Journey Into Jung’s Red Book: Liber Primus
by
JC Andrijeski
Copyright © 2010 by JC Andrijeski
Published by White Sun Press
Cover Photos Courtesy of Photos8.com
Ebook Edition, License Notes
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Also by this Author:
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Shield: Allie's War, Book Two
Sword: Allie's War, Book Three
Shadow: Allie's War, Book Four
New York: Allie's War, Early Years
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Table of Contents
Journey Into Jung's Red Book: Liber Primus
Bonus Pages! Rook: Allie's War, Book One
Journey Into Jung’s Red Book: Liber Primus
Speak and write for those who want to listen and read. But do not run after men, so that you do not soil the dignity of humanity--it is a rare good. A sad demise in dignity is better than an undignified healing. (1)
Upon reading the first part of The Red Book, by Carl Jung, I have come to the conclusion that it can only be read by completely embracing one’s subjective experience of it. Jung admonishes the reader as such, for, as he sees it, “One should not turn people into sheep, but sheep into people. The spirit of the depth demands this.” (2)
Therefore, what I offer here is just that--the rambling subjectivity of one mind immersed briefly in Jung’s world. I started with Liber Primus, as each section of The Red Book--the paintings, the calligraphy, the Liber Segundus, the Scrutinies, and the Introduction itself, which is extremely well-written and provides an outstanding summary of Jung’s works and theories in the context of their time--are books in their own right, and likely deserve separate treatment.
Therefore, in my own subjectivity, what I witnessed in reading Liber Primus, and really the Red Book as a whole, is the deconstruction of a mind. The beginnings of this process for Jung, and all of its requisite fear, ranting and expounding, both for and against its need, are documented in detail in Liber Primus. The battle mostly occurs against the trappings of what Jung calls “the spirit of the time” in which his mind lives. One of the more interesting aspects of this deconstruction is that Jung purports to do it to himself, as a deliberate act of will. Much in the way that a yogi would do to a student in an Indian ashram, or as seekers in various traditions have done for millennia through spiritual teachers, elders, priests, drugs, dreamwalks, pilgrimages and fasting, in Liber Novus, Jung takes it upon himself to split himself into sage and pupil and rip apart his own limiting preconceptions and social conditioning through the power of induced trance and his nighttime dreams.
In doing so, he inevitably takes up the battle both for and against Christianity as it exists in his time. His conflict with the dominant religion of his historical context surfaces from the outset, in fact, and the themes that surface as he uses Christianity both to understand and destroy fears of his own heresy appear and reappear throughout the course of the book. The lens of Christianity also provides a focal point for much of Jung’s ambivalence around his own potential status as Outsider. To tackle Christianity is, for him, to tackle the backbone of his cultural beliefs, and those shared by the majority of those who make up his peers and neighbors. He calls his ultimate goal “individuation,” a psychiatric term for what others might have referred to as “enlightenment,” “self-realization,” “attainment,” or any number of words used to try and capture a state of mind that operates independently of the confines of the inherited--both socially and perhaps biologically--elements of consciousness. Those elements, being in part steeped in conformity, fear and the historical frames of a particular place and time, include a strong need to feel “a part of” with other human beings of one’s society.
Therefore, when Jung does battle with that belief system, he fears for his soul, but deeper than that lies the fear of being an outcast--or worse, a fool, or a madman. As his visions unfold various heresies to help him better comprehend his own beliefs, he is also compelled to see past what his ‘spirit of the time’ has labeled evil. This attempt to break through the confines of rational (and irrational), conditioned thought--through words, through images, through dreams and trance-states, puts this book on a curious cusp between psychological text, dream diary, journal, theological text, philosophy and artistic, individualistic expression. He himself mirrors this split--seeker, artist, philosopher, thinker, scientist, even seer--who attempts to transcend the parts of the mind that have lost their ability to choose a different framing mechanism, and to learn that which was previously unknown. It is this striving for an original mind that makes one a good artist, but also a good scientist, a gifted thinker, even a revolutionary. But to reach it, Jung must first walk a path that others have walked, and therein finds a map to reach that state of mind that can think past the “truisms” of its time.
The very beginning of Liber Primus, however, is a treatise to Jung’s ambivalence around this journey and its need, his terror of exposing himself as “different” or “outside” the mainstream of human thought. Of note is the fact that the impulse to conduct this experiment in thought and life comes at a time when his own reputation is secure as a prominent scientist, a rising star with no small amount of credibility in his field. His beginning writings of the book therefore read as an apology of all that will follow, perhaps even a plea to the reader to still find him credible, since he himself believes that what he does must appear from the outside as madness. During this phase, where he agonizes over every thought he has that puts him outside of the “spirit of the times” in which he lives, “[e]very step closer to my soul excites the scornful laughter of my devils, those cowardly ear-whisperers and poison-mixers. It was easy for them to laugh, since I had to do strange things.” (3)
It’s that fear of becoming otherized, of being seen as living outside society and its belief constructs, that keeps all of us from crossing certain lines. For as much as we claim to value originality as a culture, there is an “uncanny valley” (4) in more than just the appearance of human beings. In fact, for most of us, anything that calls into question our basic beliefs around the ordering of our lives and our place in the cosmos is beyond terrifying. Most human cultures (i.e., Jung’s “spirits of the times”), find it far more convenient to label the creatively-lived life--particularly that which is charged with far-reaching implications around choice, free will and the nature of agency and responsibility--as insane. Or at the very least, they are dismissed as severely misguided, reckless, or outright dangerous to themselves and others.
Yet that hunger for more, that longing to meet something that exists beyond the spirit of the time, something that contains depth beyond those truisms that satisfy the thirst of the multitude, proves to be stronger than Jung’s fears of what will happen if he “exposes” himself through the type of self-exploration to which he finds himself drawn. For, in Jung’s view, “[h]e who possesses the image of the world possesses half the world, even if his humanity is poor and he owns nothing. But hunger makes the soul into a beast that devours the unbearable and is poisoned by it. My friends, it is wise to nourish the soul, otherwise you will breed dragons and devils in your heart.” (5) So it is against these dragons that Jung ventures, risking the ridicule that could mean the end of his rather comfortable position in the world. Or, in the words of Robert Frost, he choses “the [road] less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.” (6) and risks both winning and losing big in a way that that other road never ventures.
Jung restates his own fear of living outside the comfortable confines of society in another way, chastising himself by claiming, “It appears as though you want to flee from yourself so as not to have to live what remains unlived until now.” (7) In a footnote, he elaborates that this illness of conformity can be transferred from parent to child, by saying, “What usually has the strongest psychic effect on the child is the life which the parents...have not lived.” (8)
Taken from a different angle, of course, one could read this first section as the hysterical rantings of the ego...meaning the small, noisy, status quo-loving entity that the Buddhists speak of...fearing death. Jung’s dreams and waking illusions shatter his whole into the army of personality symbolized in the I Ching, and the different members of his army argue back and forth, trying to find truth in the spaces between the fragments of identity, culture, conditioning and what he believes is the “spirit of the depths” accessible to all.
Jung does not condemn the ego altogether, however. Instead, he sees the “I” (and even the body) as a vehicle of pure symbol in this quest, an interface for the soul in its expression in the everyday world--a communication conduit from one soul to others. (9) In other words, there is the spirit of the depths, a sort of group soul consciousness that resides below the more superficial level of conditioning, and in this place the soul resides, at least in part. Then there is the “I”, a means through which that “real” consciousness is interpreted. The “I” then uses language, its main tool of expression, and yet another layer of symbol, to communicate with the other “I’s” in which it comes into contact. Therefore, our self is removed by yet another layer of symbolic interpretation, and that layer is the “I” or “ego” (a collection of which make up “the spirit of the times”) that mediates between the physical world and the “soul”. This part of our being most collapse entirely into their self-identity, making the “I” and the person synonymous. In other words, when they say “I/me/myself” they mean the “I” of the ego, that symbol through which the real self, or “soul”, communicates. According to Jung, they cannot help but be frustrated by its competing wants as a result, and their lack of fulfillment from never reaching the place from which the symbol originates.
Eventually for Jung, that voice becomes less dominant, however, and immediately we come to the desert. In the desert lives the question: “Is it solitude, to be with oneself?” and the answer, “Solitude is only true when the soul is a desert.” (10)
When the ego is silent, what is left? At first nothing, according to Jung, only the desert of silence behind the voice we’ve always mistaken for our own. The one we secretly feel is so clever, that once silent, self-realizes as banal, as worshipping a sort of shallow intelligence--or, conversely, the hero in the form of Siegfried, he who, according to Jung, must be slain before the real person can be found. Reading Jung’s views of the desert beyond the ego reminded me of a novel called The Blue Germ by Maurice Nicoll, a follower of G.I. Gurdjieff, who wrote of a germ that obliterates the need for the ego, and 99% of humanity simply falls asleep.
The desert as a symbol is spoken of in dozens of spiritual texts, often interpreted literally as a wasteland of sand where seekers (even Jesus) go to sit in hot sun, perhaps to bake their brains until God (or the Devil) speaks to them. Jung makes this connection too, of course, saying, “The ancients lived their symbols, since the world had not yet become real for them.” Yet, he also goes back to question the literal interpretation of this, writing, “The words that oscillate between nonsense and supreme meaning are the oldest and truest.” The relationship of truth to fantasy and fiction is another theme that runs through these pages. Jung asks again and again if perceptual (factual) “truth” in the strictest sense, is really the relevant question. Myth, after all, has the same goal as any good fiction--to lie to help us better see the truth.
The temptation underlying most of this passage, of course, is to return to the world of men, become a slave to it without enduring the desert that comes before the soul is a garden. Yet, Jung claims, that person who meets himself in the desert still needs the world, and the people in it, although his relationship to them changes, for “[a]lso he whose soul is a garden, need things, men, and thoughts, but he is their friend and not their slave and fool.” (11)
Jung does dare to venture into that desert, though, and in so doing, encounters his soul, who immediately begins to argue with him. She admonishes him first for his impatience, and for his surety that he knows for what he has come. “Can you not wait?” she says. “Should everything fall into your lap, ripe and finished? You are full, yes, you teem with intentions and desirousness. Do you still not know that the way to truth stands open to only those without intentions?” Jung answers her chiding by saying, but I am “just a human being who is weak and sometimes does not do his best.” But the soul only rejoins, “Is this what you think it means to be human?” (12) Jung later revisits this idea of intention versus action and experience, by saying, “We believe we can illuminate the darkness with an intention, and in that we aim past the light. How can we presume to know in advance from where the light will come to us?” (13)
Throughout his journey in the desert, Jung deconstructs and argues against the cleverness of the spirit of his age, which is sort of a cultural organism of the collectivity of human “I’s” that live in any historical period, similar to Howard Bloom’s “memes” in The Lucifer Principle. Jung speaks on the need for that same cleverness to denounce depth, to attack it as “simpleminded.” Jung himself refers to a dichotomy between “cleverness” and “simplemindedness,” the latter of which he uses as another word for “wisdom.” I admit, however, I had a bit of an aversion to his choice of words here, and choose to see it as the spirit of the age speaking through him. But perhaps that is a response to the spirit of my own age, where a glorification of ignorance has created a sort of deification of “common sense” which is far from what I think Jung intended in his use of the term. (14)
To this end, Jung often laments being “a victim of [his] thinking,” whereby he can’t hear past the “howl” of his own thoughts. (15) The nature of thought occupies much of his writing in Liber Primus, as well as his own fears that he won’t make it to the depth he feels he must go within his own consciousness, but instead will only “rush in like a thief, seizing whatever I can and fleeing breathlessly.” (16) Yet, Jung battles against everything that causes him to question his relationship to his previous belief systems. He speaks eloquently through the character of his soul in this simple dialogue about his unhappiness about how this process touches him:
...I indignantly answered, “Do you call light what we men call the worst darkness? Do you call day night?”
To this my soul spoke a word that roused my anger, “My light is not of this world.”
I cried, “I know of no other world!”
The soul answered, “Should it not exist because you know nothing of it?” (17)
In his attempt to nail down what is missing in the Christianity of his time, Jung also speaks of the need for a form of spiritual madness in the divine life, whereby he states, “[t]o the extent that Christianity of this time lacks madness, it lacks divine life.” (18) In this, of course, Jung distinguishes between “divine madness” and regular madness, and references Socratic and Neoplatonist attempts to distinguish different forms of divine madness and their utility in stepping outside the dominant wisdom of the time to attain higher forms of self-awareness and self-knowledge. (19) Jung does not go so far as to recommend a state of madness, divine or otherwise, as a necessary one in which to attain high states of exaltation. Instead, Jung talks about the need to be able to straddle this line of madness and sanity, but always to be able to return to the stability of the age of the time, or one would lose the grounding needed to function well enough to reach the full state of individuation, (each alone is ungodly, but in balance, there is God). (20) Jung in fact describes his own journey as being one where “I had spoken to my soul during 25 nights in the desert and I had given her all my love and submission. But during the 25 days, I gave all my love and submission to things, to men, and to the thoughts of this time. I went into the desert only at night.” (21)
Through it all, Jung curses the war, and the needlessness of human death. He feels it is based on a fundamental error, the error of externalizing the inner conflicts of the individual in their search for understanding and resolution. He states, “But I ask you, when do men fall on their brothers with mighty weapons and bloody acts? They do such if they do not know that their brother is themselves.” He sees World War I as the struggle for all to kill the hero in themselves, meaning the false projection they carry around with them of the flawless “I” or ego, the image designed by the spirit of the times of the desirable human state. He believes that this Siegfried, this hero of the times, actually limits one from finding the more multi-dimensional reality of the individuated self. Because most don’t see this battle for what it is, they externalize the front to others. Jung sounds nearly bitter when he complains, “But whom do people kill? They kill the noble, the brave, the heroes. They take aim at these and do not know that with these they mean themselves. They should sacrifice the hero in themselves and because they don’t know this, they kill their courageous brother.” (22)