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Imagine one of the great creative figures of the past whose experiences have ignited a whole new world-view: Buddha, Jesus, or Muhammad, say. Imagine that, rather than themselves writing nothing, and being dependent on others to record their experiences, one of these figures was able to write down their own experiences extensively, and even add pictures. Imagine, too, that rather than being absolutised by religious traditions with a vested interest in winning quick converts, one of these figures was able to be quite explicit that his aim was not to set up a new set of claims about ultimate \u2018truth\u2019, but rather to help people develop in relation to the cultural and religious frameworks they already found themselves in. Imagine, too that rather than being at best narrowly educated in one tradition, one of these figures had a wide understanding of the arts and the sciences, and had a rich familiarity with both Christian tradition and the critical debates of nineteenth-century German thought, together with an openness to other traditions from around the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Such is the position with Jung\u2019s Red Book<\/em>, which I would personally judge to be one of the most remarkable, and above all helpful, documents yet produced by Western civilisation: not because it is perfect but because of its self-recognised imperfection, profound ambiguity, and intense appeal to our most vivid and insightful selves. The Red Book<\/em> offers Jung\u2019s own practical conclusions, based on direct experience, as to how individuals can develop in their adequacy of response to the world by engaging in a personal integration process. It consists of a series of visions, reflections and paintings, primarily based on Jung\u2019s intense visionary period between September 1913 and April 1914, but then worked over and interpreted over a further fourteen-year period until 1928.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Red Book<\/em> contains accounts of visions that Jung cultivated using his own technique of active imagination, often recalled in striking detail. It also contains his own reflections on those visions, filled with insights that are expressed in solemn and universal language. These are all the more valuable and striking because they were never compromised to meet the expectations of any particular audience, not being published until 2009, nearly fifty years after Jung\u2019s death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Red Book<\/em> is a book of vision and wisdom. It is not a book of theory, unlike the remainder of Jung\u2019s substantial corpus of writings; but all the more useful for that, because instead it generally maintains the right degree of ambiguity to be both intensely personal and intensely universal. It is helpful to make use of Jung\u2019s subsequent theory in interpreting the Red Book<\/em>, but that might also have the effect of obscuring how much the Red Book <\/em>consists of a set of developing intuitions taking a more open form than Jung\u2019s subsequent theory. Where the Red Book <\/em>does start to develop a set of claims about the universe (in the Seven Sermons to the Dead<\/em> towards the end), as I shall argue, Jung\u2019s judgement starts to become much more questionable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is also not in the least a book about analytical psychology, which is never mentioned. It seems to be mainly a historical accident, due to the field in which Jung primarily worked, that The Red Book <\/em>has been most discussed so far by psychologists, rather than, say, philosophers, or scholars and practitioners of religion, literature or art. If Einstein had produced a prophetic book in his youth, that would not make it physics. The study and interpretation of The Red Book<\/em>, insofar as it is an academic matter at all, needs to be very much an inter-disciplinary affair. More than this, however, it is a document of personal practice that should be of interest to anyone who feels themselves to be engaged on a spiritual or integrative path.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The fact that it was never published during his lifetime makes the Jung we meet in The Red <\/em>Book apparently much more adventurous, provisional, experimental, and sceptical than the Jung of the psychological writings, who wished to be taken seriously as a scientist and scholar. Always impatient with binary extremes, Jung consistently seeks out a subtle position between them, but very often the Red Book<\/em> records a process of questioning established beliefs in order to seek such \u2018mediating\u2019 positions. For example, he does not rest content either with Christian orthodoxy or with Nietzschean rejection of God, nor with thinking as opposed to feeling, nor with masculine identity as opposed to feminine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the process of questioning and seeking, he sometimes appears to be contradicting himself and occasionally strikes false notes. It is easy to misread his failure to accept a given position as the embrace of its opposite, which he generally tried to avoid. It is also too easy to read contradictions into the Red <\/em>Book, because one can easily forget the particularity of its assertions, which work for Jung at the particular point he had reached<\/em> in his development, and are obviously not intended to be final. Once one learns to accept this, the text will seem all the richer for the fact that it records a process<\/em> rather than offering unrealistic finality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n However, The Red Book<\/em> is just as much a book of (often startling) visionary experiences as it is of reflection. Jung meets all sorts of characters inside his own head. He puts a wounded god into his pocket to smuggle it home. He eats the liver of a murdered child in order to acknowledge the commonality of human guilt. He argues about Nietzsche with a musty librarian, and about the meaning of words with a desert hermit. He is accosted by a crowd of obsessive dead Anabaptists tearing about the world between prayer venues. He regularly falls in love with his own soul in female form. He seeks out a magician to learn magic, only to find that the magician has retired. The incidents in the Red Book<\/em> could potentially be turned into a stack of intriguing novels and films, rich in twists, but the stories also nearly always direct one towards a direct and dramatic appreciation of startling and subtle insights, often even before the ensuing reflections begin to unpack them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On first reading the Red Book<\/em> myself, it seemed to me that I had hit upon, not just an extraordinary book, but something approximating to a religious scripture that was about the Middle Way. The Middle Way is a principle that I have cultivated and developed in the form of practical and critical philosophy for around twenty years now, initially within the context of Buddhist tradition where the term \u2018Middle Way\u2019 originates, but more recently in a more universal way beyond any one particular tradition. Though I was already aware that Jung offered many resources for understanding the Middle Way, I didn\u2019t yet think of his work as being directly about<\/em> the Middle Way until I read the Red Book.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The central principle of the Middle Way is the reliance on imperfect experience, integrated over time and critically reflected upon to support provisional beliefs about both facts and values. To remain in this uncertain but productive space, though, we also need to avoid our tendency to absolutise, which means to set up certain claims as finally \u2018true\u2019 or \u2018false\u2019 rather than incrementally justified. Absolutisation can be either positive or negative, affirming or denying some claimed \u2018truth\u2019 which is generally promoted by a group and used as a tool of power. Thus the Middle Way requires us to stay in that ambiguous zone between ultimate affirmation and ultimate negation, affirming and denying only for provisional and practical reasons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This account of the Middle Way is a reasonable practical interpretation of the Buddha\u2019s Middle Way as offered in the Buddhist scriptures of the Pali Canon, as I have argued fully in my recent book, The Buddha\u2019s Middle Way<\/em>. It is illustrated particularly by the progress of the Buddha in the story of his early life, from the absolute assumptions represented by the Palace and the Forest, to the point where he explicitly recognised the Middle Way as independent of either. Rather than being based on conventional obedience to social expectations on the one hand, or the repressive exercise of will on the other, the Middle Way is built on recognition of the body and the conditions it creates as the starting point of a path of autonomous and experiential judgement. The Buddha\u2019s \u2018silence\u2019 in the face of metaphysical questions, and his famous raft simile, showing that no teaching is an end in itself, are also crucial to the understanding of the Middle Way in Buddhism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Middle Way Philosophy I have been developing in other books, however, is independent of any appeal to Buddhist tradition or authority. It takes seriously a point that many Buddhists seem to recognise only theoretically \u2013 that the Middle Way is universal. It offers tools for the critical assessment of the helpful and unhelpful elements in any religion, as well as other traditions (such as political, scientific, or artistic). It offers the potential to unite people from a variety of backgrounds in a critical type of universalism that does not blandly assert that all traditions are of equal value, but rather subjects those traditions to practical tests that they are likely to pass only to varying degrees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Apart from the obvious influence of the Buddha and Buddhist practice, Jung has been a major influence on Middle Way Philosophy from the beginning of my work on it. His concept of integration or individuation is a central element of Middle Way Philosophy, providing a positive account of how human judgement can improve, not just through the avoidance of absolutising dogmas, but also through the overcoming of both internal and external conflict. This Jungian concept can be further refined today using developments in cognitive psychology, embodied meaning, and neuroscience, and is beginning to gain purchase well beyond explicitly Jungian circles. I have also made much use of Jung\u2019s concept of archetypes, which I find astonishingly fruitful. A wide variety of different scientific resources can now be brought together in support of some of Jung\u2019s key insights, especially including that of Daniel Kahneman and his associates on biases, of Iain McGilchrist on brain lateralisation and its implications, and of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson on embodied meaning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I will be making some connections with these new forms of scientific insight in this book, but for more details you will have to look at my Middle Way Philosophy<\/em> series. Rather than following through the interpretation of all Jung\u2019s psychological theory in detail, my main aim here is instead to interpret The Red Book<\/em> as a resource of the most direct and inspiring kind \u2013 let us say, a scripture \u2013 of the Middle Way. The Red Book<\/em> is not easy to read and interpret, and I suspect that many of those who have an intuition of its great significance are somewhat at a loss as to how to interpret it in a way that is relevant to their lives. I am aiming to offer an interpretation of the Red Book<\/em> that makes it of universal practical value by drawing out the Middle Way Philosophy that I find there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I am happy to acknowledge that the Red Book<\/em> can potentially be interpreted in a variety of ways, and that each individual who engages with it will need to go through their own process of interpretation. My own experience, however, is that when I read The Red Book<\/em> I find Middle Way Philosophy apparently already there shaping it. As we will see, there are a number of explicit references to the Middle Way itself in it, as well as a whole integrative approach and recognition of the role of archetypes that fits the Middle Way\u2019s implications in other respects. Jung\u2019s approach is profoundly anchored in a recognition of the need to gradually integrate opposing forces wherever they are found, in a way that acknowledges and harnesses both forces dialectically rather than attempting to impose one upon the other.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe Middle Way<\/a><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Interpreting the Red Book<\/a><\/h2>\n\n\n\n