Seeing the Light, Speaking like a Poet: Alain Forget and Other Mystical Experiencers

At the 2016 Science of Consciousness Conference in Tucson, AZ, I saw a presentation by Dr. Peter Fenwick, an NDE researcher at Cambridge. Dr. Fenwick had been studying the French mystic, Alain Forget. Fenwick had filmed observable globules of light floating around a room, as Forget taught meditation to his students. As I said in my last post, light phenomena are known to be associated with both death and mystical experiences. Forget, however,  has the ability to give light to his students, who report feeling an energy opening their hearts, according to Fenwick.

Hyperscanning of Forget’s brain and a student showed very high gamma waves in the left posterior area of the brain and beta waves spreading out from the temporal lobes.  High gamma indicates heightened perception and beta indicates normal awake alertness. Fenwick said Forget was clearly driving the student’s brain with his own. However, if Forget wore goggles, the light connection failed, showing the effect had something to do with his eyes.

Fenwick is not alone in his endeavor to understand light phenomena. After the presentation, a young researcher from neuroscientist Michael Persinger’s Canadian lab came to the microphone. She said her boss was doing studies on light transfer as well. An Indian man also came forward, claiming such non-local events can be produced even at great physical distances.

In 1996, Dr. Fenwick wrote a book, The Truth in the Light, about people being enveloped in light and seeing beautiful colors, encountering a presence, hearing a voice, or encountering visible “spirits” during Near Death Experiences (NDEs). During his Tucson presentation, he claimed experiencers have no privileged age range; religious belief is not important; they see beautiful landscapes and hear heavenly music with high “emotional quality” showing “strong involvement of the right hemisphere.” NDErs mostly see relatives, even if they didn’t know they were dead, and always in their prime. Sometimes, a “Being of Light” sends the experiencer back to life careening through a tunnel.

Fenwick mentioned that Forget had written a book, How to Get Out of This World Alive, which I have now read. Fenwick says in his foreword: “Alain Forget is one of the leaders of a new wave of philosophers who, through working on themselves, using the tools bequeathed to us by the ancient Masters, have achieved a breakthrough in his experience of consciousness (14).” You can see Forget being interviewed by the patient and curious Iain McVay on Conscious.tv. Forget presents as a quite self-assured individual who has studied with great masters and read the works of mystics past.

Forget had his first mystical experience as a young man of 25 while sitting in Chartres Cathedral. Going to sacred places to read metaphysical texts and meditate silently was his practice. On this occasion, awakened by the notion that he was not his thoughts or emotions, Forget became “one with life and free of fear.” He claimed, in a Jungian way, he had dismantled his shadow and opened up his soul. With thought and desires gone, light appeared. He could now help others attain “a state of consciousness that transcends time and space and transmit energy that has a power to accelerate their evolution (17).” Another mystical event at 39 removed all thought and further awakened him to the need to drill into his/our repressed layers and develop a body of energy, that is, of light. Forget claimed he could turn his energetic state on or off at will to operate in the world.

Coincident with my study on  poets, Evelyn Underhill, in her 1911 classic, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness, claimed that visionaries, poets and saints find the “reality behind the veil (4).” This singular reality is Absolute: senses are “fused into a single and ineffable act of perception, and colour and sound are known as aspects of one thing (7).” By altering their consciousness, they “apprehend a deeper reality . . . unrelated to human speech,” which can only be expressed as poetry (31).  “‘How glorious,’ says the Voice of the Eternal to St. Catherine of Siena, ‘is that soul which has indeed been able to pass from the stormy ocean to Me, the Sea Pacific, and in that Sea, which is Myself, to fill the pitcher of her heart (37).’” Underhill showed that with light and heart entwined, union with “the One” becomes an “ineffable illumination of pure love (41).” St. Augustine too saw “the light that never changes” with the “mysterious eye of the soul,” as “primarily a movement of the heart.”

Here, Underhill is particularly clear about the unconscious aspect of creativity:

In the poet, the musician, the great mathematician or inventor, powers lying below the threshold, and hardly controllable by their owner’s conscious will, clearly take a major part in the business of perception and conception. In all creative acts, the larger share of the work is done subconsciously: its emergence is in a sense automatic. This is equally true of mystics, artists, philosophers, discoverers, and rulers of men. The great religion, invention, work of art, always owes inception to some sudden uprush of intuitions or ideas for which the superficial self cannot account . . . this is ‘inspiration’; the opening of the sluices, so that those waters of truth in which all life is bathed may rise to the level of consciousness . . . behind the world of sense (63).

She was also very poetic herself:

“[The self] has, it seems, certain tentacles which, once she learns to uncurl them, will stretch sensitive fingers far beyond that limiting envelope in which her normal consciousness is contained, and give her news of a higher reality than that which can be deduced from the reports of the senses. The fully developed and completely conscious human soul can open as an anemone does, and know the ocean in which she is bathed. This act, this condition of consciousness, in which barriers are obliterated, the Absolute flows in on us, and we, rushing out to its embrace, “find and feel the Infinite above all reason and above all knowledge,” is the true “mystical state (51).”

Underhill says mysticism is a dissociative state of consciousness that can be attained through self-hypnosis, dancing, music or other exaggerations of natural rhythm, as Persinger has suggested. It can also happen inadvertently, as I  experienced myself on one wonderful day in San Antonio, TX. With thought gone and and all of my senses titillated at once, I took a brief dip into the borderless bliss of Nirvana.

But, as with poets, mystics did not always experience bliss. Sometimes they were plunged into the so-called “dark night of the soul.” In both cases this would seem to indicate bipolar disorder, with a switch between negative right and positive left voices and visions, sometimes accompanied by a sudden inability to read (393). Some mystics, like Joan of Arc or Muhammad, were not literate from the start. It seems that the inability to read or write may open a space in heart and mind for intuitions of genius to enter unheralded as voices from a "holy" Other, especially in a solitary environment accompanied by deprivations.

Underhill’s female saints often used food deprivation to attain ecstatic states. Mechthild of Magdeburg, a 13^th century saint who wrote "The Flaming Light of the Godhead," and Catherine of Siena, whose only food was the communion host, are two examples. Beyond starvation, Underhill emphasized that "reality present[ed] itself to them under abnormal conditions . . . [t]hanks to their peculiar mental make up," citing Mme Guyon and St. Teresa along with William Blake in 'Milton' and 'Jerusalem.'" The very tenor and tone of mystical language, she added, "no less than musical and poetic perception, tends naturally . . . to present itself in rhythmical periods: a feature which is also strongly marked in writings obtained in the automatic state (80)." Mystics must have "a nervous organization of the artistic type (91)." She also identified their ability to feel a sense of presence long before Michael Persinger’s studies (242). Finally, "Over and over again they return to light-imagery (249)."

In my book, I call this "nervous organization" an enhanced right hemisphere, where language is either right dominant or bilateral, regardless of handedness. Illumination, so-called because mystical knowledge and light come to the fore, occurs following synchronization of the hemispheres and may involve a sense of presence. St. Teresa sensed the presence of Jesus on her right side, but saw a vision of a small male angel on her left side, who thrust a long spear of gold into her heart and entrails, leaving her "on fire with a great love of God (295)." The left hemisphere offered the image of Jesus, while the angel from the right tortured her into ecstasy.

In both poets and mystics, we see a common thread: early childhood trauma, atypical lateralization, voracious reading habits in search of high significance, deprivations, difficulties, mental exhaustion, with verbal expression sometimes produced in dissociative states of consciousness. Alain Forget, despite his assured countenance, is no exception. He was an only child who lost his mother at 18 months and his father at 9 years old. Watching him speak in the interview, we see him favoring his left hand, then his right, but mostly using both at once. He has a long straight brow line more to the left, showing enhanced right dominance. His ease of entering mystical states is in itself a prime qualification for an atypical mind.

Why does Forget call his book, How to Get Out of This Life Alive? He says from the very start that “As long as there is death, there is fear. / Only victory over death will make fear die (3).” The method of attaining this victory is through the Four D’s: Distancing, Discernment, Disidentification and Discrimination. As Dr. Fenwick describes in his introduction to the book, the process requires a dismantling of the ego through attentiveness, introspection, letting go, and deep self-questioning. In Forget’s words, practicing the Four D’s allows you to transcend the world of  “polar opposites” (conscious/unconscious) to become pure consciousness (20).

Forget says our shadow begins with birth trauma, as we leave the undifferentiated state in the maternal womb. He adds on the negative effect of early traumatic experience on the developing brain, just as Allan N. Schore did in Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self. As I found in my poets, loss of a parent, parental attachment issues and/or a genetic predisposition to emotional disorder can alter the brain. Dissociative selves arise from painful experiences. Forget claims that by overcompensating for pains inflicted, we trigger anxiety. What is his simple formula for overcoming the darkness? Focus on three separate sensory fields at once; for instance, feel your feet on the ground, listen to the sound of birds in the trees, and look at a tree to detach from fearful thoughts and feelings.

Forget also recommends 1) a regular practice of silence—30 minutes on an empty stomach each day; 2) balancing one’s masculine side (left brain) and feminine side (the creative and intuitive aspects of the right brain, as he puts it); 3) as you let go of anxiety,  you sense that psychological time is an illusion; bad behavior patterns dissolve and you now feel consciousness as energy (69). Letting go of the gods of yore, you can perceive them rather as quantum, magnetic, electromagnetic and electrochemical fields. Consciousness, he says, has now evolved into an energetic state.

“We are all a mixture of light and dark," he says (153). By dismantling the shadow, you “transmute it bit by bit into a body of light (145).” Can anyone develop a soul, a body of light? Categorically, no: 

“When you come into this world, you have the potential to crystallize a diamond to get out of it alive. It is up to you to develop it. If the day you die, this crystallisation has not gained sufficient substance, everything will dissolve in the collective unconscious. But when your soul reaches a certain power level, you leave the archetypes of this planet behind and your psychic destiny becomes cosmic (150).”

Consciousness at the Quantum Level

In April, I attended my fourth Science of Consciousness Conference (TSC). Sitting near a waterfall behind the conference hotel one day, I asked a woman nearby about the timing of an evening event. She noted my name tag identifying me as an author and asked me what I had written. I told her about my book, In Their Right Minds: The Lives and Shared Practices of Poetic Geniuses, and she told me she wanted to write a book. When I mentioned that she might talk to my editor who was attending the conference, she said, “The universe brought us together to convey this information.”

 Now, what is more likely: with so many authors at the conference peddling their books, there was a greater than average chance she would meet someone with this information; or, had the universe conspired to bring us together for that hillside moment?

I’ve been moving in mystical arenas for some time. It started with my oneness experience in San Antonio, TX, where, standing awestruck in the Spanish market, awash in foreign, sights, sounds and smells, I lost my sense of individual identity and felt ultimate bliss. Only one word seemed sufficient to describe it: Nirvana. My next moment brought terror. After a dear friend claimed to be channeling an angel in my backyard, I read a book on dissociative identity disorder late into the night. Finally asleep, I was awakened by a dream image of a patient lying on a psychiatrist’s couch. With eyes rolling, mouth neon-lit, a Darth Vader-like voice shouted out: “Freud only got it half right! Read the two Hyperion poems!

In my book, I describe how this enigmatic message led me to Jung and Keats, along with an exploration of paranormal connections in poets of genius and their great creativity. My book brought me an invitation to a symposium on “Further Reaches of the Imagination” at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, CA. Here, assembled scholars told tales of bizarre, unexplainable phenomena in their lives. I recounted my San Antonio experience and how I had returned to the same spot to recapture it and, sadly, NADA happened this time. They all shouted out at once: “You forgot to lick the blue water ice!” Indeed, that final element, that I had theorized in a paper submitted before the conference, had possibly tipped me into a state of synchronized brain hemispheres and supplied the key to unlock cosmic consciousness.

Now at the Science of Consciousness Conference, my former experiences, Esalen, and uncanny science all seemed to meet up. Garry Nolan, a physicist participating at Esalen had claimed that the time-space continuum could speak to us at the cellular level, if we have the proper antenna. He had been working with Dean Radin, who would also be speaking at the Consciousness Conference on remote viewing. Apparently, only one in a thousand can do it. Garry had also mentioned Marjorie Woollacott’s book, Infinite Awareness: The Awakening of a Scientific Mind (Rowman & Littlefield; Oct 15, 2015), which describes her conversion from pure neuroscientist to a believer in so much more by the touch of a guru during a meditation session. Not remembering Garry’s reference to Dr. Woollacott, I was now sitting right in front of her at a morning workshop in Tucson.

                               

But, here’s where it gets really interesting. All signs at the Consciousness Conference were tying anomalous events to hard science. First, let’s consider the claims of spirit mediums. Arnaud Delorme judged mediumship to be an altered state of consciousness. Julia Mossbridge had a model of mind that especially spoke to me: the non-conscious mind is actually the puppet master controlling the more limited conscious mind. Whereas the conscious mind does not normally access future events, precognition and presentiment are “fast-thinking, system one processes” the non-conscious mind uses to prepare us for the future. It is in fact a survival mechanism. I thought back to my precognition as a young college student on a park bench who got the startling precognition that I would marry a guy who happened to be walking by at the time. Indeed, I did marry him. My future had been preordained or in some sense already existed.

I had read medium researcher Julie Beischel's book, Investigating Mediums, before coming to the conference. She was too sick to attend, so her husband stepped in for her. In her book, she cites the possible role of the right hemisphere in mediumship and references its higher level of negative emotions, which I say definitely points to the right hemisphere. One of the mediums she tested noted that her energy shifted and came in on the left. Julie says trauma is always a part of the mediums’ mix, as I do in my research on poets, along with the role of maternal attachment and loss.

In the Unity of Consciousness workshop, Joran Josipovic explained that the right angular gyrus integrates body mapping, so that people with injury to this part of the brain have mystical experiences since they cannot feel their bodies. He also differentiated high entropy versus low entropy states in the brain: the former characterizes psychedelic states, infant consciousness, REM sleep and dreaming, NDE’s, magical thinking and temporal lobe epilepsy, all of which produce divergent thinking and creativity.

Stu Hameroff, an anesthesiologist, professor, and original founder of the Science of Consciousness Conference along with David Chalmers, believes the brain evolved to feel good. Here’s a piece he wrote that explains his thesis in simple terms:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stuart-hameroff/darwin-versus-deepak-whic_b_7481048.html

Deepak Chopra gave an amazing talk on the Conscious Universe. He believes EVERYTHING is conscious. Body/Mind should be seen as a unified wholeness of experience. The true self generates qualia (our perceptions of what’s out there). Consciousness is a formless, primitive, ontological entity existing at the quantum level. He also has a new book out on how we can change our genes.

Rudolph Tanzi, who co-authors books with Deepak, had good news about Alzheimer’s disease. The bad news is that the disease is found in 40-50% of people over 85 and that it starts in your 40’s. Tangles in the neurons produce a neuro-inflammatory response; inflammation, not the tangles, is the real issue. The good news is that they’re working on a way to stop the degenerative process before it starts. He mentioned Cat’s claw extract (Cognitive Clarity TM), which is now available; meditation, exercise, and diet (less red meat), along with 7-8 hours of sleep each night to clear out the brain.

Time and consciousness melded into one big theme at the conference. As I’m running out of time (and space), I’ll be brief. Reality, it seems, is a handshake between waves going forward and backward in time. Quantum entanglement occurs in time. The most important function of the brain is to predict the future. The quantum field is in some sense eternal. We exist in electromagnetic light fields. The brain is an electric organ and a pattern detector.

An aside about mentions of Julian Jaynes, whose theory on the right hemisphere was an early inspiration to me: a graduate student at Columbia began his talk citing Jaynes’s book, without verifying or attesting to his theory, and ended his talk referencing Jaynes. Before coming to the conference I had read Allan Combs’s Consciousness Explained Better (a riposte to Daniel Dennett’s early salvo called Consciousness Explained (1992)). Combs opens his own book with Jaynes's initial paragraph, in all its metaphoric musing and alliterative allusions, from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. I sought out Combs at the conference to tell him how much I enjoyed his very readable book. He waxed elegiac on Jaynes, not for his theory so much as for the beauty of the writing, considering it the best of its kind in the 20th century.

Final quips and quotes of note: Mental health issues arise from problems in time and space, problems distinguishing self from other. The grandfather of all the senses is the basic tendency to either approach or avoid. Is this good for me or bad for me? Self-preservation asks us to avoid, while self-development suggests we adapt. The Self is both part and whole and when we have no body to maintain we feel bliss (remember that in a Oneness experience we lose our sense of the body’s limits). Our prefrontal lobes are not totally developed until our 20’s and consciousness narrows as a function of age. As we know more, we see less. Rat studies show that the brain is hyperactive in the dying process as it is trying to save the heart in the absence of oxygen. Serotonin surges. These two findings might account for NDEs. Only 5 % of people survive heart attacks and 20 % of them have NDEs. Light is associated with death, mystical experiences and gurus, like Alain Forget, who gives light energy to open the hearts of his students, claiming he is multi-dimensional when he does it. I felt energy pouring out from my heart in my spontaneous San Antonio experience and saw sparks of light spreading out seemingly infinitely beyond me.

It seems I had come to the right place at the right time to get answers to the mysteries of my own heart and mind in a throng of like-minded folks dedicated to understanding consciousness. We are singular and infinite all at once, both awaiting spontaneous gifts of knowledge and struggling hard to make sense of our and others' experiences. I should add that there was a lot of support for belief in reincarnation amongst the presenters.

“In all chaos there is cosmos, in all disorder, a secret order.” C.G. Jung

 “Heaven lies about in our infancy. Shades of the prison house begin to close upon the growing boy.” Wordsworth

“The painter has the Universe in his mind and hands.” Leonardo da Vinci

The Red Book and the Left / Right Emotional Divide

I first bought the large edition of Jung’s long-awaited tome with its magnificent facsimiles of artwork and calligraphy. Both mesmerized and bewildered, I tried to read Sonu Shamdasani's introduction at the back of the book, but it was too large to be functional. Finally, I learned that A Reader's Edition existed. This was manageable and utterly essential to marking passages in the text and taking notes on Shamdasani's invaluable introduction and footnotes. As Shamdasani says, everything Jung ends up saying in future books did indeed come out of this early hallucinatory experience which began during the same time that André Breton and his Surrealist circle were experimenting with their own automatisms and Frederic Myers, Théodore Flournoy and Pierre Janet were studying famous spirit mediums. W.B. Yeats was engaged in séances with his wife, George, as his medium and Jung had a copy of the resulting text: A Vision. The paranormal was in the air and spirit contact was actively pursued.

As I attempted to show in my book, In Their Right Minds: The Lives and Shared Practices of Poetic Geniuses, not everyone has the ability to receive visions, make a planchette move over a Ouija Board, or get answers in a séance. It requires an atypical mind with enhanced right-hemispheric functioning and a partner. Jung fits the mold. First, he had a genetic predisposition to internal division. His mother had two personalities, No. 1 and No. 2; his grandfather, and his cousin, whose séances and splits he studied and encouraged, had the same dissociative tendencies. As a young boy, Jung felt divided between a depressive lonely self and a spirit from an earlier historical period. At the environmental level, Jung suffered from early maternal attachment issues that have been shown to presage a split personality resembling schizophrenia, but more rightly termed dissociation.

On a grander scale, the impending World War threatened his psyche. He had horrific precognitive visions in tandem with his professional break with Freud and an extra-marital relationship with Toni Wolff, who lived in his house as a second wife and shared merged dream states and fantasies with him.* Including his professional interest in troubled minds, we can understand why he felt compelled to write, in painstaking calligraphy, in Latin and German, the words he heard; then illustrated them with brightly colored, tightly controlled, symbolic imagery. As a female voice told him, it was not science, it was art. Further, it was art in service to a suppressed conscious mind.

Jung himself said he felt threatened with madness.** Environmental circumstances reinforced his intention to explore his own psyche through visions and imaginary dialogues. Based on my research into the minds of poetic geniuses, I would say Jung was predisposed to dissociate because of his bilateral brain organization, with neither side dominant, as environmental stressors pushed him over the edge. His use of right-hemispheric poetic writing and highly symbolic, vertically oriented, left-hemispheric painting helped him regain his equilibrium. Both highly verbal and artistic, he retained a helping figure, Philemon, who walked and talked with him, until he was no longer needed. Michael Persinger associates a sense of presence with synchronous activation of both hemispheres.

One of Jung’s early patients provides evidence of a how this type of mind might work. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, written by Aniela Jaffé using Jung’s notes, much of which ended up on the cutting room floor, we learn of a female patient who heard voices. She described a voice in the middle of the thorax as ‘God’s voice.’ Her other voices were distributed on both sides of her body. The ‘divine’ voice commanded that Bible chapters be assigned before each therapeutic session followed by a test. After six years of therapy, the voices ‘had retired to the left half of her body, while the right half was free of them (127).'" Both sides could speak, with more negativity coming from the right hemisphere; but the left hemisphere, focused on reading and reciting, had healed.





Neuropsychologist D. W. Harrison, writing in 2015, confirms that hallucinations experienced on the left side of the body are negative and coming from the right hemisphere; those experienced on the right are coming from the positive left hemisphere (the proverbial demon on one shoulder, the angel on the other). While writing The Red Book, Jung referred to left- versus right-sided visions. For instance, he describes a vision of a winged being sailing across the sky, coming from the right (= LH provenance), a guru with superior insight, as Shamdasani described him. Jung maintained his therapeutic practice and professional and family activities, retiring to his study in the evenings to engage with his voices and visions.

Even as a child, Jung had been a voracious reader. So, it is not surprising that his readings entered into the dramas he evoked through “active imagination.” Shamdasani traces these influences very well, which included the Bible, Swedenborg, Nietzsche and Dante, in his footnotes to The Red Book. Jung admired art as well. William Blake was an influence, although Jung criticized his predecessor's drawings as artistic rather than an “authentic representation of unconscious processes (Letters 2. Pp. 513-14).” Jung also admired Odilon Redon’s symbolist paintings. The Basilica of Sant'Apollinare in Ravenna, Italy, had a strong impact on Jung (as it had on poet and occultist James Merrill who spent 20 years in Ouija Board sessions with his partner, David Jackson). The frescos and mosaics there translated into Jung’s own “strong colors, mosaic-like forms, and two dimensional figures without the use of perspective (34)."

Parapsychological events occurred in Jung’s house that affected everyone in it. In Shamdasani’s account, Jung’s son raved in his sleep and couldn’t wake up. Asked for paper and colored pencils, he drew “a man angling for fishes with hook and line in the middle of the picture.” Again the left/right emotional divide is evident: on the left was the Devil saying something to the man, but on the right was an angel. Two of Jung’s daughters “thought they had seen spooks in their rooms.” The next day Jung wrote his “Sermons to the Dead,” claiming in Memories, Dreams, Reflections that the haunting stopped as soon as he picked up the pen.

Parapsychological events often occur when a strong emotion trapped inside needs to come out. Poltergeist phenomena in adolescent children have been described this way. Both St. Augustine and French writer George Sand claimed to have heard the words "Tolle, Lege" [Pick up and read] from an external voice, leading to a change in life course. She also had an ambiguously gendered inner figure named Corambé with whom she communicated as a child. This figure disappeared after she wrote her first book in a dissociative state. In times of great stress, inner voices can save a suffering soul. What they and we are all seeking is meaning and a way forward in difficult times.

Were Jung's Sermons “a curiosity from the workshop of the unconscious,” as he would later say, or was there a deeper meaning? What was the strong need to get those words and images on paper? And who was their author? Shamdasani says Jung’s “I" was the author in the "Black Books" section, but it was Philemon in “Scrutinies.” In some sections of Liber Novus it is was the serpent or the bird. The overall theme was “how Jung regains his soul and overcomes the contemporary malaise of spiritual alienation. This is ultimately achieved through enabling the rebirth of a new image of God in his soul and developing a new worldview in the form of a psychological and theological cosmology (Shamdasani 48).” In every poet I have studied who held dissociative discourses with "spirits," the end result included a "new" religion.

In my view, as reason gives way to the irrational, a deeper associative meaning can be uncovered, suggesting, in modern neuroscientific terms, a shutdown of the prefrontal cortex where conscious thought is processed, now expressed through symbols and imagery. The logical left hemisphere is giving way to the mythopoeic right that has similarly informed important religious figures in the past.

Was Jung mad? Richard Hull, Jung’s translator, wrote to William McGuire, who represented Princeton UP papers, saying but for Jung's “hammer[ing] out his experience into a system of therapy that works,” he’d be considered “as mad as a hatter.” Further, “[t]he raw material of his experience is Schreber’s*** world over again; only by his powers of observation and detachment, and his drive to understand, can it be said of him what Coleridge said in his notebooks of a great metaphysician . . . He looked at his own Soul with Telescope / What seemed all irregular, he saw & shewed to be beautiful Constellations & he added to the Consciousness hidden worlds within worlds (March 17, 1961, Bollingen archives, Library of Congress). The citation from Coleridge was indeed used as a motto for Memories, Dreams, Reflections (see fn. 257, p. 94 in The Red Book: A Reader’s Edition).”

By Liber Secundus, Jung seems sure of the Power of the Divine Word that others before him had also received. Writing down the Divine Word protects against “the daimons of the unending, which tear at your soul and want to scatter you to the winds. You are saved if you can say at last: that is that and only that. You speak the magic word, and the limitless is finally banished. Because of that men seek and make words (250).”

From my vantage as a reader of Jung’s text, it often does sound mad, with anomalous sense impressions common to psychotic episodes, including his recognizing highly significant messages that nonetheless cannot be understood because they are seen in unusual scripts such as hieroglyphics. The frightening sound of flapping bird wings as well as seeing “shadow forms” are also common. The accent on negativity that Jung hears in his left ear with the word “Misfortune” also shows right-hemispheric provenance. When the God calls to him, the voice is coming from both sides, which Jung interprets as a middle road; but more likely, it is a synchronization of the hemispheres known to occur in oneness experiences, where a sense of self is lost or the self and the divine are felt as coterminous. The very sense that he is working “against will and intention,” manipulated by an external source, is telling.

Underneath all of the imagery and voices, three things shine through to me: his mother complex, from which he needed to be freed; his conflicted relationship to his pastor father's religion; and the legitimization of his extra-marital relationship with Toni Wolff. When Elijah gives Salome to Jung in The Red Book, he says, “For God’s sake, what should I do with Salome. I am already married and we are not among Turks (435).” Yet a dream will convince him to enter into a sexual relationship with her. The fact that “[a] turbaned Mohammad appears the fourth night after Philemon went away, wearing a long coat and a turban, claiming to bring ‘the bliss of paradise, the healing fire, the love of women (539)” is as telling as Jung’s interpretation of “Philemon’s words that I must remain true to love to cancel out the commingling that arises through unlived love. I understood that the commingling is a bondage that takes the place of voluntary devotion. . . . I had to remain true to love, and, devoted to it voluntarily (540).”

In his epilogue to Liber Novus, Jung wrote that he had worked on the book for 16 years, and then yielded to a study of alchemy, which helped him understand what he had written. He admitted, “To the superficial observer, it will appear like madness. It would also have developed into one, had I not been able to absorb the overpowering force of the original experiences (555).”

A synthesis of supposedly opposing forces occurs in an appendix to Liber Novus: “Logos [male] and Eros [female] are reunited, as if they had overcome the conflict between spirit and flesh. They appear to know the solution. The movement toward the left, which started from Eros at the beginning of the image, now commences from Logos. He starts moving toward the left [the heart side], to complete with seeing eyes what began in blindness (571).”

A final note on the issue of madness: Dirk Corstens, head of the Hearing Voices Network in the Netherlands, does not believe that schizophrenia exists at all; rather, voices are a feature of dissociation, which originates in trauma. The “madness” comes by way of a fearful reaction to the voices. If one engages with the voices, reasons with them, they can be cajoled, tamed, and reduced to harmless or even helping presences. I believe this is what happened in Jung’s case. Through his calligraphy and art, he tamed his mind, bringing about his own healing as well as a system that could and does work for so many others.



*According to Shamdasani's research, while Toni Wolff was in analysis with Jung, she was having incredible fantasies. Jung wrote that "her phantasies entered exactly into my line of thought. Toni Wolff was experiencing a similar stream of images. I had evidently infected her, or was the déclencheur that stirred up her imagination. My phantasies and hers were in a participation mystique. It was like common stream, and a common task [April 1-2, 2011 seminar, Jung Center of Houston]."

**Michael Cornwall believes psychotic episodes should rather be termed spiritual states of emergency better treated with compassionate listening than pharmaceuticals. Paranormal connections such as precognition and voices with important messages are frequently reported in these states.

***Daniel Paul Schreber was a German lawyer and judge who had experienced severe trauma as a child because of his father's onerous child-rearing practices. His brother, under the same regime, committed suicide. Schreber passed through several phases of severe mental illness, hearing voices and developing strange views in a very God-driven narrative, leading to his institutionalization. He was eventually released because of his book, and lived peacefully with his wife for some time. But, when she fell victim to a stroke, he relapsed and spent the rest of his life in the asylum. Freud blamed Schreber's illness on repressed homosexual attraction to his own father. Jung disagreed, ascribing Schreber's case to an identification with female fecundity, as he and his wife had not been able to have children. Childhood trauma and current stressors were certainly behind his relapses. Cruel treatments by the director of the asylum and his wife's lack of visits only contributed to his gender dysphoria and delusions of grandiosity. Apparently, gender identity confusion is fairly common in schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, as well as in dissociative identity disorder. The voices were, in effect, a way to "make sense" of what he was feeling. Similarly to Jung, Schreber described a left ear connection: "inimical souls always aspired towards my head, on which they wanted to inflict some damage, and sat particularly on my left ear in a highly disturbing manner. To his credit, Freud did say that Schreber's delusions were "an attempt at recovery, a process of reconstruction" (see Rosemary Dinnage's introduction to Schreber's book).