Shadow ETC

Per shadow: according to Jung (keep in mind, I don't have a text in front of me), the shadow is "what we do not want to become". Sounds scary, but when used as a figure of yourself (possibly with no moral filter) that can be scrutinized and interrogated in order to expand one's vantage point to include ALL of one's self: the "good" (what we all/most of us agree is alright to do, feel, or think) and the "bad" (drives, impulses, dark thoughts, things that will harm us or others). I think Jung went into a LOT more detail than the puny quote I just referenced... The way in which Jung stressed Individuation as a means of achieving the experience of the whole Self (in his theory, the capital S Self includes all psychological/spiritual facets of one's being - in my reading anyway) seems to encourage one to cautiously explore whatever comes up in mental life (I use Mind and Spirit interchangeably here - possibly much to your chagrin... hee hee) but AT AN ARM'S LENGTH. Following mindfulness habits of objectifying/calling things experienced as non-self/realizing and experiencing the gap or void between the observed and the observer, !but then returning to the Self! from that non-attached state more fully informed of one's "self" (to follow through to "synthesis" according to my probably shitty reading of just the first half of the preface of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit) and possibly even more "moral" having seen and really grilled the "dark side" of our being. In short though, I think you gave a pretty good definition... Call me wordy walter... How we handle our encounter with our Shadow (and how we scan ourselves and assess for the presence of this archetype in different states of minds, situations, etc. moment by moment). One must be careful when staring down the throat of our dragon! But it sounds like you feel you've had success... Good for you!

I stated it as "conscious/unconscious memory or implicit/explicit memory" meaning that the same phenomenon could be called either. That is, implicit memory is to unconscious (probably better said as "non-conscious" because of the connotations associated with the term "unconscious" as being the dungeon people unwittingly toss in all the embarrassing and shameful stuff their mommy did to them or whatever...) as explicit memory is to conscious. Don't know if that is more clear.

Implicit memory is non-conscious, lacks sensation of recall (so we don't know we are "remembering"), and is somato-sensory, emotional, and behavioral. Memory in general is often thought of as packets of concrete stuff that we can turn to like pages in a book. The way memory actually works is by probability: the more engrained a memory is, the higher the likelihood that a similar neural net profile will fire thus enacting a certain mental experience - namely that of remembering something. Because implicit memory works non-consciously, un-remembering automatic activations of certain neural profiles will allow us to drop out of the actuality of activation and sink into the open plane of possibility. This doesn't mean that we forget anything (if anything, the process opens up the awareness of memories that were previously activated outside of our awareness) - after working on "un-remembering", we hold those implicit ways of being/reacting/responding out in front of us and are able to choose whether to engage them or to choose some other path; we release ourselves from the imprisonment of automaticity while becoming more aware of implicit memories so we can re-remember (alter meaning given to memories) or re-frame (alter the perspective of events experienced): both significant skills.

I view implicit memories as being the stuff we uncover with mindfulness work and the stuff we may re-program/re-wire with other meditative/contemplative efforts.