Jung's Red Book is here.

I'm not a Jungian exactly, but I do feel that he was an important viewing point on the events of his time. At this point in my life, I believe each of us is a living point of view. The idea came to me from experiences but I read it in a book, Mr. God This Is Anna. Every moment in her short life was connected to Mr. God, she was a viewing point for Mr.God, he was in her middle. She was always learning naturally every day.

Today I got to look through the Red Book, and I wanted to post something from it. It's a gorgeous book, huge in size about 12" by 18", very heavy, it's not going to be a book anyone can read at McDonalds on a lunch break.

What I read and want to publish and discuss begins with these words from page 238 of the Red Book:

"The Frightfullness and cruelty of the world lay under wraps and in the depths of our hearts "

But first some context. I do a lot of that:

If you are somewhat familiar with the last chapters of his Memories, Dreams and Reflections and his Collected Works you know that Collected Works (CW)are different. Its theories and generalizations are for the educated who have a scientifically oriented but somewhat inquiring mindset. That's not been the general public but that's changing rapidly now. Memories, Dreams and Reflections was written from a different mindset, it's about his real life. Its about his relationship to his inner content. Since he also mentioned that his mind produced content that he didn't 'will' that may or may not be his own mind he related to. In the last 4 chapters there are hints that many of his experiences wouldn't gain the respect from scientists that was what he was trying to achieve in the CW.

(For an honest appraisal of C. G. Jung I suggest reading the first book I read about him, The Haunted Prophet by Paul Stern. It's a critique without being only critical. The main idea I got from the book was that Jung learned that the unconsciousness of a patient often spoke to him but the person could not 'hear' his own unconscious content. The unconscious seemed to symbolize in some way, giving clues that Jung learned to decode. The patient was not 'in touch' with his own unconscious, )

That's a fact to trust.

The Red Book was created by Jung when he was acquiring the information that resulted in the Collected Works but that's my own theory. And he wrote that his endeavors were life long. He went through a 'creative illness' (1912-1917) that's how Jungians view that period which extended over a period of years. I have my reasons to believe he went through a long phase of psychosis then he lived a blended life, his inner and outer world meshed when he wrote the CW. That seems obvious after reading some of the Red Book and the last chapters of MDR. He wrote and this is a fact to keep in mind, that his mind created some content that he did not 'will' himself, there was a 'wise old man' in his inner content. Reading that when I did meant a lot to me.

From what I read in the Red Book today, it's my opinion that the material in it was received in 'visions. It was not self generated material.

Robert Monroe mentioned getting 'rotes' which were packages of information given to him by his invisible companion, to be 'digested' at leisure. Jung's 'visions' and his 'numinous' could be what Monroe named as 'rotes'. (Monroe's travels while he was in his bed were scientifically verified, because he was a scientist himself and he taught others how to experience out of body states, purely mental travels and guided adventures in other worlds. In Journeys Out of Body he discovers he can control them. In Far Journeys he discovers a presence from whom he received 'rotes' of information. In the his last book, Ultimate Journey he described incredible mental adventures, and having read that book, I felt it linked to Hoellers interpretation of Jung's Seven Sermons TO the Dead. His many journeys to find 'bits of his self' when his mind detached from his body and went somewhere were real to him, and they may have been really real to those 'bits and pieces' he collected. I'm on the fence about how really real they were. But his mind was always connected to his body.

I could not understand why that book wasn't a best seller but James Redfields' The Celestine Prophecy overshadowed it possibly, it's about the world of 'meaningful coincidence' and that's Jung's term for 'synchronicity'.

Jung didn't seem to be asleep when he had what he named visions but he may have induced, or believed he induced a state of mind known as active imagination. That seems to be like untethering the mind, watching it impartially without expectations or attempts to control anything the mind creates. He uses the word 'visions' and 'numinous' but he received information that he wrote in the Red Book. (I named mine 'mind quakes'. They were not like visions but 'rotes' they could be, it was information, cached and it had to be unpacked.)

In MDR Jung writes about some of his less than typical personal experiences in the last chapters. I was surprised at what he wrote because he described his opinions about life after death. Basically they agreed in my mind with some aspects of what I'd read about Robert Monroe's experiences in his last book, Ultimate Journey. He wrote that one that has lived life physically is given the opportunity in the next world to describe their adventures in the body! They want feed back! Stephen Hoeller's book, Gnostic Jung's Seven Sermons TO the Dead point towards that idea. The 'dead' want, need and expect input from the living.

(Mr. Hoeller decoded Jung's original Seven Sermons TO the Dead which is written in an old and complicated style, 'like' St. John of the Cross's Dark Night Of The Soul. Example from Seven Sermons: "At night the dead came back again and amidst complaining said: One more thing we must know, because we had forgotten to discuss it: teach us concerning man."

--"Man is a portal through which one enters from the outer world of the gods, demons and souls, into the inner world--from the greater world into the smaller world. Small and insignificant is man; one leaves him soon behind and thus one enters once more into infinite space; into the microcosm, into the inner eternity."

That ancient form requires interpetion of everything, but even I could get something from it when Mr. Hoeller tackled it. Psychiatry is based on the same 'style', everything represents, stands for, or symbolizes something else; it's Art its self in my opinion, the thing itself.

As for out of body experiences, I have had only a very brief 'out of body experience' when I knew I was asleep in my bed but it was nothing like they described. However in a quite different way I have experienced seeing my body and my mind's activities apart from them. They were united, synchronized with a precision that I can't describe except to write they were synchronized. This 'unity' caused me great confusion for a long time, a few decades overall.

I had an unusual experience today that produced the same dizziness, and that reminded me of how I felt. It happened when I pulled into a slanted parking slot just as the car in the slot in front was moving backwards and the car on the passenger side pulled out! For a few seconds it seemed my car wasn't stopped, my car seemed to be moving. Dizziness is an understatement but I realized my mind couldn't make sense and I felt in my body a 'no compute' state. The result was real dizziness. I assume that's because there was no point of reference in my past, the mind seems to require that. I've learned a lot from events like that one.

Over a span of years I 'saw myself' and heard myself from a kind of 'detached position', so that I was both observer and what was observed. It felt like being both actor and audience and the entire world was the stage. Other people participated or so it seemed to me, in creating that drama. In fact everyone except me seemed to know the script! It seems to me now that my task was to assemble 'bits and pieces of information' that came at me from a variety of sources into my story.

Jung wrote that every individual lives a story and that it's the personal task to discover one's story. He wrote that his was to discover the collective unconscious. I believe it had already been described by Emanuel Swedenborg or at least it was referred to as a 'memory that man possesses which he doesn't know he possesses'. (Or is possessed by, is what I believe at this point.) By the way, I am not promoting either Jung or Swedenborg. Jung obviously was influenced from reading Swedenborg, I was influenced by reading both but there were others who were equally or more important men.

Not many female authors in my batch of 'influences'! But I will mention Monica Furlong's The End Of Our Exploring as being a major source of usable information just exactly when I needed it. She wrote about 'journeys'. Because the word 'end' (as in the ' End of Our Exploring) is so commonly defined to mean 'termination' I need to define it as meaning, purpose, goal as in 'the goal of time', or the 'purpose of time' or the 'meaning of Time'. That's because I saw 2012 a few days ago, it's about the 'end of time', meaning termination of time. My point is that what Jung wrote, especially what he created in the Red Book could not have made sense to me without background from authors who wrote from prior centuries. They gave me information when I needed it, just when I needed it quite often. The timing seemed impossible quite often.

That perfect timing is what gave me the sense that the planet has a voice and that we are in our unconsious levels of mind, all connected in that particular 'vein' of our lives.

I'd been having experiences of my own that I was trying to explain to myself, that's how it all started. I began to see something that wasn't tangible, but it was there between me and what's outside of my body. Obviously the difference was mental. I don't believe what I was so troubled by was the 'astral body' kind of projection, or the psychiatric kind of projection but it was a difficult kind of self observation. It was difficult to recognize that it was complete unified senses at work. Self observation that created a literal life re-view as well as a re-direction of my energy and attention towards what was going on in my mind. The energized body felt 'wired', trembly, literally and its activities showed me the information I needed to understand my 'task' in life.

F. David Peat's book about synchronicity doesn't mention Jung's main idea, which was a process of individuation.

Jung used active imagination. I've never done 'active imagination' but I've had some 'mental adventures' in waking states. They were not visions like his but they were bundles of information and lots of memories from my past. Monroe's description of 'rotes' in Far Journeys were a clue to me because the bundles or packages were packed, cached is a good word to use. I suspect Jung's visions might have been 'cached'the same way. I named mine 'mind quakes' eventually because they required real time events over a span of years, even decades to understand them as a form of conveying information. Basically they decoded themselves, bit of information by bit of information in events that would ordinarily have been 'just daily happenings'. What created the sense of 'significance'? That's the part Jung didn't seem to write about in depth, but I've not read much of The Red Book yet.

Anyway I've wondered if Jung's 'visions' were not somewhat similar to Monroe's 'rotes' or Joseph Chilton Pearce's 'postulate arrived full blown in the mind'.(The Bond Of Power) Or what I decided was a mind quake. It was not possible for me to get that kind of meaning from my own understanding as I was in 1984, an American, poorly educated and not too inquisitive although that's not how I would have described my self. The variety of my purely mental, but observable adventures did not seem to be 'visions' but they were received, not self generated.

Psychosis is probably another word for the same kind of experience that Jung named the 'numinous'. Whatever it is, it is hard to bear and hard to bare because such events, rare as they were to me are embedded in 'thought'. His were experiences that almost no normal person could live through and hope to describe in every day language. The process of individuation and Jung's idea that it's a natural process of life came to him I suspect through the same kind of experiences many ordinary people (I'm one of them) struggle through.

Next post will begin here, from page 238 of the Red Book:

"The Frightfullness and cruelty of the world lay under wraps and in the depths of our hearts "

"What happened in the past is determined by what is to happen in the future" Norman O. Brown.

Hint of the day: I highly recommend Norman O. Brown's books, especially Apolalypse and/or Metamorphosis his last book. Especially the chapters on Islam, because its' very relevant to our 'now' conflicts. I especially recommend the chapters on 'The Excremental Vision' and his interpretation of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's travels in his Life Against Death. If you read Gulliver's Travels and thought it was a fantasy story, there's a hidden 'world' behind it. Literally. The ideas about the origin of psychoanalysis as well as 'hidden dimensions in books' were so new to me in 1996, perfectly timed to mesh with what was going on where I worked. Maybe it will be new to you. And he exposed extremely interesting ideas. That book is in my opinion the best place to get some grasp of the origin in history of anality, the anal retentive mindset. One of my mindquakes had happened in the same location Martin Luther was in, when he 'got' his revelation: he was on the privy in the tower. Just try to explain a mindquake that happened in a toilet cubicle.

The transcendental function and me at the library.

It's hard to be in the local Jung library without taking several books home. I've got more books than I have space for already. I've been interested in C.G. Jung's ideas because he did establish the existence of the 'transcendental function' and I believe that function is what creates the processes of individuation. Even if he didn't define it very well, Joseph Campbell did say that function operated similar to a mathematical function.

As though that explains everything. Or anything.

Whatever this function is it created so called 'synchronicities', or to be more accurate and specific, synchronization between me and what's outside my body. As though a 'zipper-like pull' operated between me and whatever was happening outside my body at the time. (DNA + RNA) the material world + 'me' = a new understanding of me, on this planet.

What is a 'transcendental function' you may ask? Before I answer I'd like to point out something that ought to be obvious about psychiatric ideas, the basic fact is that something hidden has to be brought to the light of waking consciousness.

C. G. Jung heard a voice in a vision after he asked: 'What is this, that I am doing?" that answered him: "This is Art." Think about what art is basically:, a representation of something that requires decoding and intepretation. Codes are very much in the air at this point in Time.
I would never have understood Picasso's 'art' if I'd not read in Rollo May's Courage To Create that his paintings 'represented' the state of man, disconnected from nature. but that was just the beginning.

Reading words to get information is not the only way to get information, every day experience is what the 'transcendental function' utilizes. But I grew up hearing people remark in offhand ways that 'life is a school and we are the pupils'. There was a point when I began to understand that I was a pupil in a school and there was an instructor, not present physically but it was there; not materially, but it was there. I suspect the 'transcendental function' is it's program/process/pattern and it is a real educational force in the field of 'imagination'.

The originator of modern psychiatry Sigmund Freud discovered there was meaning in dreams, but also behind slips of the tongue, mistakes, forgetting, jokes, i.e., there's something hidden in every day pathology. The definition of 'every day pathology' as being 'mistakes, forgetting, jokes, slips of the tongue' was a surprise! That information surprised me but I grew up in a restricted environment. I didn't know about that information until about 1996 when I read the first page of Norman O. Brown's Life Against Death,The Psychological Analysis of History in which he provided that information. Psychiatry is about 'art', decoding and getting meaning from...everything.

The transcendental function as I understand it operates like a 'highlighter' that selects, abstracts, creates curiosity, activates attention (and holds it captive basically) and it creates new meaning as well as new contexts.


My understanding is that its a defined program that operates in time, not necessarily linear time, since the process of individuation is where it 'functions'; but within a clearly defined situation: an individual life. The transcendental function would operate using material supplied by every day life circumstances and personal memories, using whatever is available in that specific life. The specificity is not easy to describe or prove to someone else.

A statement about my purpose in this blog:

September 6, 2009

This blog is about something hidden in every day life. I want to write about what I've learned about my mind, reality and time in my nearly 3/4 of a century on this planet and about what caused me to think about Time the way I do now. It's not the measure of movement in space, at least not merely physical space. It may seem a trival thing, but C. G. Jung wrote that the first half of life is preparation for the second half. That implies there's foresight in our lives. I know there has been foresight in my life and I'm not unusual.

There are family bonds, personal and workplace relationships that create 'events' that the individual, me in this life on this planet, experienced as normal when they occurred. The first 52 years of my life was preparation for a future event primarily because I knew someone who essentially felt trapped in Time, encased in a body. Living in a war zone during the first few years of life created a family mindset that's not uncommon so this isn't about anything extraordinary.

The past of many people creates fear, apprehension, a sense of futility and helplessness about the future. It's difficult not to be specific but in this family it was casual offhand remarks that were of great importance, it was a family belief that we don't know where we came from when we're born and we don't know where we go when we die and it's a waste of time to try to understand why we are here.

I realize belatedly that I had never thought that kind of thought until I was almost 60 years old! A 'strangeness' had come into my life and after 8 years of strangeness, only then, had I wondered to myself what this 'strangeness' was trying to 'tell' me. It overlayed what was outside of my body, the way a transparent sheet of plastic can cover objects, but like a transparent 'thing' it didn't change anything I looked at. Yet something was between me and what was outside of my body. There was a radical change in my mind, it was 'thought' that began after a vivid dream I had late in 1981. Once it began, that particular 'vein' of thought never stopped. Other thought of a different 'kind' began later, but for a few years thought about the dream was where my primary attention was directed. A constant stream of thought about the dream scrolled through my mind day and night, 365/24/7 until about 1986.

Then without my noticing it, thought content that was not about the dream seeped into that stream.  

 
Thought itself, is basically the most unexplored region of personal reality.

"New thought' in an 'empty head', a 'thought' less mind is enough to arouse curiosity. It aroused mine when it began, late in 1981 when a kind of 'strange event' began to occur. Such events didn't arouse my curiosity until they kept happening. What I write now is the result of those 'strange' events. The etymology of my name is 'eldritch' which I was told meant 'strange' in ancient Time, somewhere on this planet.

Time on different scales is evidently available through the mind. Too many authors have described their out of body experiences to doubt that. Let me make it clear that I've not had out of body experiences, at least nothing like Robert Monroe or Emanuel Swedenborg described, but I know there are levels in the mind and they don't announce themselves, there's no signage except the effect of how the 'world' outside the body is experienced. There are locations that alter drastically how what's outside of my body looks like, sounds like and very much alter the meaning of what I see and hear. There are levels in the mind that involve vast inner space. There is an "ongoing endeavor in Time", there is a Larger Domain where 'now' can be thousands of years in duration and some events in every day life can 'link' a person to it.


Example event:

In 1996 I worked for a company, The Boeing Commercial Aircraft Company, that was initiating a program to encourage better relationships in the workplace and a better understanding of how the business world operates. I registered for a class in Personal Communication and was surprised to read on the first page that what I was going to learn in the course had been written in the oldest known fragments, the Kagemni fragments. It was estimated to have been written 2400 years b.c. I wondered why I didn't know already information that was nearly 4500 years old then answered my own question: my family of origin was not often concerned about courtesy, about not offending anyone so I had very little exposure to 'The art of hearing, listening and excellent discourse".

It's about time I learn those rules, I thought, then I reached for my calculator.

4500 years = 1,620,000 days (360 days a year)
1,620,000 days = 38,880,000 hours
38,880,000 hours = 2,332,800,000 minutes
2,332,800,000 minutes = 139,968,000,000 seconds
1 second = 1 hertz
A hertz is a very short span of time.

More professionally stated: A second is the unit of time equal to the duration of 9, 192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyper-fine levels of the ground state of the cesisum-133 atom.
My first computer operated at a mind boggling speed of 44 mhz in 1987. My thinking about time in my non-professional, less than mathematical mindset began when I got my first computer and the word 'hertz' came at me. As computers evolved so did my experience and understanding with 'hertz', what it's relationship to Time seems to me now to be. My present computer would have seemed impossible only 20 years ago. The speed is steadily increasing, expanding the space between one second and the next one. I've not found any expert that explains that kind of distance and it's relationship to how we experience it, except as 'stress' which is pressure to process more information in the same 24 hour span. The space between one second and the next seems to expand infinitely and I'm aware that not much more than a hundred years ago it was not necessary to know anything but the hour.

Time is what keeps everything from happening at once. Alfred Korzybski wrote that man is a time binder, we store experience in our memory so that the next generation builds on what the previous generation learned. The question I have now is: "How does the next generation 'learn'? What kind of feed back exists between generations? My grandchildren seem born already at computer speeds I've barely managed to integrate into my expanded 'reality' as I experienced it. I can't watch television and also read the scrolling bars that divide my attention!

After three quarters of a century I can honestly write that I understand my first thought on this planet, it occurred when I was two and a half years old. I was laying on a bed , the wind whistled through cracks in my home, which was a one car garage converted to an apartment in 1934. Directly over head was a light bulb hanging from the ceiling. My first thought occurred into my mind: "I am in a cold place."

Nothing very profound at age two and a half, but the image of the light bulb above me, the feeling of being cold, the thought, the exact content of the  moment re-occurred into my mind even when I was in my fourth decade. I wondered why that memory haunted me much later at some point in my fourth decade. I had been alive about 14,600 days then. My first thought was a photograph of what was in front of me, complete with how I felt and a thought that occurred to me, literally it was a complete photograph what was in front of me and what was inside.

I'd like to quote this from The Dynamics of Hope by Ira Progoff to initiate my blog, which is basically about the unique individual relationship to another world, which I named the Larger Domain when I was certain it was real. He has experienced what he described, it could not be described otherwise:

"The fact is that the human being creates the meaning of his existence in the act of living it; afterwards, but only afterwards, he can look back and discover what the meaning of his life is.

In his psychological development, a human being grows by natural stages organically, until with physical maturation he comes to a plateau. He may remain at this plateau functioning within the terms that his culture prescribes and within it's framework he may live out his days more or less contentedly. But if the impulse to further growth is pressing within him, he cannot possibly be content to remain there. Then he may live on this plateau and use it as his base, in order to launch some further movement in his life. This may be in some particular area of his experience, a small area or a large area depending on his capacities. From this plateau he may thrust forward in a creative act of individuality, and with this personal experience of his, a new insight or a new emotion, an act of leadership or an act of love will be brought into the world.

These creative acts of persons are their individual leaps upward and beyond the plateau on which they merely exist biologically and socially as human beings. Often an individual has just one brief moment in which he leaps off the plateau, a brief moment of insight, a vision, a momentary act of dedication or of love, and then he drops back onto the plateau and remains there.

But in that leap he has touched something. That which has transpired was a moment of creation in which something new was brought into the totality of all human existence so that it remains forever afterwards as a fact. Afterwards it is an element in the future experience of individuals in the species.the reality of that creative moment lives on, whether or not it was given tangible form in words or in color or in sound as a poem or a painting or perhaps a melody. The immortality of what has been created does not depend on the outward form it takes, it depends rather on the authenticity of the experience, on it's inward integrity, it's unself conscious spontaneity and on the power that derives from all of these. For in that moment, something elusive and intangible but nontheless real has been brought into the world.

These creative events are meanings that did not exist before they happened; but once they have happened they exist forever."
That's scary, don't you think?