In our St. Louis Jung Society Study Group, we are reading Edward Edinger's Lectures on Jung's AION, one of Jung's most obscure and difficult works. Edinger argues that Jung, after his serious health crisis, began writing in a very different style. He no longer cared about making his ideas accessible. Rather, he wrote in the way the material came to him, the way he understood it.
In THE RED BOOK Jung describes an encounter with a wisdom figure who counsels him to understand the nature of gold and to "be like gold." Gold waits to be discovered, never changes its essential nature, remains true whatever the circumstances in which it finds itself. Above all, gold is of the highest value and has been long sought by humankind.
There are nuggets of gold in AION. Retrieving them takes much effort and patience, but the effort does pay off. I come away from our study group meetings with the impression that not understanding much of our text well might actually be a good thing, for it parallels our experience of many things in our lives about which we only have hints and glimmers. One of the lessons I am learning is that there are enough nuggets of pure gold in AION (and in my own life) to keep me digging in a reverential manner.
In THE RED BOOK Jung describes an encounter with a wisdom figure who counsels him to understand the nature of gold and to "be like gold." Gold waits to be discovered, never changes its essential nature, remains true whatever the circumstances in which it finds itself. Above all, gold is of the highest value and has been long sought by humankind.
There are nuggets of gold in AION. Retrieving them takes much effort and patience, but the effort does pay off. I come away from our study group meetings with the impression that not understanding much of our text well might actually be a good thing, for it parallels our experience of many things in our lives about which we only have hints and glimmers. One of the lessons I am learning is that there are enough nuggets of pure gold in AION (and in my own life) to keep me digging in a reverential manner.
