Reclusland

As previously mentioned, I was lucky enough to get tickets to the first public talk on Jung’s Red Book, a discussion between Sonu Shamdasani, the book’s editor (and the man at least partially responsible for getting the book released to public) and Martin Brauen (the chief curator at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York).  Getting to hear Mr Shamdasani speak on the book, which he has been studying for about 10 years, was the real heart of the evening, and what follows are the notes I managed to take down, as well as some notes from the exhibition of the book, and a few of my own opinions (in italics) as well:

- The book’s creation came from an intense period of self experimentation for Jung.  In September of 1913, Jung began having strange visions, slipping into apocalyptic day dreams in which death and destruction were sweeping throughout Europe.  Years later, some have suggested this was precognitive visions of the terror that was to descend upon Europe during World War I.  To Jung, it was simply the realization that his soul had gone astray.

- He began a series of what he called “active imaginations”, where he would sit and bring himself into a visionary, hypnagogic state, and record the dreams and visions he had during those moments in a series of black books, known, appropriately enough, as “The Black Books”.  In here are his famous VII Sermones ad Mortuos.  From these sermons, Jung would draw what he later understood to be his first mandala.  For any Thelemites in the audience, a note of interest here is that at the center of the mandala were the letters AA (A large “A “, with a smaller “A” underneath it, with the point of the smaller coming up to the crossbar of the larger), but a bit more on that to come later…

• (normally, I’d include pictures here, but since no photography was allowed you’ll have to rely on your own active imaginations, with my apologies.)

- From that group of Black Books, as well as some daily sketches he made while on Swiss military service in 1917, Jung began the serious undertaking of recording all these in chronological order in a vast red leather-bound volume with creme pages, which would eventually become his Liber Novus.  It was pointed out by Mr. Shamdasani that the proper way to experience the Red Book would be to read the text first, and then to examine the accompanying paintings afterwords, as that is the order in which they were created.

- Throughout the text, Jung will say things such as “25 days later, I had a vision…”.  To the best of his knowledge, Mr. Shamdasani claims that these dates are to be taken as literal and not part of the dream narrative.  This is according to the chronology of Jung’s notes in the Black Books.

- Apparently, each character in the book has both their own color ink, and their own decorative font, whenever they speak.

- Each vision has a double layer to its recounting: the Active Imagination is presented, and then an explanation follows it.  This was Jung’s attempt to create a comparative study of the individuation process, something like “dear friends, this is how it worked for me”.  He wanted to develop the psychology behind the mysticism, and he very much hoped to translate his mythic insights into a comprehensible science, something with which he strained at the edge of language and meaning to express.

• (And, I will point out, he was not made mad in trying to do so.  In the highly karmic realm of myth, this says a lot.)

- The book is broken up into three parts, conveniently named “Liber Primus”, “Liber Secundus”, and “Liber Tertius” (or something along those lines).  In “Primus”, Jung begins an attempt to make sense out of the visions, in “Secondus”, he completes the major part of his exploration, and in “Tertius“, the active imaginations and the explanations are presented more holistically as one thing.  Although Jung never finished his book, it has been said that his tower at Bollingen, which he built himself, acted as a sort of “Liber Quaternus”, a continuation and possibly a completion the themes laid out in the three books.

- Jung worked during a period of great mystical searching, (which I was happy to hear Mr. Shamdasani say is captured quite well in P. D. Ouspensky’s “In Search of the Miraculous“.  Anything Gurdjieffian will make me smile), as well as during a period of great artistic expression, but although Jung could very well have become either a mystic or an artist, he valued science above both.  He was a fan of neither mysticism nor modern art, and although he saw similarities to these in his Red Book work (which was perhaps why he never published it in his lifetime), he considered it mainly an attempt to make a science from his journeys into the mythic/symbolic realm.

- Jung understood that, throughout history,  man has always been embedded in a mythic system, and yet he felt that he himself had none.  This book was his attempt to rectify that situation.  For example, one piece that was displayed on the wall at the museum was of figure representing (or so the plaque said) Gilgamesh, who was found somewhere in the landscape of Jung’s unconscious, wandering around looking for Utnapishtim.  In the Epic of Gilgamesh, Utnapishtim is the counterpart of Noah, someone who has survived the Great Flood and who has the God’s secret of immortality.  In Jung’s painting, the plaque went on to say, this giant, lost on his quest for immortality, is saddened to hear from Jung that the land he seeks has been destroyed.

• (This is my recollection of a plaque on the wall at a museum, not any notes I taken from the talk or the book itself, so please excuse an misinterpretation.  However, I feel this paints an accurately tragic picture of how Jung viewed the mythic state of modern man.  Those mythic drives are still present within us, but we have destroyed the lands within which lies their fulfillment, and so they must be built anew.)

- “Jung was aware of his ability to fructify the growth process (individuation) in others.”

- The Red Book was Jung’s attempt at the creation of a new Cosmology.  As stated above, this can be seen in his mandala based on his Seven Sermons.  The first version of this he created before ever knowing what a mandala was, and this was the one with the large and small “A”s.  The large “A” was said to stand for Anthropos, and the smaller “A” for the ‘soul of man’.  A later version of this mandala is found in the Red Book (and hey, online as well!) but does not use the double A.  Instead, at the center, there is a star.  The original sketch was apparently later given to a woman by the name of Alice Crowley (no relation, I’m sure).

• (Although I do not have much interest in Aleister Crowley‘s work myself, Crowley’s plunge into the Western Alchemical/Symbolic Tradition happened right around the same time as Jung’s, and so any similarities between their work are worth mentioning, I feel, if only because they were both exploring the same psychic terrain.)

- It was pointed out that in Eastern Mandalas, the center is almost always occupied by a Divinity or a Buddha, whereas in the west the center is often occupied by a man.

• (Which seems important to me, since in the west we have Jesus Christ elevated to an officially divine position, whereas in the east, Buddha, although often prayed to as a god, is officially considered to have been a human like you are I.  The fact that this contradicts what is found at the center of the mandala interests me greatly…)

- However, Jung never felt that the Red Book was complete.  The last complete painting in the book is of a yellow castle, which to Jung (although I don’t see it myself) had a “Chinese” feel to it.  In 1928, while working on this painting, Jung received the text of “The Secret of the Golden Flower”, by Richard Wilhelm, a friend who was asking Jung to write an introduction to his book.  In this Taoist alchemical text from centuries past, Jung found references to the motifs in his Yellow Castle painting.

- After this, he broke of his work on the Red Book, took it up again in 1959 only to stop in mid-sentence.  Although it was not shown at the talk nor in the show, there is apparently also one last, unfinished painting in the book, which was characterized in the talk as Jung opening again to the outer world, rather than opening to his own inner world.

- Mr Shamdasani, who has studied this book in it’s raw form more than anyone else probably ever will, says that he thinks it will take at least a year and half of study for anyone to truly understand what Jung has put into the Red Book.

- Jung was quoted as saying that “the painting of mandalas increases one’s devotion to life”, a particularly beautiful way of phrasing it, and with that, I will end my notes.

For me, what I found most interesting (and infuriating) is that it was left unresolved whether or not Jung ever completed his process of Individuation.  Although it in no way damages the man’s work nor his scholarship, it does leaves me with the feeling of coming to the end of a great movie only to have the DVD skip and freeze, just before the climatic scene.  Given Jung’s dislike of mysticism and his description of the individuation process as “not linear, but a circumambulation around the center, the self, an approach to it that is approximate”, it is conceivable that it was simply not within his worldview to accept any kind of union with the godhead/numinous/enlightenment/whatever.

One painting from the exhibition in particular seemed (to me) to back up this line of reasoning.  Again, I could not take pictures, so you will have to bear with me until my copy arrives.  Although I will not post any other pieces from the book out of respect for the copyright, I do hope that this one image will be allowed, simply for the sake of clarification. Anyway, the plaque next to the painting read as follows: “In 1950, Jung anonymously reproduced a painting identical to this in his paper ‘Concerning Mandala Symbolism’, adding the following comment: ‘The center is symbolized by a star.  This very common image is consistent  with the previous pictures, where the sun represents the center.  The sun, too, is a star, a radiant cell in the ocean of the sky.  The picture shows the self appearing as a star out of chaos.  The four-rayed structure is emphasized by the use of four colors.  This picture is significant in that it sets the structure of the self as a principle of order against chaos.”

Yet, as any good mystic tradition will tell you, this sense of the self as something set against that which surrounds it, is a false sense of self.  This is the self that must “go out”, in order to reach enlightenment, to truly unravel the mystery of life and death and to clarify the great matter once and for all.  While I do not want to imply that Jung never made it to this point, that he failed in his quest for Individuation, I do feel saddened that the center of “The Mandala of the Life of Carl Gustav Jung” is left with such an infuriatingly blank center.

(image of said mandala to come soon, hopefully…)

Lastly, as a sort of postscript, a brief note about Mr. Shamdasani himself (whose name, I’m sure, you have grown a bit tired of reading here).  It seems he was raised in the British boarding school system, and at some point in his youth, went on a trip to India in search of a guru.  He never found a guru, but while in India, a book of Jung’s “fell into his hands” (as it was put by Mr. Brauen).  And it was this was what he brought back with him from India and which will, I can only assume, maintain him throughout the rest of his life.

FOR AN EXPLANATION OF THE CROSSED OUT SECTIONS, SEE THE COMMENTS.