I recently purchased The Red Book. As you probably know it is the reproduction of Carl Jung’s most personal work on what he calls the collective unconscious. The book is astoundingly beautiful. It is full of illuminations and calligraphic text.  I know this despite the fact that I have yet to open the cover.

I may have reservations about Jung’s theories and the concept of humanity that results but I nevertheless feel a sense of reverence for The Red Book.  Partly it is the sheer beauty of the drawings. When its publication was announced and I went surfing looking for material on it, deciding whether I would buy a copy, I stumbled across a few example illustrations. From the first I knew I was going to drop the (then) $200.

So I did. The day it came I was home ill. During one of my breaks between waves of pain, I went up to the front yard with the dog and found that UPS had been. I found the package (huge) propped up in the open laundry room. When the dog was done we all went inside.

I sat down with the box and just held it for a while. I knew what it was and I was kind of awed at its heft. Bodes well for the interior heft I am currently seeking, I thought.

I got the scissors and opened the outer box only to find a slightly smaller inner box that was free of markings. An indiscript brown package.

Jung’s work, as is true of many of today’s magicians and alchemists, roots in and through the mythic imagination. There’s usually no question when you’ve found yourself connected to the master narratives: hackles, goosebumps, shivers and other bodily signposts shudder into awareness.

What I felt holding the blank brown box were the trembling fingers of the great silence, the inhuman void that I have always known as the wyrd. When I feel that prickle, I take it as bodily recognition of something potentially and powerfully connective. I got a quick sense of a new aspen sucker wiggling above ground and beginning the transformation of what had been fundamentally barren ground.

Anyway after a while I opened the inner box and lifted out The Red Book. I just sat and paid attention to what I was feeling. It was immediately clear that I was not going to open the cover. I just stroked it. Reminded myself of Hagrid and his book of monsters, but that is what it felt like.  I had just met a new friend, one that I knew I would be able to communicate with and that would, in its turn, communicate with me.  I knew that I had met something fundamentally non-human and I was glad to get the chance to share space.

The power to be momentarily deeply, viscerally aware of sharing space, that’s the sacred thing, the magic that powers transformation. Even though this is a book of a man’s exploration of his inner narratives, symbols, and images, there is a network of dense mythic and narrative root-stuff under what shows and, like the aspen root network, it is longer lasting than the things that grow up into the air from its earthly source. How this works seems of some import, yet the question has not been answered in any satisfactory way. I don’t think archetypes float in some plane any more than I can get behind Potinus’ emanations — but the evolutionary biomechanics of it? Waaaaay to soon to say. Still, mythic magic works on us and if we create a bunch of new narratives to explain it, what of it? Isn’t the creative process what makes being human so much fun?

All these days later I have yet to open the book. I am waiting for my hands to feel like meeting the first page. But despite the physical stillness of the material book, it is already moving around in my cavernous interior. I have, for example, been thinking about what makes this reverence of mine for Jung’s book any different from my recent JW visitor’s reverence for the Bible.

I don’t think there is any real difference, except that I know the red book is a mythic representation of self and she, I’m afraid, thinks the black book is representative of something other than human reality. But all the bodily awareness, the perceptual reactions, the consequent sense of connection, all this is identical.

But wait a minute!  I just said that I felt that what lies underneath the red book and provides it’s power to provoke sensory reaction is fundamentally inhuman and yet I am aware that what Jung represents is the human universe (not the larger material one out of which we sprout).  The only way I can reconcile the two things (both of which I feel as fundamentally true), is to understand that there are parts of what shape human existence that are essentially non-human.

At the biological level this is easy to see. There are, for example, these fascinating little buggers called mitochondria. They are part of us, we cannot exist without them and neither can much of the rest of life (human or otherwise) on the planet. Yet they are not human. I mean even my finger nail isn’t really human despite the fact that it is part of me, but mitochondria are really not human. (Go read about how they work and their history if you don’t believe me.) So imagine getting a quick peak at the world from the point of view of the mitochondria. What it means to be human doesn’t have any meaning at that level. What it means to be human can only exist at a state of complexity far distinct from that of the lovely mitochondria. The two realms are invisible to each other with respect to meaning. Not that we can’t understand how they work but that is not the same thing at all as describing what it means to be mitochondria. In fact, that last bit is really a nonsensical phrase.

There are these limits beyond which what it means to be human just has no purchase. Meaning itself begins to dissolve at these margins. Sacred objects, poems, mythic narratives are those that allow us to approach the limits of intelligibility and experience for ourselves where in us the wyrd pushes. That’s what The Red Book is to me, a pathway to the thin outer reaches of the wyrd. It is a bridge to that realm where I experience the fundamental meaningless of the world that supports me and paradoxically, it is by that very experience, that the potency of my power to generate meaning for myself is made evident. At the edge of death, life is the most precious.

So both human and inhuman — when, through the gifts of the evolved brain and body we reach into that dynamo that Jung called the collective unconscious we get zapped by the inhumanity of our origins. Whether through Jung’s “active imagination” or any of the other myriad perceptual techniques, we seem to connect to aspects of ourselves that have  a longer evolutionary history than has this current set of properties and skills that we define as “what it means to be human.” The contact of realms is always electric and if one is the studious type, sometimes transformative.

Contemporary alchemy. The transformation of awareness. That’s what Jung offers and make no mistake, this capacity humans have to make meaning out of drawings and words is our most sacred magic. The bodily shiver that comes with the contact with the other, even if the other is actually as aspect of self, that’s the instinct for the sacred. And one day, soon probably, I’ll get to open the cover and step across the threshold to the meeting ground.

Cool.