JUNG’S RED BOOK: Life After Depth

“Here are some snapshot impressions of the book that may yield the skeleton of its content. Inner battles take place. In the prophetic opening the Spirit of the Depths spars with the Spirit of the Times in him. The contemporary and changing thinking of Time constantly has to give way to the immemorial and shaping future contained in, and arising from, the Depths.
A spiritual message emerges, a new way for the time we live in today, with Jung becoming the task, interpreter, and bearer of it. The teaching is of a new God image–an immanent God who is in everything big and small, dark and light. The paradox in this holds that “the highest truth and the absurd is one and the same thing.” Moreover, “the melting together of sense and nonsense produces the supreme meaning”; and “if you marry the ordered to the chaos you produce the divine child.” The task is to hold the opposites together, “the goal is not the heights but the center”–the center or Self which can be said as “God in us…”

"In Jung’s personal journey his feminine Soul voice battles with him to recognize and balance his own opposites. There is a peeling back of distrust, scorn, judgment, pride, defiance, doubt, confusion, rage, and fear. The need to develop patience—a waiting, enduring, receiving mode as the feminine (or anima) within—is put to him. He discovers that thinking and feeling need each other..."

"Jung carves his own path, insisting "my path is not your path" and, "to live oneself is to be one’s own task." The fantasies deepen in a spiraling journey of recurring, evolving patterns. The horror and the positive aspects of collective human history unfold before him. Soul insists he accept it all. "I feel the things that were and that will be". He initially recoils at the enormous task ahead. "Futurity grows out of me; I do not create it, and yet I do."

A transformative image of black snake appears, winding up, becoming white, and emerging through the mouth of the crucified Christ.

"To give birth to the ancient in a new time is creation," he writes..."

The article by Claire Dunne can be read in its entirety here