Joan, Apologies for the delay, I had urgent priorities to settle. In the meantime David Johnston has provided much revealing hints on the shadow in Jungian terms. I am now completing the reply I started but had no time to finalize. What I myself wrote comes from elaborating Jung’s concept of the synthesis of the opposites – but within the perspective of Integral Yoga and, in this particular case, of Sri Aurobindo’s description of the involution-evolution process. Yes, Jung taught that the shadow will always be with us; by this he means the personal shadow, which is not always necessarily negative, it can even be the opposite. For by personal shadow Jung means all that the ordinary waking consciousness represses and which often is negative. But the shadow can also be positively creative, yet as it doesn’t fit the parameters of the prevailing collective superego (Freud; the Mother talks on atavism) the individual represses potentially valuable material; then, piling up in the unconscious with other repressed elements, along with the really negative ones, the shadow grows disturbing. Jungian therapy is about ‘individuation’, the demiurge is the Jungian ‘Self’; Indra Sen (the late professor of psychology and ashramite) was the first one to stress a similarity with the role of the psychic being. Meeting and integrating the shadow is the starting point, but is also an unending process that goes on for life. In Integral Yoga too this is a most essential step, which goes along with the unending introspection and self-scrutiny the Mother advocates for the sadhaks; the task rests, needless to say, with one’s psychic being, presiding over what the Mother calls ‘individualisation’. Not only there is the shadow, but Sri Aurobindo, replying to the late Kishor Gandhi who had submitted to him a text by Jung, mentioned that almost everyone has an attached being compelling the sadhak to manifest the opposite of the truth of his/her inner being: the evil persona (translated into French as ‘le double mauvais’, one’s evil double). Whether it is Jung, or Integral Yoga, there is no way out but working all this out. This is the theme of my last book, “Becoming One – The Psychology of Integral Yoga”: 300 pages compiling from the Mother on all aspects of Integral Psychology, and another 160 presenting Freud, Jung and essays by major ashramites, also focusing on the shadow and evil persona. The Mother equates the light and the shadow as directly proportional to each other. She even stated that there is really nothing wrong in this manifestation, what’s wrong is that things are not in the proper place. Fit them where they should be and everything goes back to order. She also said that we should offer to the Divine not just the best of us, but the worst too, and that while meeting her all this should come forward and be offered to her. This is the abc of transformation, or nothing can be accomplished. However, Jung mentions a much more threatening shadow, collective, built up by the sum of all the individual shadows that, being systematically repressed, grows more and more threatening while adding to the collective unconscious and shadow of the age and race. This is the source of intolerance, witch hunt, persecution, war, carnage, genocide, fascism, imperialism and so on. Read the world’s news and you get the collective shadow in full swing. And then there is the absolute shadow, which is pure evil, beyond redemption. This progression reminds one of Sri Aurobindo’s distinction between the asuras to be transformed, versus the very rare type of asuras that, being pure evil, cannot be transformed and as such have to be destroyed. Hitler was one. As for the first prevailing type, Sri Aurobindo reminds us that they can even have a halo of light, besides listing their super-human qualities. This explains why it is so important to try to convert the asuras, given their extraordinary powers and (potential) light, and also the role they play in his Path. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother never made a secret of it, and this was as well a constant refrain I heard since when I first came to the Ashram, in 1973, which helped me to set things in the right perspective from the beginning – and also not to run away, disconcerted, finding instead of a promised heavenly paradise a bloody crucible of alchemic transformation. Not only Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, but all great gurus had seemingly hopeless disciples, whom they loved dearly and kept defending from other disciples often revolted. The Mother said that the asuras too are her children… And so must be the four negative emanations, whose very origin is divine, and which necessarily have no existence independently from the Divine, for they would be self-created entities, whereas God only can create! I have been pondering over the mystery of suffering, division, hatred, death since childhood, wondering how could God allow this. I revolted, embracing Manicheism and Gnosticism and their perpetual struggle between good and evil, I turned into an atheist. Believing, like the Gnostics, that the Jewish God is a ‘demiurge’ that, in their language, equates the Mother’s declaration of Jehovah being an asura. Regarding this topic, Jung’s exhilarating “Answer to Job” is a masterpiece. It’s hard indeed not to believe that our world is an asuric creation. However, having struggled with this all my life, at last through faith and surrender I started glimpsing that there is more, behind the bloody history of humanity; there is in fact a secret purpose from the beginning, if we start looking at our collective history not only in aurobindonian terms of involution/evolution, but also, more generally, in terms of myths and fairy tales. All this horror is somehow necessary, to revert not to a pristine Eden of incommensurable purity and bliss, far above, but to learn, through blood and tears and an unflinching determination, how to grow into a new being and species – not of gods, who as such have no psychic being and are not subject to evolution, but of intermediate supermen. Then everything makes sense. Even the four anti-divine emanations, which are just the other face of the Supreme, out of Which they have manifested, and to Which they will return, once their purpose in the evolutionary game is over. The same is true about the hostile forces, as well those which the Mother calls “the censors”, which will exhaust themselves when their purpose is over. There is no shadow without light, evil-suffering-death have a purpose and one day will be reabsorbed in the Divine: when we will have completed the momentous jump forward and the new species can be born. Paulette