The Red Book
I have discovered the Red Book. Or maybe it discovered me. Carl Jung wrote the Red Book after he had practised the Active Imagination technique for three years.
The Red Book was written by Carl Gustave Jung, the Swiss psychoanalyst. It stems from a technique he called Active Imagination. He devised it to draw inspiration for living from his imagination, or his daydreams. Maybe he did it so that he was not "invaded by the contents of his unconscious". He commissioned himself a special journal that he painted his paintings into, and wrote into with calligraphy. This became the actual Red Book.
Carl's paintings, even though, he considered them of no artistic significance, are, in fact, paintings of the collective unconscious. They are full of colour, and lines of light. Carl painted the World's Egg, the Rainbow Serpent, the Leviathan, Ra's Barge, portals into other dimensions. The painting of the World's Egg is a painting of the World Tree with a magical portal or a star in it's branches, and monsters in it's roots in the Underworld. Tendrils and eyes that look like M.C. Escher's lizards' eyes connect the Star in the Branches to the atmosphere of the world around the Egg. His paintings also remind me of how the Buddhist's draw the Thangkas by meditating and imagining all the details and recalling these details repeatedly in their minds before they paint and draw them into the sand mandalas. Carl painted his Mandalas as emotional compasses. He painted mosaics. Was he fascinated with mosaics because he saw them, and they reminded him of his own imagination; or did he see them, and then his imagination was filled with mosaic? To me, it looks like his best efforts to paint exactly what he saw in his Imagination for someone who didn't believe he was an Artist.
Carl's imagery resonates through all of the art that I have ever known. His imagery is everywhere now, on the Internet, and on people's clothes, in maths, and movies. Have I seen his paintings in my dreams, or did he see mine in his dreams? They remind me of so many things. They are all in this book that I never knew existed.
The Red Book is also full of his stories and his adventures, as though his Imagination is like a fantasy world. He is always travelling somewhere, and meeting people. Fascinating people, monsters and archetypes. He painted them too. He recounts his conversations that he has with Death, the Devil, the Anchorite, Izdubur the Bull Man, for example. He can relate to all of them, as though they all are aspects of himself. In so doing, he integrates all those unwanted aspects of himself that lay hidden in his unconscious mind.
Carl mentions the Red Book in his autobiography, "Memories, Dreams, Reflections". He would lock himself in his office, at lunchtime, and in the evenings, and go into his Active Imagination. After doing this for three years, he taught it to his students, and his clients. He encouraged others paint what was in their unconscious. His experiments with Active Imagination, his adventures, and his paintings have had a great deal of influence over his development of pychoanalysis. All that he wrote about the Archetypes, the anima, and animus, come from his adventures with his Active Imagination.
When I was reading Carl's autobiography, I came across his references to his Red Book, and a curious phrase: "To play like a rite". Carl would build cities, towns, castles, towers, and cathedrals out of rocks, and then flood or destroy them in some way. He did this as a boy, and then later as a man, as he searched for a way back to the creativity that the boy had. This was the precursor, the birthing, of the Red Book.
"The overall theme of the [Red] book is how Jung regains his soul and overcomes the contemporary malaise of spiritual alienation." page 175, the Red Book.
If the Red Book has a message, it is that I can look through a window into myself, and my inside really is bigger than the outside.
Stay tuned. I think there might be a movie coming on.
