Carl Jung, The Red Book, "Imitation of Christ"??
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Dear reader, please manage your instinctive hatred of all things Christ for five minutes to see what is actually written here. This reflects Jung's personal spiritual journey, not yours.
But if I am to truly understand Christ, I must realize how Christ actually lived only his own life, and imitated no one. He did not emulate any model.
If I thus truly imitate Christ, I do not imitate anyone, I emulate no one, but go my own way, and I will also no longer call myself a Christian. Initially, I wanted to emulate and imitate Christ by living my life, while observing his precepts. A voice in me protested against this and wanted to remind me that my time also had its prophets who struggle against the yoke with which the past burdens us. I did not succeed in uniting Christ with the prophets of this time. The one demands bearing, the other discarding; the one commands submission, the other the will. How should I think of this contradiction without doing injustice to the either? What I could not conjoin in my mind probably lends itself to living one after the other.
Carl Jung. The Red Book: A Reader's Edition. p. 332.
Two things:
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He seems to describe his idea of "imitating Christ" in a thoroughly Thelemic fashion.
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His description of not being able to "conjoin" Christ with the prophets of his time (read: Nietzsche) but having instead to "[live] one after the other," seems to express, imperfectly, the concept of walking in one's True Will - alternating back and forth between the expression of Chesed and Geburah according to one's Will in the moment.
Thoughts?
Expected vitriol?
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Expected V.I.T.R.I.O.L. indeed!
I agree with him: there are different kinds of imitation. He could simply repeat the actions of his role model, or he could repeat that which originated the actions of his role model, i.e. doing his True Will. The latter is what I would call to "truly imitate Christ".
I wonder who those "prophets of this time" were. Not sure he was referring to Nietzsche, or at least not solely to him, as he used the word "prophets" (plural).Oh, and I don't hate Christ. Neither did Crowley, as he expressed in his Confessions:
"I did not hate God or Christ, but merely the God and Christ of the people whom I hated."
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I think about this frequently. Jung was highly fascinated by the Nag Hammadi Codex after it was discovered. If you haven't checked it out yet, I highly recommend it.
In the Gospel of Thomas (perhaps one of the most popular writings in the Codex), the figure of Christ describes Thelemic ideology well before Crowley's time. So much so that more than a few in my life have argued Thelema is just an updated form of Christianity. The Gospel of Thomas includes descriptions by Christ that we are to discover our own unique connection to divinity, live in relationship to that divinity, and ignore those who claim to know better. Christ calls for a very personal relationship with the divine that does not require one to practice Biblical exegesis, or that strange spell "in Jesus's Name..." that the Church so adamantly grasps to. It is no wonder the Codex was hidden at the onset of Christian imperialism.