An analysis of Carl Jung's 'Red Book'

To begin with, Jung believed God is a child to those who remain adult-like, which means logically he further believed God is an adult to those who remain childlike.

I feel in order to be free from culture's influence of portraying God as an old wise man, Jung therefore challenged men my age, to think of God as a maiden, 13-20 years typically (though can range from 10-25) - think whatever age your comfortable with.

Jung warned about the heart. He wrote, the heart is both good and cunning. And whilst Christ taught God is love, you should also know love is terrible.

He had the extremely brave notion that to understand this concept, he had to recognise that he had to submit to what he feared, to even love what horrified him. Whilst this is a type of madness, it is the most bold madness. He thus was an expert on the topic of hell, stipulating you must remember the reality of hell - 'Everything odious and disgusting is your own particular Hell. How can it be otherwise? Every other Hell was at least worth seeing or full of fun. But that is never Hell. Your Hell is made up of all the things that you always ejected from your sanctuary with a curse and a kick of the foot. When you step into your own Hell, never think that you come like one suffering in beauty, or as a proud pariah, but you come like a stupid and curious fool and gaze in wonder at the scraps that have fallen from your table.' In short, we generally all loathe our hell but enjoy schadenfreude when it comes to seeing others' hell. This is I think unfortunately accurate.

To understand Jung's relationship with God, it is worth considering that as a 12 year old he 'saw God on his throne unleashing an almighty turd on the cathedral, shattering its new roof and smashing the cathedral. With this, Jung felt a sense of bliss and relief such as he had never experienced before. He felt that it was an experience of the “direct living God, who stands omnipotent and free above the Bible and Church.'

Jung believed in myths, and one of the most important questions to Jung was what myth are you? He felt one without a myth “is like one uprooted, having no true link either with the past, or with the ancestral life which continues within him, or yet with contemporary human society.”... 'One particular myth was given a central role: that of the hero. For Jung, this represented the life of the individual, attempting to become independent and to free himself from the mother. He interpreted the incest motif as an attempt to return to the mother to be reborn.'

It is notorious that Jung predicted the World War in several of his dreams between 1913 and 1914. He came up with two principal explanations for the War. First, the fall of Chrisitianity and the rise of an  ancient, irrational Germanic god called Wotan, the god of ecstasy, frenzy, and war. Jung posited that Christianity had acted as a protective talisman, mitigating the brutal warlike tendencies of the Germanic people. However, he argued that as secularization, materialism, and a focus on rationalism grew, the conscious hold of Christianity weakened. When the "subduing talisman" of the Christian cross shattered or failed to satisfy the deep spiritual and psychological needs of the people, the suppressed, primitive "Berserk" rage of the ancient pagan god was unleashed directly into the collective unconscious, possessing the masses

He believed it was it was the lack of seriousness in that culture towards Jesus and Satan that caused the War. He predicted death before the war and wondered if it was the end when he saw 'a black sea filled with red' - and felt directly it was because people 'didn’t believe in Satan and we laughed at him.' He wrote 'you locked Satan in the abyss for a millennium, and when the millennium had passed, you laughed at him, since he had become a children’s fairy tale. But if the dreadful great one raises his head, the world winces. The most extreme coldness draws near.'

Secondly Jung wrote at the time - '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 been 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!'

Jung's theory of what war actually constitutes, to me, is genius. He states that in war we kill the brave, the heroes, and we therefore sacrifice ourselves. He informs '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. They themselves are sacrificers, but they mutually do the service of sacrifice. They must all sacrifice each other, since the time has not yet come when man puts the bloody knife into himself, in order to sacrifice the one he kills in his brother. 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 do not know this, they kill their courageous brother.'

Jung believed in spirits, souls; and fate. Jung thought that 'the soul is everywhere that scholarly knowledge is not' and '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.'As the soul dealt with the theme of fate, Jung described 'how hard is fate! If you take a step toward your soul, you will at first miss the meaning. You will believe that you have sunk into meaninglessness, into eternal disorder. You will be right! Nothing will deliver you from disorder and meaninglessness, since this is the other half of the world.' He believed he needed to make himself a desert, to embrace love, to sacrifice solace and embrace solitude. He found the key being to escape events, escape men, escape thoughts, escape torment. He pinpointed 'is it solitude, to be with oneself? Solitude is true only when the self is a desert.' One point of disagreement I have with Jung is that he believed the soul to be a woman, which is very Latin. However, I hold the Germanic and Chinese view that the soul is light and masculine. What strikes me is that Jung appreciated women's tastes but not men's.

He wrote - 'I rise above gendered masculinity and yet do not exceed the human, the feminine that is contemptible to me transforms itself into a meaningful being.' He felt 'this is the most difficult thing—to be beyond the gendered and yet remain within the human'. I have to say he was more or less obsesses with rising above gendered masculinity - writing those who dont become 'dry, hard and inhuman'. The fact missing Jung is that he himself preaches that one should make oneself a desert, and what is a desert if not dry, hard and inhuman. Perhaps this is why he wrote, very Tudor like, that one should even dress as a woman in order to escape being controlled by woman. Of course, this is all explained by Jung's belief that a hero becomes free of his mother. He wrote - 'You are abandoned without mercy to woman so long as you cannot fend off mockery with all your masculinity. It is good for you once to put on women’s clothes: people will laugh at you, but through becoming a woman you attain freedom from women and their tyranny. The acceptance of femininity leads to completion. The same is valid for the woman who accepts her masculinity.' He goes further critisicing man's organisation skills, writing 'Man belongs not only to an ordered world, he also belongs in the wonder-world of his soul. Consequently you must make your ordered world horrible, so that you are put off by being too much outside yourself.' I feel Jung is lost here, despising manliness but he does make a good point that - 'The more manly you are, the more remote from you is what woman really is, since the feminine in yourself is alien and contemptuous.^'

Jung further shows himself quite hypocritical when on the one hand he says solitude is good and what the ancients taught, using the metaphor of going into the desert, whilst on the other he writes - 'solitude makes people hostile and venomous.'

What is the point of longing for the soul, fate and light? Jung wrote of the darkness 'you long to be beyond (it); despair and mortal fear seize you in this death that breathes slowly and streams back and forth eternally. All this light and dark, warm, tepid, and cold water, all these wavy, swaying, twisting plantlike animals and bestial plants, all these nightly wonders become a horror to you, and you long for the sun, for light dry air, for firm stones, for a fixed place and straight lines, for the motionless and firmly held, for rules and preconceived purpose, for singleness and your own intent.' In light 'you sleep down through the thousand solar years, and you wake up through the thousand solar years, and your dreams full of ancient lore adorn the walls of your bedchamber. You also see yourself in the totality.'

Jung believed God is the word or logos, whilst the darkness does not comprehend the word, but rather man. He thought that 'through comprehending the dark, the nocturnal, the abyssal in you, you become utterly simple.' However, he preached you must 'guard against being a slave to words. Here is the gospel: read from that passage where it says: In him was the life. I want to answer this question within the scope of your understanding: if the human God had not become important above everything, he would not have appeared as the son in the flesh, but in the word.'

Jung looked at ancient myths and modern Christianity and saw similarities - 'our old teachings were less adequate expressions of Christianity, then I’m more likely to agree with you. It’s erroneous to believe that religions differ in their innermost essence. Strictly speaking, it’s always one and the same religion. Every subsequent form of religion is the meaning of the antecedent.'

Jung taught 'Remember, the cleverer you are, the more foolish your simplemindedness. The totally clever are total fools in their simplemindedness. We cannot save ourselves from the cleverness of the spirit of this time through increasing our cleverness, but through accepting what our cleverness hates most, namely simple­mindedness.' He believed this is because 'Simplemindedness knows no intention.' In other words, it is totally without ambition. Jung foretold, 'cleverness conquers the world, but simplemindedness, the soul. So take on the vow of poverty of spirit in order to partake of the soul.'

Jung further explained 'The righteous base their intentions more on the mercy of God, which in whatever they undertake they trust more than their own wisdom. This is the intuitive method. I believe one can also follow one’s own nose. That would also be the intuitive method. If I am truly to understand Christ, I must realize how Christ actually lived only his own life, and imitated no one.'

For Jung, fate 'appears to have given us the role of two bridge pillars which carry the bridge between East and West'. Whilst Jung teaches a little of the Eastern thought that emptiness is actually fullness, he overall is scathing to the concept of emptiness, instead writing that it equates to hollowness - '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.'

Regarding truth, Jung critiqued Nietzche, stating his philosophies were 'good for those who yet are to be set free, but what about those who have been free but are forced into a corner'. Jung believes those that are forced into a corner might need resignation. He stated for 'those who have been free but are forced into a corner, they may need resignation. Even more poignantly, Jung told whilst Nietzche liked everything healthy and long lasting, Jung believed that truth unfortunatley adheres to the middle way is abhored for this fact. This resignation he likened to Christian philosophies.

Nevertheless, Jung was not Christian. He wrote 'Christ totally overcomes the temptation of the devil, but not the temptation of God - to good and reason. Christ thus succumbs to cursing the devil. You still have to learn this, to succumb to no temptation, but to do everything of your own will; then you will be free and beyond Christianity.' And yet Jung writes this 'God should not be a man of mockery, rather you yourself will be the man of mockery. You should mock yourself and rise above this.' In short, Jung appears to be adament that instead of mocking or cursing God or the Devil, you simply should of your own will mock yourself, even your virtue. Jung repeatedly repeats that virtue is as bad as vices in the red book. He preaches Christ's mistake was to worship God and not his own will. Further, he writes 'Christianity of this time lacks madness, it lacks divine life. Take note of what the ancients taught us in images: madness is divine'. He believed symbols to be the most powerful expression of life, and that was very ancient.

Regarding new religions, Jung took again a nuanced stance. He wrote 'new religion “expresses itself only in the transformation of human relations. Relations do not let themselves be replaced by the deepest knowledge. Moreover, a religion does not consist only in knowledge, but at its visible level in a new ordering of human affairs.'

Above all the red book apears to me a book about Jung's visits to hell, he writes - 'What do you think of the essence of Hell? Hell is when the depths come to you with all that you no longer are or are not yet capable of. Hell is when you can no longer attain what you could attain. Hell is when you must think and feel and do everything that you know you do not want. Hell is when you know that your having to is also a wanting to, and that you yourself are responsible for it. Hell is when you know that everything serious that you have planned with yourself is also laughable, that everything fine is also brutal, that everything good is also bad, that everything high is also low, and that everything pleasant is also shameful.' He reminds us of the latin phase 'inter faeces et urinam nascimur', translating to 'we are born between feces and urine'.

More specifically he poignantly remarks - 'The thinker feels the disgust of feeling, since the feeling in him is mainly disgusting. The one who feels thinks the disgust of thinking, since the thinking in him is mainly disgusting. So the serpent lies between the thinker and the one who feels. They are each other’s poison and healing.'

Overall the red book is no doubt a loving and dry and shocking book written by Carl Jung; I hope you enjoyed this blog!