The guiding figure behind Liber Novus, “was the same who inspired Buddha, Mani, Christ, Mahomet
“…that the guiding figure behind Liber Novus, “was the same who inspired Buddha, Mani, Christ, Mahomet—all those who may be said to have communed with God.” (LN 213). ~Lance Owens & Stephen Hoeller, C. G. Jung and The Red Book: Liber Novus – Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion.
JANUARY 26,1924
You had the night before had a dream in which I appeared in a disguise and was to do work on the Red Book and you had been thinking about it all that day and during Dr. Wharton’s hour preceding mine especially (pleasant for her I must say) …
As you had said you had made up your mind to turn over to me all of your unconscious material represented by the Red Book etc. to see what I as a stranger and impartial observer would say about it.
You thought I had a good critique and an impartial one.
Toni you said was deeply interwoven with it and besides did not take any interest in the thing in itself nor in getting it into usable form.
She is lost in “bird fluttering” you said.
For yourself you said you had always known what to do with your ideas, but here you were baffled.
When you approached them you became enmeshed as it were and could no longer be sure of anything.
You were certain some of them had great importance, but you could not find the appropriate form-as they were now you said they might come out of a madhouse.
So then you said I was to copy down the contents of the Red Book-once before you had had it copied, but you had since then added a great deal of material, so you wanted it done again and you would explain things to me as I went along, for you understood nearly everything in it you said.
In this way we could come to discuss many things which never came up in my analysis and I could understand your ideas from the foundation.
You told me then something more of your own attitude toward the “Red Book.”
You said some of it hurt your sense of the fitness of things terribly; and that you had shrunk from putting it down as it came to you, but that you had started on the principle of “voluntariness” that is of making no corrections and so you had stuck to that.
Some of the pictures were absolutely infantile, but were intended so to be.
There were various figures speaking, Elias, Father Philemon, etc. but all appeared to be phases of what you thought ought to be called “the master.”
You were sure that this latter was the same who inspired Buddha, Mani, Christ, Mahomet-all those who may be said to have communed with God.
But the others had identified with him.
You absolutely refused to. It could not be for you, you said, you had to remain the psychologist-the person who understood the process.
I said then that the thing to be done was to enable the world to understand the process also without their getting the notion that they had the Master caged as it were at their beck & call.
They had to think of him as a pillar of fire perpetually moving on and forever out of human grasp.
Yes, you said it was something like that. Perhaps it cannot yet be done.
As you talked I grew more and more aware of the immeasurability of the ideas which are filling you.
You said they had the shadow of eternity upon them and I could feel the truth of it. ~The Red Book, Introduction, Page 214.