Owning Your Own Shadow Quotes

“The persona is what we would like to be and how we wish to be seen by the world. It is our psychological clothing and it mediates between our true selves and our environment just as our physical clothing presents an image to those we meet. The ego is what we are and know about consciously. The shadow is that part of us we fail to see or know.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow: A Jungian Approach to Transformative Self-Acceptance, Exploring the Unlit Part of the Ego and Finding Balance Through Spiritual Self-Discovery

“Curiously, people resist the noble aspects of their shadow more strenuously than they hide the dark sides. To draw the skeletons out of the closet is relatively easy, but to own the gold in the shadow is terrifying. It is more disrupting to find that you have a profound nobility of character than to find out you are a bum.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow: A Jungian Approach to Transformative Self-Acceptance, Exploring the Unlit Part of the Ego and Finding Balance Through Spiritual Self-Discovery

“The persona is what we would like to be and how we wish to be seen by the world it is our psychological clothing and it mediates between our true selves and our environment just as our physical clothing presents an image to those we meet. The ego is what we are and know about consciously. The shadow is that part of us we fail to see or know.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche

“Contribute less to the general darkness of the world and do not add to the collective shadow that fuels war and strife.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche

“Our human situation divides us over and over again into ego-shadow opposition, not matter where we start. This is probably why St. Augustine said, “To act is to sin.” As long as we take our place in society, we will pay for it by bearing a shadow. And society will pay a general price with collective phenomena such as war, violence, racism. This is why the religious life speaks of another realm, heaven, and of the millennium, as the culmination of the inner life. Culture and religion have different aims.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche

“If you want to affect your environment, don’t get lost in your activism. Stop for a moment and make a mandorla. Don’t just do — be something.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche

“If a wise man abides in his room his thoughts are heard for more than a thousand miles.” if one makes a mandorla in the privacy of his interior life, it is heard for more than a thousand miles — I Ching, hexagram #61”
― Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche

“To reconcile so great a span as heaven and earth is beyond our ordinary way of seeing; generally, two irreconcilable opposites (guilty and need) make neurotic structure in us. It takes a poet — or the poet in us — to overlap such a pair and make a sublime whole of them.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche

“It is not that the light element alone does the healing; the place where light and dark begin to touch is where miracles arise. This middle place is a mandorla.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche

“If i can stay with my conflicting impulses long enough, the two opposing forces will teach each other something and produce an insight that serves them both. This is not a compromise but a depth of understanding that puts my life in perspective and allows me to know with certainty what I should do. That certainty is one of the most precious qualities known to human kind.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche

“We could give our children the most wonderful blessing if only we would stop passing the buck to them.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche

“If you wish to give your children the best possible gift, the best possible entree into life, remove your shadow from them. To give them a clean heritage, psychologically speaking is the greatest legacy. And, incidentally, you will go far in your own development by taking your shadow back into our private psychological structure— where it first originated and where it is required for your own wholeness.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche

“Invest your own darkness into something outside yourself. Projective is always easier than assimilation. It is a dark page in human history when people amen others bear their shadow for them. Men all their shadow upon women, whites upon blacks, Catholics upon Protestants, capitalists upon communists, Muslims upon Hindus. Neighbor hoods will make one family the scapegoat and these people will bear the shadow for the entire group. Indeed, every group unconsciously designates one of its members as the black sheep and makes him or her carry the darkness for the community.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche

“The tendency to see one’s shadow “out there” in one’s neighbor or in another race or culture is the most dangerous aspect of the modern psyche. It is not the monsters of the world who make such chaos but the collective shadow to which every one of us has contributed.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche

“The only alternative to torture is art” George Bernard Shaw. This means we will engage in our creativity or have to face its alternative brutality.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche

“How can one produce something of beauty or goodness without doing an equal amount of wreckage? Is it possible to live one’s ideals, do one’s best, be courteous, do well at work, and live a decent civilized life if we ritually acknowledge this other dimension of reality. The unconscious cannot her tell the difference between a real act and a symbolic one. This means that we can aspire to beauty and goodness and any out that darkness in a symbolic way. This enables us to do the upkeep of the left side of the balance.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche

“To advance from opposition (always a quarrel) to paradox (always holy) is to make a leap of consciousness. That leap takes us through the chaos of middle age and gives a vista that enlightens the remaining years of life. It is a valuable exercise to list the oppositions that we face, then try to restore them to the realm of paradox. We can start with these two sets of values: the everyday practical attitudes that nearly everyone agrees to and the religious instruction that we are given.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow: A Jungian Approach to Transformative Self-Acceptance, Exploring the Unlit Part of the Ego and Finding Balance Through Spiritual Self-Discovery

“I had a dream which both frightened and encouraged me. It was night in some unknown place, and I was making slow and painful headway against a mighty wind. Dense fog was flying along everywhere. I had my hands cupped around a tiny light which threatened to go out at any moment. Everything depended on my keeping this little light alive. Suddenly I had the feeling that something was coming up behind me. I looked back, and saw a gigantic black figure following me. But at the same moment I was conscious in spite of my terror, that I must keep my little light going through night and wind, regardless of all dangers. When I awoke I realized at once that the figure was my own shadow on the swirling mists, brought into being by the little light I was carrying. I knew too that this little light was my consciousness, the only light I have. Though infinitely small and fragile in comparison with the powers of darkness, it is still a light, my only light.* Jung had gone through a highly refined enculturating process, from his childhood in a rigid Swiss Protestant home to the severe discipline of his medical training.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow: A Jungian Approach to Transformative Self-Acceptance, Exploring the Unlit Part of the Ego and Finding Balance Through Spiritual Self-Discovery

“I had a dream which both frightened and encouraged me. It was night in some unknown place, and I was making slow and painful headway against a mighty wind. Dense fog was flying along everywhere. I had my hands cupped around a tiny light which threatened to go out at any moment. Everything depended on my keeping this little light alive. Suddenly I had the feeling that something was coming up behind me. I looked back, and saw a gigantic black figure following me. But at the same moment I was conscious in spite of my terror, that I must keep my little light going through night and wind, regardless of all dangers. When I awoke I realized at once that the figure was my own shadow on the swirling mists, brought into being by the little light I was carrying. I knew too that this little light was my consciousness, the only light I have. Though infinitely small and fragile in comparison with the powers of darkness, it is still a light, my only light.*”
― Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow: A Jungian Approach to Transformative Self-Acceptance, Exploring the Unlit Part of the Ego and Finding Balance Through Spiritual Self-Discovery

“To fall in love is to project the most noble part of one’s being onto another human being (..) the divinity we see in others is truly there, but we don’t have the right to see it until we have taken away our own projections. (..) in-loveness obliterates the humanity of the beloved. One does a curious kind of insult to another by falling in love with him, for we are really looking at our own projection of God, not at the other person.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche

“Culture takes away the simple human in us, but gives us more complex and sophisticated power. One can make a forceful argument that children should not be subjected to this division too soon or they will be robbed of childhood; they should be allowed to remain in the Garden of Eden until they are strong enough to stand the cultural process without being broken by it. This strength comes at different ages for different individuals and it requires a keen eye to know when children are ready to adapt to the collective life of a society.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow: A Jungian Approach to Transformative Self-Acceptance, Exploring the Unlit Part of the Ego and Finding Balance Through Spiritual Self-Discovery

“Researchers estimate that in an average family household, twenty-eight servants would be needed to accomplish only one part of the work that is taken care of by our mechanical aids. What a wonderful age!”
― Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow: A Jungian Approach to Transformative Self-Acceptance, Exploring the Unlit Part of the Ego and Finding Balance Through Spiritual Self-Discovery