A recent story in the New York Times discusses the release of a long-await and very mysterious book by the great psychonaut Carl Jung. The Red Book, set to be released October 7th of this year promises to blow minds while delving deeply into the psyche, dreams and thoughts of one of the world’s greatest minds.

The book has been shrouded in mystery for almost 100 years and still creates a bit of unease even to this day. According to the Times article,

Some people feel that nobody should read the book, and some feel that everybody should read it. The truth is, nobody really knows. Most of what has been said about the book — what it is, what it means — is the product of guesswork, because from the time it was begun in 1914 in a smallish town in Switzerland, it seems that only about two dozen people have managed to read or even have much of a look at it.

So, what is the book about? Well, in essence it’s the search for the Holy Grail. In other words, the primal and very essential search for Soul. Or, as the article puts it, the story is one of the classic hero’s journey where ”Man skids into midlife and loses his soul. Man goes looking for soul. After a lot of instructive hardship and adventure — taking place entirely in his head — he finds it again.”

What did the author find as she read the book? She summarized her reeading of it like this:

The book is bombastic, baroque and like so much else about Carl Jung, a willful oddity, synched with an antediluvian and mystical reality. The text is dense, often poetic, always strange. The art is arresting and also strange. Even today, its publication feels risky, like an exposure. But then again, it is possible Jung intended it as such. In 1959, after having left the book more or less untouched for 30 or so years, he penned a brief epilogue, acknowledging the central dilemma in considering the book’s fate. “To the superficial observer,” he wrote, “it will appear like madness.”

I can’t wait to read it.

“Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to.”

As I finish up with Entangled Minds by Dean Radin and launch into In Search of the Miraculous by P.D. Ouspensky, I can’t help but feel the timeliness of this statement as it bears down on me.

There is so much we don’t, can’t and won’t understand, not in lifetimes. These questions aren’t answered by religions, or science or philosophers but can only be answered I believe from within. To quote Swami Vivekananda,

The goal of mankind is knowledge … Now this knowledge is inherent in man. No knowledge comes from outside: it is all inside. What we say a man ‘knows’, should, in strict psychological language, be what he ‘discovers’ or ‘unveils’; what man ‘learns’ is really what he discovers by taking the cover off his own soul, which is a mine of infinite knowledge.

In other words, knowledge, knowing, learning is really a form of remembering.

This is about gnosis, knowledge of self and deep understanding that transcends books. The most important things we can learn, we already posses if we could all only remember where we left them.

Anyway, along similar lines, I came across this quote from a speech by the great Philip K. Dick:

Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups…So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.

We all do in our own way.