In November 1913, after his break with his one time colleague,
Sigmund Freud, Jung began a personal exploration of the
psyche. He called it his "confrontation with the unconscious", meaning he wilfully entered imaginative or "visionary" states of consciousness. The practice continued intensively from the end of 1913 until about 1917 and then abated by around 1923. Jung carefully recorded his journey of the imagination in six personal journals (referred to as the "
Black Books", so named on account of their black covers). The notebooks provide a dated chronological ledger recording visions and dialogues with his soul. Beginning in late 1914, Jung started to transcribe and illustrate, in manuscript, material from the Black Book journals into his
Red Book, the folio-sized leather-bound illuminated volume he created as a formal record of his journey. Jung repeatedly stated that the visions and imaginative experiences recorded in the Red Book formed the nucleus of all his later works. Jung kept the
Red Book private during his lifetime, allowing only a few family members and associates to read from it. The only part of this visionary material he chose to release in limited circulation was the
Seven Sermons, which he had privately printed in 1916. Throughout his life Jung occasionally gave copies of this small book to friends and students, but it was available only as a gift from Jung himself and never offered for public sale or distribution. When Jung's biographical memoir,
Memories, Dreams, Reflections, was published in 1962,
Seven Sermons to the Dead was included in an appendix. It remained unclear until recently exactly how
Seven Sermons related to the contents of the hidden
Red Book. After Jung's death in 1961, all public access to the
Red Book was denied by his heirs. Finally in October 2009, nearly 50 years after his death, the Jung family relented and released the
Red Book for publication as a
facsimile, to be edited by professor Sonu Shamdasani. Publication revealed that the
Seven Sermons to the Dead was actually the closing pages of the
Red Book. The version transcribed in the
Red Book varies only slightly from the text published earlier in 1916. The difference is that the
Red Book version includes an additional amplifying homily by Philemon (Jung's spirit guide) after each of the sermons. [
The Red Book: Liber Novus, pp. 346–54] The
gnostic author of a commentary on the Sermons,
Stephan A. Hoeller, subsequently asked the editor of
The Red Book, Sonu Shamdasani, to comment on the relationship between the two books, to which he replied that the
Seven Sermons was like an island, whereas the
Red Book was like a vast continent. ==References==