Out of the Depths: C. G.

Jungs Liber Novus

A Paper Given to the Eclectic Club of Baltimore, MD 12th March 2013 Reverend Kenneth E. Kovacs, Ph.D. Pastor, Catonsville Presbyterian Church, Catonsville, MD On 12th of November 1913, during one of the bleakest moments of his life, the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) wrote these words on the first line of a new journal: Meine Seele, meine Seele, wo bist du? My soul, my soul. Where are you? Do you hear me?1 Jung kept a journal during his university years, but then stopped as he invested enormous amounts of energy into the emerging field of psychology. But something occurred in 1913, actually, something came to a head and a breaking point in 1913, which marked a point of divergence in the psychoanalytic world, an event that set the course for the rest of Jungs life, leaving in its wake a significant, if often unrecognized, contribution to the intellectual accomplishments of the twentieth century. Indeed, Jung was one of the seminal geniuses of the twentieth century, a claim substantiated by the publication of a text in 2009, which scholars are now gradually unpacking. That book is known as the Red Book, or, more accurately, Jungs Liber Novus (New Book). This paper will explore the seminal events of Jungs life that led him to cry out to his soul and what he discovered in the depths of his unconscious. Well explore the connection between his soul-cry and the eventual publication of the Liber Novus. Then, Ill conclude by suggesting what the publication of the Liber Novus might mean for the Christian community, in particular. Karl Gustav Jung was born in Kesswil, in the Swiss canton of Thurgau, on 26 July 1875, as the fourth but only surviving child of Paul Achilles Jung (1843-1896) and Emilie Preiswerk (1848-1923). Emilie Preiswerk was the youngest child of Samuel Preiswerk (1799-1871), who was Paul Achilles Jung's professor of Hebrew. Carls father, Paul Achilles, was a pastor in the Swiss Reformed Church and came from a long line of Reformed pastors and professors. Jung was attuned to the theological issues of his day and read widely from his fathers library, particularly theological works. He considered going into the ministry, like his father, but decided instead to study medicine at the University of Basel, entering in 1895. He had no plans initially to study psychiatry, because it was considered a questionable scientific field, but after reading a psychiatry text and learning that psychoses are personality diseases, he began to feel that this could be field for him to explore. The person. What does it mean to be a person? What does it mean to be human before God? These were the questions that guided his life, since childhood. As a child, Jung had a vivid imagination, including visions and religious experiences that seriously disturbed his sense of self and his reality. In his mother he found someone who was open to the mysterious, possessing spiritual sensibilities. His father, on the other hand, was a rationalist to the core, with a faith that, in the end, failed to speak to what was stirring in Carl as a small boy and later in university. While at Basel, Jung was a member of the Zofingia Society, a student fraternity where papers on were presented and debated on an eclectic variety of subjects. Jung, as a medical student, gave a paper with the title Thoughts on the Interpretation of Christianity, in which he very carefully critiques and then dismantles the hyper-rational, ethical moralism that passed for Christianity in some circles. His primary target? The German theologian, Albrecht

Ritschl (1822-1899). Significantly, what Jung saw as lacking in Ritschl, he believed was essential to the Christian experience: a subjective knowledge of God. Ritschl rejected the possibility of a unio mystica, a mystical union, the foundation of medieval mysticism; Ritschl rejected the possibility of a present, direct relationship with God.2 And so Jung wrote: We can feel nothing but pity for Ritschls Christian. Every pagan has his gods to whom he can cry out when he feels sorrowful and afraid, even if this god is nothing but a brightly polished boot, a silver button, or a stick of wood. But Ritschls Christian knows that his God exists only in church, school, and home and owes his efficacy to the subjectively determined power of motivation supplied by memory. And it is to this powerless God that a Christian is supposed to pray for salvation from bodily and spiritual want? God cannot lift a finger, for he exists only historically, in tradition, and in a strictly limited sense. The French could just as easily, and with just as little success, importune Charlemagne to inflict a greater defeat on the wretched Germans and liberate Alsace-Lorraine.3 This lecture beautifully foreshadows the direction Jungs life will take. Raised in the world of Reformed Protestantism, in a thoroughly Protestant culture, within a wider cultural Christianity of Europe that was beginning to lose its grounding, Jung knew that something was wrong, something missing at the heart of the Christian experience, shaped by the theological liberalism of the late nineteenth century. In a hyper-rationalized world, which prized a scientific objectivism in the pursuit of knowledge and truth, what place did faith still have? What role did religion play? But wasnt liberal theologys problem alone. Jungs father and family were not liberals, they were conservatives. Jung writes, My uncle and cousins could calmly discuss the dogmas and doctrines of the Church Father and the opinions of modern theologians. They seemed safely ensconced in a self-evident world order,.4 Jung found little comfort or direction from his father, the pastor, or the larger church community. Jung had profound religious experiences as a boy that disturbed and fascinated him, but which he did not feel comfortable talking about. His religious experience was at odds with what he was discovering and experiencing within the church. A telling incident occurred as a teenager, preparing for that moment when he would be able to share in Communion. He had significant doubts about the faith, but he could not share these with his father. He was bored by the church, but, Jung writes, I made every effort to believe without understanding an attitude that seemed to correspond with my fathers and prepared for Communion, on which I had set my last hopes, Jung relates.5 Raised within a Reformed community that held a Zwinglian as in Ulrich Zwingli (1484-1531), the reformer of Zurich understanding of the sacrament (as essentially a memorial meal), Jung viewed the meal as an anniversary celebration for Lord Jesus.6 Nevertheless, it was clear to me that in this fashion [of remembering,] we were to incorporate him into ourselves. This seemed to me so preposterous an impossibility that I was sure some great mystery must lie behind it, and that I would participate in that mystery in the course of Communion, on which my father seemed to place so high a value.7 Jung was expecting something mysterious, something significant, and life-changing to occur. When he looked around at the people in the church, All were stiff, solemn, and, it seemed to me, uninterested.8 He looked on expecting some sign, for something to happen in him or in the others in worship. I had the impression that something was being performed here in the traditionally correct manner. My father, too, seemed to be chiefly concerned with going through it all according to rule, and it was part of this rule that the appropriate words were read or spoken

with emphasis. He saw no sadness and no joy and did not compare with the energy and excitement of secular festivals.9 Suddenly my turn came. I ate the bread; it tasted flat, as I had expected. The wine, of which I took only the smallest sip, was thin and rather sour, plainly not of the best. Then came the final prayer, and the people went out, neither depressed nor illumined with joy, but with faces that said, So thats that. He walked home with his father, had dinner. He was wearing a new suit, bought for the occasion, had an unusually good Sunday dinner, but otherwise I was empty and did not know what I was feeling.10 Jung relates: Only gradually, in the course of the following days, did it dawn on me that nothing had happened. I had reached the pinnacle of religious initiation, had expected something I knew not what to happen, and nothing at all had happened. I knew that God could do stupendous things to me, things of fire and unearthly light; but this ceremony contained no trace of God not for me, at any rate. To be sure, there had been talk about Him, but it had all amounted to no more than words. Among the others I had noticed nothing of the vast despair, the overpowering elation and outpouring of grace which for me constituted the essence of God. I had observed no sing of communion, or union, becoming one with With whom?11 Church was a place to which I no longer could go. There was no life there, but death.12 Yet, he remembered his religious experiences, his earlier encounters with God. God alone was real, Jung affirmed, an annihilating fire and an indescribable grace.13 Jung graduated from the University of Basel with a degree in medicine, specializing in the emerging, questionable field of psychology. In 1900, he began working in the Burghlzli, a psychiatric hospital in Zurich, with the highly regarded, psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler (1857-1939), who first coined the terms schizophrenia, schizoid, and autism. Jung later wrote a medical dissertation, published in 1902, "On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena, which focused on the psychogenesis of spiritualistic phenomena, in the form of an analysis of sances with his cousin, Helene Preiswerk. That same year he became engaged to Emma Ruschenbach (1882-1955), whom he later married. Up to that time he regularly kept a diary. One of his last entries, May 1902, reads: I am no longer alone with myself, and I can only artificially recall the scary and beautiful feeling of solitude. This is the shadow side of the fortune of love. During Jungs time at the Burghlzli, Jung developed word association theories that helped to identify structures in the unconscious, which he later identified as complexes. In 1906, Jung applied his new theory of complexes to the origins of dementia praecox (later known as schizophrenia). Jungs ideas were published in 1906 with the title, Studies in Word Association. That same year Jung sent a copy of his book to Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) in Vienna, which inaugurated a deep friendship, regular correspondence, and professional alliance. When Jung traveled to Vienna to first meet with Freud, they talk for thirteen hours straight. They had much in common and much to share. Its important to note here that its often assumed that because Jung was younger than Freud, that Jung was first a pupil or student of Freuds theories. This is a myth, propagated by the Freudian community. In an unpublished article written in the 1930s, Jung said, I in no way exclusively stem from Freud. I had my scientific attitude and the theory of complexes before I met Freud. The teachers that influenced me above all were Bleuler, Pierre Janet [1859-1947],

and Thodore Flournoy [1854-1920].14 One of the leading Jungian scholars writing today, Sonu Shamdasani, emphasizes that Freud and Jung clearly came from quite different intellectual traditions, and were drawn together by shared interests in the psychogenesis of mental disorders and psychotherapy. Their intention was to form a scientific psychotherapy based on the new psychology and, in turn, to ground psychology in the in-depth clinical investigations of individual lives.15 For six years, Freud and Jung worked together, traveled together, and lectured together. They traveled to the United States twice. In 1908, the Yearbook for Psychoanalytic and Psychopathological Researches was established, with Bleuler and Freud editors in chief and Jung as managing editor. In 1909, Jung received an honorary degree from Clark University in Worcester, MA, for his word association research. In 1910, an international psychoanalytic association was formed with Jung as president. During this period of collaboration with Freud, Jung was the principal architect of the psychoanalytic movement. While it is true that Jung was now thoroughly in gravitational pull of Freuds influence, its significant to note that Jung was independently pursuing his own research. Although Jung left behind his fathers faith, the religious experiences of his youth and his preoccupations in university never left him. He left the Burghlzli in 1909 and engaged in a growing therapeutic practice and research. His wife, Emma, came from one of the wealthiest families in Switzerland. Emma and Carl were independently wealthy. (Emma was heir of the family fortune, they were watchmakers; today, the company is known as the International Watch Company, Schaffausen, or simply, IWC.) From 1909 to 1912, Jung returned to his intellectual roots and to his cultural and religious preoccupations. He was interested in mythology, folklore, religion, the power of symbols. Freud, who essentially saw religion as the source of human suffering, as being neurotic, could not deal with the fact that Jung Freuds self-appointed heir, and disciple [Freuds word] destined to steward and share his psychoanalytic theory with the world was interested in myth and religion. Freud had his own neurosis when it came to religion. On one of their tours to the United States, Freud and Jung were at a dinner party with colleagues when Jung brought up the subject of religion. Freud fainted and slid from his chair to under the table. Another time they were walking through Central Park and Jung brought up the subject of religion and myth. Freud was so troubled by the conversation that he urinated in his trousers and Jung had to take him back to the hotel to change. Freud also collapsed standing before Michelangelos Moses sculpture in the church of St. Peter in Chains in Rome. Jungs research culminated in 1911 and 1912 with the publication of Transformations and Symbols of the Libido (Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido), published in two installments. This is the work that severed the relationship with Freud. Jung knew that when it was released it meant the end of his relationship with Freud. Freud viewed the unconscious as kind of trash receptacle of all the things the ego wants to repress. For Freud, the individual is ego-driven. The unconscious complexes need to be brought to consciousness in order to diffuse their hold over a persons life. Freud understood dreams as essentially wish fulfillment. Therefore dream interpretation was a useful way to get at the complexes that need to be brought to consciousness, out of the trash of the unconscious. The libido, for Freud, was essentially a sexual drive/force within the unconscious. Neurosis was caused by the inability to accept the essential sexual drive of the psyche. Freud reduced just about everything to sexuality. Jung believed that sexuality and sexual energy were important and should not be pathologically hindered, but Jung felt that Freud was wrong. The libido is essentially energy, its the life force pouring through nature and humans, which includes but is not limited to sexual energy. The libido needs to flow, according

to Jung. We become depressed and neurotic when that flow is blocked. The libido attaches itself to forms, to symbols, to archetypes that allow the libido to be accessed. For Jung, the unconscious is not a trash receptacle, containing scraps of the ego. The unconscious is a world, a universe unto itself, entirely unknown except through dreams and the power of archetypes that give expression to this underworld. The unconscious is not against us, but ultimately for us, possessing a wisdom and knowledge deeper than the knowledge of the ego. Dreams should not be interpreted, but listened to, attended to, because they are the windows into the unconscious, they allow the unconscious to speak. The Dream Maker is not working against us, but with us and for us. The dream has a telos. Its not in service to the ego, but in service to the psyche, the soul. In addition, Jung suggested the controversial idea in Transformations and Symbols of the Libido that the personal unconscious participates in something deeper still, which Jung later called the collective unconscious this is the unconscious that is shared by all of humanity, everyone who ever lived. From the collective unconscious emerge common archetypes, patterns, structures found across cultures, across centuries. These myths run like a steady stream through the collective unconscious and shape our actions and choices, both unconsciously and consciously. Myths, these deep stories, used to have the capacity to hold the self in the world. In a scientific, Enlightenment world, materialist in its outlook, suspicious of anything mythical or mystical, anything spiritual, irrational, Jung believed that the West has lost its myth. There was a time when Christianity was the myth, the deep story, that allowed humanity to commune with God, but the symbols of the Church, Jung argued, have lost their meaning, they have become merely signs, not charges with libido, thus contributing to the spiritual malaise of the 20th, and now, 21st centuries. Jung, too, realized that he was living without a myth. After completing Transformations, Jung knew what it meant to live without a myth. It is like one uprooted, having no true link either with the past, or with the ancestral life which continues within him, or yet with contemporary human society.16 Jung also knew that the break with Freud would come and it did and it was severe. Most of his closest friends and colleagues deserted him. He removed himself from the psychoanalytic community and professional associations. His wife supported him through this time and he focused his efforts on this patients. But he was falling apart inside. Jungs last contact with Freud was in 1912, by the end of the year his dreams began to suggest that something new and disturbing was occurring. The dreams confirmed for him that the contents of the unconscious are not dead, outmoded forms, but belong to our living being.17 He started to feel that something was alive in him that was trying to move outward. Then the visions started. In October, 13, Jung was along on a train journey to Schaffhausen, when he was: suddenly seized by an overpowering vision: I saw a monstrous flood covering all the northing and low-lying lands between the North Sea and Alps. When it came to Switzerland I saw that the mountains grew higher and higher to protect our country. I realized that a frightful catastrophe was in progress. I saw the mighty yellow waves, the floating rubble of civilization, and the drowned bodies of uncounted thousands. Then the whole sea turned blood. This vision lasted about one hour. I was perplexed and nauseated, and ashamed of my weakness.18

Two weeks later, the vision returned, this time even more vivid, with even more blood. An inner voice spoke. Look at it well; it is wholly real and it will be so. You cannot doubt it.19 Jung was troubled. He thought he was caught in a psychosis. He thought his reality was unraveling around him. It was here that Jung turned inward, confronted his fears, his psychosis, and returned to keeping a diary, a journal. In a small, brown notebook, he continued where he left off; on the 12th November 1913, he wrote: Meine Seele, meine Seele. Wo bist du? My soul, my soul. Where are you? I speak, I call you are you there? I have returned, I am here again. I have shaken the dust of all the lands from my feet, and I have come to you, I am with you. After long years of wandering, I have come to you again. Should I tell you everything I have seen, experienced, and drunk in? Or do you not want to hear about all the noise of life and the world? But one thing you must know: the one thing I have learned is that one must live this life. This life is the way, the long sought-after way to the unfathomable, which we call divine. There is no other way, all other ways are false paths. I found the right way, it led me to you, to my soul. I returned, tempered and purified.20 On the second night, Jung is led by the soul to consider the souls relationship to God. On third night, Jung discovers that one must be placed in service of the soul. During six further nights, the spirit of the depths was silent in me, since I swayed between fear, defiance, and nausea, and was wholly the prey of my passion. I could not and did not want to listen to the depths. But on the seventh night, the spirit of the depths spoke to me: Look into your depths, pray to your depths, waken the dead.21 And so began his interior journey into the depths of his unconscious. After long days working with clients, then dinner, he retired to his study, picked up his journal and journeyed into himself. Jung recalls: In order to grasp the fantasies which were stirring in me underground, I knew that I had to let myself plummet down into them, as it were. I felt not only violent resistance to this, but a distinct fear. For I was afraid of losing command of myself and becoming a prey to the fantasies and as a psychiatrist I realized only too well what they meant. After prolonged hesitation, however, I saw that there was no other way out. I had to take the chance, had to try to gain power over them; for I realized that if I did not do so, I ran the risk of their gaining power over me.22 The only way out is down and in and through. Approximately one month later, on 12th December 1913, Jung resolved upon the decisive step. I was sitting at my desk once more, thinking over my fears. Then I let myself drop. Suddenly it was as though the ground literally gave way beneath my feet, and I plunged down into dark depths. I could not fend off a feeling of panic. But then, abruptly, at not too great a depth, I landed on my feet in a soft, sticky mass. I felt great relief, although I was apparently in complete darkness. After a while my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, which was rather like a deep twilight. Before me was the entrance to a dark cave, .23 Jung describes what he encountered in that cave, people, animals, prophets from the past, flowing streams, light, a gigantic black scarab, a newborn sun, rising out of the depths of the

water. He discovered a wise old man, a gnostic priest named Philemon, who became a guide through the underworld of his unconscious. Philemon and other figures of my fantasies, Jung wrote, bought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life.24 Night after night, he went down into the depths. When personal figures emerged from this unconscious he talked with them, asked them questions, listen to what they had to say to him. This is what Jung called the confrontation with his unconscious and it went on for years. Initially, he wasnt sure about where it would lead him. In January 1914, he had another vision, seeing a sea of blood and a procession of dead multitudes. On January 22, 1914, hes shown images of destruction, military weapons, human remains, sunken, ships, destroyed states. Between the 10th June and the 12th of July 1914, he had a thrice-repeated dream of being in a foreign land and having to return quickly by ship, and the descent of the icy cold.25 Remarkably, in the midst of this enormous inner struggle, Jung was pursuing his professional life. At the end of July 1914, Jung was in Aberdeen, Scotland, invited by the British Medical Association to give a lecture, On the Importance of the Unconscious in Psychopathology. He knew something was going to happen. He assumed that he would give the lecture and then finally go mad. Then, on August 1, immediately after the lecture, he learned that war had broken out across Europe. Jung left Scotland as soon as possible, arrived in Holland, and made it back to Zurich before the Germans invaded Belgium and France. In an odd way, the war was good news and welcomed relief to the pressure caused by the dreams and visions because he realized that he wasnt going mad, but he was participating in something deep that allowed him to have a glimpse of what was to come. He writes, finally I understood. And when I disembarked in Holland on the next day, nobody was happier than I. Now I was sure that no schizophrenia was threatening me. I understood that my dreams and my visions came from the subsoil of the collective unconscious. What remained for me to do now was to deepen and validate this discovery. And this is why I have been trying to do for forty years. He had to probe the depths of [his] own psyche.26 And, so, courageously, he entered into what he described as a wilderness, a desert, and allowed himself to be stripped bare. He discovered his anima, a female personification of his unconscious, who would then lead him down into the depths, to confront his demons and his fears, to show him the way to his true self, all in service to the Self (capital S). My soul leads me to the desert, into the desert of my own self.27 He went into the desert; he wrote, to find their souls, the ancients [meaning the Desert Mothers and Fathers] went into the desert. He writes, I did not think that my soul is a desert, a barren, hot desert, dusty and without drink.28 He went down into his depths, below the ego, into the core of his being, to listen to his soul, his core self. From this period, which lasted for years, he emerged with most of his psychoanalytic theories that he then spent the rest of his life exploring, writing about, and applying. A substantial part of what Jung is known for today came from that wilderness experience. He discovered there something of the grace of God and wrestled with his demons and emerged with a strong sense of who he was (and who he wasnt) and a clear sense of his calling in life this is what is meant by individuation. Individuation is the aim of Jungian analysis. Not the treatment of neurosis, but the opening of a life into the depths where the psyche yields life, wholeness, and transformation.

Jung, as a psychologist, was reluctant to make metaphysical claims or theological claims. He reminded folks that he was not a theologian, yet he was aware of the Holy, the numinous, a Wholly Other (as Karl Barth would say), that seeks our welfare, One that is subjectively encountered, sometimes even in dreams (which Karl Barth would not say). Analysis is considered to be a form of psychotherapy, and many analysts are in fact trained also as psychotherapists, but in its purist form, a Jungian analyst eschews clinical talk of diagnoses and recovery in favor of broader (and some might say fuzzier) goals of self-discovery and wholeness a maturation process Jung himself referred to as individuation. Perhaps as a result, Jungian analysis has a distinct appeal to people in midlife. Stephen Martin, a Jungian analyst explains, The purpose of analysis is not treatment. Thats the purpose of psychotherapy. The purpose of analysis is to give life back to someone whos lost it.29 Jungs fantasies, active imaginations, commentaries on his dreams, were kept in these brown/black books. Later, he purchased from a book seller in Zurich, a large folio-sized book, with a red cover. On the inside, he transcribed the content of his black books in High German Gothic script and added his own artwork, images from his fantasies and dreams, his mandalas, images of his self going through a process of transformation. He bound them together in this book, intentionally making it look like a medieval illuminated manuscript. This was his holy book, Liber Novus a New Book that became his Bible, as it were. It was never published in Jungs lifetime. In fact, few had the privilege of reading it, even seeing it. After Jungs death in 1961, the family placed it under lock and key in a bank vault in Zurich. And there it sat until 2009, when through the ministrations of Sonu Shamdasani, the Jung Estate gave permission for a digital photo facsimile of the book, in its actual size, to be published. The Jung family, entrusted with the memory and legacy of Carl Jung, were worried about releasing this text to the world, nervous about the reaction it would receive, especially from those who are suspicious of Jungs endeavors, who consider him a mystic or gnostic or heretic or crack pot. In 1959, after having left the book more or less untouched for 30 or so years, Jung penned a brief epilogue, acknowledging the central dilemma in considering the books fate. To the superficial observer, he wrote, it will appear like madness. The Red Book (Liber Novus) was published by W. W. Norton & Company, billed as the most influential unpublished work in the history of psychology.30 To coincide with its release, the actual Red Book was taken out of the vault and put on display, first in Zurich, then in New York City at the Rubin Gallery and then at the Library of Congress. Its not an easy book to read. Its cryptic, mysterious, non-rational. But it was therapeutic for him. Its a personal record, important for Jung, in his journey of individuation. Should it be read by others? If so, how? What is to be gained from it? When asked if there something in the Red Book for us, Shamdasani say, Absolutely, there is a human story here. The basic message hes sending is Value your inner life. What does the Red Book have to offer the Christian community? Thats a huge question, which cannot be adequately answered here. I agree with Shamdasani, Jung teaches us to value our inner life because life within the depths allows us to connect with the presence of the divine at work within the human spirit. There is wisdom, knowledge from within that is worthy of our consideration, that might even be the result of the Holy Spirit communicating with the human spirit.

Jung was not interested in dogma, doctrine, or ideas about God. When asked in a famous BBC interview whether or not he believed in God, Jung famously answered, I dont believe. I know. This knowledge came to him subjectively, from within his depths, through religious experience. The arch sin of faith, Jung said, was that it forestalled experience.31 The Reformed theological tradition has never been all that comfortable with religious experience, primarily because it cant be adequately placed within a dogmatic system. Jung makes an appeal for experience. People are hungry for an experience, a subjective encounter with the numinous. Human beings hunger for that connection with the Holy. For the most part, theyre not finding it in the Church. A contemporary Jungian analyst, James Hollis, suggests, If these institutional forms really connect people with the gods, we could see the difference.32 Jung knows that an encounter with the Self inevitably yields transformation. Its a process of death and resurrection death for the ego, life for the self. I conclude with reference to Jungs lecture before the Zofingia Society, Thoughts on the Interpretation of Christianity. He includes an epigraph from Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) that reads: A single spark of the fire of justice, fallen into the soul of a learned man, is enough to irradiate, purify, and consume his life and endeavors, so that he no longer has any peace and is forced to abandon forever that tepid or cold frame of mind in which run-of-the-mill savants carry out their daily chores.33 For Jung, what matters most is fire burning in the soul, burning not with ideas about God, ideas trapped in a tepid or cold frame of mind, but a real experience of God an annihilating fire and an indescribable grace.34 Jung knew that this was available to everyone who has the courage to let oneself drop into the dark deep depths.

C. G. Jung, The Red Book (Liber Novus): A Readers Edition , Sonu Shamdasani, ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), 127. 2 Cited in Murray Stein, ed., Jung on Christianity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 50ff. 3 Cited in Stein, 55. 4 C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Recorded and Edited by Aniela Jaff (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 73. Henceforth, MDR. 5 MDR, 53. 6 MDR, 53. 7 MDR, 53. 8 MDR, 54. 9 MDR, 54. 10 MDR, 54. 11 MDR, 54-55. 12 MDR, 55. 13 MDR, 56. 14 Shamdasani, 11. 15 Shamdasani, 11. 16 Shamdasani, 14. 17 MDR, 173. 18 MDR, 175. 19 MDR, 175. 20 Liber Novus, 127-128. 21 Liber Novus, 140. 22 MDR, 178.

23 24

MDR, 179. MDR, 183. 25 Shamdasani, 29-30. 26 Shamdasani, 28. MDR, 176. 27 Liber Novus, 232 28 Liber Novus, 236 29 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/magazine/20jung-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 30 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/magazine/20jung-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 31 MDR, 94. 32 James Hollis, Creating a Life: Finding Your Individual Path (Toronto: Inner City Books, 2001), 57. 33 Cited in Stein, 44. 34 MDR, 56.