12: Carl Jung • The Red Book (Part 2)

“Your soul is in great need, because drought weighs on its world. If you look outside yourselves, you see the far-off forest and mountains, and above them your vision climbs to the realms of the stars. And if you look into yourselves, you will see on the other hand the nearby as far-off and infinite, since the world of the inner is as infinite as the world of the outer. Just as you become a part of the manifold essence of the world through your bodies, so you become a part of the manifold essence of the inner world through your soul. This inner world is truly infinite, in no way poorer than the outer one. Man lives in two worlds.”

Welcome to Creative Codex, Part 2 of Carl Jung & The Red Book, I am your host, MJDorian.

That opening quote is Carl Jung, in an entry from The Red Book entitled The Castle In The Forest. And I feel it really captures the spirit of this enigmatic book, which gives you the impression that just as we can travel outward without limits, we can travel inward without limits. In each of us there is an infinite inward.

In Part 1 we dove into this strange and beautiful book, exploring key passages, historical context, trying to understand what caused Jung to have the visions that resulted in The Red Book, and we even traveled to ancient Greece to meet a notorious oracle, the tales of which likely inspired Jung on his inward journeys. On this episode, we are going to dig even deeper.

We will explore some of the most profound visions in the second half of The Red Book. Make parallels to yet further ancient traditions that clearly inspired Jung. We will hopefully answer the question: is it a work of art or a work of deep self reflection? And by the end, we will not only try to understand Jung’s mind, but try to understand what The Red Book reveals to us about the human mind and creativity itself.

If you have not listened to Part 1 yet, I highly recommend you pause this episode and scroll down in the podcast feed to Episode 11: Carl Jung • The Red Book (Part 1), give that a full listen, and then come back. Trust me, things will only get crazier from here, and after listening to Part 1, what follows will make: Much. More. Sense.

Now, from here on I will assume you are all caught up. This is Creative Codex. Part Two of Carl Jung • The Red Book. Let’s begin.

[Intro Music Cue]

Part One: The Spirit of the Depths

As we read The Red Book, we keep encountering religious symbolism and religious characters, there are the recurring characters of Elijah and Salome, there are ancient Gods Jung meets, there will be several encounters with Satan, and there is even a moment where Jung experiences being crucified.

The crucifixion vision occurs on December 25th, 1913, and this was the last vision we covered in episode one. In that vision he once again interacts with the Biblical figures of Elijah and Salome, he becomes entangled by a black serpent that curiously ends up serving as a guide through many of these visions. When he is crucified he feels the torment of Christ, and once he seemingly transcends this experience, he learns what he was intended to learn from it, Salome gains back her sight, and finally, Jung floats off of the cross and runs into the night barefoot.

When you are reading these entries from these visions, you can’t help but ask why do they become so increasingly religious in nature? Do people who suffer mental breakdowns hallucinate religious experiences? Jung later referred to this time period, between 1913 to 1914, as a mental break, a near psychotic episode. In clinical psychology, there is a condition called religious psychosis, which is seen in people who suffer from schizophrenia. People with this condition experience periods of visual and auditory hallucinations which include conversations with God, seeing religious imagery, and even occasionally dangerous delusions that may be harmful to themselves or others.

In the book Memories, Dreams, Reflections Jung shares this with us:

“It is of course ironical that I, a psychiatrist, should at almost every step of my experiment have run into the same psychic material which is the stuff of psychosis and is found in the insane.

This is the fund of unconscious images which fatally confuse the mental patient. But it is also the matrix of a mythopoetic imagination which has vanished from our rational age.

Though such imagination is present everywhere, it is both tabooed and dreaded, so that it even appears to be a risky experiment or a questionable adventure to entrust oneself to the uncertain path that leads into the depths of the unconscious. It is considered the path of error, of equivocation and misunderstanding. I am reminded of Goethe’s words: “Now let me dare to open wide the gate / Past which men’s steps have ever flinching trod.”

Jung has enough self awareness to know this stuff sounds pretty crazy, and that fact alone may be why he chose never to publish The Red Book in his lifetime.

So if any one of us took on the task of using the same method Jung used to reach his unconscious, would we all interact with similar religious figures? Are these icons deeply embedded in our unconscious too? So much that they are universal in a sense?

Well, I took it upon myself to find out. This episode took a little longer to produce because I felt I needed to run a few experiments of my own, on myself, much in the spirit of Carl Jung. And I collected together excerpts from his later lectures that piece together his method so you can try it yourself too. But more on that later.

So why the religious symbolism and characters? I wrestled with this question the entire time while reading The Red Book, by the end I formulated three answers.

First:
– Religious characters and stories are archetypal in nature.
Second:
– Jung’s own psyche was oriented by a passion for studying religion. (Quote p.100 of Introduction to Jungian Psychology “I had read much mythology before this fantasy came to me…”)
And Third:
– Jung was in pursuit of a genuine spiritual experience. (This may have primed his mind, in a sense, toward interaction with spiritually oriented archetypes.)

We will explore each of these in more detail throughout this episode with examples from key visions. But it is the last statement which many researchers and psychologists label as controversial. That Jung was in pursuit of a genuine spiritual experience.

Science and spirituality have always had this uncomfortable relationship. For example, Jung was labeled a mystic by Freud’s colleagues, at the time in the early 1900’s they intended that as a derogatory term, and to this day, the field of psychology still doesn’t know quite what to do with spirituality, but it is finally beginning to acknowledge there is value to it. It becomes clear as you read his later lectures that Jung wanted to understand this very real human need for faith, religious experience, and God.

But then again, when you listen and read lectures about The Red Book, most often you hear these studious academic minds interpreting the work as Jung’s journey into his unconscious. And although I agree with that, it completely avoids the deliberate spiritual intent of The Red Book. It perplexes me that after listening to dozens of hours of lectures, no one seems to acknowledge Jung’s own words at the start of the process when he writes:

“My soul, where are you? Do you hear me? I speak, I call you – are you there? I have returned, I am here again. I have shaken the dust of all the lands from my feet, and I have come to you, I am with you. After long years of long wandering, I have come to you again.”

Jung is humbling himself, assuming a position of reverence, and knocking on the door to open a relationship with his soul. I don’t think he’s being romantic or prosaic here, I genuinely think he is seeking his soul. Two pages later he goes on:

“He whose desire turns away from outer things, reaches the place of the soul. If he does not find the soul, the horror of emptiness will overcome him, and fear will drive him with a whip lashing time and again in a desperate endeavor and a blind desire for the hollow things of the world. He becomes a fool through his endless desire, and forgets the way of his soul, never to find her again. He will run after all things, and will seize hold of them, but he will not find his soul, since he would find her only in himself.”

Jung seems to be describing what many people today might refer to as a ‘mid-life crisis’. But, he traces the existential dread of that experience to the emptiness a person feels when they abandon their soul.

Then in 1935, at a lecture he gave on June 14th, Jung states: “A point exists at about the thirty-fifth year when things begin to change, it is the first moment of the shadow side of life, of the going down to death. It is clear that Dante found this point and those who have read Zarathustra will know that Nietzsche also discovered it. When this turning point comes people meet it in several ways: some turn away from it; others plunge into it; and something important happens to yet others from the outside. If we do not see a thing, Fate does it to us.”

This is a really curious theory, that in a person’s life around their thirty-fifth year, a more self reflective chapter opens, beginning a compulsion to turn inward. This seems to be confirmed in Jung’s own life, as the infamous ‘River of Blood’ vision (which we covered in the last episode) hit Jung while he was traveling, it occurred on October of 1913, when Jung was forty years old. And from that point he began to work in earnest on The Red Book. In which, from the start, he overtly attempts to commune with his soul.

In attempting to open a dialogue with his soul, Jung finds something strange. He discovers two spirits that he understands as being universal in all people. One he calls ‘the spirit of this time’ and the other ‘the spirit of the depths’. He says that we each associate ourselves with either ‘the spirit of this time’ or ‘the spirit of the depths’ to varying degrees throughout our lives.

Loosely defined, ‘the spirit of this time’ concerns itself with the modern world, with the culture and ideas of the society you are in, and of the immediate things in your reach. The surface level of life. Topics that usually seem important because of their immediacy but which ultimately are defined by the habits of the current generation you exist in. This is ‘the spirit of this time’, and one can live an entire life distracted by its charm and experiences.

On the flip side, ‘the spirit of the depths’ concerns itself with your interior world, with symbols and seemingly timeless wisdom. It is concerned with deeper truths, the truth that hides beneath the shimmering surface. It also seems to be integral to spiritual experience.

If ‘the spirit of this time’ tends to the top soil then ‘the spirit of the depths’ tends to the deep earth, the flowers may bloom above, but when the season of frost comes and the flowers wither, it is the deep earth that will provide the nourishment the top soil needs to blossom once again.

So does Jung end up having a spiritual experience? This much is unclear, we would first have to define what is a spiritual experience. Save that for an entirely separate podcast. But without a doubt he has transcendent personal experiences through these visions, experiences that dramatically reorient his understanding of himself and his life. On top of that, by the end of the entries he gives birth to a new God inside of himself… Yeah, I warned you this was gonna get crazier.

Part Two: Meeting Death

Jung’s visions do not occur during a psychotic episode, these experiences are very deliberate, they are dialogues with his unconscious. He figures out a method which allows him to interact with unconscious material with relative safety while in a deep state of relaxation. The visions take on impressions very similar to dreams, in Introduction to Jungian Psychology, Lecture 12, Jung actually refers to these visions as ‘dreams’ in passing, other times he calls them visions.

It becomes clear that in Western culture we do not even have the proper terminology to make these distinctions, we have the terms daydream, fantasy, and dream. That’s it. But what he is doing is something else, what do we call that? Jung coins the term: the active imagination. The author Daryl Sharp, a well known writer on Jung, says this: “The object of Active Imagination is to give a voice to sides of the personality that are normally not heard, thereby establishing a line of communication between consciousness and the unconscious.”

This isn’t simply lucid dreaming though. Jung is letting his unconscious reveal itself to him, at times prodding it with leading questions, and then giving it permission to speak in its full splendor and terror.

On January 2nd, 1914 Jung has an entry in The Red Book that he simply titles “Death”. Jung states… (p.262, Reader’s Edition)

On the following night, I wandered to the northern land
and found myself under a gray sky in misty-hazy cool-moist air.

I strive to those lowlands where the weak currents,
flashing in broad mirrors, stream toward the sea, where
all haste of flowing becomes more and more dampened,
and where all power and all striving unites with the
immeasurable extent of the sea.

The trees become sparse, wide swamp meadows accompany the still, murky water, the horizon is
unending and lonely, draped by gray clouds. Slowly, with restrained breath, and with the great and anxious expectation of one gliding downward wildly on the foam and pouring himself into endlessness, I follow my brother, the sea. It flows softly and almost imperceptibly, and yet we continually approach the supreme embrace, entering the womb of the source, the boundless expansion and immeasurable depths.

Lower yellow hills rise there. A broad dead lake widens at their feet. We wander along the hills quietly and they open up to a
dusky, unspeakably remote horizon, where the sky and the sea are fused into infinity.

Someone is standing there, on the last dune. He is wearing a black wrinkled coat; he stands motionless and looks into the distance.

I go up to him—he is gaunt and with a deeply serious look in his eyes. I say to him:

“Let me stand beside you for a while, dark one. I recognized you from afar. There is only one who stands this way, so solitary and at the last corner of the world.”

He answered: “Stranger, you may well stand by me, if it is not too cold for you. As you can see, I am cold and my heart has never beaten.”

“I know, you are ice and the end; you are the cold silence of the stones; and you are the highest snow on the mountains and the most extreme frost of outer space. I must feel this and that’s why I stand near you.”

“What leads you here to me, you living matter? The living are never guests here. Well, they all flow past here sadly in dense
crowds, all those above in the land of the clear day who have taken their departure, 29/30 never to return again. But the living never come here. What do you seek here?”

“My strange and unexpected path led me here as I happily followed the way of the living stream. And thus I found you. I gather this is your place, your rightful place?”

“Yes, here it leads into the undifferentiable, where none is equal or unequal, but all are one with one another. Do you see what approaches there?”

“I see something like a dark wall of clouds, swimming toward us on the tide.”

“Look more closely, what do you recognize?”

“I see densely pressed multitudes of men, old men, women, and children. Between them I see horses, oxen and smaller animals, a cloud of insects swarms around the multitude, a forest swims near, innumerable faded flowers, an utterly dead summer. They are already near; how stiff and cool they all look, their feet do not move, no noise sounds from their closed ranks. They are clasping themselves rigidly with their hands and arms; they are gazing beyond and pay us no heed—they are all flowing past in an enormous stream. Dark one, this vision is awful.”

“You wanted to stay by me, so get hold of yourself. Look!”

I see: “The first rows have reached the point where the surf
and the stream flow together violently. And it looks as if a wave of
air were confronting the stream of the dead together with the surging
sea, whirling them up high, scattering them in black scraps, and
dissolving them in murky clouds of mist. Wave after wave
approaches, and ever new droves dissolve into black air. Dark one,
tell me, is this the end?”

“Look!”

The dark sea breaks heavily—a reddish glow spreads out in it—it is like blood—a sea of blood foams at my feet—the depths of the sea glow—how strange I feel—am I suspended by my feet? Is it the sea or is it the sky? Blood and fire mix themselves together in a ball red light erupts from its smoky shroud—a new sun escapes from the bloody sea, and rolls gleamingly toward the uttermost depths—it disappears under my feet.  I look around me, I am all alone. Night has fallen. What did
Ammonius say? Night is the time of silence. I looked around me and I saw that the solitude expanded into the immeasurable, and pierced me with horrible coldness. The sun still glowed in me, but I could feel myself stepping into the great shadow. I follow the stream that makes its way into the depths, slowly and unperturbed, into the depths of what is to come.

And thus I went out in that night (it was the second night of the year 1914), and anxious expectation filled me.

I went out to embrace the future. The path was wide and what was to come was awful. It was the enormous dying, a sea of blood. From it the new sun arose, awful and a reversal of that which we call day.

We have seized the darkness and its sun will shine above us, bloody and burning like a great downfall.

When I comprehended my darkness, a truly magnificent night came over me and my dream plunged me into the depths of the millennia, and from it my phoenix ascended.

[end music]

There’s a rich symbolism in this vision, it seems to echo the River of Blood visions that started Jung’s journey inward, and again, it seems to serve as possible pre-cognition of the catastrophic loss of life from the World War to come.

The imagery in this vision feels cinematic, even though these words were written decades before film was even invented. But aside from being a unique way of entertaining himself, this vision gives Jung many insights to reflect upon. And that is the point of all this. These encounters manifest meaningful personal insights into a digestible narrative, the narrative can then be written down and the subject matter painted, solidifying the insight in a tangible way.

The implication is deeply fascinating, that you can acquire valuable wisdom through your own solitary reflection.

Following that entry we see Jung making sense of that encounter:

“We need the coldness of death to see clearly. Life wants to love and to die, to begin and to end. You are not forced to live eternally, but you can also die, since there is a will in you for both. Life and death must strike a balance in your existence. Today’s men need a large slice of death, since too much incorrectness lives in them, and too much correctness died in them. What stays in balance is correct, what disturbs balance is incorrect. But if balance has to be attained, then that which preserves it is incorrect and that which disturbs it is correct. Balance is at once life and death. For the completion of life, a balance with death is fitting. If I accept death, then my tree greens, since dying increases life. If I plunge into the death encompassing the world, then my buds break open. How much our life needs death!

Joy at the smallest things comes to you only when you have accepted death. But if you look out greedily for all that you could still live, then nothing is great enough for your pleasure, and the smallest things that continue to surround you are no longer a joy. Therefore I behold death, since it teaches me how to live.

If you accept death, it is altogether like a frosty night and an anxious misgiving, but a frosty night in a vineyard full of sweet grapes. You will soon take pleasure in your wealth. Death ripens. One needs death to be able to harvest the fruit. Without death, life would be meaningless, since the long-lasting rises again and denies its own meaning. To be, and to enjoy your being, you need death, and limitation enables you to fulfill your being.”

[music]

Part Three: The Sacrificial Murder

Jung often compared thoughts to events. When your mind is visited by a thought or a daydream is that really so much different than when a bird lands on your windowsill?

Thoughts and daydreams sometimes appear without any encouragement, seemingly spontaneously. There is great value in being able to view the mind in this way, to be a silent witness to your own processes, to be an observer of the observer. What is your brain doing right now? How is it responding to your surroundings? If there are people around you, what impressions do they leave on you?

Those impressions are often projections your mind is making onto those people. We very rarely see people the way they actually appear, instead we see characters, stories, projections of our own insecurities, and archetypes. The mind is always at work, in a sense, perceiving itself, running the information of our senses through its own filter.

And sometimes, the mind can invent some pretty dark and twisted impressions or fantasies. But it is important to face those too. To understand that we have a say and we have control. The impressions or fantasies are just that and nothing more, they hold no substantial power over our fate. But those impressions and fantasies can often reveal a deeper truth about ourselves, if we only dare to examine them.

This is the beautiful way Jung viewed the brain.

In January 1914, he describes another vision entitled ‘The Sacrificial Murder’. It follows: (p.320, Reader’s Edition)

But this was the vision that I did not want to see, the horror that I did not want to live: A sickening feeling
of nausea sneaks up on me, and abominable, perfidious serpents wind their way slowly and cracklingly
through parched undergrowth; they hang down lazily and disgustingly lethargic from the branches, looped
in dreadful knots. I am reluctant to enter this dreary and unsightly valley, where the bushes stand in arid stony defiles.

The valley looks so normal, its air smells of crime, of foul, cowardly deeds. I am seized by disgust and horror. I walk hesitantly over the boulders, avoiding every dark place for fear of treading on a serpent. The sun shines weakly out of
a gray and distant sky, and all the leaves are shriveled. A marionette with a broken head lies before me amidst the stones—a few steps further, a small apron—and then behind the bush, the body of a small girl—covered with terrible wounds—smeared with blood. One foot is clad with a stocking and shoe, the other is naked and gorily crushed—the head—where is the head? The head is a mash of blood with hair and whitish pieces of bone, surrounded by stones smeared
with brain and blood. My gaze is captivated by this awful sight—a shrouded figure, like that of a woman, is standing calmly next to the child; her face is covered by an impenetrable veil. She asks me:

S: “What then do you say?”

I: “What should I say? This is beyond words.”

S: “Do you understand this?”

I: “I refuse to understand such things. I can’t speak about them without becoming enraged.”

S: “Why become enraged? You might as well rage every day of your life, for these and similar things occur every day.”

I: “But most of the time we don’t see them.”

S: “So knowing that they happen is not enough to enrage you?”

I: “If I merely have knowledge of something, it’s easier and simpler. The horror is less real if all I have is knowledge.”

S: “Step nearer and you will see that the body of the child has been cut open; take out the liver.”

I: “I will not touch this corpse. If someone witnessed this, they would think that I’m the murderer.”

S: “You are cowardly; take out the liver.”

I: “Why should I do this? This is absurd.”

S: “I want you to remove the liver. You must do it.”

I: “Who are you to give me such an order?”

S: “I am the soul of this child. You must do this for my sake.”

I: “I don’t understand, but I’ll believe you and do this horrific and absurd deed.”

I reach into the child’s visceral cavity—it is still warm—the liver is still firmly attached—I take my knife and cut it free of the
ligaments. Then I take it out and hold it with bloody hands toward the figure.

S: “I thank you.”

I: “What should I do?”

S: “You know what the liver means, and you ought to perform the healing act with it.”

I: “What is to be done?”

S: “Take a piece of the liver, in place of the whole, and eat it.”

I: “What are you demanding? This is absolute madness. This is desecration, necrophilia. You make me a guilty party to this most hideous of all crimes.”

S: “You have devised the most horrible torment for the murderer, which could atone for his act. There is only one atonement: abase yourself and eat.”

I: “I cannot—I refuse—I cannot participate in this horrible guilt.”

S: “You share in this guilt.”

I: “I? Share in this guilt?”

S: “You are a man, and a man has committed this deed.”

I: “Yes, I am a man—I curse whoever did this for being a man, and I curse myself for being a man.”

S: “So, take part in his act, abase yourself and eat. I need atonement.”

I: “So shall it be for your sake, as you are the soul of this child.”

I kneel down on the stone, cut off a piece of the liver and put it in my mouth. My gorge rises—tears burst from my eyes—cold sweat covers my brow—a dull sweet taste of blood—I swallow with desperate efforts—it is impossible—once again and once again—I almost faint—it is done. The horror has been accomplished.

S: “I thank you.”

She throws her veil back—a beautiful maiden with ginger hair.

S: “Do you recognize me?”

I: “How strangely familiar you are! Who are you?”

S: “I am your soul.”

[end music]

With visions such as this one, is it really any surprise why Jung may have been hesitant to publish The Red Book? Any one of his detractors could take this Sacrificial Murder vision and easily turn it against him, saying he is depraved and near psychotic, how could anyone follow the theories of such a man? And yet… we all have had nightmares, where are they born from? From our own mind. We all have had passing impulses toward violence. It would be naive to think that only the truly psychotic see these dark things in themselves. The truth is, we all harbor angels and demons.

Even looking at pop culture, in filmmaking, the horror genre is still to date the one that pulls in the most profits from any other genres whether they be drama or comedy, and horror has been the most profitable for a long time. I personally don’t enjoy horror movies, but I know plenty of people who do. We all harbor angels and demons in our psychology. And horror can be seen as a way to interact and confront them under the guise of entertainment.

In Jung’s journeys into his imaginative unconscious he does not refuse any imagery, he acts as a passive observer, and whatever blossoms forth he looks it straight in the eyes, with the assumption that it may be something worth understanding. It’s not always a pleasant experience, but it’s an invaluable lesson. It’s an essential step on the path toward understanding yourself.

 

Part Four: The Archetypes

In the beginning of this episode, we tried to make sense of why Jung’s visions are often so religious. I’ve thought about this a long time, and I think one of the primary reasons is that religious characters and symbols are archetypal in nature. The language of the unconscious is heavily symbolic, and intertwined with the archetypes. But what does that mean? What are archetypes?

In trying to make sense of these visions that Jung experienced, it’s really helpful to understand archetypes. What they are, how they come about, and how they influence us on a daily basis.

If you are in any creative field, understanding Jung’s theory of archetypes is incredibly useful. When you’re familiar with the idea, then you begin to see that so much of creativity interacts with archetypes.

So what are they?

Let’s first refer to Jung’s own words on the matter. In the book The Archetypes And The Collective Unconscious, Jung says:

“Since for years I have been observing and investigating the products of the unconscious in the widest sense of the word, namely dreams, fantasies, visions, and delusions of the insane. I have not been able to avoid recognizing certain regularities, that is, types. There are types of situations and types of figures that repeat themselves frequently and have a corresponding meaning. I therefore employ the term “motif” to designate these repetitions. Thus there are not only typical dreams but typical motifs in the dreams. These may, as we have said, be situations or figures. Among the latter there are human figures that can be arranged under a series of archetypes…”

So this is often the manner in which Jung talks about the archetypes, he never narrowed them down to a strict formula or a specific list. But at the same time, he does acknowledge that there are dozens of archetypes that we seem to share across cultures, regardless of time or place. Here is how I understand them: archetypes are deeply established thought structures which originate in the bedrock of your unconscious mind. We see them bubble to the surface as symbolic figures and symbolic experiences. For example, one of the most dominant archetypes is Mother.

Whenever people look at the Virgin Mary, the circuitry for the Mother archetype is activating in their mind. Whenever you watch a Disney movie you see the Mother archetype played by one of the maternal characters. Whenever you pick up a baby or a cute small animal, you are tapping into the neural wiring of your mind’s Mother archetype, you see, the strange thing is, these thought structures not only color your understanding of the world, but they become maps of their own, maps of behavior that inform your actions. And this happens all behind the curtain of your awareness, decisions being made for how you interpret the world and how you behave in it.

Take another example, that of the Doorway. In every culture in the world, the doorway is used as a point of transition, a threshold of transformation, the crossing point from one world to another. Homes are constructed around the premise of doorways leading from one mental space to another, buildings guard certain spaces with locked doorways, walking through a doorway is an archetypal experience. This may be an echo from our ancient ancestors. You can imagine 40,000 years ago, one of your distant ancestors entering a cave or a passage, and they would likely feel like they were entering a different world, a point of transition. This is the power of a doorway. It’s real and deeply wired in us in a fundamental sense.

On that note, it’s useful to point out that Jung’s method for activating these visions uses a version of the doorway or passage archetype. By digging a hole straight down, he is engaging an archetypal doorway experience, and then in these visions he often walks through even more doorways and passageways that act as points of transition to further discoveries. Perhaps that’s on of the lesson here: How do you get to the land of archetypes? You use an archetype.

And on that note, I think Jung wants us to try this ourselves. I don’t think he would be surprised to find out that The Red Book has seen a revival of interest in the last ten years. I think he knew that this type of profoundly personal experience is what the world needs, especially now, when we have grown so technologically advanced and interconnected that we risk losing touch with ourselves.

To test this theory out, that we can all explore The Red Book experience for ourselves, I tried Jung’s digging method. I ran my own experiments into the active imagination, as Jung calls it. And if you would be open to entertaining me, I would like to share one of my ‘active imagination’ visions with you. With the purpose of inspiring you to try it for yourself. After each session I have a journal where I write down everything that happened.

Now I should preface this entry with a disclaimer: if you suffer from a psychotic disorder or have schizophrenia it is advised that you do not try these methods, as the nature of engaging with unconscious fantasies can in some rare cases run the risk of a mental break with reality. Jung warned of this himself in later lectures. If you have schizophrenia and are planning to try Jung’s digging method, it is advised that you consult with a therapist who knows your history, just in case this method runs any risks.

This entry is dated December 6th, 2019. This was my third journey inward.

“I close my eyes, relax, take five long and deep breaths. I imagine walking down the long descending stairs in my parent’s house, the house that I grew up, which lead down into the basement. I make a point to fill my senses with the details that make the descent more vivid. The creak of the steps, the cavernous echo of the basement, the cold and damp air, and the hard cement floor covered by linoleum under my feet. Taking a moment, I recall all the memories I had formed here: wrestling with my brother, practicing Tae Kwon Do, working out, singing with my voice echoing through the house, and even summoning a demon here… in this very basement in a dream.

After a moment, I turn into the sub-basement, a darker and more enclosed space, it contains the boiler and the washing machine, the pipes and the support beams are exposed. I approach the wooden barricade that used to hold my childhood dog, Sonia. She was a massive great dane, which my parents never trusted to leave alone in the house. I thought on how this wooden barricade was a particularly cruel and strange method to secure a dog… in a pit of darkness for hours, without sunlight… or fresh air… as I open the barricade, she bursts forth, and rushes up the stairs… perhaps this is how she would do it when I was a child too? I think this remnant speaks true.

I enter the wooden enclosure, and there is the hole I had recently been working on. I now stand over the hole and I prod it with a shovel, pieces of the chipped cement easily break off into the shallow hole. The earth looks soft and ready… As I test it with the shovel, the hole collapses inward, as if a vacuum is sucking down the dirt. I step into it. I am swiftly pulled down a dirt tunnel, until a short stop on flat ground, with a flat stone before me, covering another hole. I pry this one up, and hop into the next dirt tunnel, as it swiftly pulls me downward towards some inevitable end.

I am spat out of the tunnel’s opening into a brook, some small river. I notice small boulders being brushed by the babbling brook’s water. I’m surprised by this locale… as in the prior digging sessions the locations were always interior spaces. I follow the brook upward, uphill, I notice there is a path leading to an a kind of old fashioned driveway up the slope, a very large villa sits atop the hill, it appears to be someone’s abandoned mansion.

My father appears on the path, as a kind of apparition, and says “Right this way.” I continue upward.

At the top of the path is the mansion, it is reminiscent of an old castle we stayed in during the summer while in Poland. I enter, and wander through its halls as if looking for something. I open some of the doors, there are empty rooms. It’s strangely unoccupied. At the end of the corridor there is one door left. I pause, open it and enter.

There is a table at the center of the room, and seated behind it is Nora… What? One of my first crushes from high school. This makes no sense. I haven’t thought about her in years.

She is wearing a thrift store fur coat, she is thin, and her messy bleached hair is as I remember it from the last time I saw her, some twenty years ago. She has smeared makeup, like a junkie… or a mental patient.

I ask, surprised “What are you doing here?”

She says “This is where I ended up.”

I respond “I think I understand… You were one of my first symbols.”

She says “Yes… the tragic female…”

I feel uneasy… She picks up a shiny revolver that is laying on the table.

She says “The classic… Femme Fatale.”

She puts the revolver in her mouth and pulls the trigger…

Blood splatters into a cloud in the air behind her. I realize I’m holding the gun now,in the confusion I had rushed over to try and pry it from her hands before she shot herself… Her body has fallen backward, with the chair, and lies on the floor.

I am in shock, and crouch down near her… I feel the compulsion to roll her head over to look at the exit wound… I do, and the hole is massive, and brings to mind the image of a spiraling tunnel of dirt. I climb inside of it, and it sucks me downward in quick descent…

I wonder “Where to now?” It goes ever and ever downward… I don’t think it will stop… My feet finally hit firm ground… I look around, but no scenery. No… nothing. Just empty space, stretching outward… not exactly blackness, but more like void, the ‘absence of’.

I inquire “Where am I?”

There is a presence which responds “You have reached a bottom.”

I state “I want to know my symbols. I want to know my Personal Myth.”

The presence reveals to me the archetypes that seem to hold special court in my mind’s make up… These are not all the symbols that make up my psyche, but for now, these are the ones we are elaborating on… Satan. Mother. Hero. Hermit.

These archetypes hold deep personal significance in my life, and the explanations that followed I will keep private for now. If you are curious to know specifics, please contact me directly. But I would like to share with you the insights I learned from this presence regarding the Hero archetype as it has manifested in my mind.

The presence says “The Hero leads himself on the journey, on the Great Adventure, but, when the Hero travels alone, he also can lead himself into danger and right off a cliff.

The lesson here is the Hero can adopt, unwittingly, a certain blindness… we can perhaps call it Hero Blindness. Where the journey is so romanticized and ambitious in the Hero’s mind that he / she can often become seduced by its glory, and forget the value of seeking help and aid from others… The value of seeing the limits of one’s reach. The value of seeing the larger picture.

You have strong associations with the Hero archetype… and it is likely that is what attracts you to the Tragic Female archetype, like Nora… Be aware of this. It is not bad in itself to have association with the Hero… but it can lead you into troubled waters if you are not aware of what and how this ‘character’ plays you.

Do not think for one instant that you are in control at all times… There are significant moments and life choices that go the way they go because the archetypes you associate with play you. You do not make many decisions… it is the archetypes themselves, living their stories through your flesh…”

[ music … ]

There is a beautiful quote by the poet W.H. Auden, who said “We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.” … “We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.” This certainly fits in with the implications of Jungian psychology, and it fits in with the apparent influence that the archetypes have on our mind.

The strange revelation I felt while reflecting on that vision of one of my first crushes from high school was that our mind has a tendency to simplify our experiences into symbolic elements, but it can also simplify people into symbols… or archetypes. This girl, in my mind, became associated under the archetype of the tragic female, or femme fatale. This wasn’t something I did by choice, I didn’t organize my brain cabinets this way… it just… happened. And I only realized it after this deep digging experience. It forces you to confront a strange question: How accurately do you really remember the people of your life? Even the people you think you know personally?

Do you really see them for the multifaceted richness they contain as a human being, or do you see them as a character? A symbolic element, and archetype in your life story. The danger of seeing people in this way is that you end up projecting qualities onto them which may occasionally fit, but which completely disregard their autonomy… relegating them to something akin to a plot device. I think if we are honest with ourselves, we would discover that most of the people in our lives are filed away into specific cabinets in this way. And whether you think that is unfair to those people or not, one thing you should consider is this: What archetype are you playing? Or what archetypes are playing you?

If you have filed someone away as a Tragic Male hero figure, and you have a strong association to the Nurturing Maiden figure, who can breathe new life and renew the Tragic Male, then in all likelihood, all your decisions will already be made for you for the entire course of that relationship. If you are possessed by the archetype that fits with someone else’s archetype well then you are no longer making conscious choices, now you are living by a script. What is weird is that this other person can be an unwilling participant in your interpretation of them as a specific archetype, you can be projecting a character onto them, and it will still activate the corresponding response in you as if they were genuinely this character.

The author and Jungian scholar Stephan Hoeller said this during a lecture on Jung’s Red Book: “One has to have a great deal of psychic strength when dealing with Archetypes. And when resisting their tendency to obtain dominance over our consciousness. We need to interact with them, and we need to get some of their wisdom, but we are not to be taken over by them.”

And I think this is one of the brilliant discoveries of Jung and of The Red Book. If we are not aware of them, the archetypes live through us, playing out their stories. Through deep interaction with the imaginative unconscious, we can discover our personal myth.

 

Part Five: Active Imagination

There is no doubt that Jung had an unparalleled intellect, and that his life’s work is a reflection of that. But Jung did not invent introspection, and he did not discover he experience of engaging with the imaginative unconscious. Rather, he rediscovered it. Ancient cultures around the world have used strikingly similar methods to engage with the unconscious for daily insights, personal reflection, and even spiritual growth. Jung had a scholar’s appetite for studying the spiritual practices of the world’s cultures. In researching for this episode I stumbled on a meditation practice which is used by Sufis, these are mystic Islamic monks.

They train themselves to enter a deep meditative state, and in this state they interact with their imaginative unconscious, traveling to foreign lands and interacting with spiritual teachers. In Sufi thought, the imagination is more than just our passing daydreams, it is said that the imagination is an essential element of our soul, and that it is one of the few things which survive our death. Not only that, but that the imagination is actually shackled by our physical body, and that our senses give us the illusion that this is all our experience contains. But that upon relinquishing the body, in death, our soul and imagination are set free.

There is a well known theologian of Islamic studies named Henry Corbin, he called this internal space that Sufi mystics enter the Mundus Imaginalis. It bears a striking resemblance to what Jung was practicing. In 1972, Corbin wrote a seminal essay documenting the significance of these Sufi mystic states. The essay is entitled ‘Mundus Imaginalis or The Imaginary and the Imaginal’. In this essay he writes:

“It must be stressed that the world into which these Oriental theosophers probed is perfectly real. Its reality is more irrefutable and more coherent than that of the empirical world, where reality is perceived by the senses. Upon returning, the beholders of this world are perfectly aware of having been “elsewhere”; they are not mere schizophrenics. This world is hidden behind the very act of sense perception and has to be sought underneath its apparent objective certainty. For this reason, we definitely cannot qualify it as being imaginary in the current sense of the word, i.e., as unreal, or non-existent.”

He goes on to argue that our terms for imagination are too inaccurate to describe these esoteric states of mind. And I tend to agree with him. Saying that we are using our imagination implies something fabricated, yet there are many ways of engaging with what appears to be our imagination, some of them, like in the Sufi mystic’s cases or in Jung’s case can appear entirely real. And what do we call that? Jung later called it the ‘active imagination.’

The theologian, Henry Corbin, goes on:

“Here we touch on the decisive point for which everything that precedes has prepared us, i.e., the organ by means of which the penetration of the mundus imaginalis, the journey to the “eighth clime”, is accomplished. What is this organ capable of producing a movement that constitutes a return ab extra ad intra (from the outside to the inside), a topographical inversion? It is not the senses or the faculties of the physical organism, much less is it pure intellect. Rather, it is the intermediary power which has a mediating role par excellence, i.e., active imagination.”

Corbin directly uses this well known Jungian term in describing these internal states. But it is important to point out that this essay, from 1972, was written in a world that had not yet seen The Red Book. The Red Book did not become public knowledge until 2009. Corbin passed away in 1978, and I can’t help but wonder what kind of parallels he might have seen between Jung’s inner work and the spiritual work of the Sufis.

Which brings us to the final entries in The Red Book. These final visions are of the most enigmatic character, and Jungian analysts are still not in full agreement as to their interpretation. It seems that by the end of The Red Book, Jung has so thoroughly affected his mind’s deep sub-structures that his soul itself needs to be re-oriented, he has affected his mind on the deepest unconscious levels. This is no child’s play. It is like he has opened up the control panel to the core mechanics of his brain.

In the beginning, in the first entries, he is the silent observer, the reverent and humble traveler into unknown lands, in these last entries he takes on a different tone, even talking back and being dismissive with some of the characters. He takes on the tone of a Master. A Master of his own domain.

But there is a strange trouble brewing now. After Jung reorganized and interacted with the archetypal layer of his mind, it seems he caused a significant shift. It seems that he has undone an aspect of his mind’s organizing principles, he has leveled the playing field so that good and evil are one and the same thing. It is known that Jung was a great admirer of Nietzsche, who often argued that the death of God was necessary for a person to free themselves from the roles that society forces on us and to build oneself up again from the ground up. The death of God can bring about the leveling of your value system, the structure of your mind that orients you morally.

On February 1st, 1914, Jung writes: [p. 418, Reader’s Edition]

“Never before had life been so doubtful, a night of aimless tension, being one in being directed against one another. Nothing moved, neither God nor the devil. So I approached the serpent that lay in the sun, as if she were unthinking. Her eyes were not visible, since they blinked in the shimmering sunshine, and I spoke to her:

“How will it be, now that God and the devil have become one? Are they in agreement to bring life to a standstill? Does the conflict of opposites belong to the inescapable conditions of life? And does he who recognizes and lives the unity of opposites stand still? He has completely taken the side of actual life, and he no longer acts as if he belonged to one party and had to battle against the other, but he is both and has brought their discord to an end. Through taking this burden from life, has he also taken the force from it?”

The serpent turned and spoke ill-humoredly:

“Truly, you pester me. Opposites were certainly an element of life for me. You probably will have noticed this. Your innovations deprive me of this source of power. I can neither lure you with pathos nor annoy you with banality. I am somewhat baffled.”

I: “If you are baffled, should I give counsel? I would rather you dive down to the deeper grounds to which you have entry and ask Hades or the heavenly ones, perhaps someone there can give counsel.”

S: “You have become imperious.”

I: “Necessity is even more imperious than I. I must live and be able to move.”

S: “You have the whole wide earth. What do you want to ask the beyond for?”

I: “It isn’t curiosity that drives me, but necessity. I will not yield.”

S: “I obey, but reluctantly. This style is new and unaccustomed to me.”

I: “I’m sorry, but there is pressing need. Tell the depths that prospects are not looking too good for us, because we have cut off an important organ from life. As you know, I’m not the guilty one, since you have led me carefully along this way.”

S: “You might have rejected the apple.”

I: “Enough of these jokes. You know that story better than I do. I am serious. We need some air. Be on your way and fetch the fire. It has already been dark around me for too long. Are you sluggish or cowardly?”

S: “I’m off to work. Take from me what I bring up.”

Slowly, the throne of the God ascends into empty space, followed by the holy trinity, all of Heaven, and finally Satan himself. He resists and clings to his beyond. He will not let it go. The upperworld is too chilly for him.

S: “Have you got tight hold of him?”

I: “Welcome, hot thing of darkness! My soul probably pulled you up roughly?”

S: “Why this noise? I protest against this violentextraction.”

I: “Calm down. I didn’t expect you. You come last of all. You seem to be the hardest part.”

S: “What do you want from me? I don’t need you, impertinent fellow.”

I: “It’s a good thing we have you. You’re the liveliest thing in the whole dogma.”

S: “What concern is your prattle to me! Make it quick. I’m freezing.”

I: “Listen, something has just happened to us: we have united the opposites. Among other things, we have bonded you with God.”

S: “For God’s sake, why this hopeless fuss? Why such nonsense?”

I: “Please, that wasn’t so stupid. This unification is an important principle. We have put a stop to never-ending quarreling,
to finally free our hands for real life.”

S: “This smells of monism. I have already made note of some of these men. Special chambers have been heated for them.”

I: “You’re mistaken. Matters are not as rational with us as they seem to be. 305 We have no single correct truth either. Rather, a most remarkable and strange fact has occurred: after the opposites had been united, quite unexpectedly and incomprehensibly nothing further happened. Everything remained in place, peacefully and yet completely motionless, and life turned into a complete standstill.”

S: “Yes, you fools, you certainly have made a pretty mess of things.”

I: “Well, your mockery is unnecessary. Our intentions were serious.”

S: “Your seriousness leads us to suffer. The ordering of the beyond is shaken to its foundations.”

I: “So you realize that matters are serious. I want an answer to my question, what should happen under these circumstances? We no longer know what to do.”

S: “Well, it is hard to know what to do, and difficult to give advice even if one would like to give it. You are blinded fools, a
brashly impertinent people. Why didn’t you stay out of trouble? How do you mean to understand the ordering of the world?”

I: “Your ranting suggests that you are quite thoroughly aggrieved. Look, the holy trinity is taking things coolly. It seems not
to dislike the innovation.”

S: “Ah, the trinity is so irrational that one 161/162 can never trust its reactions. I strongly advise you not to take those symbols seriously.”

I: “I thank you for this well-meant advice. But you seem to be interested. One would expect you to pass unbiased judgment on account of your proverbial intelligence.”

S: “Me, unbiased! You can judge for yourself. If you consider this absoluteness in its completely lifeless equanimity, you can easily discover that the state and standstill produced by your presumptuousness closely resembles the absolute. But if I counsel you, I place myself completely on your side, since you too find this standstill unbearable.”

I: “What? You take my side? That is strange.”

S: “That’s not so strange. The absolute was always adverse to the living. I am still the real master of life.”

I: “That is suspicious. Your reaction is far too personal.”

S: “My reaction is far from personal. I am utterly restless, quickly hurrying life. I am never contented, never unperturbed. I pull everything down and hastily rebuild. I am ambition, greed for fame, lust for action; I am the fizz of new thoughts and action. The absolute is boring and vegetative.”

I: “All right, I believe you. So—just what do you advise?”

S: “The best advice I can give you is: revoke your completely harmful innovation as soon as possible.”

I: “What would be gained by that? We’d have to start from scratch again and would infallibly reach the same conclusion a
second time. What one has grasped once, one cannot intentionally not know again and undo. Your counsel is no counsel.”

S: “But could you exist without divisiveness and disunity? You have to get worked up about something, represent a party, overcome opposites, if you want to live.”

I: “That does not help. We also see each other in the opposite. We have grown tired of this game.”

S: “And so with life.”

I: “It seems to me that it depends on what you call life. Your notion of life has to do with climbing up and tearing down, with
assertion and doubt, with impatient dragging around, with hasty desire. You lack the absolute and its forbearing patience.”

S: “Quite right. My life bubbles and foams and stirs up turbulent waves, it consists of seizing and throwing away, ardent wishing and restlessness. That is life, isn’t it?”

I: “But the absolute also lives.”

S: “That is no life. It is a standstill or as good as a standstill, or rather: it lives interminably slowly and wastes thousands of years, just like the miserable condition that you have created.”

I: “You enlighten me. You are personal life, but the apparent standstill is the forbearing life of eternity, the life of divinity! This time you have counseled me well. I will let you go. Farewell.”

Satan crawls deftly like a mole back into his hole again. The symbol of the trinity and its entourage rise up in peace and equanimity to Heaven. I thank you, serpent, for hauling up the right one for me. Everyone understands his words, since they are personal. We can live again, a long life. We can waste thousands of years.

[end music]

In the following passages, Jung seems intent on rebuilding himself. He recognizes the value of having dualities within oneself, but also the value of being able to dispense with dualities and perceive the infinite unbounded nature of things. He summons up strange creatures called Cabiri. These are small trickster deities associated with the ancient Greek mysteries of Samothrace, they also appear in Goethe’s Faust. In the book Transformations and Symbols of the Libido Jung mentions these creatures “The Cabiri are, in fact, the mysterious creative powers, the gnomes who work under the earth, below the threshold of consciousness, in order to supply us with lucky ideas. As imps and hobgoblins, however, they also lay all sorts of nasty tricks, keeping back names and dates that were ‘on the tip of the tongue’, making us say the wrong thing, etc. They give an eye to everything that has not already been anticipated by consciousness and the functions at its disposal.”

They give one the impression of being worker elves of the unconscious mind. It’s a strange idea, but it’s neat to consider that all cultures around the world have some form of these gnomelike or goblinlike creatures in their folk tales.

Jung has a dialogue with them, The Cabiri begin by saying: (p.426, Reader’s Edition)

“We come to greet you as the master of the lower nature.”

Jung responds “Are you speaking to me? Am I your master?”

Cabiri “You were not, but you are now.”

Jung” So you declare. And so be it. Yet what should I do with your following?”

Cabiri “We carry what is not to be carried from below to above. We are the juices that rise secretly, not by force, but sucked out of inertia and affixed to what is growing. We know the unknown ways and the inexplicable laws of living matter. We carry up what slumbers in the earthly, what is dead and yet enters into the living. We do this slowly and easily, what you do in vain in your human way. We complete what is impossible for you.”

Jung “What should I leave to you? Which troubles can I transfer to you? What should I not do, and what do you do better?”

Cabiri “You forget the lethargy of matter. You want to pull up with your own force what can only rise slowly, ingesting itself, affixed to itself from within. Spare yourself the trouble, or you will disturb our work.”

Jung “Should I trust you, you untrustworthy ones, you slaves and slave souls? Get to work. Let it be so.”

From this point, there is a break in the entry. And in the margin Jung indicates he did not consult with the Cabiri for three weeks. He then summons them up again and continues:

“It seems to me that I gave you a long time. Neither did I descend to you nor did I disturb your work. I lived in the light of day and did the work of the day. What did you do?”

Cabiri “We hauled things up, we built. We placed stone upon stone. Now you stand on solid ground.”

I: “I feel the ground more solid. I stretch upward.”

The Cabiri: “We forged a flashing sword for you, with which you can cut the knot that entangles you.”

I: “I take the sword firmly in my hand. I lift it for the blow.”

The Cabiri: “We also place before you the devilish, skillfully twined knot that locks and seals you. Strike, only sharpness will cut through it.”

I: “Let me see it, the great knot, all wound round! Truly a masterpiece of inscrutable nature, a wily natural tangle of roots
grown through one another! Only Mother Nature, the blind weaver, could work such a tangle! A great snarled ball and a thousand small knots, all artfully tied, intertwined, truly, a human brain! Am I seeing straight? What did you do? You set my brain before me! Did you give me a sword so that its flashing sharpness slices through my brain? What were you thinking of?”

The Cabiri: “The womb of nature wove the brain, the womb of the earth gave the iron. So the Mother gave you both: entanglement and severing.”

I: “Mysterious! Do you really want to make me the executioner of my own brain?”

The Cabiri: “It befits you as the master of the lower nature. Man is entangled in his brain and the sword is also given to him to cut through the entanglement.”

I: “What is the entanglement you speak of?”

The Cabiri: “The entanglement is your madness, the sword is the overcoming of madness.”

I: “You offsprings of the devil, who told you that I am mad? You earth spirits, you roots of clay and excrement, are you not
yourselves the root fibers of my brain? You polyp-snared rubbish, channels for juice knotted together, parasites upon parasites, all sucked up and deceived, secretly climbing up over one another by night, you deserve the flashing sharpness of my sword. You want to persuade me to cut through you? Are you contemplating self-destruction? How come nature gives birth to creatures that she herself wants to destroy?”

The Cabiri: “Do not hesitate. We need destruction since we ourselves are the entanglement. He who wishes to conquer new land brings down the bridges behind him. Let us not exist anymore. We are the thousand canals in which everything also flows back again into its origin.”

I: “Should I sever my own roots? Kill my own people, whose king I am? Should I make my own tree wither? You really are the
sons of the devil.”

The Cabiri: “Strike, we are servants who want to die for their master.”

I: “What will happen if I strike?”

The Cabiri: “Then you will no longer be your brain, but will exist beyond your madness. Do you not see, your madness is your brain, the terrible entanglement and intertwining in the connection of the roots, in the nets of canals, the confusion of fibers. Being engrossed in the brain makes you wild. Strike! He who finds the way rises up over his brain. You are a Tom Thumb in the brain, beyond the brain you gain the form of a giant. We are surely sons of the devil, but did you not forge us out of the hot and dark? So we have something of its nature and of yours. The devil says that everything that exists is also worthy, since it perishes. As sons of the devil we want destruction, but as your creatures we want our own destruction. We want to rise up in you through death. We are roots that suck up from all sides. Now you have everything that you need, therefore chop us up, tear us out.”

I: “Will I miss you as servants? As a master I need slaves.”

The Cabiri: “The master serves himself.”

I: “You ambiguous sons of the devil, these words are your undoing. May my sword strike you, this blow shall be valid forever.”

The Cabiri “Woe, woe! What we feared, what we desired, has come to pass.”

I set foot on new land. Nothing brought up should flow back. No one shall tear down what I have built. My tower is of iron and has no seams. The devil is forged into the foundations. The Cabiri built it and the master builders were sacrificed with the sword on the battlements of the tower. Just as a tower surmounts the summit of a mountain on which it stands, so I stand above my brain, from which I grew. I have become hard and cannot be undone again. No more do I flow back. I am the master of my own self. I admire my mastery. I am strong and beautiful and rich. The vast lands and the blue sky have laid themselves before me and bowed to my mastery. I wait upon no one and no one waits upon me. I serve myself and I myself serve. Therefore I have what I need.

My tower grew for several thousand years, imperishable. It does not sink back. But it can be built over and will be built over. Few grasp my tower, since it stands on a high mountain. But many will see it and not grasp it. Therefore my tower will remain unused. No one scales its smooth walls. No one lands on its pointed roof. Only he who finds the entrance hidden in the mountain and rises up through the labyrinths of the innards can reach the tower, and the happiness of he who surveys things from there and he who lives from himself. This has been attained and created. It has not arisen from a patchwork of human thoughts, but has been forged from the glowing heat of the innards; the Cabiri themselves carried the matter to the mountain and consecrated the building with their own blood as the sole keepers of the mystery of its genesis. I built it out of the lower and upper beyond and not from the surface of the world. Therefore it is new and strange and towers over the plains inhabited by humans. This is the solid and the beginning.”

[end music]

In 1923, he built a real tower in Bollingen next to Lake Zurich to compliment the symbolic one already completed inside him. These kinds of meaningful details profusely infused Jung’s life. The experiences of The Red Book confronted Jung with his personal myth. Something which we all contain within ourselves, a story with characters that our unconscious is writing. Perhaps this is why we are always so fascinated by stories, from even the earliest years of childhood, it speaks to a certain aspect of our deeper selves.

This experience with the Cabiri and the cutting of his own brain in half is not the last entry in The Red Book. Jung continued the work… he continued it even beyond the last entry in The Red Book. It became like a skill he could access, which gave me a deeper form of introspection.

The intent of The Red Book is not to take the symbols and archetypes he describes at face value, because these are the archetypes as they have blossomed forth in Jung’s mind. In each of our minds they blossom forth differently, with different twists and shades of character. Jung did not want to be a prophet figure to be worshipped, he encourages us to take the journey ourselves. In fact, he thinks this type of journey is integral to the evolution and survival of humanity.

In one of the first passages of The Red Book Jung states: [ p.125, Reader’s Edition ]

“It is no teaching and no instruction that I give you. On what basis should I presume to teach you? I give you news of the way of this man, but not of your own way. My path is not your path, therefore I cannot teach you. The way is within us, but not in Gods, nor in teachings, nor in laws. Within us is the way, the truth, and the life.

Woe betide those who live by way of examples! Life is not with them. If you live according to an example, you thus live the life of that example, but who should live your own life if not yourself? So live yourselves.

The signposts have fallen, unglazed trails lie before us. Do not be greedy to gobble up the fruits of foreign fields. Do you not know that you yourselves are the fertile acre which bears everything that avails you?”

Part Six: The Final Question

Is it art?

From my months of studying The Red Book and Jung’s other writings, I look at it this way: the writing documents a work of deep personal and spiritual reflection. It is inner work that is done with the intent of understanding the intricacies of the mind and integrating the whole being into a state of self mastery.

On looking through it, you see the lovingly calligraphied pages and paintings, does their inclusion make it a work of art? It is important to consider Jung’s intention here, what role do the calligraphy and the paintings serve? In Jung’s later lectures it becomes clear that they serve the role of elaborating the experiences he is reflecting on. The paintings further crystallize the insights Jung obtained in his inner work. If you are following along, reading the entries and looking at the accompanying paintings, you realize they are not literal representations of the text at any given time, this isn’t an illustrated graphic novel we are looking at. The paintings serve the same function that an intricate mandala would serve to a Tibetan Buddhist monk. On viewing the intricately designed mandala, we may view it as art, but to the monk who made it, it is part of a process of meditation. I think this is the way to see the paintings, calligraphy, and writing of The Red Book.

So we are faced with the very real existential dilemma: Does the artist’s intention matter? When I look at The Red Book or at a mandala, I see art. I don’t think the artist’s intention to deliberately create something personal imbues the final work with any more or any less art. What do you think? Do you think The Red Book is a work of art?

It seems fitting to end with Jung’s own words. Knowing what we know now, they will carry so much more weight. In 1957, Jung spoke:

“The years, of which I have spoken to you, when I pursued the inner images, were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this. It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore. My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me. That was the stuff and material for more than only one life. Everything later was merely the outer classification, the scientific elaboration, and the integration into life. But the numinous beginning, which contained everything, was then.”

Conclusion:

My friends, this concludes Part Two of Carl Jung • The Red Book. Without a doubt, the largest topic we’ve covered so far on this podcast. It really has taken months of research, and some personal experimentation as well. (As I mentioned, I wanted to get a taste for the effectiveness of Jung’s ‘digging method’ so I tried it myself a few times.) If that is something you’re interested in, I will be releasing a guided meditation for the ‘digging method’ in the coming days. The experiences I’ve had have thoroughly convinced me that everyone should experience this. And I think that was how Carl Jung felt about it too, and why he initially wrote The Red Book with the intention to publish it one day. We know this because some of the entries seem to be addressed to readers, some entries begin with ‘my dear friends’, and such phrases.

In exploring all these things I have begun to see the brain in a new way, and I’m hoping some of those lessons came across in these two episodes. One of the most surprising insights is that fantasy and daydream are one of your mind’s most natural processes. And that’s a novel idea, because from the time we are kids in school, staring out of a window, the teacher scolds us and demands that we pay attention. But in fact, when you sit still for more than five minutes, the mind’s natural tendency is to explore itself. That’s what it’s doing when it’s daydreaming, right?… It is taking the content of your memories, emotions, and desires and exploring them. This is one of your mind’s most natural functions. Fantasy.

And when you employ something like Jung’s ‘digging method’ you take that fantasy function and you turn it up to eleven. You crank that puppy up and see where it goes. Curiously, wherever it goes will be somewhere you find engaging or insightful, by its very nature your mind can’t go somewhere boring, because it wants to explore the areas of conflict and the areas of interest. So, I hope many of you will try this meditation, I will be releasing it as a bonus episode in the coming days, stay tuned for that, if you follow my Instagram @mjdorian, you’ll hear about it when it’s released.

In preparing two episodes so filled with Jung’s thoughts it is inevitable to stumble into countless tangents and side quests learning about unrelated things. One such thing I wanted to include but couldn’t find the appropriate place or time for was another insight from ancient Greece. In Part One we ventured to the Oracle of Delphi, known as Pythia. In learning about that tradition I also stumbled on Dream Incubation Temples. These were temples in ancient Greece whose sole purpose was this: you would visit with a problem or ailment, the priest or priestess of the temple would take your offering, hear your concerns, and then direct you to a part of the temple where cushions and pillows were setup, and you would lay down likely say a prayer or meditation and take a nap. Then during your nap, it was believed you would receive the answer to your problem, or guidance from Asclepius on how to heal your illness.

Asclepius was a renowned healer in ancient Greece who was so well known that after his death he was elevated to a God. Asclepius is often depicted holding a large staff that is entwined by a climbing serpent. Yes, brings to mind all the serpent imagery from The Red Book right? That’s not all though, this symbol of the staff with the serpent became so synonymous with healing that we still use it today in all the world’s medical fields. Whenever you see the logo for a hospital you see the Rod of Asclepius, for example, look up the World Health Organization, their logo is the earth, with laurels flanking it, and the Rod of Asclepius at center.

Whenever I see this symbol now I think of how far back it goes, I think of the Dream Incubation Temples which were all destroyed when Christianity became the dominant religion in Greece, I think of how that symbol harkens back to a tradition where intelligent people respected their interior world, the world of their imagination, of their unconscious, and the world of their dreams. I think this is what Jung saw in these ancient traditions too. And it’s time to bring that back, some form of it that can live in the modern era.

On that note, if you enjoyed this episode and want to hear more like it I ask that you send it to a friend or a loved one. Tell them to listen too. The only way forward for this podcast is for it to grow, to reach more listeners, but it’s an uphill battle. I don’t have a enough money yet to start advertising, all my income goes toward bills at the moment, hopefully, in the near future that will improve and I can set aside a budget toward it, but for now it is all self produced and advertised person-to-person. So please send it to a friend, or two, or three.

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It’s been a crazy journey with these two episodes, I feel like I just took a semester on Carl Jung. So this is definitely not the last you will hear of him on the show, I have found myself peppering in Jung quotes and references at random points in my daily life, that is how thoroughly he has taken over. I encourage you to dive into one of his books as well, the most approachable for a wide audience is ‘Man And His Symbols’, I recommend the hardcover it’s a much easier read with full photos and color illustrations. It’s the way it was meant to be experienced. But if you really want to get into the weeds I suggest diving into Introduction to Jungian Psychology. It is a series of lectures and Questions & Answers that Jung gave which get into his personal experiences but also his main theories. When I first started an interest in Jung I made the mistake of starting with the very dense and technical work called Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, I highly recommend it of course, but it forces you to read every sentence three times because it is so jam-packed with meaning.

The next episode will be an interview / conversation episode, where I pick someone’s brain on topics of creativity and psychology. And those are really fun. So stay tuned for that, it will be out in February.

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This has been Creative Codex, I am MJDorian.

Until next time, dig deep my friends.

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