October 2009 Archives

In a year of firsts, and what we hope will continue to be an Era of Firsts, the President of the United States has sent a videotaped greeting to all those who celebrate Diwali, the "Festival of Lights," in the U.S. and around the world. The holiday, which runs over five or six days in different regions, is observed by Hindus, Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs for a variety of reasons, and it is a national holiday throughout India. In the President's message, he creates yet another first by quoting from Hindu Scripture, specifically the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, 1.3.28:
From the unreal lead me to the real,
From darkness lead me to the light,
From death lead me to deathlessness. (trans J. Mascaro)
    In a year in which the primordial sound of OM was referred to in an acceptance speech at the Oscars, and Vice President Biden spoke the traditional Hindu Greeting "Namaste" on CNN, this adds another link in the chain of worldwide spiritual awareness emanating from America, the most spiritually diverse nation on Earth. We may have our failings as a country, as a political and economic force in the world, but it is hard to find another place more accepting of the world's religious traditions, from Atheism to Zen.

The word is out that Carl Jung's legendary Red Book, containing many years' worth of his most private explorations of his psyche, will be published in facsimile this month by W. W. Norton. The combination of hand-lettered pages and astonishing multicolored paintings in a baffling array of styles makes the book feel like a cross between William Blake's illustrated poems and an illuminated manuscript from the Middle Ages. In 1913, Jung underwent a crisis, or what he termed a "confrontation with the unconscious." Not one to shrink from a challenge, he induced visions and hallucinations and recorded what he discovered. The Red Book is the result of his psychological self-analysis and artistic visions. The book, which was the subject of an unprecedented New York Times Magazine cover story, is laden with copious footnotes and cross-references by Jung researcher and editor Sonu Shamdasani, including citations of the writings of some of Jung's clients and his many astonishing paintings. (Judging from the few illustrations that accompanied the Times article, his artistic styles range from Surrealism and Transcendentalism to graffiti art--one image looks surprisingly like a precursor of Keith Haring!)