There's always the other side right? The side B, the antagonists, the underdogs, the evil twin, the shadow. The shadow concept involves the unconscious mind and is said to be the opposite of the ego. This part of the mind may represent the opposite, meaning one person who is said to be kind has a harsh side somewhere in his mind’s unacknowledged part. There would always be the trigger for this and the way to prevent destructive things from happening is to integrate it well with the conscious part of the mind. I have seen and encountered friends who significantly justify the idea of the shadow. Some people may appear to be harmless but hey, they'd turn out to be the bad guys of the story. I can say that I have something in me that can be referred to as the element of my unconscious mind. I am a very very patient person but sometimes (rarely), a sudden burst of emotion unleashes. Lucky enough, I did handle these kinds of situations in the past. The thing is, we must know or at least have an idea on what triggers these emotions or hidden personalities, as they say. For my part, I think being over-stressed leads me into losing my patience and composure. Most importantly, we also have to learn about handling them when the sudden instance comes up.

The talk I attended (Dr. Leslie's Shadow and Evil in Naruto) gave a lot of pointers regarding philosophical analysis by Carl Gustav Jung and the Naruto analogies that come with it. First of all, I would like to express my satisfaction with how the presentation was delivered. It’s really a very innovative way to discuss certain concepts in the philosophical world through the use of parallelism with the hit anime series, “Naruto”.

In Naruto, certain characters possess a part in them that makes them inadvertently go wild. It was well-explained in the lecture that we must, in a way, be open to other things aside from the ego. In order to do this, we must explore and understand the world of religion and spirituality because human beings’ unconscious are encountered through things or symbols seen in dreams, religion, art and in other things we do in our life especially in relationships. I also learned that there’s this way to balance our unconsciousness with the conscious side, psychotherapy that is. For me, it is very essential for us to take this into consideration for all of us have this hidden “us” within us.

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"You aren't even worth killing, foolish little brother."
"If you want to kill me, despise me, hate me, and live in an unsightly way... Run, and cling to life, and then some day, when you have the same eyes as I do, come before me." - Itachi