C.G. Jung: The Shadow is a Tight Passage

This meeting with oneself is, at first, the meeting with one’s own shadow.

The shadow is a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well.

But one must learn to know oneself in order to know who one is.

For what comes after the door is, surprisingly enough, a boundless expanse full of unprecedented uncertainty, with apparently no inside and no outside, no above and no below, no here and no there, no mine and no thine, no good and no bad.

It is the world of water…..where I am indivisibly this and that; where I experience the other in myself and the other-than-myself experiences me.

The  Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

 p. 21

The Well of Grief

Those who will not slip beneath
     the still surface on the well of grief

turning downward through its black water
     to the place we cannot breathe

will never know the source from which we drink,
     the secret water, cold and clear,

nor find in the darkness glimmering
     the small round coins
          thrown by those who wished for something else.

  — David Whyte
      from Where Many Rivers Meet
      ©2007 Many Rivers Press