For Carl Gustav Jung, the renowned Swiss psychiatrist and founder of Analytical Psychology, the shadow is the diametrical opposite of the conscious self, the ego. The shadow represents everything that the conscious person does not wish to acknowledge within themselves.

For example, if you think of yourself as a kind and generous person, your shadow is unkind and greedy. The shadow is not necessarily good or bad. It simply counterbalances some of the one-sided dimensions of our personality. Jung emphasized the importance of being aware of shadow material and incorporating it into conscious awareness. Otherwise, we project these attributes onto others.

Until now, what is commonly referred to in English as the Tibetan Book of the Dead was actually just an excerpt, or chapter, called the Bardo Thodol or The Great Liberation by Hearing. The entire 1,300 year old funerary text, credited to Padmasambhava, the great yogi who brought Buddhism to Tibet, is actually a much larger book.