Everybody has an aware self, a superego, and an id, an inner shadow, our own monster.

“Change is coming through my shadow,” said the poet, but what kind of change?

There are three ways to handle the shadow, the most common is choking it under the superego tirany.

The overcomming cannot be good. That’s what happens when the family guy betrails his wife, when the young rapes, when white people shoot a black people crowd driven by fear.

Have you ever heard of respectable people that’s dirty in privacy? That’s the choked shadow digging for some air.

The second approach can be even worst; that’s when one surrenders to the shadow, letting it take control.

Those people sink into the addiction, sex, reprehensible habits, animalising to the core.

The last way is the harder: making peace with the shadow.

In order to make peace with the shadow, one must fully accept oneself, since the worst. One needs to recognise one’s instincts, fears, rage, addictions, traumas, the good, the bad, and the ugly, everything as part of the one’s whole. On doing that, one can be in peace and reach a chilled state.

So the shadow can simply be, and the self can take control of the superego, getting free of its chains. In that state, the shadow turns into a self’s tool, just like the superego.

Otherwise the self is a superego’s slave (in the first case), or a shadow’s slave (in the second).

We usually call the superego “consciousness”, ’cause it makes us “on rails”, but it’s just our fear of being put out of the tribe. Consciousness is the latin form of awareness, and our aware part is the self; so conscious is the self, that part of you that you call “me”.

Don’t let yourself be enslaved by your fears or your primitive mind.