AION - Research in Self Healing

AION is one of Carl Jung's later works and an important stage on the journey towards what I see as his magnum opus: Mysterium Coniunctionis.

Most people find these books "difficult"; they are certainly dense, in the sense of rich, in meaning, with copious notes and a thorough bibliography of the numerous alchemical source texts. You can read a brief summary here but it really doesn't do justice to the complexity of the original text.

Jung's great gift to humanity was to see in alchemy a history of the Western psyche. The alchemical processes become vital as living psychodramas. To understand the processes can give the individual a method to heal the psyche.

The world of alchemical symbols does not belong to the rubbish heap of the past, but stands in a very real and living relationship to our most recent discoveries concerning the psychology of the unconscious. (Mysterium Coniunctionis)

The "magnetism" that Jung discusses in AION is a kind of attraction between the conscious self and the unconscious self - the turning around and looking inwards. Without that very simple first step, the individual has not even started - the prima materia must be acknowledged first - abyssus abyssum invocat is a positive step.

I read all of Jung's works; must be 30 years ago now. They were not so easy to find, and rather expensive, at the time and I ordered them in sequence from the local library. Now it is easier - you can buy them online or find them on z-lib.org. I read them as psychological manuals, not just textbooks, and was thus able to experience the "individuation process", as Jung called it, or "positive disintegration", using Dabrowski's term. I wrote many notebooks, now lost, and it is important to write everything down - your own psychic travelogue.

There is no need for a master - you have everything you need already within you - you are both student and master.

This is actually the position of Dzogchen: your enlightenment is your own and can happen either spontaneously or through practice. All of the literature and the living teachers are there to help you only if you are lost. And even that relationship requires a bit of alchemical magnetism.