The Red Book

Greetings,

The family of Dr. Carl Jung, the famous Swiss psychoanalyst, have decided after years of internal debate to allow the translation and publication of The Red Book.

I visited the Jung Institute in Zurich in the mid-70's when I was on a personal pilgrimage. I wrote about it in A Century Is Nothing.

Jung's incredible work is called The Red Book and is published by W.W. Norton. They are calling it, "the most influential unpublished work in the history of psychology."

It is Jung's inner journey between 1914 and 1930. It contains writings and illustrations detailing his personal struggle with his unconscious.

I've included a couple of links. The first is an in-depth article by Sara Corbett in the NYT.  Read more...

The Rubin Museum of Art in New York will display the original book and conduct a series of discussions and gatherings called The Red Book Dialogues beginning October 19th.

The Philemon Foundation is dedicated to publishing the complete works of C. G. Jung.

In The Red Book  Jung nurtures his "active imagination," facing his fears, demons, protective guardians and the sources of his creativity to interact fully with his unconscious. He confronts all the diverse energies and allows his "experiments" to guide him on his personal path toward individuation. 

Active imagination according to Jung, is "a certain way of meditating imaginatively, by which one may deliberately enter into contact with the unconscious and make a conscious connection with psychic phenomena."

"How did you sleep?"

"Did you dream?"

"Yes. I value my inner life."

Metta.

Visual stories

Greetings,

Here are five excellent photographic sites for your exploration. Enjoy.

burn...

100eyes...

no caption needed...

verve...

magnum...

leica fotografie international...

Metta.

 A resting Buddha in Quanzhou, China.

Andy Warhol

Greetings,

This is from Volume 56, Number 16 - October 22, 2009 issue of The New York Review of Books by Richard Dorment. He reviews three new books about the artist Andy Warhol.

...Warhol asked different questions about art. How does it differ from any other commodity? What value do we place on originality, invention, rarity, and the uniqueness of the art object? To do this he revisited long-neglected artistic genres such as history painting in his disaster series, still life in his soup cans and Brillo boxes, and the society portrait in Ethel Scull Thirty-Six Times. Though Warhol isn't always seen as a conceptual artist, his most perceptive critic, Arthur C. Danto, calls him "the nearest thing to a philosophical genius the history of art has produced."

...Warhol's friend Henry Geldzahler, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, recognized that the artist's two great innovations were "to bring commercial art into fine art" and "to take printing techniques into painting. Andy's prints and paintings are exactly the same thing. No one had ever done that before. It was an amazing thing to do."

...As Danto explains in his brilliant short study of Warhol, the question Warhol asked is not "What is art?" but "What is the difference between two things, exactly alike, one of which is art and one of which is not?"

NY Review of Books. Read more...

Andy Warhol Museum...

"I don't know where the artificial stops and the real starts." - Andy Warhol

Metta.

Life > Logic

Greetings,

Lover of numbers, mathematics, and logical contradictions. Life is a paradox. We are a metaphor. How's it feel to be a metaphor, contemplating perception and sensation? Are we overwhelmed by the perceptual data flow?

Look around. You'll see, observe many humans completely insane with their perceptual overload. Their hard wired receivers are overloaded with INCOMING data. It's scary, downright frightening. Pure fear. 

Zombies and automatons. Willing slaves to their personally created hell on earth. Their want. Their perpetual state of being distracted. It's all they know, this life of distractions. 

I'm having coffee yesterday with a very intelligent friend. We hadn't seen each other for six weeks. She kept pulling her cell out of her pocket. Reading the screen. Texting someone. Out there. I didn't say a word. I stopped talking when she did this. I just observed her behavior. She never said, "Excuse me." 

Must be really important I figured.

Can you imagine how she may have felt if, during our short time together I said, "Excuse me but you are really boring me. I can't stand it. I need to text someone. I need to use my phone to connect with someone who is not here but I really wish they were because you are boring me."

Text me baby. Tell me about your situation. Your sweet distraction. Text me your insecurity and loneliness. 

Speaking of scary, what's scary is seeing all the crazy Ha Noi motorcycle drivers texting while they zoom along narrow crowded streets in heavy traffic. Talk about a logical death wish.

Text this: Meditate on the complete cessation of your perception. Of your sensation. Poof! You disappear into bliss. No time, no boundaries.

Maybe it's not the answers we need to ask but the questions we need to know. All this.

"If you don’t know much about infinity, for instance, you are invited to check in to “Hilbert’s Hotel” — which, with its infinite number of rooms, can miraculously accommodate additional guests even when it’s completely full."

LOGICOMIX

Written by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou. 

Illustrated by Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna

Read more...

It all adds up.

Metta.