The Red Book

During the first day of a college philosophy class, our professor told the room that if we were only interested in being a squirrel (i.e. only cared about eating, sleeping, shitting, partying, and having sex), we should do ourselves a favor and drop the class while we still could. That description felt at the time like I was the closest to the natural world I’d ever been, but since it didn’t cover everything I was interested in I decided to stay and see what happened while a third of our class decided to hit the pines. It was not a gentle semester for any of us, and our weeks filled quickly with the kind of raw Mongolian havoc that only an atheist with a doctorate in Christian ethics can wreak on the flabby, denominational Europe of the undergraduate mind. My friends and I spent many hours trying to think of arguments to counter his various offensives, but we’d never encountered someone who could shoot with that accuracy while moving at that speed and the outcomes began to feel inevitable.

Which of course was the point. He remains one of the most honest and empathetic people I’ve ever met, and his brutal and regular insistence that philosophy is about the search for the Truth not a vehicle for clever self-celebration or a tool for reinforcing an unassailable, already-held belief was abstractly branded on me by the end of the semester. The only times he would wreck our shit for real were when we were trying to win a debate or discussion in an underhanded or ungenerous way, and I lost count quickly of the number of times he would pause them to remind us that if we knew of a stronger version of our opponent’s position than the one they were presenting, it was our duty as human beings to respond to that version instead. I still think about his insistence on intellectual generosity and humility on a daily basis, and it’s one of the few things I still hold steadfastly as a direct and personal order.

The Red Book by Carl Jung couldn’t be more different than much of what I read back then, but the work’s effect on me so far has carried some striking similarities. It feels like a 2 ton gorilla loose in my porcelain home looking for food, and its destructive qualities seem to exist outside the scope of conventional morality or institutions. If Rumi’s now-colloquial “out beyond good and evil/there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” is the north star, then The Red Book is a firsthand account of the journey anyone must take to follow it. It is bone-breaking work in places and deep medicine in others, and the slivers of illumination it offers along the way somehow manage to feel both earned and underserved in equal measure.

In almost every sense, this book feels like the most lucid and awake piece of writing I’ve read in many years. It plunges you into levels of yourself you did not know existed, or perhaps suspected but avoided, with such a generous and hungry intensity that it can start to feel at times like you’ve been lit on fire. And in some sense I think that’s true. But if Dante’s descent into Hell was a pyrotechnic fiesta fueled by the bodies and moral abandonments of his real world enemies, Jung’s work here is volcanic and cavernous and liquid by comparison. This is a journey into the forge of creation, and an exploration of the self that burns even brighter against the backdrop of the first World War it was written within. It makes sense now why Jung asked that it not be published during his lifetime, and it makes sense why it’s been quickly making the rounds through sections of the zeitgeist since its release in 2009. I mention it today because it’s begun to feel like a necessary read for anyone, and honestly if I could afford a copy of it for each of you right now I’d do it. Happy Friday.