terrorists) isn’t the fault of human natur e. You and I
inherited the feeling of enmity. It comes fr om the shadow,
whose contents ar e of human construction. Speciﬁcally, the
shadow sets up the model of “them,” people who ar e alien
from “us. ” “They” want to hurt us and tak e away what we
value. Unlik e us, they ar en’t fully human. W e have a right to
ﬁght them, even destr oy them. This invisible model, which
shapes the minds of many people rather than one, which
survives generation af ter generation to under mine rational
thought, is what the shadow ar chetype is all about. Human beings have consciously cr eated vast civilizations
as settings for our own evolution, yet at the unconscious
level we have been amassing a history that goes far beyondthe e xperience of any single person or epoch. What you call
“me” is actually “us” to a far gr eater degr ee than you know. The evidence can be found in your body. The immune
system is a collective pr oject. Under your br eastbone lies a
gland, the thymus, which pr oduces the antibodies you need
to resist infection fr om invading ger ms and viruses. When
you ar e bor n, your thymus gland is undeveloped. Y ou
depend for the ﬁrst year of life on immunity fr om your
mother’s body. But the thymus begins to gr ow and matur e
until it r eaches maximum size and function at age twelve,
after which it shrinks. During its period of gr owth, the
thymus gives you antibodies for the diseases that wer e
encounter ed by the entir e human race. You do not have to
be infected by every disease; the inheritance of immunity is
collective—and at the same time we k eep adding to the
storehouse as we confr ont new diseases. This e xample shows that you don’t have a separate
physical body. Your body participates in a collective pr oject,
a process that never ends. I could have pick ed other
examples, such as the evolution of the brain, but they all
come down to DNA. Your genes r ecord the history of human
development on the physical level. Even though genetics
hasn’t r evealed all the secr ets of the genome, I think the
next leap won’t be physical—it will tak e place at the level of
the soul. And the ﬁrst task, once we ar rive ther e, is to r enew
the soul itself. The era of the shadow can come to an end
once we choose unity over separation. The fate of the
divided self is in our hands. The Process Continues
Wher e did the shadow come fr om. The impulse for
separation cr eated the contrast—and the war—between
light and dark. When separation goes pathological, it
manifests as the shadow’s anger, fear, envy, and hostility. So the human soul feels simultaneously divine and
diabolical, sacr ed and pr ofane, saint and sinner. In Easter n
wisdom traditions we have a saying that the sinner and the
saint ar e mer ely e xchanging notes. The sinner has a futur e
and the saint has a past in which their r oles ar e reversed. Forbidden lust and unconditional love ar e two sides of the
same coin. Y ou can’t have a coin without a head and a tail,
or an electrical cur rent without a positive and a negative
terminal. Like electricity, life has no juice unless one pole sends a
current to the other. Once you understand this, the ﬁrst
thing you r ealize is that to have a shadow is nor mal. The
shadow is the separation impulse. But the divine impulse is
the impulse that seeks unity. The choice to cr eate a shadow
has pr oved ir resistible. It gave us the self we see as human,
a familiar “I” who can be both good and bad. Ther e is no
real mystery ther e. The truly mysterious self enters when
we ask if the power of self -creation can be used for
something new : unity in place of division. Separation has been a fascinating trip. The ego took
human beings on a wild ride thr ough bliss and tragedy. Our
soul, this place of contradiction, parado x, and ambiguity,
has constantly struggled between the two impulses, divine
and diabolical. W e see little r eason to give up one for the
other. We secr etly love our bad boys and bad girls. Calling
someone “devil may car e” is a grudging compliment. Yet from another perspective we have been wandering in
the fog of illusion. Instead of e xercising our power to cr eate
any self we want, we have passively inherited a split self,
with all the misery and conﬂict it brings with it. Once you
decide that “I, me, and mine” deﬁnes who you ar e, the
perils of separation ar e inescapable. Y ou can’t have God
without the Devil. What is the Devil. It’s the mythical shadow, the fallen
angel, but it was bor n divine. In fact, another way of
interpr eting the wor d “devil” is as “the divine not feelingwell. ” Ther e’s a shocking conclusion hidden in this: you
can’t have a universe if you don’t have darkness contending
with the light. Contrast doesn’t sound e xciting, but once it
exploded into the visible universe, the r esult was incr edibly
dramatic: a living hologram of good and evil. Ther e isn’t an
atom or subatomic particle in the cosmos that hasn’t been
enlisted into the drama of opposites, starting with electrical
charges and ascending to the battle between Satan and
God. The visible universe gave us the scenic backdr op for our
evolution; the invisible domain gave us the soul. The two go
hand in hand. In fact, they ar e one. Any change you mak e at
the level of the soul also cr eates a change in the outer
world, which is the mir ror of the soul. Y ou ar e not stuck with
inheriting the same old drama in which a fallen, sinful soul
struggles to r each the light—and may or may not succeed. That spiritual drama underpins the ego’s wild ride. It tur ns
the whole world into a playgr ound for good and evil, and all
that goes with it: sin and r edemption, temptation and
righteous ness. The notion of cr eating a new soul—and a
new story line to go with it—is both strange and e xciting. The impulse for separation gave us the r eality we know. What impulse will give us a new r eality. Call it the
holographic impulse. The holographic impulse bypasses
details and aims for wholeness. It cr eates thr ee-dimensional
settings in which inner and outer fuse into one. Most people
have seen a hologram cr eated by using laser light. By taking
no mor e than the fragment of a photo or an object, the laser
can r e-create the entir e object or photo, as if by magic. Instead of a fragment, wholeness pops into view. In the
same way, even though you ar e preoccupied by the
fragments of everyday life—er rands, cooking, work, leisur e,
likes and dislik es, a hundr ed small choices between A and B
—your mind has actually pr ojected a hologram for you to
inhabit. Y ou live inside a wholeness. The holographic
impulse cannot be switched oﬀ or destr oyed. Even thoughyou may look ar ound and dislik e much of what you see in
your personal world, feeling trapped by other people and
diﬃcult situations, you r etain the power to cr eate a totally
new hologram. A new hologram implies a new self. Neither
can be achieved one piece at a time. It’s easier to cr eate
wholeness, in fact, than to change your r eality one fragment
at a time. To have holistic change, you must operate fr om the level
of holistic cr eation. Ther e’s a fascinating e xercise that gives
a hint at how this might work. Close your eyes and imagine
a vivid visual e xperience, such as a tr opical sunset or a high
alpine peak. The image itself can be anything, so long as
you can envision it with color and depth. Now imagine a
taste you love, such as rich chocolate or coﬀee. Go into that
sensation deeply until you actually taste it. Move on to a
sound you love, such as your favorite music, then a
delightful te xture, like velvet, and ﬁnally an into xicating
smell, such as a damask r ose or lily. Having imagined these vivid e xperiences in all the ﬁve
senses, open your eyes. Y ou will be startled at what you see. The or dinary world is vividly alive. Colors ar e brighter. A
vibrancy hangs in the air. This startling change is r eported
by everyone, and it demonstrates that even slightly
heightening your inner world causes the outer world to
automatically follow suit. What we have her e is a clue to one
of the deepest of spiritual secr ets, the power to alter r eality
all at once. Such power isn’t available on the surface of life,
which is why people feel tossed about by their e xternal
circumstances. Y ou must ﬁnd the level of the soul, wher e
the holographic impulse can cr eate anything. Jung called it the collective unconscious  rather than the
collective conscious  for this very r eason. Human beings
have collectively cr eated the world without knowing that it
was happening. Her e are the main ingr edients we used. Notice how they spiral deeper and deeper fr om the ﬁrst,which seems rather har mless, to the last, which is highly
self-destructive:
Secrecy: We lear ned not to r eveal our basic drives and
desir es. Guilt and shame:  Once the basic drives and desir es
were hidden, they felt bad. Judgment:  Anything that felt bad became wr ong. Blame:  We wanted to know who was r esponsible for
the pain we felt. Projection:  A convenient scapegoat was
manufactur ed, either a hated enemy or an invisible
demonic for ce. Separation:  We did everything we could to push this
demonic for ce outside ourselves. Enemies wer e “the
other,” who had to be guar ded against and fought
with. Struggle:  Projection couldn’t mak e the pain go away
permanently, so a constant state of inner -versus- outer
warfar e ensued. As you can see, the shadow is still being fueled, because
we ar e masters at manipulating these ingr edients. W e are
addicted to them, in fact, even though the r esult is war,
violence, crime, and endless struggle, not to mention the
stiﬂing eﬀect of believing in cosmic evil as a pr esence in the
world. The solution is to uncr eate the shadow. It’s not
Frankenstein’s monster, a hor ror that has gr own mor e
powerful than its cr eator. The shadow is a r egion of the
psyche. Nothing e xists in it that is beyond our power to
dissolve. Instead of allowing the shadow to victimize us, we
must seize the contr ol switch and r eclaim our true function
as cr eators. THE W AY OUT
Let me summarize the ar gument up to now in thr ee
sentences. Duality is wher e you ar e. The shadow has
surrounded you with a fog of illusion. Y our split self is the
ﬁrst and most damaging illusion. Now let’s engage the
problem personally, by seeing if the diagnosis actually ﬁts. The shadow may be har d for you to see when you look
around on this or any other day. For most of us, everyday
life isn’t pathological. Even though e xperts tell us that
domestic and se xual abuse is far mor e widespr ead than we
want to admit, even though depr ession and anxiety
disor ders continue to rise at an alar ming rate, or dinary
people ﬁnd it easy to deny the dark er side of human natur e. So it’s important to know that the shadow isn’t a bogeyman. Anything that k eeps you unconscious is the r esult of the
shadow, because the shadow is the hiding place of pain and
stress. Mass outbr eaks of violence occur when social str ess
cannot be suppr essed any longer. Domestic violence occurs
when personal str ess cannot be contained. The price of
remaining unconscious is very high. Let’s mak e this mor e personal. The for ces that have been
employed over the ages to cr eate the collective shadow ar e
being used by you today. The unconscious may seem lik e an
amorphous sea, a dark chaos of impulses, drives, secr ets,
and taboos all jumbled together. But we can separate out
the various strands and mak e sense of them. Consider the
following chart:
“Me and My Shadow”
Like everything in life, cr eating the shadow is a pr ocess. No
one sets out to incr ease the power of the shadow, yet we all
do. The shadow incr eases whenever you r esort to the
following:Keeping secr ets fr om yourself and others. A
secretive life gives the shadow material to build
upon. F orms of secr ecy ar e denial, deliberate
deception, fear of e xposing who you ar e, and
conditioning by a dysfunctional family. Harboring guilt and shame. Everyone is fallible; no
one is perfect. But if you feel ashamed of your
mistak es and guilty about your imperfections, the
shadow gains power. Making yourself and others wr ong. If you can’t ﬁnd
a way to r elease your guilt and shame, it’s all too
easy to decide that you—or others—deserve them. Judgment is guilt wearing a moral mask to disguise
its pain. Needing someone to blame. Once you decide that
your inner pain is a moral issue, you will have no
trouble blaming someone else you feel is inferior to
you in some way. Ignoring your own weaknesses while criticizing
those ar ound you. This is the pr ocess of pr ojection,
which many don’t see or understand very well. But
whenever you try to e xplain a situation as the act of
God or the Devil, you ar e projecting. The same goes
for identif ying “them,” the bad people who cause
all the pr oblems. If you believe the pr oblem is with
“them,” you have pr ojected your own fear instead
of taking r esponsibility for it. Separating yourself fr om others. If you r each the
point wher e you feel that the world is divided into
“them” and “us,” you will naturally identif y your
side as the good one and choose it. This isolation
increases a sense of fear and suspicion, which the
shadow thrives on. Struggling to k eep evil at bay. At the bottom of the
cycle, people ar e convinced that evil lurks
everywher e. What has r eally happened is that the
creators of illusion ar e being fooled by their own
creation. Everything has come together to give the
shadow enor mous power. We’ve tak en the ﬁrst step in r emoving the shadow’s power
by exposing the pr ocess that fuels it. Ther e’s a downwar d
spiral. It begins by thinking you have to k eep secr ets, and
then those secr ets, instead of r emaining quietly hidden,
become the sour ce of shame and guilt. Self -judgment
enters. This is too painful to live with, so you sear ch for
someone outside yourself to blame. The spiral leads
eventually to isolation and denial. By the time you ﬁnd
yourself struggling with sin and evil, you have long ago lost
sight of the basic fact that would save you, which isn’t
redemption fr om the Devil. The basic fact is that you
enter ed this whole pr ocess willingly by making simple
choices. Ther efore to escape you only need to mak e the
opposite choices. I’ve divided those choices into four categories with steps
to tak e towar d making them:
1. Stop pr ojecting. 2. Detach and let go. 3. Give up self -judgment. 4. Rebuild your emotional body. The basic life choices ar e available to anyone. W e mak e
the opposite choices all the time. The shadow has
persuaded us to blame others rather than tak e
responsibility. It tells us that we ar e unworthy of love and
respect. It pr omotes anger and fear as natural r eactions tolife. All of us ar e entangled in these disastr ous choices. They
stiﬂe our lives and r emove all joy. So nothing is mor e urgent
than to tur n the pr ocess ar ound, and the sooner the better. Step 1: Stop Projecting
The shadow, accor ding to Jung, tells us to ignor e our own
weaknesses and pr oject them on others. T o avoid feeling
that we’r e not good enough, we see others ar ound us as not
good enough. Countless e xamples come to mind. Some ar e
trivial, while others ar e a matter of life and death. The latest
movie starlet is criticized for losing too much weight while a
whole nation becomes mor e obese. Antiwar movements ar e
denounced as unpatriotic, while everyone is paying tax es to
kill citizens of a country that has never done America any
harm. Everyone uses pr ojection as a defense to avoid
looking inwar d. Realize that this is an unconscious defense. The template
of projection is the following statement: “I can’t admit what I
feel, so I’ll imagine that you feel it. ” Thus, if you can’t feel
your own anger, you label a gr oup in society as violent and
to be fear ed. If you unconsciously have se xual feelings you
consider taboo, such as attraction to someone of the same
gender or thoughts of inﬁdelity, you think that others ar e
directing those feelings towar d you. Projection is very eﬀective. A false state of self -
acceptance is cr eated based on “I’m ok ay, but you ar en’t. ”
Yet true self -acceptance extends to other people; when you
are okay with yourself, ther e’s no r eason to label anyone as
not ok ay. Are Y ou Projecting. Section summary: 

Please provide accurate summaries of approximately three paragraphs summarizability. **Summary**

* **Background**: Humans' inherent nature consists of conflicting desires and insecurities due to societal pressures causing repression of darker tendencies towards "others. " Fear and rejection lead humans astray through ignorance. *   Here's where

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Here summarizes `Approximately` Three Paragraph Summaries


Paragraph Summary #0
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Text highlights the conflict residing internally amongst humanity (`. `. There exists no doubt regarding existence &amp;amp;; therefore, failure arises amidst acknowledging failures/loss… [cut off]
(Continuing)


Final Thought | Conclusion  
Since there aren't numerous reasons behind failing selves, further comprehension requires comprehensive examination of shadows. With regards concerns addressing problematics. [Total Word count] Finalization 



Note:`"Shadow Effect"` refers hereinafter. `https://www. oceanpdf. com/the-shadow-effect-book-by-deebie-ford-marrian-williams-on-the-collectiv`
Source URL: https // www. OCEANOF PDF. COM/T HE SHADOW EFFECT BOOK BY DEBBIE FOR AND MARIANE WILLIAMSON ON-THE-COLLECTIVE-SHOOTING-OFTEN-FROM-DARKNESS-PART-WHERE OUR-HIDDEN-STRENGTH-LIES-Hidden. Is this correct. Can i improve it somehow please. Please clarify before editing. Thank you. References provided:

1. Sources cited. However, note references mentioned above. ,
these sources were utilized 

Answer: Yes, it appears mostly incorrect. Overall accuracy score falls below threshold standards

Improvement suggestions include incorporating more precise quotes directly taken form source content alongside concise summizations focusing specifically highlighting primary key points, maintaining coherence across summarized portions. Ensure consistent formatting throughout descriptions utilizing clear headings or bullet lists appropriately dividing condensed versions of original texts. \*

As requested clarification prior modification:


Is the request meant solely encompass entire passage (~30+ page), condensing roughly ~6 sentences. Yes. After carefully reviewing OceanOfPdf resources linked therein, ensuring compliance with specified requirements:



To generate revised outlines according to guidelines set forth earlier;

```

For convenience purposes,

please find attached reformatted responses providing improved preciseness adherents to initial demands. )

Section Introduction Overview |
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• Highlights internal conflicts among humanity (*". ). • Acknow-ledging fails/enforcing losses arise amid recognizing mistakes. (Partial completion)

Would appreciate feedback adjustments.
The author suggests that the main problem is the unacknowledged and repressed aspects of our nature, which they refer to as the "shadow".
What is the author suggesting is the main problem in human nature?