THE DESCENT INTO HELL IN MODERN TIMES (1912 TO 2012): RED BOOK AND SAVITRI

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2011

9:30 AM - 1:30 PM

AT THE INSTITUTE

Instructor: RICHARD STEIN, MD

4 Continuing Education Credits approved for MD, PhD, PsyD, MFT, LCSW & RN

“The spirit of the depths is pregnant with ice, fire, and death. You are right to fear the spirit of the depths, as he is full of horror.”

C.G. Jung, “A Descent into Hell in the Future,” The Red Book, p. 238

“I am the victim of titanic ills, I am the doer of demoniac deeds;

I was made for evil, evil is my lot…” Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, p. 507

In the first decade of the 20th Century, there was a general optimism about the future of humanity. Science and reason were emerging as great powers to solve human technical and social problems, and religion was on the decline. Nietzsche had declared that God was dead, Darwin had laid the foundations of evolution and genetics, Marx’s theories were touted as the solution to social injustice, and Freud’s theory of the unconscious revealed the well springs of human behavior. Humankind seemed on the brink of entering a golden age of reason.

Yet there were also uneasy rumblings about the social, artistic, and spiritual developments that were coming with this change in the weltanschauung. Great artists and thinkers were catching glimpses of something dark and destructive in human nature that could not be controlled by the modern mind. If the intelligence and powers once projected on God were no longer external and transcendent, then what of the dark and demonic forces of Satan? If heaven is a projection of human imagination, then what of hell? 

In 1912, as Jung broke away from Freudian psychoanalysis, his personal turmoil led to intuitions of the dark times to come. His visions (1912-13) formed the basis of The Red Book (2009). It begins with an inner conflict between “the spirit of the times” and “the spirit of the depths,” which still speaks to our own problems a century later.

Sri Aurobindo (1872 -1950), though less well known to Western readers, was a contemporary of Jung’s. He was drawn to similar questions about the place of man in the universe, the limits of reason, and the evolutionary demands of the current dilemma. After his graduation from Cambridge University, he returned to India to become a revolutionary writer and the first activist to call for total independence from Great Britain. In 1910 he was dragged from his bed at gunpoint by British agents and jailed for “seditious writings,” a charge punishable by death. His year in an Indian prison, including extensive periods of solitary confinement, was his personal journey into hell as well as a deeper opening to spiritual experiences that changed the direction of his life.

Jung and Sri Aurobindo both foresaw a terrible struggle with evil in the 20th Century, as well as humanity’s redemption through the feminine, the inner life of the soul, and the value of the individual.

In our Saturday seminar, we will examine the confrontation with hell and death in spiritual transformation and look for personal, clinical and collective answers to this ongoing struggle.

RICHARD STEIN, MD, is a psychiatrist and an analyst member of the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. Following a stay in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram (1973-4) he returned to San Francisco where he trained as a Jungian analyst. He has written about Sri Aurobindo, the archetype of initiation, and Jung’s shadow problem, as well as teaching and lecturing regularly in the analytic training and public programs of the Jung Institute and other training centers. He has been in private practice for over 30 years in San Francisco.

4 AMA PRA Category 1 Credits™ are offered for this event.