(Note: This article was originally published to JamieMcSloy.co.uk on March 14th, 2020. I’m going through an old backup of the site, which has hundreds of posts that aren’t currently uploaded. As I’m working hard on updating the site, letting these old posts be the daily posts for a while.)
Build Your Own Red Book
The other day, I was talking with fellow online guru Benjamin George about the direction of my online projects, the direction of his life, and of various weird things like Hypersigils and consciously creating reality.
Folks, that’s a subject we’ll explore in a later set of articles that are planned as part of the now mythological site update that I’ll be doing. Allegedly.
Let’s take a bit of a detour and start with the Grand-Daddy of the plan I’m going to be following.
Carl Jung… The Wizard Hiding In Plain Sight
When people look back at the idea of Alchemy, they tend to snigger. “How could those guys have thought you’d turn lead into gold? That’s crazy!”
Alchemy, the magical practice of ridicule, is mostly responsible for first the Enlightenment in philosophy and later the Industrial Revolution. Your more-than-average weird man looking for spirits in chemicals birthed the modern world.
And just like that, we have the 20th Century parallel. Early psychology, when you read the words of the men involved, had a distinctly not-so-normal basis to it.
Again, this gets sniggered at today;
Can you believe Freud had an Oedipus Complex? Haha he thought it was all about sex!
The truth is much stranger.
I’ll focus on Jung, who I’ve been reading for the past couple of years now.
Jung was a psychotherapist, but you can easily make the error in assuming a psychologist today is the same as a psychologist back in the day. This isn’t true.
Jung was concerned with the power of narrative and believed the subjective universe to be a tangible thing: the imaginary was as real as the physical world, ultimately.
The implication of that is huge, and well outside our pay grade… for now.
Let’s just hold onto that while we talk about something of interest.
The Red Book
During his lifetime, Jung had communications with an entity that gave him visionary insight into how the subjective universe operated.
Without taking the modern view that this was a figment of his imagination, we’ll talk about the Red Book.
The Red Book comprises his most mystical and magical thoughts and communications with Philemon, a spirit who gave him higher knowledge.
The Red Book is a nigh-on undecipherable text filled with dreams, visions, insights and other scribblings. He hand painted a lot of the images and wrote in calligraphy. He had it bound in leather and it was not published until decades after his death.
To this point, it’s a rare and closely guarded book.
In essence, it’s like any other grimoire: a book of impenetrable magic and keys created by the wizard, and the reward for getting your hands on it – let alone deciphering it – is great.
This brings me onto my quick point for the day.
Build Your Own Red Book
The Red Book is notable because it’s an example of a book that creates a feedback loop for the author. Jung allegedly scrapped, rewrote, wrote, edited and was otherwise never happy with the document.
In an age before the humble blogger, it was very difficult to have documents that constantly needed updating as you updated your thoughts.
The issue with works that tap into your subconscious is that your subconscious isn’t fixed. Moreover, by writing something down, you change it in your mind. (Hence this article taking a huge left turn for what I planned.)
And writing gives you insight that you obviously have within you already; but once you unlock it, it changes.
To Build your own Red Book is to create something with the purpose of making conscious this process; you write down dreams, fantasies, ideas and you see what you can pull out. You then allow the work to take you down roads that you wouldn’t have gone down.
Bonus: Build Your Own Necronomicon
I believe I’ve bought and read very attempt to make real the Necronomicon of H.P. Lovecraft. The book, in essence, is a fictional device of reference in the works of everyone who works in the Cthulhu mythos.
It’s the same as the Red Book, except it doesn’t actually exist.
Any attempts to make the Necronomicon tangible fail, because ultimately it’s a book that needs to live in the psyche of the reader.
I mention it because this is the second, and weirder part of the “Build Your Own Red Book” idea:
The Necronomicon causes weird things to happen to all who read it. It has a life of its own.
There’s a certain element to that when you start to include things like working with dreams, deliberately encouraging Apophenia and Pareidolia and allowing yourself to be taken to weird places as you uncover things about yourself and the world.
It’s scary territory, but it’s probably the best way to make otherworldly achievements and experiences a part of your life; in terms of uniqueness, you are the only one that has access to the resource that is your subjective universe.
More filtered information on this will come later. For now, got to take a trip into the wyrd world.