Called by the depths

Reading C.G. Jung’s Red Book and using it as a tool for digging deeper in my life, thought, and various practices.

I mentioned Jung at the end of the last post, but that was more than three months ago. I have since been drawn in by the vortex of his Liber Novus (The Red Book). The gigantic facsimile edition has graced our home for almost five years, ever since I read this tantalizing pre-publication article in The New York Times. (Two paragraphs rendered unreadable in this version are here.) I was able to read a little of the book, but I eventually found the size and weight too unwieldy to handle. Recently I discovered its more conveniently sized companion, The Red Book: A Reader’s Edition, which arrived in the mail last Tuesday, along with Reading the Red Book by Sanford Drob.  I have a lot of momentum into reading The Red Book after listening to all of Lance Owens’ lectures and starting to read C.G. Jung: A Biography in Books, which I bought on Owens’ recommendation. It seems I am being called by the Spirit of the Depths to overcome the Spirit of This Time 🙂

Also, last Tuesday my brother-in-law brought my 1976 Antioch degree portfolio back from [the first typist I hired to type it] along with my copy of Ira Progoff’s At a Journal Workshop. Seeing all the above on the dining room table at the same time makes me hopeful that engaging with The Red Book might provide the energy to drive me deeper into my own writing projects.

In this moment I see two avenues opening. One is talking with [the new typist] about finally getting the Antioch portfolio into machine readable format, so I can work it into my memoir project. The Red Book will be my touchstone setting the tone for that project. (How’s that for enhancing gravitas?). The second avenue is reconnecting with my Progoff Intensive Journal as I look for an outlet for the energy I access from the Red Book experience.


At the same time, I have several other projects that are percolating in the background. 

I am hoping that engaging with The Red Book might allow me to go deeper with many
of these too. I prioritized them by the intensity of my current engagement, selected the top four, and together with Jung, appointed them to the new version of my five-member imaginary internal Board of Advisors:


 Current advisory committee

1. C.G. Jung – The Red Book

2. A.H. Almaas – Spacecruiser Inquiry

3. Tenzin Wangyal – Inner Refuge

4. Thomas Berry – The Dream of the Earth

5. John Cobb – Whitehead as the Philosopher of an Ecological Civilization

 As you can see, participation in my Advisory Committee does not imply having ever met me in “real life”.

 My committee also has five “backup” members:

Dogen – Whitehead, ecology, identity

Joanna Macy – Active Hope

David Abram – Earth in Eclipse

Matt Segall – Dissertation (Whitehead, Schelling, Steiner)

David McMahan – Buddhist Modernism

 


I am hoping that working with all of them on their interconnected visions will eventually help with the global consciousness koan that initiated this blog and remains it’s primary focus.  In any event, I wanted to share what’s churning as I try to process the difficult question of what is the consciousness shift necessary for healing the Earth.