Phew! This one was a travail. All right.
The first section of the book is about Western Religion, which is to say, Jesus. Jung has this habit of getting way too hype about Jesus and alchemy, and then prattling in semisensical circles until he hits the end of a chapter, catches his breath, and lapses back into coherence. It is possible I don't care enough about Jesus to properly appreciate these episodes.
I did care about his analysis of the Godhead, and his finally reckoning out what the Holy Spirit is. I was raised Catholic. Have you ever been raised Catholic? Have you ever been a little boy full of weird ideas, deviant impulses, and a tremendous imagination that hungers to comprehend everything, up to and including God? Have you ever asked any question whatsoever to your catechism teachers? In the event you answered "no" to one or more of these questions, let me assure you these people exist only to obfuscate, and also, it is terrible. I've read so heavily on religion that I border on freelance theologian, and up until this book, I've still had no idea what the Holy Spirit is. Carl suggests that God ran the whole creationistic gamut in an effort to express himself in the form of a human, to eventually redeem humanity after balancing out his DID (which Carl tactfully referred to as "antinomy", as God is comprised of a series of contradictions and conflicting beliefs, which I'll explore more when I talk about the Answer to Job.) Yahweh was bowel-clenchingly jealous and insecure back in the Old Testament days, and demanded constant sacrifice and appeasement for his delicate li'l celestial ego. He was also a big fan of genocide upon perceiving an insult. Come New Testament, he took a few steps back, felt bad about the mass slaughter and sadism committed in his halcyon, schizophrenic youth, and decided to redeem everybody by manifesting in the physical form of Jesus the Christ. He did, pissed off the Romans, got tacked up like Christmas tinsel, etc. etc, you know this story. That wasn't just God sacrificing his son, that was God sacrificing himself a la Odin as a means of apology for all the bullshit previously heaped on mankind. The ascension returned him to Heaven, whereupon he will hang out (no pun intended) until the end of days when he will become General Jesus and raise a little Hell. Or banish it, rather, for 1000 years. In the meantime, God is communicating his Godliness into mankind indirectly, via the Holy Spirit, which is sort of like the demiurgic effluvia left over from Creation (initially) and then from the last time God did anything directly (New Testament, potentially Koran). The Godhead can be understood as God the Father, Jesus the Son, and The Holy Spirit the imprecise god-juice that permeates the universe and gives truth to the statement "God is everywhere". Or, for a more modern analogy, God the proton, Jesus the Neutron, and The Holy Spirit the unobservable and theoretical electron cloud surrounding them that actually comprises everything.
Carl talked a lot about making it a quatrain, too, but couldn't seem to be able to decide between Lucifer, Mary, or Sophia. Sophia, for those not well versed in obscure Gnostic conjecture or Biblical euphemism, was potentially the feminine counterpart to Yahweh who was his "daily delight" before the Creation -- contrast with the devil's emanation, Lilith.
The Answer to Job was where we got the psychological profile of Yahweh as uncertain, insecure, dependent, and in constant need of reassurance and approval. His inability to suffer criticism was well established prior, but could no longer be ignored by the innocent Job, a simple shepherd just trying to make it in this workaday world. Lucifer popped up and bet God that Job could be swayed from faith. To prove him wrong, God destroyed Job's life. Killed his flocks, murdered his children, drove his wife away from him, made all his friends turn on him, afflicted him with diseases and sores -- unmade the poor man. Then, taunted him, dared him to critique Him further. Thing is, Job never critiqued him. Jung pulls a handful of quotes from the Bible to help illustrate that Job was a beaten man, grovelling and wormlike, praying for mercy and protection to God FROM the same God, even as this omnipotent maniac had a shouting match with Himself about "WHO'S THE BITCH NOW!" And by Himself, I don't mean a pseudopod thereof, as would've been the case if He had been addressing Lucifer directly since He made Lucifer from Himself, denied him free will, and orchestrated his fall and subsequent antagonism. No, Yahweh yells at no one, as though there were an opponent with any power to challenge him, and projects this on Job, who is cowering in existential terror because everything was already taken from him for no reason and this mad deity still has the damnation card up his sleeve. Job's sycophancy eventually punches through Yahweh's delusional rambling, and He removes the boils and gives him a new wife and flocks. "You'll make new children, they'll be better, in My mercy."
Yeesh.
Carl concludes this 400 page rant with the revelation that God is real, though not in a necessarily Christian sense. He's not real as in a Tall White Sky Man With A Beard Who Will Spank You For Masturbating. He's a phenomenon. God is acknowledged by billions of people, and the thought of Him shapes their behavior. Even if He has no physical form, and never did, he exists as a "psychical event" and, from a psychological perspective, can't be disregarded.
The latter third of the book was about Eastern Religion, and much of it was just Carl checking his privilege about how he can't properly understand the depth of Eastern philosophy and thought, being a European. Still, he was a strong advocate for Zen, which resonated with me. The suggestion was that Eastern vs Western thought could be best summarized with their views of introversion and extraversion. In the West, introversion is frequently viewed as undesirable or maladaptive. Anyone who needs to scamper away, who spurns community to deliberately be a loner, is not to be trusted. Something is wrong, there. They should be out, engaging their peers and the world! In the East, it's seen as the opposite. Those who need the constant chatter of others to cloud their phenomenology are deceiving themselves and filling the void with irrelevant distractions to keep from confronting themselves through honorable contemplation. It's only by looking inward that we can achieve our balance.
I am as Western as they get. I am a big, loud American with a superiority complex and no sense of proportion or moderation. That said, I'm of a mind with the Eastern school of thought. We need to decompress, and to look inward, not necessarily in a spiritual sense but as a means of understanding who and what we really are. If you have doubts vis-à-vis this method's efficacy, refer to the second sentence in this paragraph and then corroborate with the fact I just used fuckin' "vis-à-vis" in an online book review I don't even need to be doing.
The last chapter, Jung talks about the Tao Teh Ching, the book of changes. For the uninitiated, it's basically Chinese tarot cards. You bring a problem or question to the book, you do its little magic trick with a pendulum and it'll point you to one of the pages where you will get a vague answer that will help illuminate and advise your situation. Witchery! Pseudoscientific pap. Sure, sure, sure. Jung did it, and he loved it because it all applied to his situations. At the end he says -- and I paraphrase -- "Anyone with half a brain could step up and say, "Well, Jesus, Carl, of course it seems to apply to your situation, but it's not because it's magic. It's just you projecting your subconscious onto the I Ching." To which I would respond, "Duh! That's sort of the point! I'm a scientist, dude. Think before you talk."
I'll end this with Jung's savage attack on reductionism, which is more or less how he decided to end this giant book:
If [man] is a slave to his quasi-biological credo, he will always try to reduce what he has glimpsed to the banal and the known, to a rationalistic denominator which satisfies only those who are content with illusions. But the foremost of all illusions is that anything can ever satisfy anybody.
That illusion stand behind all that is unendurable in life and in front of all progress, and it is one of the most difficult things to overcome.