Jung

and the 

Red Book

By Tom Laughlin

Jung and the Red Book

Chapter 1:

The key to understanding the Red Book, Jung’s psychology, spirituality, religion and alternate medicine - how emotions cause physical illness - is to discover what is the reality of the Unconscious

Until – and unless - you understand what the Unconscious is, the reality behind the word, you’ll never understand Jung, Jung’s psychology, his theories and the practice of his therapy, the emotional psyche and how our emotions create our physical and mental illnesses, nor will you understand Jung’s discoveries about spirituality, religion and morality. 

For Jung, the Unconscious is real – is a reality - more than an inanimate, lifeless entity.  Behind the word “Unconscious” is a Living Being – as alive and living as you and I.  Filled with both the DNA of our body, and our mind, our psyche, our personality, containing within it everything we are to become.

Jung was the first man in history to discover this amazing reality - that the Unconscious was a living organism, a living being, containing in its DNA the blueprint of everything we were to become, and containing in it not only its own intelligence and its own power, but an intelligence and power that were vastly superior to the conscious ego’s intelligence and power. 

This is the first amazing discovery of Jung’s, that this superior intelligence and power in the Unconscious instead of being a wasteland or a “sea of mud” as Freud called it, not only actually precedes the existence of the ego and our conscious personality, but is the entity that actually creates our ego and our consciousness – our conscious personality -  in the first place.

Common sense showed Jung – as it shows everyone of us - that there is no ego, no consciousness in the newborn baby.  None!  The baby has no ability to distinguish, differentiate, memorize, or even talk.  The ego doesn’t exist, which was the major point of departure that caused the split between Freud and Jung.  Freud was wrong when he insisted that the subconscious (Freud’s term) was a tabula rasa, an empty slate, and the only things that exist in it – everything that’s in it – first came to the ego, and everything that is in it has gotten there because it was first experienced by the ego and then repressed, suppressed, or depressed by the ego.  For Jung, this could not be true because it is a self evident reality that the ego doesn’t exist in the newborn baby, and takes a long time to slowly develop. 

Jung asked “Where does our ego, our conscious personality come from?”  Clearly it comes from something inside the newborn baby.  Clearly something inside the newborn has the power and the intelligence to create the conscious personality and the ego from seemingly nothing.  This lack of a ego and all the function the ego eventually learns to do is as self evident a reality as is the fact the sun is going to rise in the morning. The ego and the conscious personality can do none of the functions it eventually develops the ability to do, just as the body can’t sit up, walk, talk, run or play that it eventually will learn to do.  It doesn’t take any sophistication to see that the ego is created slowly and inexorably from something inside the baby. 

Clearly there was some mysterious “inner teacher” inside the newborn baby that teaches it how to do all of the physical things and mental things it will eventually learn to do. 

Take talking.  The newborn baby can’t speak a word, but without anyone giving it formal lessons, the baby slowly learns to talk, and by the time it’s 3 years old, has developed the physical and mental ability to speak.   And without formal lessons, it speaks perfect English, correctly using grammar, syntax, etc. 

But there’s more.  If the baby happens to be American, but raised by Spanish speaking parents (or French or German), the baby learns – automatically – to speak the English of his environment, playmates, school, etc., but also learns to speak the Spanish of his parents, and even though the parents speak with a heavy accent, the child doesn’t speak the English of his parents, but the English of his environment and playmates.  Who teaches him that?  To Jung there clearly had to be some mysterious inner teacher in the child, teaching the child to speak.  And not only an ordinary language teacher, but a very sophisticated teacher who could teach the child to speak the English of his playmates and the Spanish of his parents, and without a lesson, know the difference.

Herein is the cataclysmic difference between not only Jung and Freud, but virtually all other psychologists before and since. 

To Jung, there was a mysterious power and intelligence in the unconscious from the moment of conception – a power and intelligence vastly superior to our human intelligence.  And Jung dedicated his life to learning what that Superior Intelligence and Superior Power hidden in the Unconscious were – how they functioned, how they created the ego and conscious personality in the first place, how they developed it, how they healed it when it got damaged, and how and what power did this Superior Intelligence and Superior Power, including superior will power, have over the ego’s intelligence, power and will. 

Jung devoted his life to finding out the answers to these questions.

For Jung there was only one way to learn the secrets of the Superior Power and Intelligence hidden in the Unconscious part of the psyche – and that was to deliberately and consciously experience the Unconscious in all its fullness and power.  To descend into the Unconscious deliberately and directly, bringing his consciousness with him. 

The result of this historic encounter between Jung’s ego/consciousness and the Unconscious with its Superior Power, Intelligence and blueprint for the Greater Personality he, like all of us, was to become is the Red Book.

The Red Book is the first time in human history that a man has discovered the awesome, transpersonal, transcendental power and intelligence that lies hidden within each of us in this unknown part of our psyche, the Unconscious.  The first man to develop a strong enough and healthy enough stabilized ego to allow the Unconscious to come into the ego, to flood the ego in order to make the Unconscious reveal its secrets – what it is, how it functions, what is contained in it, why it wants to become added to the conscious personality, and how, with the ego’s help, it will be able to do that. 

Why it wants to become added to the conscious personality is easy to answer.  Remember the Unconscious contains within it our psychological and physical DNA, our individual blueprint, which is as unique to us as our DNA is unique – a blueprint that contains the Greater Personality we were meant to be from our moment of conception and birth.

What is meant by the Greater Personality?

Just as the newborn baby has very limited physical and mental abilities, at birth and for the first year of life, there is a “greater person” than what the baby is now lying latent “en potencia” waiting to be developed on a specific timetable according to each individual’s unique DNA/blueprint, and for the rest of its life that potential greater personality slowly, but inexorably, continues to develop and show itself. 

At one year the child can do hundreds of physical and mental acts it couldn’t do at birth.  At three years old, the Greater Personality the child would become has emerged  more dramatically, as it now can do thousands of mental and physical things it could not do at birth – walk, talk, play dozens of games, and make distinctions and distinguish hundreds of objects and people, as well as the things it wants to do and like, and things it doesn’t want to do and doesn’t like. 

By the time the child is seven, this Greater Personality is powerfully visible as it can now do thousands of things physically and mentally it couldn’t do at three years of age – read, write, do arithmetic, ride a bicycle, create artistically, and thousands more. 

The Greater Personality continues to emerge every day year by year, until at fifteen the person can now to thousands and thousands of mental and physical acts it couldn’t do at seven – from using the computer, to playing video games, all sorts of sports, the violin, and countless more greater skills than it had at birth, at three, or seven. 

With this ‘inner teacher’ which continues to create all of our aspirations and needs which continue to motivate the ego to develop more and more of the skills, talents and abilities lying dormant in the Greater Personality contained in our Unconscious, continues for the rest of our life, until our death.  When we are thirty, we have become a far greater person than we were at 15, and the same is true when we become fifty, seventy, or even older.  Unless we suffer a serious physical or mental illness, we continue to develop the Greater Personality within us, contained in the blueprint in our Unconscious, until we pass over to the other side. 

Jung’s astonishing achievement was to be the first person to go into the Unconscious, discover all the secrets it contained, especially its Superior Power and Intelligence which had created in it each human being’s personal blueprint, which contained in it the Greater Person we were to eventually become, and would become if the development of our Greater Personality did not get damaged along the way by something or someone in our environment – and when it did, Jung was the first man to discover the tools we needed to heal the damage done to the Greater Person we were meant to be from conception.

The secret to Jung’s healing process, his therapy, was to develop the tools whereby each one of us could discover what our blueprint is that is hidden in our unconscious, to find the purpose the Superior Intelligence and Power wanted us to discover as the best way to develop our Greater Personality.

To Jung, the question of whether we are formed by genetics or environment was a non-existent one.  For Jung, genetics and environment were two sides of the same coin.  Neither could develop without the other.  The genes contained our unique DNA and blueprint, but the environment was indispensable to developing it fully, just as the seed planted in the ground is genetically disposed to become a tree or a flower, unless its environment is healthy, unless it’s planted in good soil, gets plenty of water and sunlight, the genes in the seed will not grow into a beautiful tree or flower.  So too, the environment we are raised in, starting with – and most importantly – our parents, our family and extended family, our neighborhood, our schools, our religion, all can play an indispensable role and allow us to develop the Greater Personality within, or to damage it. 

Just as we are unaware of how our lungs, liver, kidneys, and the retina in our eye function, and just as we had to develop new tools, the sophisticated technology of x-rays, CT-scans, MRIs, mammograms, blood tests, etc. to learn more about how all the organs in our bodies function, so, too, we remain unaware (ignorant) of the fact that we have such a powerful Unconscious filled with complexes that totally control our life and all our relationships, Jung’s enormous contribution was to develop the psychological tools each of us desperately needs in order to learn what goes on in our Unconscious, what are the complexes that control and dominate us, as well as develop the tools to treat the Greater Personality that’s trying to be developed in us when it gets damaged. 

The key to understanding the Red Book and Jung’s enormous contributions to our psychology, is to understand that the Unconscious is a living being, a vastly Superior Intelligence and Power to the ego’s intelligence, a power that controls our lives and everything in it, especially our relationships, and specifically our ability to love and be loved, and sexual desires and performance (See Sex and Eros).   Once you understand the enormous power and intelligence hidden in the Unconscious, and the blueprint it uses to create us, you can now understand the enormous achievement Jung made when he deliberately subjected himself to an encounter with this vastly superior part of our psyche, to wrest from it its secrets.

This first encounter in which Jung allowed himself to be subjected to a tsunami of psychological images and ideas from the Unconscious is the Red Book – the first attempt in the history of mankind by a conscious human being to submit himself to the awesome power of his Unconscious, to learn its secrets for the benefit of us all. 

In doing so, Jung has wrested from nature the most valuable secrets about who we are, how we function, and how we can become better, more fully what we were always meant to be.  Jung’s descent into his unconscious was a terrifying experience, for he had no guideline or benchmarks to tell him what was happening or what he could expect next.  He had no idea what he was struggling with, a power so gigantic it could easily have overwhelmed a lesser man, someone with a less strong, stable and healthy ego.  For this alone Jung takes his place among the greatest leaders and wisest people of all time. 

As a result of his encounter for the ages, Jung has given us tools that now make it not only possible, but relatively easy to discover our own Unconscious, our Greater Personality hidden within it, and what it wants us to do to develop it or heal it if it gets damaged. 

We not only Jung much, we all – mankind – should be eternally grateful for the secrets in the Unconscious he has revealed to us. 

Next:  For what Jung discovered and the tools he gave us to discover our own blueprint  hidden in our Unconscious that alone can develop our Greater Personality and bring us the deepest happiness and joy.