Aion (Collected Works of C.G. Jung Vol.9 Part 2)

That said, _Aion_ is one of Jungs greatest works and is one of the first three that anyone who is new to Jung should start with. The first part deals with Christianity, and the significance of the death of Christ. This is treated as a legitimate, factual historical event, yet it is also explained as a collective pschic phenomenon in the general sense. The middle part of the book deals with ancient alchemy, and the symbolic parallels between alchemy and modern conceptions of psychology. This might sound dull, but trust me - you will be surprised to see the uncanny symbolic parallels between ancient magical practices and the most modern, up to date theories of the psyche. This is discussed at length in the section on the "Two Fishes", which is one of Jungs greatest essays (although quite difficult). The final section deals with quaternity symbolism, and features a wide array of strange diagrams. About 200 pages in, these diagrams will become more frequent, and the reader might get frustrated trying to see the significance of these rudimentary drawings. Personally, my advice is to stop reading after 200 pages. All of the useful essays are contained within these first 200 pages, while the final 50 or so pages contains esoteric essays which can be considered, at best, curiosity pieces for the insatiable, die-hard Jungian. The editiors wisely confined this esoterica to final few pages of the book. This is not to take anything away from the book as a whole. Overall, _Aion_ is extremely profound and insightful, and is a must read for Jungians and non-Jungians alike.

Jung suggests that humans have a psychological makeup that generally exceeds their ability to comprehend it. In this volume he defines and describes these "hidden" aspects of the human psyche, such as: the Ego, the Self, the Shadow, the Anima and others. Jung makes suggestions as to how modern Western humans can discover these unconscious aspects of themselves and how they can be integrated into human consciousness.

This volume hints at a process Jung called individuation, in which the personally unconscious aspects of a human being are united with their normal consciousness, and then this expanded consciousness becomes subservient to a new meta-consciousness, which he called The Self, and which transcends human comprehension, except as an experience. (It is beyond names and forms.) Jung spends a good deal of time describing The Self using Western religious metaphors to make his examples.

Most of Jungs theories have slipped into our collective Western unconsciousness, so that they are now part of our unconscious assumptions, (e.g. projection, shadow, denial, the unconsciousness of our faults) and if you would like to become conscious of these assumptions, a reading of this book might facilitate that experience.

If you are familiar with Jungs work, this will increase your understanding of his concept of the human psyche, its parts and the goal of unification of those parts.