Liber Novus (The Red Book) by C. G. Jung
“To the superficial observer, it will appear like madness."
from The Red Book (Jung) by Carl Gustav Jung
Liber Novus (The Red Book) by C. G. Jung
In studying his fantasies, Jung realized that he was studying the myth-creating function of the mind.51
C. G. Jung • The Red Book
If you go to thinking,224 take your heart with you. If you go to love, take your head with you. Love is empty without thinking, thinking hollow without love.
C. G. Jung • The Red Book
Just as Christ tormented the flesh through the spirit, the God of this time will torment the spirit through the flesh. For our spirit has become an impertinent whore, a slave to words created by men and no longer the divine word itself.204
C. G. Jung • The Red Book
He argued that individuation and collectivity were a pair of opposites related by guilt. Society demanded imitation. Through the process of imitation, one could gain access to values that were one’s own. In analysis, “Through imitation the patient learns individuation, because it reactivates his own values.”155 It is possible to read this as a
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individuation vs collectivity
it is very important that we experience the contents of the unconscious before we form any opinions about it.
C. G. Jung • The Red Book
The differentiation of the personal and impersonal unconscious provided a theoretical understanding of Jung’s mythological fantasies: it suggests that he did not view them as stemming from his personal unconscious but from the inherited collective psyche. If so, his fantasies stemmed from a layer of the psyche that was a collective human
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collective psyche
To live oneself means: to be one’s own task. Never say that it is a pleasure to live oneself. It will be no joy but a long suffering, since you must become your own creator. If you want to create yourself, then you do not begin with the best and the highest, but with the worst and the deepest. Therefore say that you are reluctant to live yourself.
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If you have still not learned this from the old holy books, then go there, drink the blood and eat the flesh of him who was mocked61 and tormented for the sake of our sins, so that you totally become his nature, deny his being-apart-from-you; you should be he himself, not Christians but Christ, otherwise you will be of no use to the coming God.