Brainstorm

I bought the Red Book not necessarily intending to read the text.

Rather, it offers a record of a psychoanalytic modality, the one that worked for Jung.

I wouldn't expect to get transformative insights just by reading transcripts of sessions of somebody else's psychoanalysis. The only way to get that insight would be to undergo psychoanalysis myself.

"Create your own Red Book..." can be taken literally: get out the pens and inks and create your own illuminated manuscript, your own sacred object.

Although I have not yet finished reading the RED BOOK, I am a good way along. I am great fan of Jung and his work, and have longed for a more sustained look inside this elaborate “secret journal” than the one Laurens van der Post offered in his film biography for the BBC, or the few reproductions in JUNG - WORD & IMAGE. Shamdasani has done a brilliant job editing the translation and the scholarly apparatus that surrounds it - and still I miss some of the same close attention that could have been paid to the images themselves. Jung himself refused to call his lavish paintings and drawings “art” because from his point of view, they were simply clinical records, “not enhanced by any desire for aesthetic effect.” From what I have been able to absorb thus far, the illustrations, (and particularly the illuminated capital letters), are a visual “narrative” that elucidates many of the mysteries of the text.

Years ago I started with "Man and His Symbols." Twenty years
later, I'm near the end of the journey, having absorbed about
as much as my feeble mind can bear. This is what I got out of the
readings.
Jung worked with the Nobel laureate physicist, W. Pauli,
(exclusion principle). They believed that another factor, one
which balances out cause and effect, exists in the space-time
continuum. Jung termed these "meaningful coincidences" - a
"synchronicity principle."
They also agreed that 'number' is the most primal archetype
of order in the human mind, i.e., pre-existent to consciousness.
As Jung said: "it is here that the most fruitful field of
further investigation might be found."

Worth reading:

http://plus.maths.org/issue51/reviews/book1/index.html

The thing that always kept myself close to Jung's work was the uncanny occurrence in my dreams of dream material that would appear in subsequent pages of what book i was reading of his. My Reading of the Red Book has been the same experience. I stop reading at some point and my dream appears in what i read the next day. So the question is why does this happen with some and not with others? It may not be as universal as Jung might have thought. But that it can happen at all is something we have to take enough notice not to dismiss.

Having read almost all of Jung's published works, I have to say that this blogger hasn't even scratched the surface of the concepts and meanings that Jung's Red Book deals with. It is someone laying their self and their sole bare for analysis...Few humans have ever been both this intelligent and this courageous. Read some Jungian psychology that has taken hold and you'll see that his insights are way ahead of his time... really only now beginning to be taken seriously by psychology and philosophy of mind. There's nothing wrong with someone unfamiliar with his work to give impressions/opinions - provided you properly frame your ignorance up-front. Jung certainly did not intend for this to be a "good read." It is intended to be insightful for those with an open mind and an analytical bent.

This book deserved a more intelligent reviewer.