The Red Book: A Reader's Edition: Philemon

In the Homeric epic the ODYSSEY, Odysseus visits the underworld. In Virgil's AENEID, Aeneas visits the underworld. In Dante's DIVINE COMMEDY, the character named Dante visits the underworld with Virgil as his guide through the Inferno and Purgatory.Figuratively speaking, C. G. Jung, M.D. (1875-1961), the Swiss psychiatrist and psychological theorist, could be described as visiting the underworld of his psyche periodically over a number of years as part of his mid-life crisis. In his self-experimentation, he visited the underworld of his psyche through self-induced hallucinations - visual and auditory hallucinations.Self-inducing hallucinations is a potentially dangerous practice, and I do not recommend it. Instead of doing it for ourselves, we can read Jung's elaborate report of his experiences.In 2009, Norton published Jung's RED BOOK: LIBER NOVUS, expertly edited by the historian Sonu Shamdasani, translated by Mark Kyburz, John Peck, and Sonu Shamdasani. It is a handsome over-sized book that includes many informative footnotes by Shamdasani. Jung's RED BOOK contains many of his works of art based on his visual hallucinations and the "fair" copies of the texts he produced in calligraphy based on his auditory hallucinations. In addition, some other material Jung recorded in connection with his encounter with the unconscious is included in three appendices.In addition to the over-sized book, Norton also published the regular-sized book THE RED BOOK: LIBER NOVUS; A READER'S EDITION (2012). Both books contain the same textual material, but arranged differently. However, Jung's paintings are not reproduced in the READER'S EDITION.Everybody can remember having dreams when they were asleep. The psychological and neurological processes that are involved in producing dreams when we are asleep, are also involved in producing hallucinations when we are awake - visual and/or auditory hallucinations.By the time when Jung undertook this extraordinary self-experimentation, he had a well-developed mystique about the so-called unconscious and about dreams. As a result of this mystique about the unconscious, he styled his extraordinary self-experimentation as his encounter with the unconscious. As a result of the mystique about dreams, he understood the visual and auditory hallucinations as dream-like experiences.But at a certain juncture in his so-called encounter with the unconscious, he had a crisis. For help, he turned to a former patient of his named Antonia ("Toni") Wolf (1888-1952). She was somehow able to help him get through the crisis he had experienced as a result of his extraordinary self-experimentation. As a result of her helping him through that crisis, the two of them were close the rest of her life.In the course of his extraordinary self-experimentation, Jung encountered an enormous number of visual and auditory hallucinations. He wrote out his recollections of many of those experiences. But then he transcribed many of his written accounts into "fair" copies in calligraphy - which look like medieval illuminated manuscripts. In addition, he used his artistic talents to make painting of some of the imagery in his visual hallucinations.In short, Jung used three different ways to process and work through his self-induced hallucinations:(1) he talked about them with Toni Wolff;(2) he wrote out a rough draft and then made a fair copy of the same material in calligraphy; and(3) he also made works of art representing certain key imagery from his visual hallucinations.Jung may have also written about some of his experiences during his encounter with the unconscious in letters to Toni Wolff. But if he did, those letters have not come down to us.In any event, because of the extent of Jung's self-experimentation over a period of years, he had a lot of material to work through.In 1925, Jung discussed his encounter with the unconscious in connection with his body of work up to that time. See the book INTRODUCTION TO JUNGIAN PSYCHOLOGY: NOTES ON THE SEMINAR ON ANALYTIC PSYCHOLOGY GIVEN IN 1925 BY C. G. JUNG, edited by William McGuire (1989); revised 2012 edition edited by Sonu Shamdasani (both editions published by Princeton University Press).Years later, Jung himself experienced a breakthrough in his understanding of his own encounter with the unconscious when he read Richard Wilhelm's German translation of THE SECRET OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER: A CHINESE BOOK OF LIFE and wrote a commentary on it. The 1929 German edition included a commentary by Jung. The entire 1929 German edition was translated into English by Cary F. Baynes (1883-1977). The English edition was published in 1931. Sadly, Richard Wilhelm (1873-1930) had died on March 2, 1930.Subsequently, in the 1930s, Jung drew on his own understanding of his experiences in his encounter with the unconscious as he perceptively interpreted Friedrich Nietzsche's THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA. In Jung's commentary on Nietzsche's book, Jung sees Nietzsche composing this work as part of Nietzsche's own proverbial mid-life crisis. In effect, Jung draws on his own understanding of his encounter with the unconscious to elucidate certain aspects of Nietzsche's book. I say "In effect" here because Jung does not explicitly advert to his own experiences in his protracted encounter with the unconscious - or explicitly advert to his understanding of his own experiences. Nevertheless, he is "In effect" drawing on his own hard won understanding of his own experiences in certain points he makes about Nietzsche's experiences.See the two books titled NIETZSCHE'S ZARATHUSTRA: NOTES OF THE SEMINAR GIVEN IN 1934-1939 BY C. G. JUNG, edited by James L. Jarrett (Princeton University Press, 1988). Jarrett also edited the 1998 abridged edition.UNDERSTANDING THE IMPORTANCE OF JUNG'S RED BOOKNow, in the book THE ORIGINS OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND (Houghton Mifflin, 1977), Julian Jaynes argues that our human ancestors experienced auditory and visual hallucinations. If he is right about this, then Jung's self-experimentation involved re-awakening the capacity of the human psyche to have auditory and visual hallucinations comparable to the hallucinations of our ancient ancestors.But to what extent, if any, is the bicameral form of thinking still active and alive in educated people in Western culture such as Jung? If this bicameral form of thinking is still active and alive in educated people in Western culture today, then it is presumably involved in producing dreams when we are asleep, and in producing visual and auditory hallucinations when we are awake.Let me now set forth a different framework for considering the breakdown of the bicameral form of thinking and the historical emergence of consciousness that Jaynes discusses. In the book RUIN THE SACRED TRUTHS: POETRY AND BELIEF FROM THE BIBLE TO THE PRESENT (Harvard University Press, 1989), Harold Bloom makes the following observation that is relevant to Jaynes's discussion: "Frequently we forget one reason why the Hebrew Bible is so difficult for us: our only way of thinking comes to us from the ancient Greeks, and not from the [still residually bicameral] Hebrews" (page 28). Bloom explicitly refers to "Greek thinking and Hebrew psychologizing," and suggests that the two modes of thought and expression seem irreconcilable because they represent two antithetical visions of life. But I would say that the thought and expression in the Hebrew Bible represent what Jaynes refers to as the bicameral mind.In the book JESUS AND YAHWEH: THE NAMES DIVINE (Riverhead Books, 2005), Bloom further elaborates his point about how deeply Greek thinking permeates the thinking of educated people in Western culture today:"Whoever you are, you identify necessarily the origins of your self more with Augustine, Descartes, and John Locke, or indeed with Montaigne and Shakespeare, than you do with Yahweh and Jesus. That is only another way of saying the Socrates and Plato, rather than Jesus, have formed you, however ignorant you may be of Plato. The Hebrew Bible dominated seventeenth-century Protestantism, but four centuries later out technological and mercantile society is far more the child of Aristotle than of Moses" (page 146).Basically, I agree with Bloom that educated people in Western culture today are dominated by the Greek tradition of thought. As he says, the origin of our Western sense of self is dominated by the Greek tradition of thought. However, if Jaynes is right about the bicameral mind of our human ancestors, including, I contend, the residually oral ancient Hebrews and early followers of the historical Jesus, then the bicameral mind that Jaynes discusses represents a deeper layer of the human psyche today. But does this make any difference? If it does, what difference does it make?In the book ORALITY AND LITERACY: THE TECHNOLOGIZING OF THE WORD (Methuen, 1982), the American cultural historian and theorist Walter J. Ong, S.J. (1912-2003), perceptively discusses Jaynes's theory of the bicameral mind:"[T]he early and late stages of consciousness which Julian Jaynes (1977) describes and relates to neurophysiological changes in the bicameral mind [involving the right and left hemispheres of the brain] would also appear to lend themselves largely to much simpler and more verifiable description in terms of a shift from orality to literacy. . . . The `voices' [of the Gods supposedly coming from the right hemisphere of the brain, according to Jaynes's theory] began to lose their effectiveness between 2000 and 1000 BC. This period, it will be noted, is neatly bisected by the invention of the alphabet around 1500 BC and Jaynes indeed believes that writing helped bring about the breakdown of the original bicamerality [involving the two hemispheres of the brain]. The ILIAD provides him with examples of bicamerality in its unselfconscious characters. Jaynes dates the ODYSSEY a hundred years later than the ILIAD and believes that wily Odysseus marks a breakdown into the modern self-conscious mind, no longer under the rule of the `voices.' Whatever one makes of Jaynes's theories, one cannot but be struck by the resemblance between the characteristics of the early or `bicameral' psyche as Jaynes describes it - lack of introspectivity, of analytic prowess, of concern with the will as such, of sense of difference between past and future - and the characteristics of the psyche in oral cultures not only in the past but even today. . . . Bicamerality may mean simply orality. The question of orality and bicamerality perhaps needs further investigation" (pages 29-30).As far as I know, the question of orality and bicamerality has not been further investigated since 1982. For example, it is not investigated in the essays gathered together in the book REFLECTIONS ON THE DAWN OF CONSCIOUSNESS: JULIAN JAYNES BICAMERAL MIND THEORY REVISITED, edited by Marcel Kuijsten (Julian Jaynes Society, 2006).In effect, Jung's auditory hallucinations can be used to support Jaynes's theory about the voices in the bicameral mind. As I have suggested, all of us have human psyches similar to Jung's. Therefore, all of us have the latent potential for experiencing voices as Jung did and, according to Jaynes, as our pre-literate ancestors did.Now, Ong never tired of referring to Eric A. Havelock's perceptive book PREFACE TO PLATO (Belknap Press/ Harvard University Press, 1963). In this book Havelock works with the contrast between the Homeric mind and the Platonic mind. In addition, Havelock aligns the Homeric mind with oral culture and the Platonic mind with distinctively literate culture. In the passages quoted above from Bloom, Bloom in effect aligns educated people in Western culture with the Platonic mind that Havelock discusses. In other words, formal education in Western culture for centuries have provided the cultural conditioning in the distinctively literate mind that Havelock refers to as the Platonic mind.However, as Ong mentions, Jaynes finds examples of the bicameral mind in the ILIAD. So the bicameral mind as discussed by Jaynes can be aligned with the Homeric mind as discussed by Havelock.Havelock describes the Homeric mind as using imagistic thinking. Jung's paintings in THE RED BOOK make it clear that his visual hallucinations involved imagistic thinking.Next, because Ong himself was a Jesuit priest, I want to point out here that Jesuits make two 30-day retreats in silence (except for daily conferences with the retreat director) following the SPIRITUAL EXERCISES of St. Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order. Pope Francis, the first Jesuit pope, made two such 30-day retreats as part of his Jesuit training.The instructions in the SPIRITUAL EXERCISES instruct people of how to proceed to carry out certain spiritual exercises (also known as meditations or contemplations) that involve using imagistic thinking to imagine, say, well-known biblical scenes.If people follow the instructions in the SPIRITUAL EXERCISES, then they are engaging in a form of meditation that I will style here as guided meditation - at least up to a certain point. But there is a culminating instruction to cap off the meditation by carrying on a conversation with the figure involved in the relevant biblical scene - say, Jesus, or Mary. Of course we have no way of knowing how this culminating instruction worked out for Ong when he made his two 30-day retreats, nor do we know how this worked out for all the other Jesuits such as Pope Francis who made two 30-day retreats following the SPIRITUAL EXERCISES as part of their Jesuit training.Now, Jung's self-induced hallucinations did not involve using guided meditations. So we can describe his self-experimentation as involving unguided imagistic meditations. (Of course we should note that there are also forms of meditation that do not involve imagistic thinking. Those forms of meditation involve non-imagistic meditation.)From Jung's reports in THE RED BOOK, it appears that at times he did indeed engage the figures in conversations - and they carried one their side of the conversations with him. But did St. Ignatius Loyola and perhaps other Jesuits experience conversations with biblical figures in which the biblical figures carried on their side of the conversations?After all, the grieving followers of the deceased historical Jesus had visual and auditory hallucinations in which the deceased Jesus spoke with them. St. Paul famously experienced a visual and auditory hallucination in which the figure known as Jesus the Christ spoke to him. In the history of Christianity, there are also examples of visual and auditory hallucinations in which a figure speaks to the person.Now, would making two 30-day retreats following the SPIRITUAL EXERCISES lead people to conjoin the Above (ego-consciousness) and the Below (the unconscious) as discussed in Jung's RED BOOK (page 370 in the over-sized edition; page 577 in the READER'S EDITION)? Not necessarily, but it could happen to certain people because 30-day retreats following the SPIRITUAL EXERCISES involve each retreatant in introspection about his or her life.I said above that self-inducing hallucinations is a potentially dangerous practice. But so are Ignatian guided meditations and non-imagistic forms of meditation. For an approach to meditative reflection and introspection that is not potentially dangerous, I recommend the daily practice of awareness that Anthony de Mello, S.J. (1931-1987), advocates in his posthumously published book THE WAY TO LOVE: MEDITATIONS FOR LIFE (2012) and elsewhere. Practiced daily over an extended period of time, this practice of awareness can help engender the conjoining of the Above and Below.For an accessible discussion of auditory hallucinations, see Daniel B. Smith's book MUSES, MADMEN, AND PROPHETS: RETHINKING THE HISTORY, SCIENCE, AND MEANING OF AUDITORY HALLUCINATIONS (Penguin Press, 2007).CONCLUSIONIn conclusion, we can all be grateful to Jung for preparing his elaborate report about his visit to the underworld for us. By engaging in the potentially dangerous practice of self-inducing hallucinations and then preparing such an elaborate report of his visit to the underworld, he saved us from indulging in the potentially dangerous practice of self-inducing hallucinations.In the present essay, I have attempted to depotentiate our pathologizing of auditory and visual hallucinations, as Smith has also attempted to do in his book mentioned above. If Jaynes's theory is to be believed, auditory hallucinations that he refers to as voices were relatively commonplace in our bicameral ancestors in pre-literate cultures.By depotentiating auditory and visual hallucinations, I hope to persuade people today to look over Jung's RED BOOK.I want to say that I do not expect auditory and visual hallucinations to become as common in our contemporary secondary oral culture as Jaynes suggests that they were in pre-literate cultures. But I do hope that they will become more understandable.I do not know if all vision quests culminated in visual hallucinations. But the basic spirit of the vision quest is a sound idea. I would even go so far as to say that the SPIRITUAL EXERCISES of St. Ignatius Loyola involve the basic spirit of the vision quest.In THE RED BOOK, Jung refers to his search or quest for his soul. Basically, this is what the spirit of the vision quest is about. No doubt Jung himself found his mission in life through his encounter with the auditory and visual hallucinations he describes in THE RED BOOK.But this implies that people who have not undertaken a vision quest have not found their souls. This would presumably include most of the educated people in Western culture that Bloom refers to in the passages quoted above.

1. Within the human psyche you have the conscious mind which includes a retrievable memory. This conscious memory function may or may not be fully functional during an intentional encounter with the second component of the human psyche, the personal unconscious mind. The level of the person’s conscious memory function depends on how the encounter with the person’s unconscious mind is conducted. As with any risky endeavor, an intentional contact with the personal unconscious mind is best conducted with sufficient tools and preparation. If the conscious mind has a memory that is still functional when contact with the unconscious mind is made, the individual will have the ability to replay all or parts of the unconscious content that is encountered and interpret and analyze the content in the daylight of full consciousness. In turn, the product of conscious analysis of the unconscious content can be stored in the conscious mind’s memory and, if not overwhelmed by the unconscious mind during intentional contact between the conscious and unconscious mind, be effectively used by the conscious mind during subsequent encounters with the unconscious mind to aid in navigating the unconscious mind’s territory.2. As the conscious mind delves into the unconscious mind’s territory it must surrender some of its territory. It is then possible to dwell in the conscious and unconscious states of mind simultaneously. Something akin to realizing you are asleep and dreaming while what is appearing before you in the dream continues to play as you consciously participate in the unconscious content of the unconscious mind. You are aware that you are dreaming but your conscious memory is able to record the events of the unconscious mind you are involved in as a participant. It is a state of mind where you are a participant in a dream or aware of certain content of your unconscious mind and you know it is a dream but you retain a conscious memory of the events as well as a memory that you knew that it was a dream at the time you were an active participant in the dream (aka, ‘lucid dreaming’). During these simultaneous encounters, the conscious mind must, at a minimum, retain some basic level of its conscious memory function. What conscious functions are first surrendered by the conscious mind in an intentional contact with the unconscious mind may not be exactly the same in different individuals' encounters with their unconscious mind. Nor will it be the same if the psyche does not retain an adequate level of functionality within the conscious realm of its domain. In this dual awareness state of the human psyche the unconscious mind is present at its lowest intensity. However, even at this low level of intensity, the unconscious mind will always eclipse far more functions of the conscious mind than the few functions of the unconscious mind that the conscious mind is able to record in conscious memory during intentional encounters.3. These forays into the unconscious are not without risk to the normal and continued function of the conscious mind. It is possible to temporally disable or even seriously damage conscious functions during intentional contact between the conscious and unconscious parts of the human psyche. The unconscious mind always has a clear view of the conscious mind and has varying degrees of persuasive control over the conscious mind. However, the conscious mind may only catch risky glimpses of the unconscious mind and has little or no control over the content of the unconscious.4. As time goes on, an individual who intentionally contacts their personal unconscious mind and appropriately analyzes the conscious memory of the unconscious content in small steps may make slow but steady progress in their ability to navigate their personal unconscious while avoiding damage to their conscious functions.5. The third component of a person’s psyche is the collective unconscious interface between the personal unconscious mind and the flow of archetypal content which is the substance of the collective unconscious. The area and composition of the collective unconscious may be thought of as analogous to the concept of the “cloud” in modern computer terms. The collective unconscious can interface with the personal unconscious mind of an individual as though it was an omnipresent and integral part of the personal unconscious mind of the individual rather than a remote entity. This interface is fraught with confusion because of the dissimilar language or format of the content in the collective unconscious when it interfaces with a personal unconscious mind. Ideally, archetypal images are invited to trickle into the personal unconscious mind and mildly flavor the content of the personal unconscious mind which in turn permits the personal unconscious mind to hand on this assimilated image content to the conscious mind through dreams or what seem to be spontaneous impulses that the conscious mind may act upon. In this respect, these mild encounters with archetypal image content that has been processed by the personal unconscious mind can produce what may be described as artistic thoughts and images within an individual’s conscious mind. These thoughts have a universality of image and content that comes from the archetypes that gave birth to them. Raw archetypes are by their nature universal images or concepts that will resonate with other individuals’ conscious minds at a very basic level or be received by others’ minds through an unconscious level of feeling. Therefore, filtered and processed archetypal images that can enter other people’s conscious mind via their unconscious mind often present themselves as uncannily intuitive concepts. The very fundamental concept of true artistic appeal is the resonance in others’ minds when a person is able to reproduce archetypal based content in a conscious or material form such as music, painting, artful story-telling, etc. When archetypal based content is presented to other conscious minds, it invariably strikes a chord in the mind of others that has the effect of imparting an empathetic connection or a feeling of deja vu in reaction to the content being presented by the individual who has been able to surface collective unconscious images in a conscious product (or art). This is the ideal outcome of an individual’s contact with archetypal content filtered or translated through the unconscious mind to the conscious mind. This is the creation of art.6. On the other hand, archetypal image content from the collective unconscious, in some cases, can flood a person’s unconscious mind and spill over unprocessed images into the conscious mind which will result in primal and often terrifying disruption of the conscious thought process resulting in undesirable consequences such as; (a) hearing compelling voices, (b) perseverative ideation outbursts that are too overpowering and raw to be artfully communicated to others, and (c) terrifying visual images of primal human fears, etc. These undesirable intrusions upon the conscious mind are some of the more common manifestations of archetypal content that reach a person’s conscious mind in an overwhelming or unprocessed form.---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Next topics to consider ---(1) The malevolent and/or benevolent nature of the archetypes of the collective unconscious.(2) Archetypal content as independent entities that have their own consciousness (spirits & demons).(3) (question posed) Is all of the archetypal content of the collective unconscious contained within the physical structure of each human brain or is there an external source of archetypes that can “visit” with the brain of various individuals at various times.ALOHA!--john

No illustrations in this 'Readers' edition.

If you want a short overview of Jung's contribution to Western thought and psychology, and how this arose from his life, I thoroughly recommend Sonu Shamdasani's introductory essay (about 70 pages). He writes extremely well, avoiding the long-windedness and tedious qualifications that often ruin debates in the warring world of psychology.The absolutely seminal place of the Red Book, or Liber Novus, in Jung’s intellectual development is astonishing, and was not known (except to a tiny circle of cognoscenti) until the 21st century. In sum, in the years before World War One, Jung began to have extremely violent and disturbing dreams, featuring brutal warfare, ruined cities, maimed women and children etc. He thought he was going mad, and that the dreams – which absolutely preoccupied him in the daytime as well as at night - presaged the onset of schizophrenia. When war broke out and its horrors quickly became established, Jung was delighted – in a manner of speaking. He realised that he had not been going mad, but that his mind had somehow tapped into what he called the collective unconscious. This reinforced his break with Freud and propelled him further into creative-spiritual, analytic psychology directions, characterised by an openness to broad cultural and religious influences which went against the grain of reductionist, Western scientism.Jung developed his theories over a number of years. He bravely cut himself off, to a great extent, from the psychoanalytic community in which he had lived and practised, in order to delve further into his unconscious. He developed a technique which he called the ‘active imagination’, which involved a self-induced state in which he interrogated dream-like figures from within his mind. He wrote all of this down in his ‘black books’, which he later synthesised into the Red Book, none of which were published in his lifetime.The reason for this secrecy was that Jung was afraid that if the personal, experiential basis of his theories – from dreams – was widely known, he would be discredited as unscientific. Additionally, he did not feel ready to expose his raw material since he had not fully absorbed it himself.His ‘active imagination’ forays led him to his theory of archetypes, anima and animus etc, and eventually to his own theory of individuation, in which the individual transcends his narcissistic self-absorption and his attachment to his cultural group, via integrating his unconscious and conscious selves, so as to become a truly ego-free and yet rooted personality.Not until 2009, near 50 years after his death in 1961 – and due to the mammoth efforts of Shamdaseni to persuade Jung's resistant heirs - was the Red Book finally published in German, with an English language translation appearing in 2012. The Black Books (produced circa 1913–1932, on which the Red Book is based) were only published in 2020.While I found Shamdasani’s essay fascinating, I have to say that – as a complete amateur - I only dipped into parts of the bulk of the book, which consists in Jung’s summaries of many of his ‘active imagination’ encounters. These are quite unlike true dreams, because they largely consist in semi-intelligible theorizing and obscure conversations with archetypal figures, and are fairly static. There is no real emotion, fantasy (sexual or other), violence, surreal drama or sense of personal history. Rather, these half-dreams are Jung's semi-unconscious musings on Western intellectual and spiritual figures or tropes.

This is one of those absolute enigmas of a book where, as you’re reading it, you find yourself lost within the reality that exists deep within someone’s own mind, and not just anyone’s mind but the powerful, confusing mind of the incredible Psychologist and Philosopher, C.G Jung.I had first been interested in this book as it popped up on one of those ‘Top Ten lists’ on YouTube as in one of the Top Ten most mysterious books and the premise of ambiguity with it, whether he was indeed within his own mind or in an alternate dimension/realm/time was what pulled me in so I went to buy it. Originally I had wanted to have the Calligraphy version of the book which I assumed would have his surreal, personally, created paintings/drawings of his dream imagery. However looking at the price I quickly bailed out and went for the readers edition, which, although very much interesting, was a less majestic version.Due to the nature of its writing, flitting between the recollections of his dream imagery, his own notes, his sanity, the footnotes and the translator’s notes I found myself struggling to get into a flow of reading, in fact the only parts I found myself fully immersed in were his conversations with his soul and other characters within it, including Satan and Jesus. It certainly wasn’t an easy read, however as it is in its own respects, technically a factual report on his investigations of his own mind, I don’t wish to linger upon the enjoyment factor.On the plus though, it has opened my eyes to all manner of different philosophies (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre etc.) and also a spiritual change to my perception of the world and of my inner workings, including my ‘soul’, as it were. I won’t go into the details here, this should just be a review of the book, not my inner workings.So, in conclusion: The book itself is a hard read, perhaps if I had the pictures in it, I would have not struggled as much (they’re a cross between Vedic depictions and old medieval religious drawings in my opinion) as it would give me a psychedelic break every now and then to properly digest what I had just read. However in saying that, if you do soldier through, though there is no immediate epiphany of spiritual enlightenment there is a feeling that you have learned something significant from what you’ve been through. You feel the journey as Jung did and that is quite an impressive thing. Whether you read it for scientific, spiritual, occultist, psychological or Literary reasons you will come away with an opinion of this book, a long lasting one.I give it four stars- though a hard and sometimes slightly incoherent/tedious read (I would drop it to a 2.5 - 3 if I was judging it solely on that) the effects of reading this book (about 2-3 months ago) have changed my perceptions of reality and fueled an interest in philosophy. So taking into account the good, bad and lingering parts of this book,it is worthy of its place in the most mysterious books of all time but it takes serious dedication to read it cover to cover. Four stars is a fair score.

I hope the dear future historians are going to realise that after this book, humanity will never be the same.A must read, for everyone that is trying to make any sense out of life.

When the Light first entered mankind, about three thousand years ago, the reaction varied quite significantly. Plato and the Buddha, for instance, were deluded by the experience, both regarding the reflection of the mundane world created by the Light as a true reality. On the other hand, Lucifer and Prometheus were punished for what was considered their impiety, as though they were responsible for stealing the Light from some divinity, when in fact the appearance of the Light was simply the next stage in the development of the human being. Only Confucius grasped the true benefit of the Light for mankind, which has been the development of prudence, where the Light is used to illuminate the affairs of mankind in both time and space.But the most significant response to the phenomenon is instanced in the dualism first expressed by Zoroaster or Zarathustra, who perceived the larger effect of the coming of the Light, seeing how it penetrated into the primordial darkness in which mankind until then had lived. Unfortunately, Zoroaster was blinded by the Light to the extent that he could no longer see in the Dark – as his ancestors had done until then. This was not as such a serious failure – the Light itself was a sufficient replacement for mankind’s earlier night-vision. What was serious for the subsequent history of mankind was his reaction to the Dark, his profound terror of what was now an unknown, where the once beneficial agents that had supported mankind through long ages now became threatening demons and devils.It is obvious from the history of mankind since then that the development of the rationality made available to us by the Light has been unable to overcome the profound and instinctive fear of this primordial Darkness, made more apparent to us by the futile attempts of Reason to simply deny the existence of the Dark. And nowhere has this struggle been more apparent than in the modern developments in the practice of psychology.The experiences of Dr Carl Jung as recounted in his Red Book can stand as a kind of textbook example of this phenomenon. A rational and well-read intellectual with already a successful career in the treatment of mentally afflicted men and women, who is suddenly subjected to what would in an earlier age would have been seen as divine/demonic possession. He is a person well-placed to observe his own experiences and attempt a treatment of what he came to see as a classical psychosis.What must be observed at the beginning is that Dr Jung will treat as a psychological phenomenon what once had been treated as either demonic possession or as an esoteric intrusion. There are obvious limitations to this approach, if only because (1) experience in itself is systematically subordinated to theory, witnessed for instance in the creation of realms like the unconscious, and entities such as the id, ego, anima etc, for which there are no objective correlatives, and (2) the whole discourse is carried on at the level of theory only, so that experienced events remain isolated except where they conform to one theory or another.To the extent that we cannot know whence experience comes – true for all experience – we can only make sense of our experiences by relating them directly to one another. This is possible because when closely observed with an open mind it is discovered that our experiences denote themselves to us, determined by our knowledge, interests and dispositions.In the case of Dr Jung’s experiences, only the primary visions, which occurred in December 1913, can be regarded as relating direct experience, though as will be seen later much of the denotation might have been imposed by Dr Jung for other reasons.The narrative elements recorded by Dr Jung can be discounted, to the extent that they are in effect intrusions by him that distort the underlying experience. We should concentrate instead on those elements that do not fit within Dr Jung’s assumptions of what he is experiencing. There are four elements that constitute the core of Dr Jung’s direct spiritual encounter: (1) the old man declares that he and his daughter are one; (2) the old man describes his daughter as wisdom; (3) Dr Jung’s apparent crucifixion enables or permits the daughter to have sight; and (4) the old man then tells Dr Jung that his work is fulfilled here.Thus from an esoteric point of view the rest of the Red Book is nugatory, useful only perhaps within the purview of some theory of psychology. Even so, it is clear that no real personal development is achieved by Dr Jung, for even when he establishes his apparently unified self in the iron rod-tower – which he received in some mysterious way – he cannot acknowledge as significant that the rod is a “message of darkness”. Put simply, Dr Jung could not or would not learn to look and listen – something he castigates himself for on a number of occasions – and allow the Dark to communicate with him.Even so, why did Dr Jung subsequent inner struggles take the form they did? They did not arise out of theoretical considerations, that is clear. This means that some event in Dr Jung’s life at that time must have triggered what became a quite fundamental crisis in his life. Consider the names Dr Jung bestowed on his two visitors from the Dark, Elijah and Salomé. An unexpected combination: what inspired these names? Consider to start with that both are personages from Jewish culture. Did Dr Jung have close associations with Jews at the time who might compel these designations. There are, Sigmund Freud and his pupil-mistress, Lou Salomé. We know of the fraught relations between Jung and Freud; how much more complicated must this threesome have been? Lou Salomé was not alone the mistress of the major power-figure in Jung’s life, but she had been the love-interest of his idol, Friedrich Nietzsche, and had proven to be the femme-fatale of other intellectuals. It must have been a crushing experience for Jung, from which he may never have recovered. This suggests that the Red Book, rather than being a self-revelation, might in fact be a screen designed to hide a damaged self.Finally, what might Dr Jung have done in his visions, other than react profusely? Well, he had performed what can be assumed to have been a spiritually important act for himself: he had permitted Wisdom to see in her own right. Might he not have asked her what she saw? Wouldn’t her answer have been much more significant for us that Dr Jung’s subsequent self-torture?Parsifal, after all, had also failed to asked the crucial question. But, unlike Dr Jung, he had struggle to a maturity that in the end permitted him to learn his truth.