The Holy Grail of the Unconscious

The New York Times ^ | 16 Sep 2009 | SARA CORBETT

[BGHater]

This is a story about a nearly 100-year-old book, bound in red leather, which has spent the last quarter century secreted away in a bank vault in Switzerland. The book is big and heavy and its spine is etched with gold letters that say “Liber Novus,” which is Latin for “New Book.” Its pages are made from thick cream-colored parchment and filled with paintings of otherworldly creatures and handwritten dialogues with gods and devils.If you didn’t know the book’s vintage, you might confuse it for a lost medieval tome.

And yet between the book’s heavy covers, a very modern story unfolds. It goes as follows: Man skids into midlife and loses his soul. Man goes looking for soul. After a lot of instructive hardship and adventure — taking place entirely in his head — he finds it again.

Some people feel that nobody should read the book, and some feel that everybody should read it. The truth is, nobody really knows. Most of what has been said about the book — what it is, what it means—is the product of guesswork, because from the time it was begun in 1914 in a smallish town in Switzerland, it seems that only about two dozen people have managed to read or even have much of a look at it.

Of those who did see it, at least one person, an educated Englishwoman who was allowed to read some of the book in the 1920s,thought it held infinite wisdom — “There are people in my country who would read it from cover to cover without stopping to breathe scarcely,” she wrote — while another, a well-known literary type who glimpsed it shortly after, deemed it both fascinating and worrisome, concluding that it was the work of a psychotic.

[The Comedian]

From the twisted depths of a psychotic madman comes the ghost-written fictional masterpiece of the decade whose roots and inspirations are as obscured as the background of its supposed author:

[SunkenCiv]

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[Citizen Tom Paine]

if any of you have any spare time just glance through Jung’s book about dreams and you will get some insights about yourself. Your subconscious is really trying to tell you something on occasion. it pays to listen to it. Jung shows that the dreaming process in man, far from being archaic and redundant, was more relevant than ever. When you dream, pay attention to your archetypical dreams.

[Daffynition]

Thanks for posting this article BGH. Good stuff.

Though no sane man will knowingly eat contaminated food,
and will only consume that which he knows to be healthy for his body,
why nothing similar in what he normally serves his mind?
Why do men continue to take in, mentally, rations which are obviously,
to any reasonable observer, without nutritional value?
That is: What they generally accept in their minds as entertainment (even information)
offers no real, new knowledge, no up-lifting or challenging ideas,
and nothing that speaks to the positive future and potential of man.

And yet...out in the public marketplace of man’s mind, there things stand,
and once this is clearly seen and understood aright,
a man can retire his attention — nay, he must retire his attention from this torpid,
redundant, lowest-common-denominator-from-the-past mass spectacle,
and begin to mentally abide solely with himself — and with the stillness
that is now his private feast.