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Wholeness by Individuation: Jung

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Evolution in Polarity: Ing

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“The Light at the Core of the Darkness” from C.G. Jung’s “Red Book”

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INDIVIDUATION: Jung believed that most of us have lost touch with important parts of our selves. Through listening to the messages of our unconscious in dreams and waking imagination we contact and reintegrate our different parts. His thought was that the goal of life is “individuation”, the process of coming to know, giving expression to, and harmonizing the various components of the psyche. If we realize our uniqueness we can undertake the process of individuation and tap into our true self. Each human has a specific nature and calling which is uniquely his or her own fulfilled through a union of conscious and unconscious derived through a thorough exploration of the shadow self. If the imperative for this union is ignored a person becomes mentally, physically and/or emotionally ill.

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EVOLUTION IN POLARITY: in polarity in which we exist, recognition, attention and understanding (the formula for love), is paid to the part to realize the whole, to the dark to know the light, to unconscious reality for the optimal experience of conscious reality. exclusive attention given any being or focus, at the negation of another, generates an opposite and equal force demanding to be seen and known. the universal law of balance is immutable.

true at every level — the individual/micro, or global/macro — in the seen and unseen, every being, every thing, or energy existing within this evolutionary process, requires acknowledgement and understanding. in this way, it seeks confirmation of it’s existence in order to know that it indeed does, and that it has meaning and purpose. otherwise, what is the point of existing? in existence denied, absence of attention, and/or judgement of, very painful feelings of abandonment generates fragmentation. from this state of extreme discomfort the being perpetrates increasingly urgent and desperate acts and manifestations, craving the relief and comfort of inclusion into the whole. liberation and elevation occur at the moment of being seen and understood… loved; this is the alchemical moment of transformation.

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Carl Jung’s, previously privately kept, psyche memoir called “The Red Book” — scanned, translated and footnoted — will be in stores early next month, published by W. W. Norton and billed as the “most influential unpublished work in the history of psychology.”

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below is an excerpt of a ten page article on Jung and his long-held private book, written by “New York Times”, Sara Corbett…

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This is a story about a nearly 100-year-old book, bound in red leather, which has spent the last quarter century secreted away in a bank vault in Switzerland. The book is big and heavy and its spine is etched with gold letters that say “Liber Novus,” which is Latin for “New Book.” Its pages are made from thick cream-colored parchment and filled with paintings of otherworldly creatures and handwritten dialogues with gods and devils. If you didn’t know the book’s vintage, you might confuse it for a lost medieval tome.

And yet between the book’s heavy covers, a very modern story unfolds. It goes as follows: Man skids into midlife and loses his soul. Man goes looking for soul. After a lot of instructive hardship and adventure — taking place entirely in his head — he finds it again…

…What happened to Carl Jung has become, among Jungians and other scholars, the topic of enduring legend and controversy. It has been characterized variously as a creative illness, a descent into the underworld, a bout with insanity, a narcissistic self-deification, a transcendence, a midlife breakdown and an inner disturbance mirroring the upheaval of World War I. Whatever the case, in 1913, Jung, who was then 38, got lost in the soup of his own psyche haunted by troubling visions and hearing inner voices. Grappling with the horror of some of what he saw, he worried in moments that he was, in his own words, “menaced by a psychosis” or “doing a schizophrenia.”

He later would compare this period of his life — this “confrontation with the unconscious,” as he called it — to a mescaline experiment. He described his visions as coming in an “incessant stream.” He likened them to rocks falling on his head, to thunderstorms, to molten lava. “I often had to cling to the table,” he recalled, “so as not to fall apart.”

Had he been a psychiatric patient, Jung might well have been told he had a nervous disorder and encouraged to ignore the circus going on in his head. But as a psychiatrist, and one with a decidedly maverick streak, he tried instead to tear down the wall between his rational self and his psyche. For about six years, Jung worked to prevent his conscious mind from blocking out what his unconscious mind wanted to show him. Between appointments with patients, after dinner with his wife and children, whenever there was a spare hour or two, Jung sat in a book-lined office on the second floor of his home and actually induced hallucinations — what he called “active imaginations.” “In order to grasp the fantasies which were stirring in me ‘underground,’ ” Jung wrote later in his book “Memories, Dreams, Reflections,” “I knew that I had to let myself plummet down into them.” He found himself in a liminal place, as full of creative abundance as it was of potential ruin, believing it to be the same borderlands traveled by both lunatics and great artists.

Jung recorded it all. First taking notes in a series of small, black journals, he then expounded upon and analyzed his fantasies, writing in a regal, prophetic tone in the big red-leather book. The book detailed an unabashedly psychedelic voyage through his own mind, a vaguely Homeric progression of encounters with strange people taking place in a curious, shifting dreamscape. Writing in German, he filled 205 oversize pages with elaborate calligraphy and with richly hued, staggeringly detailed paintings.

What he wrote did not belong to his previous canon of dispassionate, academic essays on psychiatry. Nor was it a straightforward diary. It did not mention his wife, or his children, or his colleagues, nor for that matter did it use any psychiatric language at all. Instead, the book was a kind of phantasmagoric morality play, driven by Jung’s own wish not just to chart a course out of the mangrove swamp of his inner world but also to take some of its riches with him. It was this last part — the idea that a person might move beneficially between the poles of the rational and irrational, the light and the dark, the conscious and the unconscious — that provided the germ for his later work and for what analytical psychology would become.

The book tells the story of Jung trying to face down his own demons as they emerged from the shadows. The results are humiliating, sometimes unsavory. In it, Jung travels the land of the dead, falls in love with a woman he later realizes is his sister, gets squeezed by a giant serpent and, in one terrifying moment, eats the liver of a little child. (“I swallow with desperate efforts — it is impossible — once again and once again — I almost faint — it is done.”) At one point, even the devil criticizes Jung as hateful.

He worked on his red book — and he called it just that, the Red Book — on and off for about 16 years, long after his personal crisis had passed, but he never managed to finish it. He actively fretted over it, wondering whether to have it published and face ridicule from his scientifically oriented peers or to put it in a drawer and forget it. Regarding the significance of what the book contained, however, Jung was unequivocal. “All my works, all my creative activity,” he would recall later, “has come from those initial fantasies and dreams.”…

…The central premise of the book was that Jung had become disillusioned with scientific rationalism — what he called “the spirit of the times” — and over the course of many quixotic encounters with his own soul and with other inner figures, he comes to know and appreciate “the spirit of the depths,” a field that makes room for magic, coincidence and the mythological metaphors delivered by dreams.

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about the viewing and copying of the red book for its publication:

…there sunbathing under the lights, sat Carl Jung’s Red Book, splayed open to Page 37. One side of the open page showed an intricate mosaic painting of a giant holding an ax, surrounded by winged serpents and crocodiles. The other side was filled with a cramped German calligraphy that seemed at once controlled and also, just given the number of words on the page, created the impression of something written feverishly, cathartically…

…The Red Book had an undeniable beauty. Its colors seemed almost to pulse, its writing almost to crawl. Shamdasani’s relief was palpable, as was Hoerni’s anxiety. Everyone in the room seemed frozen in a kind of awe, especially Stephen Martin, who stood about eight feet away from the book but then finally, after a few minutes, began to inch closer to it. When the art director called for a break, Martin leaned in, tilting his head to read some of the German on the page. Whether he understood it or not, he didn’t say. He only looked up and smiled…

…It turned out that nearly everybody around the Red Book was dreaming that week. Nancy Furlotti dreamed that we were all sitting at a table drinking amber liquid from glass globes and talking about death. (Was the scanning of the book a death? Wasn’t death followed by rebirth?) Sonu Shamdasani dreamed that he came upon Hoerni sleeping in the garden of a museum. Stephen Martin was sure that he had felt some invisible hand patting him on the back while he slept. And Hugh Milstein, one of the digital techs scanning the book, passed a tormented night watching a ghostly, white-faced child flash on a computer screen. (Furlotti and Martin debated: could that be Mercurius? The god of travelers at a crossroads?)

Early one morning we were standing around the photo studio discussing our various dreams when Ulrich Hoerni trudged through the door, having deputized his nephew Felix to spend the previous night next to the Red Book. Felix had done his job; the Red Book lay sleeping with its cover closed on the table. But Hoerni, appearing weary, seemed to be taking an extra hard look at the book. The Jungians greeted him. “How are you? Did you dream last night?”

“Yes,” Hoerni said quietly, not moving his gaze from the table. “I dreamed the book was on fire.”

…In the Red Book, after Jung’s soul urges him to embrace the madness, Jung is still doubtful. Then suddenly, as happens in dreams, his soul turns into “a fat, little professor,” who expresses a kind of paternal concern for Jung.

Jung says: “I too believe that I’ve completely lost myself. Am I really crazy? It’s all terribly confusing.”

The professor responds: “Have patience, everything will work out. Anyway, sleep well.”

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article in full length: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/magazine/20jung-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

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In two places at once … Spiritual Pilgrim, Woodcut, anonymous German artist, circa 1530. Jung, CW 10, plate VII

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Comments (0) Sep 21 2009

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jim, you must be picking up my feeling and thought of you on the ethers… i have been reading your book, “The Boy”, bit by bit like a good desert, right before bed and wanting to drag it out as long as possible because i didn’t want my beautiful bedtime story to end. but end it did, finally, friday night the evening before you wrote your a.m. comment: http://www.shamaniqueone.com/poetryandverse/is-pledge#comment-55 .

when i read the last words and shut the book i felt the emotions of sadness, deep appreciation, and strong desire to write a note, all at the same time. the thought i.e., in this case “i love what jim did and i want to write him a note to tell him”… combined with the emotion “gee i’m sad this ride is over, but so happy to have experienced it” are the ingredients in the manifestation, which, in this example was your response in the physical form of a note. thoughts in general and here specifically my thoughts, are the rocket ship and the emotions the fuel, so to speak, which together creates/created the mechanism that propelled the the note writing desire into form. i would have been the one to write that evening but didn’t because it was late and i was tired, so i went to bed saying to myself i’d make it a priority, monday, my first day back to the computer.

like a good friend, you picked up my transmission and, probably unknowingly, sent the note to me instead the next morning :)

how very nice.

this really wonderful story is about a boy who awakens to, and chooses to, nurture himself and his magic regardless of the many who do not endorse such a way of being. and when i say magic, i’m talking about the real deal here, not some contrived, don’t worry you’re safe because it’s not really going happen – since no one flies around on broomsticks kind of magic, but the real natural, dying to express itself, inherent in all – magic.

the boy, initially, by no choice and then by choice, cherishes and develops that part of himself while living within a society which, in general, doesn’t have a clue and doesn’t want to. there are the archetypical characters, antagonists, supporters, etc., human and animal alike, that are very likeable and dislikeable just as in any great myth.

jim weaves the manifestations into the story of this life so adeptly that it is totally relatable, just as i understand the creative process to work. i was happily reminded once again, that we have yet another brother in this author as a part of our great global tribe.

i am a magic person. i live, eat, drink and dance the magic of life. this story, like magic, fed me, hence the desert analogy. jim, i know you said the story of “the boy” will continue in sequel but getting the next book out tomorrow would just barely be enough to satisfy me. also, could you make it… hmmm… about 300 pages longer?

with great appreciation and luv,

ing  :)

just barely scratching the surface more on jim:

http://www.jamesstraussauthor.com

http://from-the-chateau-dif.blogspot.com

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Comments (2) Jul 27 2009