Let's Find Out - Beautiful Lecture by James Hillman on Carl Jung's Red Book

Episode Date: October 1, 2019

I always fall asleep to lectures on philosophy, history, astronomy, and Dr. James Hillman is one of the best unintentional ASMR voices out there. The fact that he has fascinating perspectives of profound psychological and philosophical topics synchronizes nicely with my content. Enjoy. Youtube link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBQWN0fL430&t=332s

The man you're about to listen to is named James Hillman. He's a young scholar, or was, I believe he passed away in 2011 a couple years after recording this audio clip. I'm not going to say much more other than I'm personally really inspired by Carl Jung's writings. I recently read the Red Book, which is kind of, well, it was a very post-human. published young didn't even want it widely read while he was alive because it departed so dramatically from young's scientific ethos he it was a very personal book it was essentially young experimenting with his own creative psyche I guess

is really the only way to put it on top of being a rigorous scientist a very acclaimed academic you know very wide-red intellectual a very esteemed not only medical doctor he had a lot of formal medical training he was very learned in philosophy contemporary philosophy psychology obviously he was a he paved the way for a whole subgenre of psychoanalytic thinking and philosophy but he also was a sharp very genius thinker when it came to religious and spiritual history and mythology and thought and he had a lot to bring to that subject so I wanted to introduce you guys to this guy James

Hillman I often fall asleep to lectures more often than ASMR actually believe it or not and this is one of the videos I've fallen asleep too quite a bit so I put a little music behind it and just basking what this guy has to say about life particularly given that he's in his 80s and he is a lifelong studier of psychology the human mind and in Carl Young in particular so I hope you guys get something out of this and I hope you enjoy it The title that I gave my thoughts this morning is Jung and the profoundly personal. And so it seemed probably a good move in old age to make it profoundly personal,

not only about Jung's profoundly personal, but maybe something from my own past. But first I want to quote something from from Orden, Wiston, Auden, the poet. We are lived by powers, we pretend to understand. And that's the whole thing. And the work that Sonu has been doing, the work that Jung did, what that book is, and what Jung spent his life trying to write

and make clear, is the pretending to understand, trying to understand the powers. And we are always up against the enormous limitations of the mind and of language in attempting to understand the powers that are living us. And once we enter the realization that we are being lived, we are not the sole agents.

The ego is a myth, a figure, I've never met one anywhere, except the word somewhere or another, that all of that attempts to understand the powers. And this changes the way one imagines what's going on in life and what happens in relationships, what happens in therapy, what happens everywhere else. are being lived by powers we pretend to understand. Of course, I never understood this. Still don't fully, but feel it. And this is June 2010. In June 1961, I was then 35, and I was allowed to go out to Jung's house and pay homage to Jung's body. He was in a separate room and some of us went out to Kisnach from Zurich.

I remember carrying a lily. One of those huge lilies with white, exquisite things that you see imaged in psychologists. and alchemy, and being received beautifully by Frau Lili Jung, Frau Hearnie, Fraud Grette Bauman, and we sat on a sofa sometimes, different people coming and going, and I looked at photographs from the old days, and we were beautifully received at this time of morning. So it was probably the second or third day, I don't know exactly. And so I had my moment in the room with the body and paid homage, had my lily. And the message, the meaning that I was given was get out or get on or gets over, something like that and do my work.

Now, after that, interesting that lily, because I remember Yolanda Yaakovi, a member of that group at that time, brought red roses. I brought the Anima image of the lily. You know, I was the young man of 35 who was Anima possessed, possessed by the idea of the soul, the softness, the adulation, all of those virtues that the Lilly was. But the message was, get out, get on, get over, and do my work. And that was the crew. So then for years and years and years and years, it seems to me, I was doing the work.

And at the same time, I was undoing the work. And I was living the tension that so. Shonu Shamsani spoke of last night, the tension between the public and the private. Now, I have reached that or resolved that tension for a moment by telling that story, by telling a story that is public or telling a story in public that is intimately private. And Jung's, the Red Book, is a book of deep, deep, intimate privateness. So of course there's this tension. What part is public? What part is private?

How far do you go with this or with that? Of course, in late life, it's resolved. The whole business becomes what's public and what's private anyway. But then what difference does it really make? We are all scandals. But each differently, of course. So that tension of doing and undoing, the tension between undoing the language that Sonu has been speaking about, these words that obsess our attempt to understand, ego, unconscious, this kind of type and that type,

these rational words that are left over from psychology of other periods, psychology of other dimensions, psychologies of other psychologists. Jung's own language was not that. That's what the Red Book, when it came out, was like an enormous turn for me, a revelation that my undoing all these years of trying to work through and resists,

resist this language of opposites. You use the word contraries. Contraries are not opposites. They're necessary to each other. They're co-relative, coexistent. You don't have one without the other. Black and white aren't opposites. They are only opposites if your mind has to think in an Aristotelian way and put them into the category of opposites. Otherwise, you can have all sorts of whiteness without thinking. about black and you can have all sorts of blackness without any kind of necessary opposition. There are no white berries. There's no white coal. There's no, I mean, these are necessary, these are mistakes in thinking. And it was that struggle all along that has occupied me,

but now with the Red Book, there is the revelation, the revelation that the language, the language of psychology is imagistic. It's poetic. It is pre-dialectic, pre-logical. Jung writes those sentences that seem sometimes to be forgotten in the psychological types which you mentioned as being so crucial and as the book that I think that's the first book that came out after the beginnings of the experience with liberty. Liebernovus. Am I right about that? 1921, I think. Yeah. He says, image is not a psychic reflection of an external object. It's not because you saw something and then you have an image of it, but a concept derived from poetic usage. Poetic usage is the beginning of the right language for

psychology, if we're talking about the powers that have us, a fantasy image, and they appear in space and as voice, but are not pathological as such. He writes, and I'll give you even the paragraph number, paragraph 722 in psychological types. Imagination is the reproductive or creative activity of the mind in general. What does the mind do? It doesn't invent words like ego. It invents imaginative forms, figures, melodies, poetic phrases, moments of insight, intuitions, formula.

Imagination is the reproductive or creative activity, of the mind in general. Fantasy as imaginative activity is the direct expression of psychic life. What does the psyche do naturally? As a chicken naturally lays an egg, the human psyche fantasizes. That's its primary activity. Our dreams are prior to our thinking. This is a way of looking at the world that seems to me to have been realized in Jung's life in the Red Book. That is, the concession of the mind that goes back to Aristotle but gets reinforced particularly from Descartes onward, the rational mind, the mind that was dominating that 18th century

in which Blake and Swedenborg were contraries, that that mind doesn't do the job. And that psychology that arises from that mind can't do the job. So of course, everyone's in therapy because they're using the wrong mind to deal with the psyche. And the therapists are using the wrong mind in dealing with the psyches who are using the wrong mind.

The mind is creating images, fantasies, and that these are living realities that can speak to us. They come figured at times, not only, as I say, also a melody is a psychic image. Fantasy as imaginative activity is the direct expression of psychic life. and they are identical with, again Jung's quote, with the flow of psychic energy. So our energy, our emotional vitality, whichever way it goes, down or up, inward or outward, the psychic energy is actually only one aspect, the other aspect are the fantasy figures and forms. So if you want to get hold of your emotions or know what emotion or feel yourself trapped by an emotion,

you try to find the image of that emotion, which tells you much more about the emotion than simply suffering the emotion itself. It isn't to get out of the emotion, it is to find its form, to find its fantasy, to elaborate it further, identical with the flow of psychic energy. Even more, he says, in psychological types. Paragraph 78, this one.

Psyche creates reality every day. The only expression I can use for this activity is fantasy. Wow. psyche creates reality every day. We think there's psychic inner world, and then there's reality, watch out, don't do that. Psychic reality, and then reality, hard reality, which is always hard, tough, real, cold, and so on.

Well, that reality is a fantasy also. It's only not recognized as a fantasy, and so we call it reality. Whatever we call reality is a fantasy that has got stubborn and blocked and become obscured to the fact of the flow of psychic energy in it. This opens the whole business. This opens the soul to living, to living, so that as a line from Soroy in one of his plays,

Two people meet, and one says to the other, what's the fantasy now, Kitty Duval? That's the relationship. What's the fantasy now? Not what happened to you when you were four. That's a fantasy, too, what happened to you when you were four. This, what I'm trying to elaborate, is also that it is profoundly personal.

We think the profoundly personal is what happened to us when we were four. The wounds we've suffered, the hopes that were dashed, the relationships that we have or had, the intimacies, the memories, that this is the profoundly personal. But these are the things that happen to everybody. Everyone has been jilted. Everyone has been disappointed. everyone has filled with enthusiasm. These are the profoundly collective experiences. The profoundly personal is the engagement with one's own demons or the visit to hell.

And the encounter with the figures that Jung had, this is the most intimate, deep, profound, unexpected, completely surprising, individualized part of life. In other words, the encounter with one's own soul. And the Red Book begins with that. Jung felt he had lost his soul, and it was now his job to find it, or to find out where it was or what had happened.

This is the profoundly personal. This changes a lot because the entire realm of psychotherapy for a hundred years has been going down the avenue of the profoundly personal is my personal life, my personal memories,

my personal childhood, my personal experiences, my personal, the subjectivism of my, what Freud called the Tagus Resta, or the personal unconscious or the repressed. But there is something else that is not collective in that way,

and not collective, let's say, that is not common to us all, but has some deep individual, a fateful aspect. And this is what Jung was engaged with, as I read the Red Book. He was engaged with uncovering what are in the depths of the soul that was given to him and the fate that was given to him. That changes what's important in your life. It changes that these things you're trying to work out in regard to your personal life are really being lived by powers we're trying to understand.

And it takes a kind of courageous theat mihi, let it be done to me to drop into that. Again, in profoundly personal in my own case, when I got to Zurich in 1953, the terrors of what lurked that I didn't understand or was afraid of, seemed to me to be down below. Now, I hadn't read about Jung's descent through the hole of the dug, but I had that feeling that there were things that were going to come up and get me.

And I took to making little paintings of what might be down there because this was encouraged by my analyst that seemed to be the way you did things. and I recall the descent in my moment was into water. I went down deep into the bottom of the sea and there were a lot of creatures there that were going to grab me and hold me and do things and so on.

And I had the experience that I could breathe underwater. And that was a revelation. whatever a revelation is, that seemed a revelation that I could actually stay in this realm and do things, talk, ask questions, move around, explore, and breathe underwater. It was that literal and that concrete and that vivid, the being underwater, and yet at the same time,

the imagination, the phantom. made it possible to breathe. Now this is just one example of hundreds of examples of this kind of work that Jung invented. invented because I say he invented it for modern psychology. People have been doing exploratory journeys forever. That's not, and they're recorded in all kinds of ways, in epics, in Dante's work, in Blake's work,

in Blake's where, and all the way back, all sorts of people have done Hildegard van Bingen and so on and so forth. That's not the point. The point is that Jung did something different with it. He devised this partly as a way, as a method, as something that can be recorded carefully and observed with a phenomenological mind.

And I say a phenomenological mind rather than an empirical mind, because he was not doing experiment only in the sense of let's try this and see what happens. He was allowing the phenomena to speak. And there's a difference between empiricism and phenomenology here because the empiricists is also doing something with what is. And the phenomenologist is, first of all, allowing the phenomenon to have its say, and all thoughts about it, what it should be, how it should work,

all the historical information is bracketed out, and you're left with simply the way the phenomenon appears. And Jung let the phenomena speak. Now, we need to know here how difficult it is to let them speak. In our culture, we must remember that, Let me just, because I do have a note, actually. I think it's Mark, the biblical Mark. And you'll be able to tell me.

Jesus doesn't let the, yeah, Mark 134. Jesus suffered not the devils to speak. Now, do you realize by letting the demons speak, by letting the voices speak, Jung was making a move of demonology, as Carl Jasper's has said, and he was opening, he was immediately being heretical,

as his pastor said at his funeral, that he was a heretic. But it's very important, because the heretics belong within the church. They're not simply heretics. They have a very important role. And so he let the demon speak. Mark 134 says Jesus suffered not the devils to speak.

Get thee behind me, Satan. Arrow hell. Death wears thy sting. That opening produced a radical move in the relation of Jung to Christianity. And the voice says at times in the red book, the Christianity that he has in is not, Sona will be able to tell me those passages where the Christianity in the,

that Jung thought he was a Christian is not the Christianity that he is discovering in the book. Is that more or less? So that he says, and you can see why, because he is allowing other voices, the multitude of voices to speak and to be figured, to be personified, to have as reality as other figures. In the basic fundamental Christian way of looking at it,

there is only one voice that can speak to you and that it must be Jesus' voice. So all the others are out of the game. So the images are also voices, and they bring some sort of message from the day. dead. And that was one of the things I'd love to talk more with you, Sono, about, is who are the dead? Who are the dead in Jung's book? Are they his personal

ancestors? Are they the dead of Jerusalem from the seven sermons? Who are the dead? What is the message of the dead? And what is it in America, what is it in our culture that has so much trouble with the dead? So difficulty, our president can't even go to the coffins of the dead, a former president, that we have this tremendous wall between living and death, so that at any cost we must keep the living alive because what's on the other side.

No sense of the permeability of life and death, of the flow of the others. of the others, of the voices, of the figures, of the powers into our life every day, of our relation to those on the other side who, in the old days, used to say, welcome, to be welcomed by the ancestors when you die. Received. Instead, there's something, this great unknown, and you die alone, and all these horrors are imagined, because there's a lot of this great unknown, and you die alone, because there's no sense of the ancestors. And of course our ancestors are the American Indians who lived in this soil.

So perhaps our dead, we are cut from the dead by what we have buried. And to go to the dead would bring up all sorts of things we don't want to bring up. But it's a question that seems to me the dead are the daily encounter with everything that has been left out, buried, burned, drowned, forgotten on purpose, and continues to send wafts of little messages through all sorts of small intuitions, hunches,

hints, warnings, omens, the little feelings in the stomach could say, no, I don't think I'll do that. I'm not going to pick up the phone on that one. I let that one go. Those little cautions and warning. Who sends those? Who's protecting us every day about not doing this or doing that? Remember, Socrates said that he was never told by his dime on what to do. He was only cautioned what not to do. Where does that, what not to do? The moment of holding off, holding back, not. The moment of not. Are those the dead keeping us safe, watching out for us?

Today this book is so enormously, how many thousand could I have those figures again? What were they? 46,000 in English. 46,000 in English, 10,000. And more languages coming. And more languages coming. Imagine. And another printing.

We're in the sixth. Imagine. On the bestseller list, imagine. Imagine. It was last week on law and order, criminal intent. If you happen to see. Was that what it's called criminal intent? If you happen to have seen it,

The Red Book was displayed itself, and it was part of a cult. It was inspiring some, inspiring some, I don't know whether they were vampires or they were. Now, of course it's been review, you know, we've had meetings like this in New York and Los Angeles and the New York Times and so and so forth. What is its importance in our culture at this moment? Is what I have been saying about the dead, about the voices, about letting the demons speak, about the deep polytheistic background that has been forgotten, about the depth of the profundity of one's personal life,

and its importance, and the individual search for not for meaning but for image for images meanings meanings don't carry you through

but the images are your companions you can have all the slogans in the world and explanations and understandings but what carries you through are the voices and figures you live with and can talk with is that what's missing

is that what they call it's so radically different from anything else in psychology, so radically different from today's cultural milieu of technology, economics, reason, information. When the book, when it was being written around 1915, let's say, just that period, at that time, current in the mind was Blavatsky, surrealism, parapsychology, worked on by leading intellects like William James

and many others in England. Dadaism, German expressionism, Joyce. There were compatible and comparable experiments in other areas. In our time, this book

is absolutely freakish because we have lived, we live in such a narrow, technical, rational, explanatory, causal way of thinking. We have shrunk our mindset tremendously since the beginning of the century when this book was not as strange, in my mind, would not have been as strange. After all, Jung wrote his doctoral dissertation in the year 1900 on occult phenomena for a medical degree. Think of that in today's medicine. Today's medicine is packed with occult phenomenon.

But so it's, the book is sort of a necessity. The book is a necessity in our time and it is recognized on a deep level of the collective psyche. Thank you very much.