Gnosis
Emergent Wisdom
GNOSIS IS NOT GNOSTICISM
Your Essence by its very nature is Immortal
http://www.american-buddha.com/lit.jungaion.13.htm
It seems to me one more proof of the overweening gnostic tendency in philosophical thinking to ascribe to God qualities which are the product of our own anthropomorphic formulations. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 254-256.
https://www.academia.edu/472446/Becoming_an_Angel_the_mundus_imaginalis_of_Henry_Corbin_and_the_Platonic_path_of_self_knowledge
Corbin differentiates between a universal, representational, abstract knowledge and what he calls a “presential illumination which the soul, as a being of light, causes to shine upon its object. By making herself present to herself, the soul also makes the object present to her... the truth of all objective knowledge is thus nothing more nor less than the awareness which the knowing subject has of itself”.
The Angel
https://www.academia.edu/472446/Becoming_an_Angel_the_mundus_imaginalis_of_Henry_Corbin_and_the_Platonic_path_of_self_knowledge
Which now brings us to the supreme form of manifestation of Absolute Being in this tradition, which is in the Presence of the Angel. Corbin says “The Angel is the face that our god takes for us, and each of us finds his god only when he recognises that face.” Such a recognition takes place in the imaginal world. Far from being creations of human fantasy, the angelic beings exemplify an intensity of ‘real being’ of which we are mere reflections. According to this tradition of prophetic philosophy, the active intellect of God can only be encountered through the Angel of Revelation personified as an individual angelic being – it could be speculated upon as an abstract concept, but only fully understood through personal encounter. Now as we saw in the angelology of Avicenna,each human soul has as its counterpart, a celestial soul, who is the eternal and perfected individuality of the person, their “transcendent celestial self” as Corbin describes it. The question then becomes how to integrate the earthly ego with this soul and through it with its angel, for it is through such an engagement that the individual becomes fully a Person,an integrated whole, connected to the source of Being yet also active in the world. As Tom Cheetham puts it, The connection with the Angel, the archetype in Heaven…guarantees that every being can be more itself, more real, more alive, to the degree that it is in contact with this celestial Presence. 23 Making the connection, however, is not easy; it involves breaking through the boundaries of habitual consciousness and opening up to an intensity of existence normally inaccessible – hence the ecstasies of the mystic, or the divine frenzies of the Platonic lover. We can see the importance of an imaginal cosmology as a container and structure for such an experience, providing a navigation map as it were through from one world to the other. As Cheetham observes, without such a guiding image the struggle to achieve the sacred marriage would be in vain and humanity would collapse into an unredeemed chaos. Corbin uses the image of two poles balancing the celestial and human dimensions of the soul. Without the celestial pole, he says, the terrestrial one would topple and the world would be “completely depolarised in vagabondage and perdition”. 24 Indeed failure to connect with the angel results in very real powers of darkness invading the soul, and here Corbin differs from his contemporary Carl Jung, for he did not see the dark forces a sa shadow to be integrated, but as an enemy to be defeated by the powers of Light. In other respects, we could certainly talk of this coniunctio of human and angelic in terms ofi ndividuation, for the ego must undergo a painful transformation before the encounter with the angel can occur. The metaphors of travelling to the underworld, fighting the dragon, undergoing the alchemical nigredo or submitting to the tasks of Psyche all point to the struggle which precedes the dawn of consciousness which will inevitably entail meeting with the angelic Guide. This guardian angel or daimon will be revealed in a manner of ways, through a dream or visionary experience or a passionate encounter with an embodied human being, but it will only manifest in so far as the soul is ready for it.
The point being that the Angel can only manifest itself through the sensory world of images, be they in a dream, in artistic creations or human persons. This is when they become symbols, and this manifestation implies that a spiritual life in no way turns itself away from the world but on the contrary engages even more fully with it in order to penetrate to its depths. Corbin says The sensible species does not divert from the Angel but leads to the “place” of the encounter, on the condition that the soul seeks the encounter. For there are various ways of turning towards the sensible. There is one that simultaneously and as such turns towards the Angel. What follows is the transmutation of the sensible into symbols… If objects are turned to and venerated without the transcendent vision, or if the transcendent vision is separated from the object and worshipped in isolation from its material embodiment, one falls into the “two-faced spiritual infirmity” of idolatry. As in neoplatonic theurgy, re-investing the sensible world with spiritual properties is essential for their apprehension, and heals the divide between gods and men which is a symptom of literal thinking about the world – or we might say, of diabolic thinking, as opposed to the unifying function of the symbolic.
Conclusion - The importance of Corbin’s work cannot be overestimated in a world which is blinkered and starved of a sense of the sacred, and which tends to reduce the imagination to fantasy and illusion. He gives us a language in which to speak with penetrating insight about the reality of visionary experience, a place to locate divinatory ‘realisation’. But perhaps most importantly he reconnects the reader with what has become popularly known as “the power of now” –through demonstrating that a faithful study of religious experience must involve a move away from the objectifying approach of the historian,towards the position of the mystic for whom it is a living reality. He stands in the line of Platonic interpreters from Plotinus, Iamblichus and Ficino through to the archetypal and depth psychologists Carl Jung and James Hillman, who all “battle for the soul of the world”and for the autonomy of the individual, through a championing of the imagination as a faculty of perception which can penetrate far deeper into the mysterious nature of being than any abstract or conceptual thought.
Therefore I declare that the essential or archetypal body of the faithful adept is itself his Paradise. He himself is inside his own Paradise, in this world already as in the Aevum to come. The archetypal body of the impious man is itself his Gehenna; he dwells in his own Hell, in this world as well as in the world to come. Have you not heard it said that the "clay" out of which the faithful believer is made belongs to the Earth of Paradise, whereas the "clay" of the impious man belongs to the Earth of Gehenna? So that the Earth of Paradise is Paradise, and the Earth of Gehenna is Gehenna. As regards Paradise or Hell, to each one can be given only what he is capable of receiving, and which is of the same nature as the "clay" of which he is made. No one is qualified to taste reward or punishment that surpasses the extent of his fitness. From the First Day, each one has been given the Last Day. If, in the preterrestrial world, the world of seminal reasons, he was a faithful adept, he was then and there worthy of reward, and he was given a proportionate share of the Earth of Paradise. If, on the otherhand, he deserved punishment, he was given a proportionate share of the Earth of Gehenna. --Corbin, Spiritual Body
The Angel
https://www.academia.edu/472446/Becoming_an_Angel_the_mundus_imaginalis_of_Henry_Corbin_and_the_Platonic_path_of_self_knowledge
Which now brings us to the supreme form of manifestation of Absolute Being in this tradition, which is in the Presence of the Angel. Corbin says “The Angel is the face that our god takes for us, and each of us finds his god only when he recognises that face.” Such a recognition takes place in the imaginal world. Far from being creations of human fantasy, the angelic beings exemplify an intensity of ‘real being’ of which we are mere reflections. According to this tradition of prophetic philosophy, the active intellect of God can only be encountered through the Angel of Revelation personified as an individual angelic being – it could be speculated upon as an abstract concept, but only fully understood through personal encounter. Now as we saw in the angelology of Avicenna,each human soul has as its counterpart, a celestial soul, who is the eternal and perfected individuality of the person, their “transcendent celestial self” as Corbin describes it. The question then becomes how to integrate the earthly ego with this soul and through it with its angel, for it is through such an engagement that the individual becomes fully a Person,an integrated whole, connected to the source of Being yet also active in the world. As Tom Cheetham puts it, The connection with the Angel, the archetype in Heaven…guarantees that every being can be more itself, more real, more alive, to the degree that it is in contact with this celestial Presence. 23 Making the connection, however, is not easy; it involves breaking through the boundaries of habitual consciousness and opening up to an intensity of existence normally inaccessible – hence the ecstasies of the mystic, or the divine frenzies of the Platonic lover. We can see the importance of an imaginal cosmology as a container and structure for such an experience, providing a navigation map as it were through from one world to the other. As Cheetham observes, without such a guiding image the struggle to achieve the sacred marriage would be in vain and humanity would collapse into an unredeemed chaos. Corbin uses the image of two poles balancing the celestial and human dimensions of the soul. Without the celestial pole, he says, the terrestrial one would topple and the world would be “completely depolarised in vagabondage and perdition”. 24 Indeed failure to connect with the angel results in very real powers of darkness invading the soul, and here Corbin differs from his contemporary Carl Jung, for he did not see the dark forces a sa shadow to be integrated, but as an enemy to be defeated by the powers of Light. In other respects, we could certainly talk of this coniunctio of human and angelic in terms ofi ndividuation, for the ego must undergo a painful transformation before the encounter with the angel can occur. The metaphors of travelling to the underworld, fighting the dragon, undergoing the alchemical nigredo or submitting to the tasks of Psyche all point to the struggle which precedes the dawn of consciousness which will inevitably entail meeting with the angelic Guide. This guardian angel or daimon will be revealed in a manner of ways, through a dream or visionary experience or a passionate encounter with an embodied human being, but it will only manifest in so far as the soul is ready for it.
The point being that the Angel can only manifest itself through the sensory world of images, be they in a dream, in artistic creations or human persons. This is when they become symbols, and this manifestation implies that a spiritual life in no way turns itself away from the world but on the contrary engages even more fully with it in order to penetrate to its depths. Corbin says The sensible species does not divert from the Angel but leads to the “place” of the encounter, on the condition that the soul seeks the encounter. For there are various ways of turning towards the sensible. There is one that simultaneously and as such turns towards the Angel. What follows is the transmutation of the sensible into symbols… If objects are turned to and venerated without the transcendent vision, or if the transcendent vision is separated from the object and worshipped in isolation from its material embodiment, one falls into the “two-faced spiritual infirmity” of idolatry. As in neoplatonic theurgy, re-investing the sensible world with spiritual properties is essential for their apprehension, and heals the divide between gods and men which is a symptom of literal thinking about the world – or we might say, of diabolic thinking, as opposed to the unifying function of the symbolic.
Conclusion - The importance of Corbin’s work cannot be overestimated in a world which is blinkered and starved of a sense of the sacred, and which tends to reduce the imagination to fantasy and illusion. He gives us a language in which to speak with penetrating insight about the reality of visionary experience, a place to locate divinatory ‘realisation’. But perhaps most importantly he reconnects the reader with what has become popularly known as “the power of now” –through demonstrating that a faithful study of religious experience must involve a move away from the objectifying approach of the historian,towards the position of the mystic for whom it is a living reality. He stands in the line of Platonic interpreters from Plotinus, Iamblichus and Ficino through to the archetypal and depth psychologists Carl Jung and James Hillman, who all “battle for the soul of the world”and for the autonomy of the individual, through a championing of the imagination as a faculty of perception which can penetrate far deeper into the mysterious nature of being than any abstract or conceptual thought.
Therefore I declare that the essential or archetypal body of the faithful adept is itself his Paradise. He himself is inside his own Paradise, in this world already as in the Aevum to come. The archetypal body of the impious man is itself his Gehenna; he dwells in his own Hell, in this world as well as in the world to come. Have you not heard it said that the "clay" out of which the faithful believer is made belongs to the Earth of Paradise, whereas the "clay" of the impious man belongs to the Earth of Gehenna? So that the Earth of Paradise is Paradise, and the Earth of Gehenna is Gehenna. As regards Paradise or Hell, to each one can be given only what he is capable of receiving, and which is of the same nature as the "clay" of which he is made. No one is qualified to taste reward or punishment that surpasses the extent of his fitness. From the First Day, each one has been given the Last Day. If, in the preterrestrial world, the world of seminal reasons, he was a faithful adept, he was then and there worthy of reward, and he was given a proportionate share of the Earth of Paradise. If, on the otherhand, he deserved punishment, he was given a proportionate share of the Earth of Gehenna. --Corbin, Spiritual Body
Carl Jung and his associate G.R.S. Mead worked on trying to understand and explain the gnostic faith from a psychological standpoint. Jung's analytical psychology in many ways schematically mirrors ancient gnostic mythology, particularly those of Valentinus and the 'classic' gnostic doctrine described in most detail in the Apocryphon of John (see gnostic schools).
Jung understands the emergence of the Demiurge out of the original, unified monadic source of the spiritual universe by gradual stages to be analogous to (and a symbolic depiction of) the emergence of the ego from the unconscious
However, it is uncertain as to whether the similarities between Jung's psychological teachings and those of the Gnostics are due to their sharing a "perennial philosophy", or whether Jung was unwittingly influenced by the Gnostics in the formation of his theories. Jung's own 'gnostic hymn', the Septem Sermones ad Mortuos (The Seven Sermons to the Dead), would tend to imply the latter, but after circulating the manuscript, Jung declined to publish it during his lifetime. Since it is not clear whether Jung was ultimately displeased with the book or whether he merely suppressed it as too controversial, the issue remains contested.
Uncertain too are Jung's belief that the gnostics were aware of and intended psychological meaning or significance within their myths.
On the other hand, it is clear from a comparison of Jung's writings and that of ancient Gnostics, that Jung disagreed with them on the ultimate goal of the individual. Gnostics in ancient times clearly sought a return to a supreme, other-worldly Godhead. In a study of Jung, Robert Segal claimed that the eminent psychologist would have found the psychological interpretation of the goal of ancient Gnosticism (that is, re-unification with the Pleroma, or the unknown God) to be psychically 'dangerous', as being a total identification with the unconscious.
To contend that there is at least some disagreement between Jung and Gnosticism is at least supportable: the Jungian process of individuation involves the addition of unconscious psychic tropes to consciousness in order to achieve a trans-conscious centre to the personality. Jung did not intend this addition to take the form of a complete identification of the Self with the Unconscious. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jungian_interpretation_of_religion
“At this level we can hardly attribute anima to the male sex only. The “feminine” and “life” as well as the Chinese, Indian, and Gnostic analogies to anima are relevant to men and women equally. We are now at an archetypal level of anima, the “feminine archetypal image” (CW 9,ii, 41n5), and an archetype as such cannot be attributed to, or located within, the psyche of either sex. We can take this one step further, for we cannot be sure that the archetypes are only psychic, belonging only to the realm of psyche, unless we extend psyche first beyond sexual differences, then beyond the human person and psychodynamics (compensation), and beyond psychology too.” --James Hillman
From thefifthbody.homestead.com - February 11, 2014 12:39 AM The Gnostics recognized the condition of exile as more than an event in history. They saw it as having a profound cosmic and even transcosmic dimension. The human spirit, they held, is quite literally a stranger in a strange land. "Sometimes I feel like a motherless child," laments the American spiritual. The Gnostics would have agreed and might have been tempted to replace "sometimes" with "always".
The exile may indeed find himself in a dark land, but his very awareness of the darkness can also reveal a light on the path to freedom. So also, the awareness of our alieness and recognition of our place of exile for what it is are the first great steps on the path of return. We begin to rise as soon as we realize that we have fallen.
The predicament of exile and alienation is not confined to humanity nor does it originate at the human level. Long before there was a cosmos as we know it, a great drama of exile and return was played out in the story of the divine feminine being named Sophia. Having resided in the lofty height of eternal Fullness...
Mythology as a vital psychic phenomenon is as necessary as it is unavoidable. In this discussion, it seems to me, the gnostic danger of ousting the unknowable and incomprehensible and unutterable God by philosophems and mythologems must be clearly recognized, so that nothing is shoved in between human consciousness and the primordial numinous experience. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 254-256.
Jung understands the emergence of the Demiurge out of the original, unified monadic source of the spiritual universe by gradual stages to be analogous to (and a symbolic depiction of) the emergence of the ego from the unconscious
However, it is uncertain as to whether the similarities between Jung's psychological teachings and those of the Gnostics are due to their sharing a "perennial philosophy", or whether Jung was unwittingly influenced by the Gnostics in the formation of his theories. Jung's own 'gnostic hymn', the Septem Sermones ad Mortuos (The Seven Sermons to the Dead), would tend to imply the latter, but after circulating the manuscript, Jung declined to publish it during his lifetime. Since it is not clear whether Jung was ultimately displeased with the book or whether he merely suppressed it as too controversial, the issue remains contested.
Uncertain too are Jung's belief that the gnostics were aware of and intended psychological meaning or significance within their myths.
On the other hand, it is clear from a comparison of Jung's writings and that of ancient Gnostics, that Jung disagreed with them on the ultimate goal of the individual. Gnostics in ancient times clearly sought a return to a supreme, other-worldly Godhead. In a study of Jung, Robert Segal claimed that the eminent psychologist would have found the psychological interpretation of the goal of ancient Gnosticism (that is, re-unification with the Pleroma, or the unknown God) to be psychically 'dangerous', as being a total identification with the unconscious.
To contend that there is at least some disagreement between Jung and Gnosticism is at least supportable: the Jungian process of individuation involves the addition of unconscious psychic tropes to consciousness in order to achieve a trans-conscious centre to the personality. Jung did not intend this addition to take the form of a complete identification of the Self with the Unconscious. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jungian_interpretation_of_religion
“At this level we can hardly attribute anima to the male sex only. The “feminine” and “life” as well as the Chinese, Indian, and Gnostic analogies to anima are relevant to men and women equally. We are now at an archetypal level of anima, the “feminine archetypal image” (CW 9,ii, 41n5), and an archetype as such cannot be attributed to, or located within, the psyche of either sex. We can take this one step further, for we cannot be sure that the archetypes are only psychic, belonging only to the realm of psyche, unless we extend psyche first beyond sexual differences, then beyond the human person and psychodynamics (compensation), and beyond psychology too.” --James Hillman
From thefifthbody.homestead.com - February 11, 2014 12:39 AM The Gnostics recognized the condition of exile as more than an event in history. They saw it as having a profound cosmic and even transcosmic dimension. The human spirit, they held, is quite literally a stranger in a strange land. "Sometimes I feel like a motherless child," laments the American spiritual. The Gnostics would have agreed and might have been tempted to replace "sometimes" with "always".
The exile may indeed find himself in a dark land, but his very awareness of the darkness can also reveal a light on the path to freedom. So also, the awareness of our alieness and recognition of our place of exile for what it is are the first great steps on the path of return. We begin to rise as soon as we realize that we have fallen.
The predicament of exile and alienation is not confined to humanity nor does it originate at the human level. Long before there was a cosmos as we know it, a great drama of exile and return was played out in the story of the divine feminine being named Sophia. Having resided in the lofty height of eternal Fullness...
Mythology as a vital psychic phenomenon is as necessary as it is unavoidable. In this discussion, it seems to me, the gnostic danger of ousting the unknowable and incomprehensible and unutterable God by philosophems and mythologems must be clearly recognized, so that nothing is shoved in between human consciousness and the primordial numinous experience. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 254-256.
Knowledge and intelligence are by no means identical, as you know; there are many people who know a great deal, who labour under loads of information, without being at all intelligent. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 154.
This leads us over to the secret gnosis of the Middle Ages, when it takes the form of alchemy. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 8March1935, Pages 198
The Gnosis is a disturber of the peace of the Church, but it is full of psychological truths, many yet undiscovered. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 8March1935, Pages 199.
If a sudden separation occurs in the pleroma there arises the possibility of creation and consciousness.
In the completeness of the pleroma there is nothing to explain or distinguish because change and causality cease to exist there. When we have achieved our greatest capacity for consciousness the task is to continue our efforts to carry into reality what we have learned. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 9.
They [Gnostics] were concerned with the problem of archetypes, and made a peculiar philosophy of it. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 17.
Gnosticism was stamped out completely and its remnants are so badly mangled that special study is needed to get any insight at all into its inner meaning. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 97.
The Pleroma, or fullness, is a term from Gnosticism. It played a central role in the Valentinian system. Hans Jonas states that "Pleroma is the standard term for the fully explicated manifold of divine characteristics, whose standard number is thirty, forming a hierarchy and together constituting the divine realm" (The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity [London: Routledge, 1992], p. 180).
In 1929, Jung said: "The Gnostics ... expressed it as Pleroma, a state of fullness where the pairs of opposites, yea and nay; day and night, are together, then when they 'become,' it is either day or night. In the state of 'promise' before they become, they are nonexistent, there is neither white nor black, good nor bad" (Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930, ed. William McGuire [Bollingen Series, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984], p. 131)
Somehow, as the Gnostics surmised, we have "collected" ourselves from out of the cosmos.
That is why the idea of "gathering the seeds of light" played such an important role in their systems and in Manichaeism. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 268.
Considering that the light of Christ is accompanied by the "dark night of the soul" that St. John of the Cross spoke about, and by what the Gnostics of lrenaeus called the umbra Christi, which is identical with the chthonic aspect mentioned above, the life of Christ is identical in us, from the psychological point of view, with the unconscious tendency toward individuation. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 268.
This leads us over to the secret gnosis of the Middle Ages, when it takes the form of alchemy. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 8March1935, Pages 198
The Gnosis is a disturber of the peace of the Church, but it is full of psychological truths, many yet undiscovered. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 8March1935, Pages 199.
If a sudden separation occurs in the pleroma there arises the possibility of creation and consciousness.
In the completeness of the pleroma there is nothing to explain or distinguish because change and causality cease to exist there. When we have achieved our greatest capacity for consciousness the task is to continue our efforts to carry into reality what we have learned. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 9.
They [Gnostics] were concerned with the problem of archetypes, and made a peculiar philosophy of it. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 17.
Gnosticism was stamped out completely and its remnants are so badly mangled that special study is needed to get any insight at all into its inner meaning. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 97.
The Pleroma, or fullness, is a term from Gnosticism. It played a central role in the Valentinian system. Hans Jonas states that "Pleroma is the standard term for the fully explicated manifold of divine characteristics, whose standard number is thirty, forming a hierarchy and together constituting the divine realm" (The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity [London: Routledge, 1992], p. 180).
In 1929, Jung said: "The Gnostics ... expressed it as Pleroma, a state of fullness where the pairs of opposites, yea and nay; day and night, are together, then when they 'become,' it is either day or night. In the state of 'promise' before they become, they are nonexistent, there is neither white nor black, good nor bad" (Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930, ed. William McGuire [Bollingen Series, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984], p. 131)
Somehow, as the Gnostics surmised, we have "collected" ourselves from out of the cosmos.
That is why the idea of "gathering the seeds of light" played such an important role in their systems and in Manichaeism. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 268.
Considering that the light of Christ is accompanied by the "dark night of the soul" that St. John of the Cross spoke about, and by what the Gnostics of lrenaeus called the umbra Christi, which is identical with the chthonic aspect mentioned above, the life of Christ is identical in us, from the psychological point of view, with the unconscious tendency toward individuation. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 268.
Jung states, "Hippolytus, giving an account of the doctrine of the Naasenes (a second century Gnostic sect) says that the serpent dwells in all things and creatures, and that all temples were named after her. Every shrine, he says, every initiation, and every mystery is dedicated to her." The Gnostic Basilides worshipped the god Abraxas; an intimidating figure consisting of a rooster head, a human torso, with serpents for legs. This is an ideal chthonic representation, embracing the depths symbolized by the serpents rising to the human and achieving solar transcendence as depicted by the rooster head. Mephistopheles in Goethe's Faust also takes on a chthonic, daemonic appearance when he appears to the magician as a dog. Carl Jung suggests that this recalls the three-headed dog Cerberus who guarded the underworld. But more importantly Mephistopheles chthonic properties are expressed when as the dog he is depicted circling around Faust imitating the Uroboros snake. http://www.vadgemoore.com/writings/beast_to_godhead.html
But
I wonder how it comes that so many people think I am a gnostic while
equally many others accuse me of being an agnostic. ~Carl Jung, Letters
Vol. II, Pages 53-55.
I postulate the psyche as something real. But this hypothesis can hardly be called "gnostic" any more than the atomic theory can. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 53-55.
You overlook the facts and then think that the name is the fact, and thus you reach the nonsensical conclusion that I hypostatize ideas and am therefore a "Gnostic." ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 245.
It is evident that Buber has a bad conscience, as he publishes only his letters and does not represent me fairly, since I am a mere Gnostic, though he hasn't the faintest idea of what the Gnostic was moved by. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 64-65.
I would abandon the term "Gnostic" without compunction were it not a swearword in the mouths of theologians. They accuse me of the very same fault they commit themselves: presumptuous disregard of epistemological barriers. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 147.
Letter To H. Haberlandt
Dear Colleague, 23 April 1952
Very many thanks for kindly sending me your review of Aion.
It stands out from all the others because it is obvious that its author has really read the book, which is something I am grateful for.
I therefore venture to ask you to let me know in what sense you use the term "Gnosis."
You can hardly mean knowledge in general, but more specifically the Christian or even that of Gnosticism.
In both the latter cases it has to do with metaphysical assertions or postulates, i.e., it is assumed that actually consists in the knowledge
of a metaphysical object.
Now I state expressly and repeatedly in my writings that psychology can do no more than concern itself with assertions and
anthropomorphic images.
The possible metaphysical significance of these assertions is completely outside the bounds of empirical psychology as a science.
When I say "God" I mean an anthropomorphic (archetypal) God-image and no not imagine I have said anything about God.
I have neither denied nor affirmed him, unlike the Christian or Gnostic yvwm> which thinks it has said or has to say something about a metaphysical God.
The difficulty which gives rise to misunderstandings is that archetypes are "real."
That is to say, effects can be empirically established whose cause is described hypothetically as archetype, just as in physics
effects can be established whose cause is assumed to be the atom (which is merely a model).
Nobody has ever seen an archetype, and nobody has ever seen an atom either.
But the former is known to produce numinous effects and the latter explosions.
When I say "atom" I am talking of the model made of it; when I say "archetype" I am talking of ideas corresponding to it, but never of the thing-in itself, which in both cases is a transcendental mystery.
It would never occur to a physicist that he has bagged the bird with his atomic model (for instance Niels Bohr's planetary system).
He is fully aware that he is handling a variable schema or model which merely points to unknowable facts.
This is scientific gnosis, such as I also pursue.
Only it is news to me that such knowledge is accounted "metaphysical."
You see, for me the psyche is something real because it works as can be established empirically.
One must therefore assume that the effective archetypal ideas, including our model of the archetype, rest on something actual even though unknowable, just as the model of the atom rests on certain unknowable qualities of matter.
But science cannot possibly establish that, or to what extent, this unknowable substrate is in both cases God.
This can be decided only by dogmatics or faith, as for instance in Islamic philosophy (Al-Ghazzali), which explained gravitation as the will of Allah.
This is Gnosticism with its characteristic overstepping of epistemological barriers.
The Church's proofs of God likewise come under this heading, all of which beg the question if looked at logically.
By contrast I pursue a scientific psychology which could be called a comparative anatomy of the psyche.
I postulate the psyche as something real.
But this hypothesis can hardly be called "gnostic" any more than the atomic theory can.
So my question is: Wherein consists my "gnosis" in your view, or what do you understand by "gnosis"?
Excuse me for bothering you with such a long letter.
But I wonder how it comes that so many people think I am a gnostic while equally many others accuse me of being an agnostic.
I would like to know whether I am making a fundamental mistake somewhere that occasions such misunderstandings.
I would be sincerely grateful to you if you could lighten my darkness.
With collegial regards,
Yours very sincerely,
C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 53-55.
I postulate the psyche as something real. But this hypothesis can hardly be called "gnostic" any more than the atomic theory can. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 53-55.
You overlook the facts and then think that the name is the fact, and thus you reach the nonsensical conclusion that I hypostatize ideas and am therefore a "Gnostic." ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 245.
It is evident that Buber has a bad conscience, as he publishes only his letters and does not represent me fairly, since I am a mere Gnostic, though he hasn't the faintest idea of what the Gnostic was moved by. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 64-65.
I would abandon the term "Gnostic" without compunction were it not a swearword in the mouths of theologians. They accuse me of the very same fault they commit themselves: presumptuous disregard of epistemological barriers. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 147.
Letter To H. Haberlandt
Dear Colleague, 23 April 1952
Very many thanks for kindly sending me your review of Aion.
It stands out from all the others because it is obvious that its author has really read the book, which is something I am grateful for.
I therefore venture to ask you to let me know in what sense you use the term "Gnosis."
You can hardly mean knowledge in general, but more specifically the Christian or even that of Gnosticism.
In both the latter cases it has to do with metaphysical assertions or postulates, i.e., it is assumed that actually consists in the knowledge
of a metaphysical object.
Now I state expressly and repeatedly in my writings that psychology can do no more than concern itself with assertions and
anthropomorphic images.
The possible metaphysical significance of these assertions is completely outside the bounds of empirical psychology as a science.
When I say "God" I mean an anthropomorphic (archetypal) God-image and no not imagine I have said anything about God.
I have neither denied nor affirmed him, unlike the Christian or Gnostic yvwm> which thinks it has said or has to say something about a metaphysical God.
The difficulty which gives rise to misunderstandings is that archetypes are "real."
That is to say, effects can be empirically established whose cause is described hypothetically as archetype, just as in physics
effects can be established whose cause is assumed to be the atom (which is merely a model).
Nobody has ever seen an archetype, and nobody has ever seen an atom either.
But the former is known to produce numinous effects and the latter explosions.
When I say "atom" I am talking of the model made of it; when I say "archetype" I am talking of ideas corresponding to it, but never of the thing-in itself, which in both cases is a transcendental mystery.
It would never occur to a physicist that he has bagged the bird with his atomic model (for instance Niels Bohr's planetary system).
He is fully aware that he is handling a variable schema or model which merely points to unknowable facts.
This is scientific gnosis, such as I also pursue.
Only it is news to me that such knowledge is accounted "metaphysical."
You see, for me the psyche is something real because it works as can be established empirically.
One must therefore assume that the effective archetypal ideas, including our model of the archetype, rest on something actual even though unknowable, just as the model of the atom rests on certain unknowable qualities of matter.
But science cannot possibly establish that, or to what extent, this unknowable substrate is in both cases God.
This can be decided only by dogmatics or faith, as for instance in Islamic philosophy (Al-Ghazzali), which explained gravitation as the will of Allah.
This is Gnosticism with its characteristic overstepping of epistemological barriers.
The Church's proofs of God likewise come under this heading, all of which beg the question if looked at logically.
By contrast I pursue a scientific psychology which could be called a comparative anatomy of the psyche.
I postulate the psyche as something real.
But this hypothesis can hardly be called "gnostic" any more than the atomic theory can.
So my question is: Wherein consists my "gnosis" in your view, or what do you understand by "gnosis"?
Excuse me for bothering you with such a long letter.
But I wonder how it comes that so many people think I am a gnostic while equally many others accuse me of being an agnostic.
I would like to know whether I am making a fundamental mistake somewhere that occasions such misunderstandings.
I would be sincerely grateful to you if you could lighten my darkness.
With collegial regards,
Yours very sincerely,
C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 53-55.
Jung, (CW 6: 52, par. 78).
Gnosis, in the hands of Roberts Avens, is a perennial philosophy of the heart. He provides a readable, uncomplicated, and reliable introduction to the Gnosis going on today in the poetical thought of Martin Heidegger and the archetypal psychology of James Hillman. As a psychological philosopher, Avens brings fresh meanings to basic gnostic ideas about angels, salvation through knowledge, and the world as alive and ensouled. Therapies that encourage personified images and ecology movements concerned with the soul in things can find here a profound philosophical ground in The New Gnosis.
http://www.amazon.com/New-Gnosis-Heidegger-Hillman-Angels/dp/0882143271
Hillman roots psyche in the emotionally charged archetypal realm, the sphere of the vibrant Gods, of the "little people" in the depths Who exist prior to the human's being. This view of a vacillating psyche neither freezes the perspectival frame nor solidly frames an experience since "all realities" are symbolic rather than literal, fluid rather than fixed. This approach is similar to Martin Heidegger who begins his philosophizing methodology with the human as Dasein,[ii] or simply being-in-the-world. Dasein refers to the human not so much as "the thing that thinks," but as the "thing that is thought," and then thinks. In such a view, the horizon is always open and opening--solid facts and systems are dead and stifling. Robert Avens book, The New Gnosis: Heidegger, Hillman and Angels, artfully explicates the procedural relationship between James Hillman's archetypal psychology and Heidegger's philosophy of Being, making it clear that neither man supports objective or factual Truth. Rudiger Safransky, arguably Heidegger's best biographer writes of Heidegger's methodology, which captures Hillman's as well:
Near the end of his life, Arthur Schopenhauer once said, 'Mankind has learned a few things from me that it will never forget.' No such statement is known of Heidegger. He did not create any constructive philosophy in the sense of a world picture or moral doctrine. There are no 'results' of Heidegger's thinking, in the sense that there are 'results' of the philosophy of Leibniz, Kant or Schopenhauer. Heidegger's passion was for questioning, not answering. Questions appeared to him as 'piety of thinking,' because it opened up new horizons...where man experiences himself as a location where something gapes open. (429) Similarly Hillman concludes Re-Visioning Psychology by writing: "Though this has been a groundwork of irreplaceable insights, they are to be taken neither as a foundation for a systematic theory nor even as a prolegomenon for any future archetypal psychology" (229). Both Hillman and Heidegger denied that they were constructing systems, neither philosophical nor psychological. Heidegger never spoke of "a" philosophy, but of philosophizing (What 65), and Hillman never spoke of "a" psychology but of psychologizing (113). Heidegger called his philosophical method a "talking through" (67) while Hillman called his psychological procedure a "seeing through" (113). For Hillman all exercises in literalizing or systematizing are fallacious attempts to freeze the eternal mystery into solid facts--facts which stifle and suffocate soul. For Hillman, even literalisms and facts are reduced to non-factual mysteries:
Literalism is itself one kind of mystery: an idol that forgets it is an image and believes itself a God, taking itself metaphysically, seriously, damned to fulfill its task of coagulating the many into singleness of meaning which we call facts, data, problems, realities. The function of this idol--call it ego or literalism--is to keep banality before our eyes, so that we remember to see through, so that mystery becomes possible. Unless things coagulate there is no need for insight. The metaphorical function of the psyche depends on the ever-present literalist within each of us. (150) With Hillman there are no literal ideas or solid facts. As a methodological reductionist he shrinks all literalisms to just another part of the psychic mystery and demotes facts to nothing but coagulated ideas perpetrated by the misinformed ego. All ego-generated facts are false Gods--idols which simply serve to remind us that everything is fluid and ever shifting.
... Hillman tends toward a kind of neo-gnosticism, as Avens' book The New Gnosis: Heidegger, Hillman and Angels suggests, by reducing psyche solely to some sort of mysterious non-physicality--something like the proto-physical prakriti in the Hindu Sankhaya philosophy. Hillman runs the same risk, as do all gnostical systems, of devaluing matter by positing psyche as not only the matrix from which realities emerge, but the amorphous essence as well. His emphasis on psyche as invisible, unstable and relative makes it difficult to function in this solid world where Newton and Descartes still have seats at the methodological table. A reality ultimately comprised of psychic fiction[iii] and ethereal images comes close to elevating the anima over the mundi, diminishing the human capacity to get hold of something solid. Steven Pinker takes on this postmodernist tendency to reduce reality to representation, or to what many postmodernists call a "crisis of representation". Pinker points out that the Concise Glossary of Cultural Theory emphasizes the primacy of images in postmodernism and cultural studies:
http://michaelbogar.blogspot.com/2013/08/james-hillman-postmodern-romantic_23.html
Hillman does not limit the soul to humanity, but seeks to extend it (and with that our conception of psychology, psychotherapy, and psychoanalysis) to the world at large, to the products of culture and nature as well as humanity. Each thing, Hillman affirms, using the Gnostic/Kabbalistic image, has a spark of soul at its core. "Let us imagine the anima mundi (the world soul)," Hillman tells us, as that particular soul spark, that seminal image, which offers itself through each thing in its visible form." (Hillman, 1982, p. 77)
Psychology, according to Hillman must be practiced on the world at large and not just on people. Indeed it is the very view that only the person has psyche or soul which places an unbearable psychic burden on humanity, imprisoning us within our own psychologies and removing us from any genuine encounter with the world. The view that only humanity has soul, and that the rest of the world is dead and evil, is in Hillman's view, a cause of the contemporary crisis in our "environment".
http://www.amazon.com/New-Gnosis-Heidegger-Hillman-Angels/dp/0882143271
Hillman roots psyche in the emotionally charged archetypal realm, the sphere of the vibrant Gods, of the "little people" in the depths Who exist prior to the human's being. This view of a vacillating psyche neither freezes the perspectival frame nor solidly frames an experience since "all realities" are symbolic rather than literal, fluid rather than fixed. This approach is similar to Martin Heidegger who begins his philosophizing methodology with the human as Dasein,[ii] or simply being-in-the-world. Dasein refers to the human not so much as "the thing that thinks," but as the "thing that is thought," and then thinks. In such a view, the horizon is always open and opening--solid facts and systems are dead and stifling. Robert Avens book, The New Gnosis: Heidegger, Hillman and Angels, artfully explicates the procedural relationship between James Hillman's archetypal psychology and Heidegger's philosophy of Being, making it clear that neither man supports objective or factual Truth. Rudiger Safransky, arguably Heidegger's best biographer writes of Heidegger's methodology, which captures Hillman's as well:
Near the end of his life, Arthur Schopenhauer once said, 'Mankind has learned a few things from me that it will never forget.' No such statement is known of Heidegger. He did not create any constructive philosophy in the sense of a world picture or moral doctrine. There are no 'results' of Heidegger's thinking, in the sense that there are 'results' of the philosophy of Leibniz, Kant or Schopenhauer. Heidegger's passion was for questioning, not answering. Questions appeared to him as 'piety of thinking,' because it opened up new horizons...where man experiences himself as a location where something gapes open. (429) Similarly Hillman concludes Re-Visioning Psychology by writing: "Though this has been a groundwork of irreplaceable insights, they are to be taken neither as a foundation for a systematic theory nor even as a prolegomenon for any future archetypal psychology" (229). Both Hillman and Heidegger denied that they were constructing systems, neither philosophical nor psychological. Heidegger never spoke of "a" philosophy, but of philosophizing (What 65), and Hillman never spoke of "a" psychology but of psychologizing (113). Heidegger called his philosophical method a "talking through" (67) while Hillman called his psychological procedure a "seeing through" (113). For Hillman all exercises in literalizing or systematizing are fallacious attempts to freeze the eternal mystery into solid facts--facts which stifle and suffocate soul. For Hillman, even literalisms and facts are reduced to non-factual mysteries:
Literalism is itself one kind of mystery: an idol that forgets it is an image and believes itself a God, taking itself metaphysically, seriously, damned to fulfill its task of coagulating the many into singleness of meaning which we call facts, data, problems, realities. The function of this idol--call it ego or literalism--is to keep banality before our eyes, so that we remember to see through, so that mystery becomes possible. Unless things coagulate there is no need for insight. The metaphorical function of the psyche depends on the ever-present literalist within each of us. (150) With Hillman there are no literal ideas or solid facts. As a methodological reductionist he shrinks all literalisms to just another part of the psychic mystery and demotes facts to nothing but coagulated ideas perpetrated by the misinformed ego. All ego-generated facts are false Gods--idols which simply serve to remind us that everything is fluid and ever shifting.
... Hillman tends toward a kind of neo-gnosticism, as Avens' book The New Gnosis: Heidegger, Hillman and Angels suggests, by reducing psyche solely to some sort of mysterious non-physicality--something like the proto-physical prakriti in the Hindu Sankhaya philosophy. Hillman runs the same risk, as do all gnostical systems, of devaluing matter by positing psyche as not only the matrix from which realities emerge, but the amorphous essence as well. His emphasis on psyche as invisible, unstable and relative makes it difficult to function in this solid world where Newton and Descartes still have seats at the methodological table. A reality ultimately comprised of psychic fiction[iii] and ethereal images comes close to elevating the anima over the mundi, diminishing the human capacity to get hold of something solid. Steven Pinker takes on this postmodernist tendency to reduce reality to representation, or to what many postmodernists call a "crisis of representation". Pinker points out that the Concise Glossary of Cultural Theory emphasizes the primacy of images in postmodernism and cultural studies:
http://michaelbogar.blogspot.com/2013/08/james-hillman-postmodern-romantic_23.html
Hillman does not limit the soul to humanity, but seeks to extend it (and with that our conception of psychology, psychotherapy, and psychoanalysis) to the world at large, to the products of culture and nature as well as humanity. Each thing, Hillman affirms, using the Gnostic/Kabbalistic image, has a spark of soul at its core. "Let us imagine the anima mundi (the world soul)," Hillman tells us, as that particular soul spark, that seminal image, which offers itself through each thing in its visible form." (Hillman, 1982, p. 77)
Psychology, according to Hillman must be practiced on the world at large and not just on people. Indeed it is the very view that only the person has psyche or soul which places an unbearable psychic burden on humanity, imprisoning us within our own psychologies and removing us from any genuine encounter with the world. The view that only humanity has soul, and that the rest of the world is dead and evil, is in Hillman's view, a cause of the contemporary crisis in our "environment".
PSYCHE EXISTS AS A SOURCE OF KNOWLEDGE
Iona Miller, (c)2015
…nature exists without human aid, can deal with her processes herself, has everything in herself to bring about transformations, to move from the depths to the heights and down into the depths again. ~Jung, Modern Psychology, Page 42.
Iona Miller, (c)2015
…nature exists without human aid, can deal with her processes herself, has everything in herself to bring about transformations, to move from the depths to the heights and down into the depths again. ~Jung, Modern Psychology, Page 42.
We can experience gnosis not as a medieval religious belief but because
it happens to us unsought and unexpected. Gnosis is not Gnosticism. It doesn't require belief, scripture, or Apocrypha. The transformative perspective, observable in its real effects, unlocks the hermeneutics of the creative imagination. The life of the unconscious goes on within us without our conscious knowledge.
Gnosis is an emergent property, not merely an introverted religious attitude. Embracing gnosis does not mean embracing Gnostic dogma or medieval doctrines -- participatory convictions based on personal desires and fears. The secret is inside the creation and based in the study of nature and our own nature. We become more integrated by bringing more of the unconscious and mythic into consciousness.
Can we find the absolute in the depths of our soul -- the very source of symbols? Even physics declares our personal experience is profoundly subjective. There are two principle attitudes -- devotion and gnosis. Gnosis is not a philosophy, nor a way to rationally comprehend the world.
All that is knowable is our immediate subjective experience. Our most personal "I" is our core subjective experience which is identical to awareness. That awareness is the ground where the objects of awareness -- sensations, thoughts, images, memories, and emotions -- fluctuate and intermingle. Fundamental awareness has no intrinsic form, content, or characteristics. So awareness is less about the dualism of mind and matter, light or dark, or polarized good and bad, but more about the dualism of awareness and the contents of awareness.
Gnosis is not a ready-made religion but a more comprehensive view allowing psyche to speak for itself in dream, active imagination, synchronistic phenomena, premonitions, mythic living, and creative expression. "Self-redemption" is an arduous path that leads through self-deception. Insights in self-understanding come through grace, not labor or merit.
Gnosis is a spontaneous personal event of primordial psychic experience. Empirical experience of the psyche may appear in modern dreams. Experiences of the collective unconscious may be reflected in gnostic literature, but are not derived from it. Those lacking such experience can never understand it, but that does not nullify its existence. Getting it conceptually is not the same as knowing it experientially, thus, all "esoteric" secrets remain concealed from the uninitiated.
Continually recurring fundamental ideas can arise from the archetypal potentials of objective psyche. Generally similar ideas are modified by era and context. We can recognize their archetypal core. We live in archaic identity with the absolute unconscious. Archetypes are the psychophysical interface of emotion and energy, linking inner and outer realms. The form of opposites become distinct but conjoined as they enter consciousness.
Such numinous assertions and feelings produced by psyche may or may not express universal 'truths'. We perceive the psyche with intuition, but not everyone has discriminating intuition and clarity. Our universal vision is as limited as our rational and irrational human vision. Intuition exalts and redeems us through connection with our core -- the midpoint of our internal Cosmos.
True gnosis is an expansion of consciousness. But according to our concepts, beliefs, and assumed truths (psychological presuppositions), intuition can produce understanding or danger and destruction. Jung observed that belief is transformed into gnosis by individuation. Eternal knowledge or perennial wisdom is not intellectual.
We imagine we are imagining "the real" but such consciousness can be used correctly or incorrectly. Because the psyche and archetypes are bi-polar they can produce either wisdom or utter nonsense. There is the path through the labyrinth that is a descent to the underworld, but there are also false paths, deceptions, and dangers on that path. Each must beware of spiritual pretensions and gnostic inflation, careful not to mistake ego for the interior Light, which helps us realize our own darkness.
Rationality cannot eliminate the irrational but is part of the same phenomena. Beliefs arise from lack of experience and knowledge of psychic dynamics. More than one heart has been misled. The naive take the manifestations of the unconscious -- this natural psychic activity -- at face value, mistaking them for the essence of the world or revealed truth. Insights appear as natural revelations. Numinosities appear paradoxically true and untrue.
Some manifestations are simply misguided inner authority or inferior notions, ideas, images, motivations, emotions, and the disturbances they create. A sense of certainty is no guarantee of accuracy. Experience is mythic, projective, and subjective. All of it adds up to nothing without psyche's infusion of value and meaning -- living psychological process. Conscious and unconscious comprehension are united by myth, which is preconscious and therapeutic.
We must be modest, not mistaking 'our truth' for 'the truth'. Yet, it remains important to continue to pursue the search for truth in our lives. We are led inside ourselves by the assimilation of myth -- an inner journey. Sapientia Dei is revealed through the archetypes. The Gnostics considered themselves members of a new aeon marked essentially by the rise of spiritual man. Trusting their own spiritual powers, they plumbed their spiritual depths.
Deeper layers of the unconscious are independent of culture and time. Myths remain myths even if some people take them as literal revelations or eternal truths. Myths are renewed in retelling with new spiritual language. In psychological insight, knowledge and understanding correspond with symbolic expression of the myth. Myths die when they no longer live and grow.
Gnosis is characterized by the integration of archetypal contents. The holistic perspective on external and internal mirrors the alchemical "unus mundus." Today the same Gnostic or alchemical symbols and motifs arise from the collective unconscious. But the Promethean creative spirit goes largely unnoticed. The chthonic part of the psyche -- undifferentiated consciousness -- is our life-sustaining structure.
Gnosis is a general human phenomena which can appear any time, anywhere, independent of tradition. Experiential knowing is a spontaneous creative phenomenon that reflects a rich reserve of ideas and images absorbed consciously and unconsciously, newly organized in novel ways -- familiar material placed in a surprising and creative context -- an achievement of particular genius.
Man in antiquity differentiated between man's "daemon" and his "own mind".
~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Lecture VII, Page 50.
The world is an image to us, even when we have a scientific conception of it and assert: "This is so and so", it is still only an image. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Alchemy, Page 62.
But that "the One" should meditate, and that the world should be produced by the spirit in its creative role, is a conception which goes directly back to the philosophy about the Nous in antiquity. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Alchemy, Pages 59-60.
it happens to us unsought and unexpected. Gnosis is not Gnosticism. It doesn't require belief, scripture, or Apocrypha. The transformative perspective, observable in its real effects, unlocks the hermeneutics of the creative imagination. The life of the unconscious goes on within us without our conscious knowledge.
Gnosis is an emergent property, not merely an introverted religious attitude. Embracing gnosis does not mean embracing Gnostic dogma or medieval doctrines -- participatory convictions based on personal desires and fears. The secret is inside the creation and based in the study of nature and our own nature. We become more integrated by bringing more of the unconscious and mythic into consciousness.
Can we find the absolute in the depths of our soul -- the very source of symbols? Even physics declares our personal experience is profoundly subjective. There are two principle attitudes -- devotion and gnosis. Gnosis is not a philosophy, nor a way to rationally comprehend the world.
All that is knowable is our immediate subjective experience. Our most personal "I" is our core subjective experience which is identical to awareness. That awareness is the ground where the objects of awareness -- sensations, thoughts, images, memories, and emotions -- fluctuate and intermingle. Fundamental awareness has no intrinsic form, content, or characteristics. So awareness is less about the dualism of mind and matter, light or dark, or polarized good and bad, but more about the dualism of awareness and the contents of awareness.
Gnosis is not a ready-made religion but a more comprehensive view allowing psyche to speak for itself in dream, active imagination, synchronistic phenomena, premonitions, mythic living, and creative expression. "Self-redemption" is an arduous path that leads through self-deception. Insights in self-understanding come through grace, not labor or merit.
Gnosis is a spontaneous personal event of primordial psychic experience. Empirical experience of the psyche may appear in modern dreams. Experiences of the collective unconscious may be reflected in gnostic literature, but are not derived from it. Those lacking such experience can never understand it, but that does not nullify its existence. Getting it conceptually is not the same as knowing it experientially, thus, all "esoteric" secrets remain concealed from the uninitiated.
Continually recurring fundamental ideas can arise from the archetypal potentials of objective psyche. Generally similar ideas are modified by era and context. We can recognize their archetypal core. We live in archaic identity with the absolute unconscious. Archetypes are the psychophysical interface of emotion and energy, linking inner and outer realms. The form of opposites become distinct but conjoined as they enter consciousness.
Such numinous assertions and feelings produced by psyche may or may not express universal 'truths'. We perceive the psyche with intuition, but not everyone has discriminating intuition and clarity. Our universal vision is as limited as our rational and irrational human vision. Intuition exalts and redeems us through connection with our core -- the midpoint of our internal Cosmos.
True gnosis is an expansion of consciousness. But according to our concepts, beliefs, and assumed truths (psychological presuppositions), intuition can produce understanding or danger and destruction. Jung observed that belief is transformed into gnosis by individuation. Eternal knowledge or perennial wisdom is not intellectual.
We imagine we are imagining "the real" but such consciousness can be used correctly or incorrectly. Because the psyche and archetypes are bi-polar they can produce either wisdom or utter nonsense. There is the path through the labyrinth that is a descent to the underworld, but there are also false paths, deceptions, and dangers on that path. Each must beware of spiritual pretensions and gnostic inflation, careful not to mistake ego for the interior Light, which helps us realize our own darkness.
Rationality cannot eliminate the irrational but is part of the same phenomena. Beliefs arise from lack of experience and knowledge of psychic dynamics. More than one heart has been misled. The naive take the manifestations of the unconscious -- this natural psychic activity -- at face value, mistaking them for the essence of the world or revealed truth. Insights appear as natural revelations. Numinosities appear paradoxically true and untrue.
Some manifestations are simply misguided inner authority or inferior notions, ideas, images, motivations, emotions, and the disturbances they create. A sense of certainty is no guarantee of accuracy. Experience is mythic, projective, and subjective. All of it adds up to nothing without psyche's infusion of value and meaning -- living psychological process. Conscious and unconscious comprehension are united by myth, which is preconscious and therapeutic.
We must be modest, not mistaking 'our truth' for 'the truth'. Yet, it remains important to continue to pursue the search for truth in our lives. We are led inside ourselves by the assimilation of myth -- an inner journey. Sapientia Dei is revealed through the archetypes. The Gnostics considered themselves members of a new aeon marked essentially by the rise of spiritual man. Trusting their own spiritual powers, they plumbed their spiritual depths.
Deeper layers of the unconscious are independent of culture and time. Myths remain myths even if some people take them as literal revelations or eternal truths. Myths are renewed in retelling with new spiritual language. In psychological insight, knowledge and understanding correspond with symbolic expression of the myth. Myths die when they no longer live and grow.
Gnosis is characterized by the integration of archetypal contents. The holistic perspective on external and internal mirrors the alchemical "unus mundus." Today the same Gnostic or alchemical symbols and motifs arise from the collective unconscious. But the Promethean creative spirit goes largely unnoticed. The chthonic part of the psyche -- undifferentiated consciousness -- is our life-sustaining structure.
Gnosis is a general human phenomena which can appear any time, anywhere, independent of tradition. Experiential knowing is a spontaneous creative phenomenon that reflects a rich reserve of ideas and images absorbed consciously and unconsciously, newly organized in novel ways -- familiar material placed in a surprising and creative context -- an achievement of particular genius.
Man in antiquity differentiated between man's "daemon" and his "own mind".
~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Lecture VII, Page 50.
The world is an image to us, even when we have a scientific conception of it and assert: "This is so and so", it is still only an image. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Alchemy, Page 62.
But that "the One" should meditate, and that the world should be produced by the spirit in its creative role, is a conception which goes directly back to the philosophy about the Nous in antiquity. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Alchemy, Pages 59-60.
"One is more precious, but the other needs wisdom and skill before it will unlock, for it is that one which unties the knot." Dante's Purgatorio, Canto IX
In the Pleroma, Above and Below lie together in a strange way and produce nothing; but when it is disturbed by the mistakes and needs of the individual a waterfall arises between Above and Below, a dynamic something that is the symbol. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 59-63.
We find in Gnosticism what was lacking in the centuries that followed: a belief in the efficacy of individual revelation and individual knowledge. This belief was rooted in the proud feeling of man's affinity with the gods. ~Carl Jung, Psychological Types, Page 242.
God is not dead. He is as alive as ever. God is creation, for he is something definite, and therefore differentiated from the Pleroma. God is a quality of the Pleroma, and everything I have said about creation also applies to him. ~Carl Jung; The Red Book; Page 348.
It is of course extremely difficult, in judging Gnostic images, to tell how much
is genuine inner experience and how much is philosophical superstructure.
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 553-554.
The message of the Christian symbol is Gnosis, and the compensation effected by the unconscious is Gnosis in even higher degree. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 25.
We find in Gnosticism what was lacking in the centuries that followed: a belief in the efficacy of individual revelation and individual knowledge. This belief was rooted in the proud feeling of man's affinity with the gods. ~Carl Jung, Psychological Types, Page 242.
God is not dead. He is as alive as ever. God is creation, for he is something definite, and therefore differentiated from the Pleroma. God is a quality of the Pleroma, and everything I have said about creation also applies to him. ~Carl Jung; The Red Book; Page 348.
It is of course extremely difficult, in judging Gnostic images, to tell how much
is genuine inner experience and how much is philosophical superstructure.
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 553-554.
The message of the Christian symbol is Gnosis, and the compensation effected by the unconscious is Gnosis in even higher degree. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 25.
PLEROMA
-Literally, ‘the fullness’ or ‘perfection’.
- The Pleroma is the totality of beings in the Upper Aeons.
- The Pleroma is also called the ‘emanations of the Father’, the ‘treasuries of light’ and the ‘immeasurable deep’.
- The Pleroma or Fullness describes the Upper Aeons, while its opposite ‘the Deficiency’ describes the Lower Aeons: “The disciples said to him, ‘What is the fullness, and what is the deficiency?’ He said to them, ‘You are from the fullness, and you dwell in the place where the deficiency is.’” (Dialogue of the Saviour)
- as ‘emanations of the Father’: “Therefore, all the emanations of the Father are pleromas, and the root of all his emanations is in the one who made them all grow up in himself.”
(Gospel of Truth)
- As ‘treasuries of light’: “and a multitude of emanations will come forth from all the Jeus, through the command of my Father when he moves them, and they will fill all the treasuries. And they will be called ranks of the Treasuries of the Light.” (First Book of Jeu)
- In the Untitled Bruce Codex ms, the Pleroma is described as a temple-city with four gates and a Holy of Holies: “He created the holy Pleroma in this way: four gates with four monads within it, one monad to each gate and six helpers (parastatai) to each gate, ... and an unutterable aspect - to each gate. One of his aspects looks forth from the gate to the outer aeons, the other looks inwards to the Setheus, and the other looks to the height, and the sonship is in each monad. ... The unutterable aspect of the overseer looks towards to the holy of the holies, that is, the infinite one who is the head of the sanctuary.” (Untitled Text in the Bruce Codex)
- The Untitled Text in the Bruce Codex also describes the Pleroma as ‘the body’ of the monad, which is like the mother-city “This is the manner in which they are all within the monad : there are twelve monads making a crown upon its head ; each one makes twelve. And there are ten decads surrounding its shoulders. And there are nine enneads surrounding its belly. And there are seven hebdomads at its feet, and each one makes a hebdomad. And to the veil which surrounds it like a tower, there are twelve gates. There are twelve myriad powers at each gate, and they are called archangels and also angels. This is the mother-city of the only-begotten one.” (Untitled Text in the Bruce Codex)
- As the ‘immeasurable deep’: “After these things there is another place which is broad, having hidden within it a great wealth which supplies the All. This is the immeasurable deep.” (Untitled Text in the Bruce Codex)
- One may also ‘become full’: “Become full, and leave no space within you empty.” (Apocalypse of James)
http://www.gnosticq.com/az.text/glos.mr.html#Anchor-PLEROMA-33869
-Literally, ‘the fullness’ or ‘perfection’.
- The Pleroma is the totality of beings in the Upper Aeons.
- The Pleroma is also called the ‘emanations of the Father’, the ‘treasuries of light’ and the ‘immeasurable deep’.
- The Pleroma or Fullness describes the Upper Aeons, while its opposite ‘the Deficiency’ describes the Lower Aeons: “The disciples said to him, ‘What is the fullness, and what is the deficiency?’ He said to them, ‘You are from the fullness, and you dwell in the place where the deficiency is.’” (Dialogue of the Saviour)
- as ‘emanations of the Father’: “Therefore, all the emanations of the Father are pleromas, and the root of all his emanations is in the one who made them all grow up in himself.”
(Gospel of Truth)
- As ‘treasuries of light’: “and a multitude of emanations will come forth from all the Jeus, through the command of my Father when he moves them, and they will fill all the treasuries. And they will be called ranks of the Treasuries of the Light.” (First Book of Jeu)
- In the Untitled Bruce Codex ms, the Pleroma is described as a temple-city with four gates and a Holy of Holies: “He created the holy Pleroma in this way: four gates with four monads within it, one monad to each gate and six helpers (parastatai) to each gate, ... and an unutterable aspect - to each gate. One of his aspects looks forth from the gate to the outer aeons, the other looks inwards to the Setheus, and the other looks to the height, and the sonship is in each monad. ... The unutterable aspect of the overseer looks towards to the holy of the holies, that is, the infinite one who is the head of the sanctuary.” (Untitled Text in the Bruce Codex)
- The Untitled Text in the Bruce Codex also describes the Pleroma as ‘the body’ of the monad, which is like the mother-city “This is the manner in which they are all within the monad : there are twelve monads making a crown upon its head ; each one makes twelve. And there are ten decads surrounding its shoulders. And there are nine enneads surrounding its belly. And there are seven hebdomads at its feet, and each one makes a hebdomad. And to the veil which surrounds it like a tower, there are twelve gates. There are twelve myriad powers at each gate, and they are called archangels and also angels. This is the mother-city of the only-begotten one.” (Untitled Text in the Bruce Codex)
- As the ‘immeasurable deep’: “After these things there is another place which is broad, having hidden within it a great wealth which supplies the All. This is the immeasurable deep.” (Untitled Text in the Bruce Codex)
- One may also ‘become full’: “Become full, and leave no space within you empty.” (Apocalypse of James)
http://www.gnosticq.com/az.text/glos.mr.html#Anchor-PLEROMA-33869
GNOSIS IS RELATED TO EXPERIENTIAL "KNOWING",
SELF KNOWLEDGE & SELF REALIZATION
Gnosis is not Gnosticism
"Gnosticism" is a dualistic religion with roots in Christianity, Cathars,
Bogomils and Manicheanism, Theosophy, and the Sant tradition
"We find in Gnosticism what was lacking in the centuries that followed: a belief in the efficacy of individual revelation and individual knowledge. This belief was rooted in the proud feeling of man's affinity with the gods." ~Carl Jung.
Intuition is a form of creativity, supra-logic -- receiving input and ideas without knowing exactly how and where you got them from. You simply know it is not from yourself but an activity of the soul. Sometimes it is referred to as gut feeling, sixth sense, inner sense, instinct, inner voice, spiritual guide, etc.
SELF KNOWLEDGE & SELF REALIZATION
Gnosis is not Gnosticism
"Gnosticism" is a dualistic religion with roots in Christianity, Cathars,
Bogomils and Manicheanism, Theosophy, and the Sant tradition
"We find in Gnosticism what was lacking in the centuries that followed: a belief in the efficacy of individual revelation and individual knowledge. This belief was rooted in the proud feeling of man's affinity with the gods." ~Carl Jung.
Intuition is a form of creativity, supra-logic -- receiving input and ideas without knowing exactly how and where you got them from. You simply know it is not from yourself but an activity of the soul. Sometimes it is referred to as gut feeling, sixth sense, inner sense, instinct, inner voice, spiritual guide, etc.
Splendor by L. J. McCloskey
“There is an inmost center in us all, where truth abides in fullness;....and, to know, rather consists in opening out a way where the imprisoned splendor may escape, then in effecting entry for a light supposed to be without.” ― Robert Browning
It is only the intervention of time and space here and now that makes reality. Wholeness is realized for a moment only—the moment that Faust was seeking: all his life. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 214.
“There is an inmost center in us all, where truth abides in fullness;....and, to know, rather consists in opening out a way where the imprisoned splendor may escape, then in effecting entry for a light supposed to be without.” ― Robert Browning
It is only the intervention of time and space here and now that makes reality. Wholeness is realized for a moment only—the moment that Faust was seeking: all his life. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 214.
If one could arrive at the truth by learning the words of wisdom, then the world would have been saved already in the remote times of Lao-tze. ~Carl Jung, Letters Volume 1, Pages 559-560.
At all events wisdom cannot be taught by words. It is only possible by personal contact and by immediate experience. ~Carl Jung, Letters Volume 1, Pages 559-560.
At all events wisdom cannot be taught by words. It is only possible by personal contact and by immediate experience. ~Carl Jung, Letters Volume 1, Pages 559-560.
Works by Gnostic scholar GRS Meade:
- Simon Magus (1892)
- Orpheus (1895/6)
- Pistis Sophia (1896, 1921 ed).
- Pistis Sophia at sacred-texts
- Fragments of a Faith Forgotten (1900 1st edition);
- Fragments of a Faith Forgotten at sacred-texts.
- Apollonius of Tyana 1905, at sacred-texts.
- Thrice Greatest Hermes, vol. 1
- Thrice Greatest Hermes, vol. 2
- Thrice Greatest Hermes, vol. 3 (London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1906) at sacred-texts.
- The Hymns of Hermes
- The Gnosis of the Mind
- Commentary on "Pœmandres"
- Introduction to Pistis Sophia
- 3rd edition 1931 pp.241- 249 Introduction to Marcion
- Gnostic John the Baptizer: Selections from the Mandæan John-Book (1924)
IS THERE A FEMININE GNOSIS?
http://www.esswe.org/uploads/user-files/A14-02-Voss-Is-there-a-Feminine-Gnosis.pdf
http://www.esswe.org/uploads/user-files/A14-02-Voss-Is-there-a-Feminine-Gnosis.pdf
GNOSIS & HERMETICISM FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN TIMES
http://books.google.com/books?id=0zfCrnqj_FUC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Gnosis+and+Hermeticism+from+Antiquity+to+Modern+Times++edited+by+R.+van+den+Broek,
+Wouter+J.+Hanegraaff&hl=en&sa=X&ei=gOQZVNz-HYGziwLOsYHYBw&ved=0CCoQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Gnosis%20and%20Hermeticism%20from%20Antiquity%20to%20Modern%20Times%20%20edited%20by%20R.%20van%20den%20Broek%2C%20Wouter%20J.%20Hanegraaff&f=false
http://books.google.com/books?id=0zfCrnqj_FUC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Gnosis+and+Hermeticism+from+Antiquity+to+Modern+Times++edited+by+R.+van+den+Broek,
+Wouter+J.+Hanegraaff&hl=en&sa=X&ei=gOQZVNz-HYGziwLOsYHYBw&ved=0CCoQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Gnosis%20and%20Hermeticism%20from%20Antiquity%20to%20Modern%20Times%20%20edited%20by%20R.%20van%20den%20Broek%2C%20Wouter%20J.%20Hanegraaff&f=false
The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal By Joshua Ramey
I could not say I believe. I know!
Gnostic Scholar Stephan Hoeller
http://gnosis.org/lectures.html
http://gnosis.org/bookstore3.htm
The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead (1982), ISBN 0-8356-0568-X
During a 2003 interview, Hoeller talked about Gnosticism:
"I think we could describe it as a very early form of Christianity, very different in many respects from what Christianity became later on. It is much more individualistic. It is much more orientated toward the personal, spiritual advancement and transformation of the individual, regarding figures such as Jesus as being helpers rather than sacrificial saviors. It is a form of religion that has a much more ecumenical and universal scope in terms of its relationship to spiritual, religious traditions other than the Christian. I would say that this appears to be, as far as Gnosticism is concerned, the time that the Greeks called the kairos, the time when the Gods are reborn. We live in an age, I think, when certain timeless ideas, which have been submerged and subdued for a long time, are making their appearance once again. In that respect we're living in very interesting times as the Chinese would say. Interesting times, spiritually powerful times, always cast a great shadow. There will also be great difficulties, but I think that Gnostic traditions, along with a number of kindred ideas, are being reborn at this time, and will have a significant influence in the future. Those of us who find ourselves working within that field are singularly blessed that we can do this work at this particular time. So I feel I'm at the right place and at the right time and I am profoundly grateful for all of that."
I have had the experience of being gripped by something stronger than myself, something that people call God. ~Carl Jung; "The Old Wise Man" published in Time, 1955.
Tears, sorrow, and disappointment are bitter, but wisdom is the comforter in all psychic suffering. Indeed, bitterness and wisdom form a pair of alternatives: where there is bitterness wisdom is lacking, and where wisdom is there can be no bitterness. ~Carl Jung; CW 20; Mysterium Coniunctionis; Page 246; Para 330.
Intuition [is] perception via the unconscious. ~Carl Jung; "The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious", 1950.
Gnostic Scholar Stephan Hoeller
http://gnosis.org/lectures.html
http://gnosis.org/bookstore3.htm
The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead (1982), ISBN 0-8356-0568-X
- Jung and the Lost Gospels (1989), ISBN 0-8356-0646-5
- Freedom: Alchemy for a Voluntary Society (1992), ISBN 0-8356-0678-3
- Gnosticism: New Light on the Ancient Tradition of Inner Knowing (2002), ISBN 0-8356-0816-6
During a 2003 interview, Hoeller talked about Gnosticism:
"I think we could describe it as a very early form of Christianity, very different in many respects from what Christianity became later on. It is much more individualistic. It is much more orientated toward the personal, spiritual advancement and transformation of the individual, regarding figures such as Jesus as being helpers rather than sacrificial saviors. It is a form of religion that has a much more ecumenical and universal scope in terms of its relationship to spiritual, religious traditions other than the Christian. I would say that this appears to be, as far as Gnosticism is concerned, the time that the Greeks called the kairos, the time when the Gods are reborn. We live in an age, I think, when certain timeless ideas, which have been submerged and subdued for a long time, are making their appearance once again. In that respect we're living in very interesting times as the Chinese would say. Interesting times, spiritually powerful times, always cast a great shadow. There will also be great difficulties, but I think that Gnostic traditions, along with a number of kindred ideas, are being reborn at this time, and will have a significant influence in the future. Those of us who find ourselves working within that field are singularly blessed that we can do this work at this particular time. So I feel I'm at the right place and at the right time and I am profoundly grateful for all of that."
I have had the experience of being gripped by something stronger than myself, something that people call God. ~Carl Jung; "The Old Wise Man" published in Time, 1955.
Tears, sorrow, and disappointment are bitter, but wisdom is the comforter in all psychic suffering. Indeed, bitterness and wisdom form a pair of alternatives: where there is bitterness wisdom is lacking, and where wisdom is there can be no bitterness. ~Carl Jung; CW 20; Mysterium Coniunctionis; Page 246; Para 330.
Intuition [is] perception via the unconscious. ~Carl Jung; "The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious", 1950.
"As Above, So Below." = "Mind Above, Thought Below."
There are two offshoots from all the Aeons, having neither beginning nor end, from one root, and this root is a certain Power, an invisible and incomprehensible Silence.
One of them appears on high and is a great power the mind of the whole, who rules all things and is a male; the other below is a great thought, a female giving birth to all things. Standing opposite one another, they pair together and cause to arise in the space between them an incomprehensible Air, without beginning or end; but in it is a Father who upholds all things and nourishes that which has beginning and end.
This is he who stood, stands, and shall stand, a masculo-feminine Power after the likeness of the pre-existing boundless Power which has neither beginning nor end, abiding in solitude. ~Carl Jung; Mysterium Coniunctionis; Page 136. [From Elenchos, VI, 19.2.]
Gnosis or Neurosis?
Gnosis, as a special kind of knowledge, should not be confused with. "Gnosticism." ~Footnote #13, Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Page 45.
The "Gnosticism" of the 2nd and 3rd centuries A.D. contained much beauty and wisdom but also many of the writers of the time lost themselves within the web of their own words creating much confusion as to what they meant.
Even at that time there were schisms withing "Gnosticism" where groups and sects formed that engaged in the most licentious behavior.
"Gnosis" on the other hand refers to the structure and dynamics of the human psyche wherein "Knowledge" is "bestowed" upon an individual through the human experience that is commonly known as "Revelation."
This "Gnosis" is not restricted by any particular religion, creed, dogma, culture or era but is largely the result and manifestation of how a particular individual lives their own life.
Therefore a person born under a star over Mecca, Calcutta or Lasha may worship Allah, Shiva or Buddha and attain "Gnosis" while not worshipping Christ as the devout adherents to "Gnosticism" born under a Star in Alexandria, Egypt did in the early part of the Christian era.
There are two offshoots from all the Aeons, having neither beginning nor end, from one root, and this root is a certain Power, an invisible and incomprehensible Silence.
One of them appears on high and is a great power the mind of the whole, who rules all things and is a male; the other below is a great thought, a female giving birth to all things. Standing opposite one another, they pair together and cause to arise in the space between them an incomprehensible Air, without beginning or end; but in it is a Father who upholds all things and nourishes that which has beginning and end.
This is he who stood, stands, and shall stand, a masculo-feminine Power after the likeness of the pre-existing boundless Power which has neither beginning nor end, abiding in solitude. ~Carl Jung; Mysterium Coniunctionis; Page 136. [From Elenchos, VI, 19.2.]
Gnosis or Neurosis?
Gnosis, as a special kind of knowledge, should not be confused with. "Gnosticism." ~Footnote #13, Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Page 45.
The "Gnosticism" of the 2nd and 3rd centuries A.D. contained much beauty and wisdom but also many of the writers of the time lost themselves within the web of their own words creating much confusion as to what they meant.
Even at that time there were schisms withing "Gnosticism" where groups and sects formed that engaged in the most licentious behavior.
"Gnosis" on the other hand refers to the structure and dynamics of the human psyche wherein "Knowledge" is "bestowed" upon an individual through the human experience that is commonly known as "Revelation."
This "Gnosis" is not restricted by any particular religion, creed, dogma, culture or era but is largely the result and manifestation of how a particular individual lives their own life.
Therefore a person born under a star over Mecca, Calcutta or Lasha may worship Allah, Shiva or Buddha and attain "Gnosis" while not worshipping Christ as the devout adherents to "Gnosticism" born under a Star in Alexandria, Egypt did in the early part of the Christian era.
Gnosticism Gnosticism in modern times
Carl Jung and his associate G.R.S. Mead worked on trying to understand and explain the gnostic faith from a psychological standpoint. Jung's analytical psychology in many ways schematically mirrors ancient gnostic mythology, particularly those of Valentinus and the 'classic' gnostic doctrine described in most detail in the Apocryphon of John (see gnostic schools).
Jung understands the emergence of the Demiurge out of the original, unified monadic source of the spiritual universe by gradual stages to be analogous to (and a symbolic depiction of) the emergence of the ego from the unconscious
However, it is uncertain as to whether the similarities between Jung's psychological teachings and those of the Gnostics are due to their sharing a "perennial philosophy", or whether Jung was unwittingly influenced by the Gnostics in the formation of his theories. Jung's own 'gnostic hymn', the Septem Sermones ad Mortuos (The Seven Sermons to the Dead), would tend to imply the latter, but after circulating the manuscript, Jung declined to publish it during his lifetime. Since it is not clear whether Jung was ultimately displeased with the book or whether he merely suppressed it as too controversial, the issue remains contested.
Uncertain too are Jung's belief that the gnostics were aware of and intended psychological meaning or significance within their myths.
On the other hand, it is clear from a comparison of Jung's writings and that of ancient Gnostics, that Jung disagreed with them on the ultimate goal of the individual. Gnostics in ancient times clearly sought a return to a supreme, other-worldly Godhead. In a study of Jung, Robert Segal claimed that the eminent psychologist would have found the psychological interpretation of the goal of ancient Gnosticism (that is, re-unification with the Pleroma, or the unknown God) to be psychically 'dangerous', as being a total identification with the unconscious.
To contend that there is at least some disagreement between Jung and Gnosticism is at least supportable: the Jungian process of individuation involves the addition of unconscious psychic tropes to consciousness in order to achieve a trans-conscious centre to the personality. Jung did not intend this addition to take the form of a complete identification of the Self with the Unconscious. --Wikipedia
Carl Jung and his associate G.R.S. Mead worked on trying to understand and explain the gnostic faith from a psychological standpoint. Jung's analytical psychology in many ways schematically mirrors ancient gnostic mythology, particularly those of Valentinus and the 'classic' gnostic doctrine described in most detail in the Apocryphon of John (see gnostic schools).
Jung understands the emergence of the Demiurge out of the original, unified monadic source of the spiritual universe by gradual stages to be analogous to (and a symbolic depiction of) the emergence of the ego from the unconscious
However, it is uncertain as to whether the similarities between Jung's psychological teachings and those of the Gnostics are due to their sharing a "perennial philosophy", or whether Jung was unwittingly influenced by the Gnostics in the formation of his theories. Jung's own 'gnostic hymn', the Septem Sermones ad Mortuos (The Seven Sermons to the Dead), would tend to imply the latter, but after circulating the manuscript, Jung declined to publish it during his lifetime. Since it is not clear whether Jung was ultimately displeased with the book or whether he merely suppressed it as too controversial, the issue remains contested.
Uncertain too are Jung's belief that the gnostics were aware of and intended psychological meaning or significance within their myths.
On the other hand, it is clear from a comparison of Jung's writings and that of ancient Gnostics, that Jung disagreed with them on the ultimate goal of the individual. Gnostics in ancient times clearly sought a return to a supreme, other-worldly Godhead. In a study of Jung, Robert Segal claimed that the eminent psychologist would have found the psychological interpretation of the goal of ancient Gnosticism (that is, re-unification with the Pleroma, or the unknown God) to be psychically 'dangerous', as being a total identification with the unconscious.
To contend that there is at least some disagreement between Jung and Gnosticism is at least supportable: the Jungian process of individuation involves the addition of unconscious psychic tropes to consciousness in order to achieve a trans-conscious centre to the personality. Jung did not intend this addition to take the form of a complete identification of the Self with the Unconscious. --Wikipedia
Self Realization
' Gnosis cannot be described or spoken of except in apophatic terms; that is to say, in terms of what is not. It has no resemblance to anything conceived by the mind. Nakedness of the mind, a full stop to thought, precedes the moment of illumination or gnosis. As long as the mind clings to its old assumed wisdom, mystical experiences remain temporary epiphanies rather than gnosis. ~Rosamonde Ikshvàku Miller, 2013.'
It is only through the psyche that we can establish that God acts upon us, but we are unable to distinguish whether these actions emanate from God or from the unconscious. We cannot tell whether God and the unconscious are two different entities.
Both are border-line concepts for transcendental contents. But empirically it can be established, with a sufficient degree of probability, that there is in the unconscious an archetype of wholeness which manifests itself spontaneously in dreams, etc., and a tendency, independent of the conscious will, to relate other archetypes to its centre.
Consequently, it does not seem improbable that the archetype produces a symbolism which has always characterized and expressed the Deity . . .
The God-image does not coincide with the unconscious as such, but with a special content of it, namely the archetype of the self. It is this archetype from which we can no longer distinguish the God image empirically."
~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 395 and Psychology and Religion; West and East, CW 11, Page 468.
' Gnosis cannot be described or spoken of except in apophatic terms; that is to say, in terms of what is not. It has no resemblance to anything conceived by the mind. Nakedness of the mind, a full stop to thought, precedes the moment of illumination or gnosis. As long as the mind clings to its old assumed wisdom, mystical experiences remain temporary epiphanies rather than gnosis. ~Rosamonde Ikshvàku Miller, 2013.'
It is only through the psyche that we can establish that God acts upon us, but we are unable to distinguish whether these actions emanate from God or from the unconscious. We cannot tell whether God and the unconscious are two different entities.
Both are border-line concepts for transcendental contents. But empirically it can be established, with a sufficient degree of probability, that there is in the unconscious an archetype of wholeness which manifests itself spontaneously in dreams, etc., and a tendency, independent of the conscious will, to relate other archetypes to its centre.
Consequently, it does not seem improbable that the archetype produces a symbolism which has always characterized and expressed the Deity . . .
The God-image does not coincide with the unconscious as such, but with a special content of it, namely the archetype of the self. It is this archetype from which we can no longer distinguish the God image empirically."
~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 395 and Psychology and Religion; West and East, CW 11, Page 468.
The religious person enjoys a great advantage when it comes to answering the crucial question that hangs over our time like a threat: he has a clear idea of the way his subjective existence is grounded in his relation to "God". I put the word "God" in quotes in order to indicate that we are dealing with an anthropomorphic idea whose dynamism and symbolism are filtered through the medium of the unconscious psyche. Anyone who wants to can at least draw near to the source of such experiences, no matter whether he believes in God or not. Without this approach it is only in rare cases that we witness those miraculous conversions of which Paul's Damascus experience is the prototype.
That religious experiences exist no longer needs proof. But it will always remain doubtful whether what metaphysics and theology call God and the gods is the real ground of these experiences.
The question is idle, actually, and answers itself by reason of the subjectively overwhelming numinosity of the experience. Anyone who has had it is seized by it and therefore not in a position to indulge in fruitless metaphysical or epistemological speculations. Absolute certainty brings its own evidence and has no need of anthropomorphic proofs. ~Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self; Page 64.
The seat of faith, however, is not consciousness but spontaneous religious experience, which brings the individual's faith into immediate relation with God. Here we must ask:
Have I any religious experience and immediate relation to God, and hence that certainty which will keep me, as an individual, from dissolving in the crowd?
~Carl Jung; The Undiscovered Self; Page 85
That religious experiences exist no longer needs proof. But it will always remain doubtful whether what metaphysics and theology call God and the gods is the real ground of these experiences.
The question is idle, actually, and answers itself by reason of the subjectively overwhelming numinosity of the experience. Anyone who has had it is seized by it and therefore not in a position to indulge in fruitless metaphysical or epistemological speculations. Absolute certainty brings its own evidence and has no need of anthropomorphic proofs. ~Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self; Page 64.
The seat of faith, however, is not consciousness but spontaneous religious experience, which brings the individual's faith into immediate relation with God. Here we must ask:
Have I any religious experience and immediate relation to God, and hence that certainty which will keep me, as an individual, from dissolving in the crowd?
~Carl Jung; The Undiscovered Self; Page 85
Oleg Korolev
More selections from Gnostic texts:
"I am the Word who dwells in the ineffable Silence. I dwell in undefiled Light and a Thought revealed itself perceptibly through the great Sound ... And it the Sound exists from the beginning in the foundations of the All [multiverse or cosmos]. But there is a Light that swells hidden in Silence and it was the first to come forth...I alone am the Word, ineffable, incorruptible, immeasurable, inconceivable. It (the Word?) is a hidden Light ... being unreproducible, an immeasurable Light, the source of All...It is foundation that supports every movement of the Aeons that belong to the mighty glory. It is the founding of every foundation. It is the breath of the powers. It is the eye of the three permanence's, which exist as a Voice by virtue of a Thought. And it is a Word by virtue of the Sound ... I (the Word) became a foundation for the All..." (Trimorphic Protennoina, Nag Hammadi Library)
"I am a Voice speaking softly. I exist from the first. I dwell within the silence..."
(Trimorphic Protennoia)
"I am the silence that is incomprehensible. I am the Voice whose Sound is manifold and the Word whose appearance is multiple... I am the hearing which can be attained by everyone." (Thunder: Perfect Mind, Nag Hammadi Library)
"He is the First Father of the All (universe). He is the First Being. He is the First Source. He it is whose Voice has penetrated everywhere. He is the First Sound whereby the All perceived and understood." (Hymn in the Untitled Text of the Bruce Codex)
"It is I who am hidden within Radiant Waters. I am the one who gradually put forth (manifested, emanated) the All... It is I who am laden with the Voice. It is through me that Gnosis comes forth. I am perception (enlightenment) and knowledge, uttering a Voice... I am the real Voice. I cry out in everyone, and they recognize it (the Voice), since a seed (of me) dwells in (each of) them." (Trimorphic Protennoia, Nag Hammadi Library)
"It is He to whom the universe has come; they were silent before Him and have not told of Him, for He is beyond speech, beyond thought. So This is the First Fountain; it is He whose Voice has penetrated in every place -- this is the First Sound vibrating until the universe feels and understands." (Bruce Codex of Egypt)
The Five Hebrew-Sounding Names (Panch Naam Mantras) of the Jewish Sethian Gnostics
Throughout Gnostic literature names of specific lights of the different realms are described:
Armozel of the First region,
Oroiael of the Second,
Daveithe of the Third,
and Elethe of the Fourth.
The Fifth Aeon, the Divine, is the all-encompassing Light.
(Andrea Grace Diem, The Gnostic Mystery)
Name One: Armoz-el of the first region,
Name Two: Oroia-el of the second,
Name Three: Daveithe of the third,
Name Fourth: El-ethe of the fourth.
The Fifth Aeon and Fifth Name not revealed:
the Divine, Self-Begotten One.
These sacred names, which correspond to five heavenly regions or planes, are words of power. By repeating various names of God while concentrating in the darkness, the energies of the soul that normally are scattered and dissipated into the world of the five senses are gathered together at the Single Eye. With this Singleness of Vision - concentration at the Third Eye Center, Light will appear. One will begin to rise above body-consciousness and begin the interior voyage of spiritual ascension (soul travel) accompanied by the Radiant Form of the Master. Trimorphic Protennoia:
"He who possesses the Five Seals of these particular names has stripped off the garments of ignorance [the material body and subtle bodies: astral, causal, etc...] and put on a shining Light. And nothing will appear to him that belongs to the Powers of the Archons [rulers of the lower regions]. Within those of this sort, darkness will dissolve and ignorance will die. And the thought of the creature, which is scattered, will present a single appearance and dark Chaos will dissolve and ... until I reveal myself to all my fellow brethren, and until I gather together all my fellow brethren within my eternal Kingdom. And I proclaimed to them the ineffable Five Seals in order that I might abide in them and they also might abide in me."
Gnostics
In 1947, French scholar Jean Doresse identified the Egyptian find at Nag Hammadi as a cache of rare Gnostic texts. "Gnosticism" is the label scholars use for a body of teachings derived from the Mystery Schools of pre-Christian antiquity. Gnostics who protested against Christian doctrines such as divine retribution and Christ’s resurrection found themselves targeted as heretics and were brutally suppressed by early converts to the One True Faith. This is the untold story of how the Mysteries ended. Since that signal year, 1947, some of the lost Mystery School knowledge has been recovered.
Gnosis (“inner knowing”) was a path of experimental mysticism in which the initiates of the Mystery Schools explored the psyche and the cosmos at large. Using psychoactive plants, yoga, and sex magic, these ancient seers experienced altered states and developed siddhis, occult skills such as clairaudience and remote viewing. Gnosis was a kind of yogic noetic science melded with parapsychology. In heightened perception, Gnostics developed a vast cosmological vision centered in a female deity, the Divine Sophia. http://www.ritmanlibrary.nl/c/r/pdf/gnosis-exh-E.pdf
"I am the Word who dwells in the ineffable Silence. I dwell in undefiled Light and a Thought revealed itself perceptibly through the great Sound ... And it the Sound exists from the beginning in the foundations of the All [multiverse or cosmos]. But there is a Light that swells hidden in Silence and it was the first to come forth...I alone am the Word, ineffable, incorruptible, immeasurable, inconceivable. It (the Word?) is a hidden Light ... being unreproducible, an immeasurable Light, the source of All...It is foundation that supports every movement of the Aeons that belong to the mighty glory. It is the founding of every foundation. It is the breath of the powers. It is the eye of the three permanence's, which exist as a Voice by virtue of a Thought. And it is a Word by virtue of the Sound ... I (the Word) became a foundation for the All..." (Trimorphic Protennoina, Nag Hammadi Library)
"I am a Voice speaking softly. I exist from the first. I dwell within the silence..."
(Trimorphic Protennoia)
"I am the silence that is incomprehensible. I am the Voice whose Sound is manifold and the Word whose appearance is multiple... I am the hearing which can be attained by everyone." (Thunder: Perfect Mind, Nag Hammadi Library)
"He is the First Father of the All (universe). He is the First Being. He is the First Source. He it is whose Voice has penetrated everywhere. He is the First Sound whereby the All perceived and understood." (Hymn in the Untitled Text of the Bruce Codex)
"It is I who am hidden within Radiant Waters. I am the one who gradually put forth (manifested, emanated) the All... It is I who am laden with the Voice. It is through me that Gnosis comes forth. I am perception (enlightenment) and knowledge, uttering a Voice... I am the real Voice. I cry out in everyone, and they recognize it (the Voice), since a seed (of me) dwells in (each of) them." (Trimorphic Protennoia, Nag Hammadi Library)
"It is He to whom the universe has come; they were silent before Him and have not told of Him, for He is beyond speech, beyond thought. So This is the First Fountain; it is He whose Voice has penetrated in every place -- this is the First Sound vibrating until the universe feels and understands." (Bruce Codex of Egypt)
The Five Hebrew-Sounding Names (Panch Naam Mantras) of the Jewish Sethian Gnostics
Throughout Gnostic literature names of specific lights of the different realms are described:
Armozel of the First region,
Oroiael of the Second,
Daveithe of the Third,
and Elethe of the Fourth.
The Fifth Aeon, the Divine, is the all-encompassing Light.
(Andrea Grace Diem, The Gnostic Mystery)
Name One: Armoz-el of the first region,
Name Two: Oroia-el of the second,
Name Three: Daveithe of the third,
Name Fourth: El-ethe of the fourth.
The Fifth Aeon and Fifth Name not revealed:
the Divine, Self-Begotten One.
These sacred names, which correspond to five heavenly regions or planes, are words of power. By repeating various names of God while concentrating in the darkness, the energies of the soul that normally are scattered and dissipated into the world of the five senses are gathered together at the Single Eye. With this Singleness of Vision - concentration at the Third Eye Center, Light will appear. One will begin to rise above body-consciousness and begin the interior voyage of spiritual ascension (soul travel) accompanied by the Radiant Form of the Master. Trimorphic Protennoia:
"He who possesses the Five Seals of these particular names has stripped off the garments of ignorance [the material body and subtle bodies: astral, causal, etc...] and put on a shining Light. And nothing will appear to him that belongs to the Powers of the Archons [rulers of the lower regions]. Within those of this sort, darkness will dissolve and ignorance will die. And the thought of the creature, which is scattered, will present a single appearance and dark Chaos will dissolve and ... until I reveal myself to all my fellow brethren, and until I gather together all my fellow brethren within my eternal Kingdom. And I proclaimed to them the ineffable Five Seals in order that I might abide in them and they also might abide in me."
Gnostics
In 1947, French scholar Jean Doresse identified the Egyptian find at Nag Hammadi as a cache of rare Gnostic texts. "Gnosticism" is the label scholars use for a body of teachings derived from the Mystery Schools of pre-Christian antiquity. Gnostics who protested against Christian doctrines such as divine retribution and Christ’s resurrection found themselves targeted as heretics and were brutally suppressed by early converts to the One True Faith. This is the untold story of how the Mysteries ended. Since that signal year, 1947, some of the lost Mystery School knowledge has been recovered.
Gnosis (“inner knowing”) was a path of experimental mysticism in which the initiates of the Mystery Schools explored the psyche and the cosmos at large. Using psychoactive plants, yoga, and sex magic, these ancient seers experienced altered states and developed siddhis, occult skills such as clairaudience and remote viewing. Gnosis was a kind of yogic noetic science melded with parapsychology. In heightened perception, Gnostics developed a vast cosmological vision centered in a female deity, the Divine Sophia. http://www.ritmanlibrary.nl/c/r/pdf/gnosis-exh-E.pdf
A Gnostic sect evolved during the second century AD. and existed for several centuries afterwards. The name, or word, was derived from the Greek ophis, meaning "serpent, and relates to the great reverence which the Ophites had toward the serpent. The members progressed through full-fledged initiation ceremonies that included symbols for purity, life, spirit and fire. The entire system of the sect appears to be a combination of the mysteries of the Egyptian goddess Isis, concepts of oriental mythology, and early Christian doctrine.
According to the theologians Origen, Irenaeus and others, the essence of the Ophitic Doctrine was that the God of the Old Testament was a misanthropic deity from whose power mankind had to be liberated. From this point of view the serpent in the Garden of Eden was a benefactor to mankind when he urged Adam and Eve to revolt against such a God. Therefore, other enemies of Jehovah in the Old Testament became heroes of the sect.
As a mark of reverence for the serpent, it was reported, the snake took part in the sect's communion service. The following was reported by Epiphanius (fourth century Church Father) who called the service abominable. The snake was kept in a chest known as the cista mystica. At the beginning of the service the snake is summoned out. He then rolls among the loaves of bread which are on the table after which are broken and eaten. Following this each of those present kiss the snake on the mouth for it has been tamed by a spell. They have then fallen down and worshipped the snake as a part of the Eucharist service. They claimed they have sent forth a hymn to the Father, and thus concluded their mysteries. A.G.H.
THE GNOSTIC MOVEMENT
In the first and second centuries of the Common Era numerous schools of thought refer to themselves as "Gnostic." There is no organized religion by the name of "Gnosticism" with specific doctrines to follow and creeds to believe; there are, rather, many different Gnostic systems, each with its own particular theological slant. Several. sects are named after a founder, a specific place, a symbol (like the snake), or a group of people. Four of the most famous fall into the first camp, a school with a particular founder. These are the schools of Marcion, Basilides, Valentinus, and Mani. [1]
Although each Gnostic sect may emphasize one philosophical point over another, the fundamental aspiration always remains the same: the pursuit of gnosis [2]; thisis the common thread among all the sects. Gnosis, which in Greek simply means knowledge, is not of the intellect, or matters dealing with the everyday world; rather, gnosis refers to knowledge of the spiritual world. The highest form of gnosis would be the knowledge of the Divine--direct, experiential knowledge of God which is not taught or found in the Scriptures. There are really two adjacent forms of knowledge dealing with the spiritual world: knowledge of God (which we shall see is self-knowledge) and knowledge of special techniques, including passwords in order for the soul to ascend through various spiritual regions to the unknown Father.
The underlying goal is to raise one's consciousness beyond the physical world to the higher, spiritual worlds. It is as though the body were a cage in which the soul (as a bird) is entrapped. When the soul vacates the physical body it is said to ascend through various spiritual realms and its consciousness becomes purified. Finally, it reaches its primordial home, the Divine.
According to Gnostics, there is a substratum of reality, an Unknown, Nameless God who is unchanging and immeasurable, transcending any particularity or imposition one can attribute to It. In the Gnostic text The Apocryphon of John this Godhead is referred to as "the invisible One who is above everything," the "unnamable since there is no one prior to him to give him a name," and the "ineffable!' one beyond quantity and quality. [3] And in Marsanes, God is described as "the Silent One who is not known." [4] To Marcion, this Unknown Being is the "Alien God," symbolically signifying that the Divine is other to this world/creation. [5] Each soul or spirit entity is seen as essentially the same essence of God, a pure spark or atom of divine consciousness.
Hence, Gnostics are in some ways advocating a qualified non-dualism in which all souls are ontologically united in the Divine. In other ways, Gnostics are radical dualists, because they make a sharp distinction between the external, physical world and the internal, spiritual world.
The common misnomer is referring to all Gnostics as pessimists who de-value human beings. On the contrary, most Gnostics assign an exceptionally high value to the human soul. The analogy of Plato's cave illustrates this better. According to Plato, the prisoner mistakes shadows on a cave's wall to be reality. But, argues Plato, it is the source of those shadows, the Light, which is the true reality. In the Gnostic view, one has the potential to unshackle the chains of ignorance and turn from the shadows on the wall to look reality straight in the face. The world/creation is seen as evil only because it attracts one to the outside, to the external, and in the process the inner Self is forgotten. This is the great "original sin" according to the Gnostics.
The sleeping spirit is made conscious by the Divine Man or the Redeemer who takes human form. He descends from the spiritual realms to reveal divine secrets and call souls back. Some Gnostics, especially the followers of a Gnostic named Mani, [6] assume that a Divine Man incarnates in different human forms throughout history to awaken people of all times and places. Accordingly, the Divine Man comes to restore the soul to its original purity and to lead it back to God. Several Gnostics argue that humans return to this earthly realm (reincarnate) until consciousness of the Divine is realized. Again, we see that Gnostics are not de-valuing the human soul but are ultimately suggesting an optimistic fate for it. [7]
The Gnostic movement as a whole draws upon many mystical philosophies, including neo-Platonism, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and possibly Hinduism, [8] to name a few. With the spread of a Greek culture, there seems to be a tendency among philosophers to syncretize [9] waves of thought and to identify a common denominator. [10]
The Gnostic tradition has often been associated with Christianity. Christian Gnostics claim to have the "true" teachings of Jesus. Many orthodox Christians argue that these esoteric interpretations were absurd and destructive to Christian faith. Nonetheless, in the early second century C.E. these Gnostics were not yet divorced from the greater part of the Christian community. [11]
Yet, between the third and fourth centuries C.E., the boundaries of Christianity are no longer as fluid, and groups are excluded as heretical. This is the age of the great heresiologists. Irenaeus, the first Church Father, is considered the greatest opponent of the Gnostic tradition. Its five books establish systematic guidelines to reject Gnostics. Several anti-Gnostic writers follow Irenaeus, among which are Hippolytus, Clement, Origen, and Tertullian. In the third and fourth centuries C.E., in an attempt to establish a strong institutionalized Church, extremely sharp boundaries were drawn. The Gnostic movement is accused of trying to undermine the Church, and, consequently, all Gnostic thought is condemned as a heresy. Most Gnostic writings are destroyed at this time.
Despite the apparent historical connection between the Gnostic tradition and Christianity, the argument that the Gnostic tradition emerges from Christianity is tenuous. Contrary to popular understanding, the Gnostic tradition, in its formative stages, seems to have a "parasitical" [12] relationship with Judaism. Birger Pearson, an expert in Gnostic Studies, suggests that unfulfilled eschatology may have aroused spiritual rebellion in Jewish circles. Consequently, in revolt, a Gnostic hermeneutical program is employed, giving "birth to a radically new religious movement," [13] no longer recognizable as Jewish. Thus the Christian Gnostic tradition, argues Pearson, is an attempt on the part of Gnostics to gain entry into Christian communities, or to gain adherents to their communities, by means of equating their own gnosis with alleged secret teachings of Jesus. It is precisely this that causes so much difficulty for modern interpreters, some of whom continue to insist that Gnosticism, in its origins, was sparked by the appearance in history of a suitable savior figure, understood to be Jesus Christ. But this is an illusion. [14]
Part of the evidence supporting this theory is the Gnostic utilization of the Old Testament. It is interpreted, or more precisely re-interpreted, in a new light. Well-known biblical figures, such as Adam, are given a new role embodying basic Gnostic presuppositions. In a sense, it is a metaphorical teaching device, twisting the original story line to present their ideology. The Sethians, for example, speak of Adam as the figure who) transmits secrets to his son Seth, who then incarnates as "the great illuminator" [15] (e.g., Melchizedek, Zoroaster, Jesus) to reveal the eternal knowledge to the Gnostic (Sethian) race. [16] In fact, Gnostics go so far as to reverse the roles of good and evil to present the "deeper meaning." For instance, in the biblical creation story, the serpent (for some Gnostics) is not seen as an evil power but as a positive one, for the serpent urges Eve and Adam to wake up from the slumber and to realize their divine nature. Irenaeus elucidates this Gnostic view:
But their mother (wisdom) cunningly led Eve and Adam astray by the agency of the snake, so that they transgress the commandment of laldabaoth [lower demiurge]. And Eve was easily persuaded, as if she were listening to an offspring of god. And she persuaded Adam to eat from the tree from which god had said not to eat. Moreover--they saw--when they ate they became acquainted with the power which is superior to all, and they revolted from those who had made them. [17]
The serpent, then, begins to represent something completely different from what it does for the orthodox Jew or Christian. According to Irenaeus, the Gnostic sect of Ophites were among those who utilized this bold allegorization of the serpent in the creation story. [18]
A prime example of the Gnostic re-interpretation of the Old Testament is their view of the biblical god. [19] They contend that the god of the Old Testament is penultimate, that is, a lower deity and not the Godhead. They even go as far as to portray him as a demonic being, envious of the human race and striving to enslave souls in ignorance (i.e., through Jewish Law). [20] We can look at several examples in the Nag Hammadi Codices that describe this illegitimate lower demiurge. For instance, in Trimorphic Protennoia it says of this hostile power:
There appeared the great Demon who rules the lowest part of the underworld and Chaos. He has neither form nor perfection, but on the contrary possesses the form of the glory of those begotten in the darkness. Now he is called "Saklas," that is Samael, "Yaldabaoth," he who had taken power, who had snatched it away from the innocent one (Sophia)... [21]
Another example is found in The Apocryphon of John which describes an ignorant, jealous god:
He is impious in his arrogance, which is in him. For he said, "I am God and there is no other God besides me," for he is ignorant of his strength, the place from which he had come." [22]
Since, according to most Gnostics, the creator god is of evil origin, so also is the creation. This anti-cosmic attitude has resulted in varying attitudes of ethics. We learn a great deal about the various Gnostic ethics in Clement of Alexandria's Stromateis (Book III). He writes:
Accordingly we may divide all the heresies into two groups in making answer to them. Either they teach that one ought to live on the principle that it is a matter of indifference whether one does right or wrong, or they set too ascetic a tone and proclaim the necessity of continence on the group of opinions which are godless and arise from hatred of what God has created. [23]
The ascetics contend that worldly pleasure impedes spiritual growth because it. attracts one to the outside, to the external, and the inner spiritual Self is forgotten. To combat this problem strict ethics are employed. For some, this included a vegetarian diet, extensive fasts, abstinence from intoxicants, and celibacy. Irenaeus places the Gnostic Saturnilus here. He explains:
Marriage and procreation, they maintain, are of Satan. Many of his followers abstain from animated things (i.e., meat), and through this feigned continence they lead many astray. [24]
According to Clement the Marcionite doctrine of ethics also falls into this camp. He remarks: By the Marcionites nature is regarded as evil because it was created out of evil matter and by a just Creator. On this ground, that they do not wish to fill the world made by the Creator-God, they decide to abstain from marriage. Thus they are in opposition to their Maker and hasten toward him who is called the good God, but not to the God, as they say, of the other kind ... they are continent, not of their own free choice, but from the hatred of the Creator. [25] He later adds:
Marcionites have interpreted them [children] in a godless sense and are ungrateful to their Creator. [26]
On the other hand, libertines, like the Barbeliotes, supposedly engage in sexual cultic rituals, which begins with a feast of meat and wine and ends in an orgy. They justify their behavior as a means to transmit their sexual emission and the soul of the dead animal to the heavenly world. They are said to refuse giving birth to children because it again entraps a "seed of light" into an evil creation. [27] Nature is abused in the worst of ways as a fight against the creator god. Clement is especially infuriated with the "blasphemous immortality of Carpocrates" [28] who "can have pigs and goats as their associates." [29]
There is also a third Gnostic group, the moderate ascetics, that Clement fails to categorize. We find here the Valentinians. [30] Abuse of materials is abandoned; instead,. the materials of the world are used with caution and limitation. Marriage and procreation are also rightfully condoned. The overall theme here is living a life of moderation as, well as indifference to worldly pleasure, but certainly not an aversion or sanctification of it. When Clement is rebuffing encratic behavior of the libertines, he draws upon the Valentinians as a potential model: [31]
If these people (i.e., the libertines) spoke of acts of spiritual union like the Valentinians, perhaps one could accept their view. But to suppose that the holy prophets spoke of carnal and wanton intercourse is the way of a man who has renounced salvation. [32]
Indeed, the Gnostic tradition is a complex religious tradition with many fascinating dimensions. Their theology entails a Transcendent God far surpassing the creator god who rules over this earthly plane. The human soul, a microcosm of this highest Being, remains imprisoned in the body since it is fooled by the inferior power and fails to realize its higher nature. The cosmos is viewed as a dark prison and this results in different attitudes of ethics, including asceticism, moderate asceticism, or libertinism The overall objective of the Gnostic is to return to the Unknown God by awakening the human spiritual consciousness. But how does one awaken one's human spiritual consciousness? To answer this question we shall utilize the Nag Hammadi literature. But let us look at a comparable religious tradition known as the Sant tradition.
Notes
1. The first three are Christocentric, influenced by the Gospel of John and the letters of Paul; Mani is mostly influenced by Asian philosophy. Some argue Marcion is not a Gnostic because he did not accept the Gnostic tenet that souls are divine by nature or that it is gnosis that saves. Rather, he adopts the Pauline view that one is essentially corrupt and saved only through faith. For further discussion of Marcion, see Kurt Rudolph, op cit., p. 316.
2. The Greek term gnosis is cognate with Sanskrit jnana. Whether gnosis as such is comparable with jn3na-yoga (the causal path of knowledge), however, is debatable.
3. James M. Robinson (ed.), "The Apocryphon of John H," in The Nag Hammadi Library in English (San Francisco: Harper and Row Publishers, 1988, third edition), p106. Hereafter cited as NHL.
4. Marsanes (X,l), in NHL, p. 463.
5. See Kurt Rudolph, op. cit., p. 62. Marcion and Valentinus apparently were excommunicated from the Roman Church for their philosophical position.
6. Mani's alternative church (i.e., the Manichean tradition) eventually died out in the seventeenth century in China. The three principles stressed were: 1) A Divine Man incarnated in different forms (e.g., Buddha, Jesus); 2) Outward observances like sacraments were totally unnecessary; 3) Evil did not originate from God (the world of Light) but had its own principle source--that is, the world of darkness. It is this world of darkness that overwhelmed archetypal Man, contaminating sparks of Light with material form. Mani's dualism of light and darkness, the realm of good and the realm of evil, seems to be directly influenced by Iranian Zoroastrianism. See Rudolph, op. cit., pp. 334-35.
7. This may not apply to Basilides, who, according to Hippolytus, believes that once God has pulled ready souls back to It a "great unconsciousness" will descend upon the rest of humankind. See H. L. Mansel, D.D., The Gnostic Heresies of the First and Second Centuries (London: AMS Press, 1875), p. 156. Yet, it is important to note that there are two irreconcilable accounts of the doctrines of Basilides: one is presented by Hippolytus and the other by Irenaeus. Which account renders a more accurate depiction of Basilides remains uncertain at this time.
8. For an interesting discussion on the philosophical connection between Gnostic ideas and Hindu thought see Geo Widengren, The Gnostic Attitude (Santa Barbara: Institute of Religious Studies, 1973).
9. I hesitate to describe the Gnostic tradition as a syncretistic religion. This label, although a seemingly neutral description, is often coupled with pejorative connotations, generally suggesting that the tradition is simply a subgroup which defiled its parent religion(s).
10. Today, we see this same spirit in the New Age Movement which tries to syncretize religions of the East and West, transpersonal psychology, and modem physics.
11. There is some indication that Gnostic ideas affect many of the writings of the New Testament (especially the Gospel of John). A debatable example is Colossians, which appears to deal with the problem of false teachers and reacts against varying concepts of the soteriology of the soul. Rules of food and drink and ascetical principles, often observances of Gnostics, are scoffed at. Moreover, 2 Thessalonians is in part written in reaction against advocates of a newly emerging philosophy, which, in this letter, are condemned as the lawless one, those "who exalt himself above every so-called god and object of worship, so as to seat himself in the Temple of God, claiming that he is god." Ephesians also warns against "teaching arising from human trickery," but this letter incorporates several attitudes similar to Gnostics. It discusses Jesus' descent from the inner regions and petitions the "Sleeper to Awake and arise from the dead." The letter of Jude, the second letter of Peter, and the Pastoral letters (1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, Titus) clearly attack false teachers who make reference to "what is falsely called knowledge." Several scholars suggest, however, that during the composition of the New Testament the Gnostic tradition was at such an early stage of development that the writers may have been reacting to another tradition other than the Gnostic tradition.
12. Pearson, op. cit., p. 8.
13. Ibid., p. 125. For further discussion of the relationship between Judaism and the development of the Gnostic tradition see chapter three of Pearson's book, pp. 39-51.
14. Ibid., p. 9.
15. The Apolcalypse of Adam (V. 5), in NHL, p. 285.
16. For an insightful analysis of Seth, see Pearson, op. cit., pp. 52-83.
17. Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses, I.30.8; I.30.9; I.30.15. Hereafter cited as Adv. haer.
18. Irenaeus, Adv. haer., I.30.7.
19. God spelled with a lower case 'g' is not meant to be disrespectful in any way to the Judaic/Christian religion. It represents the Gnostic understanding of an inferior demiurge, while God with an upper case 'G' refers to the Gnostic Transcendent God.
20. The three Christian Gnostics (Marcion, Basilides and Valentinus) supported this theology, and both Marcion and Valentinus were excommunicated from the Roman Church for their philosophical position.
21. Trimorphic Protennoia (XHI,I), in NHL, p. 515.
22. The Apocryphon of john, in NHL, p. 111.
23. Henry Chadwick, B.D. and John Ernest Leonard, D.D., translators, "Stromata" (Bk. IIII), The Library of Christian Classics Vol. II. Alexandrian Christianity (Philadelphia: The Westminister Press), p. 58.
24. Irenaeus, Adv. haer., 1.24.2.
25. Stromata, Bk. III, p. 46.
26. Ibid., p. 50.
27. Epiphanius, Pararion, 26.9.4.
28. Stromata, Bk. III, p. 52.
29. Ibid., p. 53.
30. James E. Davidson, "Structural Similarities and Dissimilarities in the Thought of Clement of Alexandria and the Valentinians," The Second Century: A Journal of Early Christian Studies, Vol. III, No. IV (Georgia: Mercer University Press, Winter 1983), pp. 214-15.
31. Clement's own ethics clearly fall into this third camp. He takes the motto, "It is better to marry than to bum." See Stromata, Bk. III, p. 53. "Burning" here simply means desire and suppression of such only intensifies it. Celibacy is acceptable if "chosen according to sound rule with godly reasons, provided that the person gives thanks for the grace God has granted, and does not hate the creation or reckon married people to be of no account." (p. 85) He continues to add that "both celibacy and marriage have their own different forms of service and ministry to the Lord." (p. 90) In regards to dietary ethics, Clement again stands in the moderate camp. Ideally, he promotes a meatless, alcohol free diet, but, according to Clement, "if one partakes of them, he does not sin." See Stromata, Bk. VII, p. 532..
32. Stromata, Bk. III, p. 53.
http://andrea65.tripod.com/gnostic2.html
According to the theologians Origen, Irenaeus and others, the essence of the Ophitic Doctrine was that the God of the Old Testament was a misanthropic deity from whose power mankind had to be liberated. From this point of view the serpent in the Garden of Eden was a benefactor to mankind when he urged Adam and Eve to revolt against such a God. Therefore, other enemies of Jehovah in the Old Testament became heroes of the sect.
As a mark of reverence for the serpent, it was reported, the snake took part in the sect's communion service. The following was reported by Epiphanius (fourth century Church Father) who called the service abominable. The snake was kept in a chest known as the cista mystica. At the beginning of the service the snake is summoned out. He then rolls among the loaves of bread which are on the table after which are broken and eaten. Following this each of those present kiss the snake on the mouth for it has been tamed by a spell. They have then fallen down and worshipped the snake as a part of the Eucharist service. They claimed they have sent forth a hymn to the Father, and thus concluded their mysteries. A.G.H.
THE GNOSTIC MOVEMENT
In the first and second centuries of the Common Era numerous schools of thought refer to themselves as "Gnostic." There is no organized religion by the name of "Gnosticism" with specific doctrines to follow and creeds to believe; there are, rather, many different Gnostic systems, each with its own particular theological slant. Several. sects are named after a founder, a specific place, a symbol (like the snake), or a group of people. Four of the most famous fall into the first camp, a school with a particular founder. These are the schools of Marcion, Basilides, Valentinus, and Mani. [1]
Although each Gnostic sect may emphasize one philosophical point over another, the fundamental aspiration always remains the same: the pursuit of gnosis [2]; thisis the common thread among all the sects. Gnosis, which in Greek simply means knowledge, is not of the intellect, or matters dealing with the everyday world; rather, gnosis refers to knowledge of the spiritual world. The highest form of gnosis would be the knowledge of the Divine--direct, experiential knowledge of God which is not taught or found in the Scriptures. There are really two adjacent forms of knowledge dealing with the spiritual world: knowledge of God (which we shall see is self-knowledge) and knowledge of special techniques, including passwords in order for the soul to ascend through various spiritual regions to the unknown Father.
The underlying goal is to raise one's consciousness beyond the physical world to the higher, spiritual worlds. It is as though the body were a cage in which the soul (as a bird) is entrapped. When the soul vacates the physical body it is said to ascend through various spiritual realms and its consciousness becomes purified. Finally, it reaches its primordial home, the Divine.
According to Gnostics, there is a substratum of reality, an Unknown, Nameless God who is unchanging and immeasurable, transcending any particularity or imposition one can attribute to It. In the Gnostic text The Apocryphon of John this Godhead is referred to as "the invisible One who is above everything," the "unnamable since there is no one prior to him to give him a name," and the "ineffable!' one beyond quantity and quality. [3] And in Marsanes, God is described as "the Silent One who is not known." [4] To Marcion, this Unknown Being is the "Alien God," symbolically signifying that the Divine is other to this world/creation. [5] Each soul or spirit entity is seen as essentially the same essence of God, a pure spark or atom of divine consciousness.
Hence, Gnostics are in some ways advocating a qualified non-dualism in which all souls are ontologically united in the Divine. In other ways, Gnostics are radical dualists, because they make a sharp distinction between the external, physical world and the internal, spiritual world.
The common misnomer is referring to all Gnostics as pessimists who de-value human beings. On the contrary, most Gnostics assign an exceptionally high value to the human soul. The analogy of Plato's cave illustrates this better. According to Plato, the prisoner mistakes shadows on a cave's wall to be reality. But, argues Plato, it is the source of those shadows, the Light, which is the true reality. In the Gnostic view, one has the potential to unshackle the chains of ignorance and turn from the shadows on the wall to look reality straight in the face. The world/creation is seen as evil only because it attracts one to the outside, to the external, and in the process the inner Self is forgotten. This is the great "original sin" according to the Gnostics.
The sleeping spirit is made conscious by the Divine Man or the Redeemer who takes human form. He descends from the spiritual realms to reveal divine secrets and call souls back. Some Gnostics, especially the followers of a Gnostic named Mani, [6] assume that a Divine Man incarnates in different human forms throughout history to awaken people of all times and places. Accordingly, the Divine Man comes to restore the soul to its original purity and to lead it back to God. Several Gnostics argue that humans return to this earthly realm (reincarnate) until consciousness of the Divine is realized. Again, we see that Gnostics are not de-valuing the human soul but are ultimately suggesting an optimistic fate for it. [7]
The Gnostic movement as a whole draws upon many mystical philosophies, including neo-Platonism, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and possibly Hinduism, [8] to name a few. With the spread of a Greek culture, there seems to be a tendency among philosophers to syncretize [9] waves of thought and to identify a common denominator. [10]
The Gnostic tradition has often been associated with Christianity. Christian Gnostics claim to have the "true" teachings of Jesus. Many orthodox Christians argue that these esoteric interpretations were absurd and destructive to Christian faith. Nonetheless, in the early second century C.E. these Gnostics were not yet divorced from the greater part of the Christian community. [11]
Yet, between the third and fourth centuries C.E., the boundaries of Christianity are no longer as fluid, and groups are excluded as heretical. This is the age of the great heresiologists. Irenaeus, the first Church Father, is considered the greatest opponent of the Gnostic tradition. Its five books establish systematic guidelines to reject Gnostics. Several anti-Gnostic writers follow Irenaeus, among which are Hippolytus, Clement, Origen, and Tertullian. In the third and fourth centuries C.E., in an attempt to establish a strong institutionalized Church, extremely sharp boundaries were drawn. The Gnostic movement is accused of trying to undermine the Church, and, consequently, all Gnostic thought is condemned as a heresy. Most Gnostic writings are destroyed at this time.
Despite the apparent historical connection between the Gnostic tradition and Christianity, the argument that the Gnostic tradition emerges from Christianity is tenuous. Contrary to popular understanding, the Gnostic tradition, in its formative stages, seems to have a "parasitical" [12] relationship with Judaism. Birger Pearson, an expert in Gnostic Studies, suggests that unfulfilled eschatology may have aroused spiritual rebellion in Jewish circles. Consequently, in revolt, a Gnostic hermeneutical program is employed, giving "birth to a radically new religious movement," [13] no longer recognizable as Jewish. Thus the Christian Gnostic tradition, argues Pearson, is an attempt on the part of Gnostics to gain entry into Christian communities, or to gain adherents to their communities, by means of equating their own gnosis with alleged secret teachings of Jesus. It is precisely this that causes so much difficulty for modern interpreters, some of whom continue to insist that Gnosticism, in its origins, was sparked by the appearance in history of a suitable savior figure, understood to be Jesus Christ. But this is an illusion. [14]
Part of the evidence supporting this theory is the Gnostic utilization of the Old Testament. It is interpreted, or more precisely re-interpreted, in a new light. Well-known biblical figures, such as Adam, are given a new role embodying basic Gnostic presuppositions. In a sense, it is a metaphorical teaching device, twisting the original story line to present their ideology. The Sethians, for example, speak of Adam as the figure who) transmits secrets to his son Seth, who then incarnates as "the great illuminator" [15] (e.g., Melchizedek, Zoroaster, Jesus) to reveal the eternal knowledge to the Gnostic (Sethian) race. [16] In fact, Gnostics go so far as to reverse the roles of good and evil to present the "deeper meaning." For instance, in the biblical creation story, the serpent (for some Gnostics) is not seen as an evil power but as a positive one, for the serpent urges Eve and Adam to wake up from the slumber and to realize their divine nature. Irenaeus elucidates this Gnostic view:
But their mother (wisdom) cunningly led Eve and Adam astray by the agency of the snake, so that they transgress the commandment of laldabaoth [lower demiurge]. And Eve was easily persuaded, as if she were listening to an offspring of god. And she persuaded Adam to eat from the tree from which god had said not to eat. Moreover--they saw--when they ate they became acquainted with the power which is superior to all, and they revolted from those who had made them. [17]
The serpent, then, begins to represent something completely different from what it does for the orthodox Jew or Christian. According to Irenaeus, the Gnostic sect of Ophites were among those who utilized this bold allegorization of the serpent in the creation story. [18]
A prime example of the Gnostic re-interpretation of the Old Testament is their view of the biblical god. [19] They contend that the god of the Old Testament is penultimate, that is, a lower deity and not the Godhead. They even go as far as to portray him as a demonic being, envious of the human race and striving to enslave souls in ignorance (i.e., through Jewish Law). [20] We can look at several examples in the Nag Hammadi Codices that describe this illegitimate lower demiurge. For instance, in Trimorphic Protennoia it says of this hostile power:
There appeared the great Demon who rules the lowest part of the underworld and Chaos. He has neither form nor perfection, but on the contrary possesses the form of the glory of those begotten in the darkness. Now he is called "Saklas," that is Samael, "Yaldabaoth," he who had taken power, who had snatched it away from the innocent one (Sophia)... [21]
Another example is found in The Apocryphon of John which describes an ignorant, jealous god:
He is impious in his arrogance, which is in him. For he said, "I am God and there is no other God besides me," for he is ignorant of his strength, the place from which he had come." [22]
Since, according to most Gnostics, the creator god is of evil origin, so also is the creation. This anti-cosmic attitude has resulted in varying attitudes of ethics. We learn a great deal about the various Gnostic ethics in Clement of Alexandria's Stromateis (Book III). He writes:
Accordingly we may divide all the heresies into two groups in making answer to them. Either they teach that one ought to live on the principle that it is a matter of indifference whether one does right or wrong, or they set too ascetic a tone and proclaim the necessity of continence on the group of opinions which are godless and arise from hatred of what God has created. [23]
The ascetics contend that worldly pleasure impedes spiritual growth because it. attracts one to the outside, to the external, and the inner spiritual Self is forgotten. To combat this problem strict ethics are employed. For some, this included a vegetarian diet, extensive fasts, abstinence from intoxicants, and celibacy. Irenaeus places the Gnostic Saturnilus here. He explains:
Marriage and procreation, they maintain, are of Satan. Many of his followers abstain from animated things (i.e., meat), and through this feigned continence they lead many astray. [24]
According to Clement the Marcionite doctrine of ethics also falls into this camp. He remarks: By the Marcionites nature is regarded as evil because it was created out of evil matter and by a just Creator. On this ground, that they do not wish to fill the world made by the Creator-God, they decide to abstain from marriage. Thus they are in opposition to their Maker and hasten toward him who is called the good God, but not to the God, as they say, of the other kind ... they are continent, not of their own free choice, but from the hatred of the Creator. [25] He later adds:
Marcionites have interpreted them [children] in a godless sense and are ungrateful to their Creator. [26]
On the other hand, libertines, like the Barbeliotes, supposedly engage in sexual cultic rituals, which begins with a feast of meat and wine and ends in an orgy. They justify their behavior as a means to transmit their sexual emission and the soul of the dead animal to the heavenly world. They are said to refuse giving birth to children because it again entraps a "seed of light" into an evil creation. [27] Nature is abused in the worst of ways as a fight against the creator god. Clement is especially infuriated with the "blasphemous immortality of Carpocrates" [28] who "can have pigs and goats as their associates." [29]
There is also a third Gnostic group, the moderate ascetics, that Clement fails to categorize. We find here the Valentinians. [30] Abuse of materials is abandoned; instead,. the materials of the world are used with caution and limitation. Marriage and procreation are also rightfully condoned. The overall theme here is living a life of moderation as, well as indifference to worldly pleasure, but certainly not an aversion or sanctification of it. When Clement is rebuffing encratic behavior of the libertines, he draws upon the Valentinians as a potential model: [31]
If these people (i.e., the libertines) spoke of acts of spiritual union like the Valentinians, perhaps one could accept their view. But to suppose that the holy prophets spoke of carnal and wanton intercourse is the way of a man who has renounced salvation. [32]
Indeed, the Gnostic tradition is a complex religious tradition with many fascinating dimensions. Their theology entails a Transcendent God far surpassing the creator god who rules over this earthly plane. The human soul, a microcosm of this highest Being, remains imprisoned in the body since it is fooled by the inferior power and fails to realize its higher nature. The cosmos is viewed as a dark prison and this results in different attitudes of ethics, including asceticism, moderate asceticism, or libertinism The overall objective of the Gnostic is to return to the Unknown God by awakening the human spiritual consciousness. But how does one awaken one's human spiritual consciousness? To answer this question we shall utilize the Nag Hammadi literature. But let us look at a comparable religious tradition known as the Sant tradition.
Notes
1. The first three are Christocentric, influenced by the Gospel of John and the letters of Paul; Mani is mostly influenced by Asian philosophy. Some argue Marcion is not a Gnostic because he did not accept the Gnostic tenet that souls are divine by nature or that it is gnosis that saves. Rather, he adopts the Pauline view that one is essentially corrupt and saved only through faith. For further discussion of Marcion, see Kurt Rudolph, op cit., p. 316.
2. The Greek term gnosis is cognate with Sanskrit jnana. Whether gnosis as such is comparable with jn3na-yoga (the causal path of knowledge), however, is debatable.
3. James M. Robinson (ed.), "The Apocryphon of John H," in The Nag Hammadi Library in English (San Francisco: Harper and Row Publishers, 1988, third edition), p106. Hereafter cited as NHL.
4. Marsanes (X,l), in NHL, p. 463.
5. See Kurt Rudolph, op. cit., p. 62. Marcion and Valentinus apparently were excommunicated from the Roman Church for their philosophical position.
6. Mani's alternative church (i.e., the Manichean tradition) eventually died out in the seventeenth century in China. The three principles stressed were: 1) A Divine Man incarnated in different forms (e.g., Buddha, Jesus); 2) Outward observances like sacraments were totally unnecessary; 3) Evil did not originate from God (the world of Light) but had its own principle source--that is, the world of darkness. It is this world of darkness that overwhelmed archetypal Man, contaminating sparks of Light with material form. Mani's dualism of light and darkness, the realm of good and the realm of evil, seems to be directly influenced by Iranian Zoroastrianism. See Rudolph, op. cit., pp. 334-35.
7. This may not apply to Basilides, who, according to Hippolytus, believes that once God has pulled ready souls back to It a "great unconsciousness" will descend upon the rest of humankind. See H. L. Mansel, D.D., The Gnostic Heresies of the First and Second Centuries (London: AMS Press, 1875), p. 156. Yet, it is important to note that there are two irreconcilable accounts of the doctrines of Basilides: one is presented by Hippolytus and the other by Irenaeus. Which account renders a more accurate depiction of Basilides remains uncertain at this time.
8. For an interesting discussion on the philosophical connection between Gnostic ideas and Hindu thought see Geo Widengren, The Gnostic Attitude (Santa Barbara: Institute of Religious Studies, 1973).
9. I hesitate to describe the Gnostic tradition as a syncretistic religion. This label, although a seemingly neutral description, is often coupled with pejorative connotations, generally suggesting that the tradition is simply a subgroup which defiled its parent religion(s).
10. Today, we see this same spirit in the New Age Movement which tries to syncretize religions of the East and West, transpersonal psychology, and modem physics.
11. There is some indication that Gnostic ideas affect many of the writings of the New Testament (especially the Gospel of John). A debatable example is Colossians, which appears to deal with the problem of false teachers and reacts against varying concepts of the soteriology of the soul. Rules of food and drink and ascetical principles, often observances of Gnostics, are scoffed at. Moreover, 2 Thessalonians is in part written in reaction against advocates of a newly emerging philosophy, which, in this letter, are condemned as the lawless one, those "who exalt himself above every so-called god and object of worship, so as to seat himself in the Temple of God, claiming that he is god." Ephesians also warns against "teaching arising from human trickery," but this letter incorporates several attitudes similar to Gnostics. It discusses Jesus' descent from the inner regions and petitions the "Sleeper to Awake and arise from the dead." The letter of Jude, the second letter of Peter, and the Pastoral letters (1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, Titus) clearly attack false teachers who make reference to "what is falsely called knowledge." Several scholars suggest, however, that during the composition of the New Testament the Gnostic tradition was at such an early stage of development that the writers may have been reacting to another tradition other than the Gnostic tradition.
12. Pearson, op. cit., p. 8.
13. Ibid., p. 125. For further discussion of the relationship between Judaism and the development of the Gnostic tradition see chapter three of Pearson's book, pp. 39-51.
14. Ibid., p. 9.
15. The Apolcalypse of Adam (V. 5), in NHL, p. 285.
16. For an insightful analysis of Seth, see Pearson, op. cit., pp. 52-83.
17. Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses, I.30.8; I.30.9; I.30.15. Hereafter cited as Adv. haer.
18. Irenaeus, Adv. haer., I.30.7.
19. God spelled with a lower case 'g' is not meant to be disrespectful in any way to the Judaic/Christian religion. It represents the Gnostic understanding of an inferior demiurge, while God with an upper case 'G' refers to the Gnostic Transcendent God.
20. The three Christian Gnostics (Marcion, Basilides and Valentinus) supported this theology, and both Marcion and Valentinus were excommunicated from the Roman Church for their philosophical position.
21. Trimorphic Protennoia (XHI,I), in NHL, p. 515.
22. The Apocryphon of john, in NHL, p. 111.
23. Henry Chadwick, B.D. and John Ernest Leonard, D.D., translators, "Stromata" (Bk. IIII), The Library of Christian Classics Vol. II. Alexandrian Christianity (Philadelphia: The Westminister Press), p. 58.
24. Irenaeus, Adv. haer., 1.24.2.
25. Stromata, Bk. III, p. 46.
26. Ibid., p. 50.
27. Epiphanius, Pararion, 26.9.4.
28. Stromata, Bk. III, p. 52.
29. Ibid., p. 53.
30. James E. Davidson, "Structural Similarities and Dissimilarities in the Thought of Clement of Alexandria and the Valentinians," The Second Century: A Journal of Early Christian Studies, Vol. III, No. IV (Georgia: Mercer University Press, Winter 1983), pp. 214-15.
31. Clement's own ethics clearly fall into this third camp. He takes the motto, "It is better to marry than to bum." See Stromata, Bk. III, p. 53. "Burning" here simply means desire and suppression of such only intensifies it. Celibacy is acceptable if "chosen according to sound rule with godly reasons, provided that the person gives thanks for the grace God has granted, and does not hate the creation or reckon married people to be of no account." (p. 85) He continues to add that "both celibacy and marriage have their own different forms of service and ministry to the Lord." (p. 90) In regards to dietary ethics, Clement again stands in the moderate camp. Ideally, he promotes a meatless, alcohol free diet, but, according to Clement, "if one partakes of them, he does not sin." See Stromata, Bk. VII, p. 532..
32. Stromata, Bk. III, p. 53.
http://andrea65.tripod.com/gnostic2.html
http://www.gnosis.org/Foreword-Search-for-Roots.pdf
The publication in 2009 of C. G. Jung's The Red Book: Liber Novus has initiated a broad reassessment of Jung's place in cultural history. Among many revelations, the visionary events recorded in the Red Book reveal the foundation of Jung's complex association with the Western tradition of Gnosis.
In The Search for Roots, Alfred Ribi closely examines Jung's life-long association with Gnostic tradition. Dr. Ribi knows C. G. Jung and his tradition from the ground up. He began his analytical training with Marie-Louise von Franz in 1963, and continued working closely with Dr. von Franz for the next 30 years. For over four decades he has been an analyst, lecturer and examiner of the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich, where he also served as the Director of Studies.
But even more importantly, early in his studies Dr. Ribi noted Jung's underlying roots in Gnostic tradition, and he carefully followed those roots to their source. Alfred Ribi is unique in the Jungian analytical community for the careful scholarship and intellectual rigor he has brought to the study Gnosticism. In The Search for Roots, Ribi shows how a dialogue between Jungian and Gnostic studies can open new perspectives on the experiential nature of Gnosis, both ancient and modern. Creative engagement with Gnostic tradition broadens the imaginative scope of modern depth psychology and adds an essential context for understanding the voice of the soul emerging in our modern age.
The publication in 2009 of C. G. Jung's The Red Book: Liber Novus has initiated a broad reassessment of Jung's place in cultural history. Among many revelations, the visionary events recorded in the Red Book reveal the foundation of Jung's complex association with the Western tradition of Gnosis.
In The Search for Roots, Alfred Ribi closely examines Jung's life-long association with Gnostic tradition. Dr. Ribi knows C. G. Jung and his tradition from the ground up. He began his analytical training with Marie-Louise von Franz in 1963, and continued working closely with Dr. von Franz for the next 30 years. For over four decades he has been an analyst, lecturer and examiner of the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich, where he also served as the Director of Studies.
But even more importantly, early in his studies Dr. Ribi noted Jung's underlying roots in Gnostic tradition, and he carefully followed those roots to their source. Alfred Ribi is unique in the Jungian analytical community for the careful scholarship and intellectual rigor he has brought to the study Gnosticism. In The Search for Roots, Ribi shows how a dialogue between Jungian and Gnostic studies can open new perspectives on the experiential nature of Gnosis, both ancient and modern. Creative engagement with Gnostic tradition broadens the imaginative scope of modern depth psychology and adds an essential context for understanding the voice of the soul emerging in our modern age.
Hermetism is often and wrongly confused with Gnosticism, which similarly originated in Egypt in roughly the same era. For present purposes, a few salient points of contrast will suffice. Like the God of Stoicism, the Hermetic God was omnipresent and omniscient through the material cosmos. In Gnosticism, by contrast, God was transcendent, and the physical universe was an evil place created by an evil Demiurge (van den Broek 1998). Hermetic ethics celebrated the divine within the world; Gnostic ethics were abstemious, ascetic efforts to escape from the world (Mahé 1998).
There were also differences in their valuations of visions. Jonas (1969) drew attention to the fact that the motif of heavenly ascension was originally intended, for example in Jewish apocalyptic literature, as an objective reality, but was subsequently transformed into an allegory of the mystical path. The mystical appropriation of the ascension motif was complete by the second century era of the Alexandrine Christian fathers, St. Clement and Origen (Danielou 1973). The allegorical tradition was also present in the Gnostic literature of Nag Hammadi, although in a slightly different manner. Referring to experiences of visions in general, The Exegesis on the Soul 34 stated: "Now it is fitting that the soul regenerate herself....This is the resurrection that is from the dead. This is the ransom from captivity. This is the upward journey of ascent to heaven. This is the way of ascent to the father" (Robinson 1988:196). For the Gnostics, as for the Alexandrine fathers, ascension was one among several literary tropes that could signify mystical experiences of highly varied manifest contents. --Dan Merkur, http://www.esoteric.msu.edu/Merkur.html
Gnosis, Dan Merkur
http://books.google.com/books?id=feCZlyf8mecC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
http://www.esoteric.msu.edu/Merkur.html
http://gnosis.org/library/valentinus/Reading_List.htm
http://www.gnostic-jesus.com/gnostic-jesus/gnostic-library.html
There were also differences in their valuations of visions. Jonas (1969) drew attention to the fact that the motif of heavenly ascension was originally intended, for example in Jewish apocalyptic literature, as an objective reality, but was subsequently transformed into an allegory of the mystical path. The mystical appropriation of the ascension motif was complete by the second century era of the Alexandrine Christian fathers, St. Clement and Origen (Danielou 1973). The allegorical tradition was also present in the Gnostic literature of Nag Hammadi, although in a slightly different manner. Referring to experiences of visions in general, The Exegesis on the Soul 34 stated: "Now it is fitting that the soul regenerate herself....This is the resurrection that is from the dead. This is the ransom from captivity. This is the upward journey of ascent to heaven. This is the way of ascent to the father" (Robinson 1988:196). For the Gnostics, as for the Alexandrine fathers, ascension was one among several literary tropes that could signify mystical experiences of highly varied manifest contents. --Dan Merkur, http://www.esoteric.msu.edu/Merkur.html
Gnosis, Dan Merkur
http://books.google.com/books?id=feCZlyf8mecC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
http://www.esoteric.msu.edu/Merkur.html
http://gnosis.org/library/valentinus/Reading_List.htm
http://www.gnostic-jesus.com/gnostic-jesus/gnostic-library.html
Matteo Arfanotti
http://gnosis.org/gnostic-jung/The-Gnostic-Jung.html
http://gnosis.org/whatisgnostic.htm
http://gnosis.org/whatisgnostic.htm
- The Gnostics posited an original spiritual unity that came to be split into a plurality.
- As a result of the precosmic division the universe was created. This was done by a leader possessing inferior spiritual powers and who often resembled the Old Testament Jehovah.
- A female emanation of God was involved in the cosmic creation (albeit in a much more positive role than the leader).
- In the cosmos, space and time have a malevolent character and may be personified as demonic beings separating man from God.
- For man, the universe is a vast prison. He is enslaved both by the physical laws of nature and by such moral laws as the Mosaic code.
- Mankind may be personified as Adam, who lies in the deep sleep of ignorance, his powers of spiritual self-awareness stupefied by materiality.
- Within each natural man is an "inner man," a fallen spark of the divine substance. Since this exists in each man, we have the possibility of awakening from our stupefaction.
- What effects the awakening is not obedience, faith, or good works, but knowledge.
- Before the awakening, men undergo troubled dreams.
- Man does not attain the knowledge that awakens him from these dreams by cognition but through revelatory experience, and this knowledge is not information but a modification of the sensate being.
- The awakening (i.e., the salvation) of any individual is a cosmic event.
- Since the effort is to restore the wholeness and unity of the Godhead, active rebellion against the moral law of the Old Testament is enjoined upon every man.6
Isis-Apophis-Osiris
“I.A.O. is the name of God among Gnostics.”
The Divine Spirit is symbolized by the vowel O, which is the eternal circle. The letter I symbolizes the Inner Being of each human being, but both are intermingled with the letter A, as a point of support. This is the powerful mantra or magic word.
“I.A.O. is the name of God among Gnostics.”
The Divine Spirit is symbolized by the vowel O, which is the eternal circle. The letter I symbolizes the Inner Being of each human being, but both are intermingled with the letter A, as a point of support. This is the powerful mantra or magic word.
Gnosis, as a special kind of knowledge, should not be confused with. "Gnosticism." ~Footnote #13, Psychology and Religion, Page 45.
For a certain type of intellectual mediocrity characterized by enlightened rationalism, a scientific theory that simplifies matters is a very good means of defense because of the tremendous faith modern man has in anything which bears the label "scientific."
Such a label sets your mind at rest immediately, almost as well as Roma locuta causa finita: "Rome has spoken, the matter is settled."
In itself any scientific theory, no matter how subtle, has, I think, less value from the standpoint of psychological truth than religious dogma, for the simple reason that a theory is necessarily highly abstract and exclusively rational, whereas dogma expresses an irrational whole by means of imagery.
This guarantees a far better rendering of an irrational fact like the psyche. Moreover, dogma owes its continued existence and its form on the one hand to so-called "revealed" or immediate experiences of the "Gnosis" [See Footnote #13] for instance, the God-man, the Cross, the Virgin Birth, the Immaculate Conception, the Trinity, and so on, and on the other hand to the ceaseless collaboration of many minds over many centuries.
It may not be quite clear why I call certain dogmas "immediate experiences” since in itself a dogma is the very thing that precludes immediate experience.
Yet the Christian images I have mentioned are not peculiar to Christianity alone (although in Christianity they have undergone a development and intensification of meaning not to be found in any other religion).
They occur just as often in pagan religions, and besides that they can reappear spontaneously in all sorts of variations as psychic phenomena, just as in the remote past they originated in visions, dreams, or trances. Ideas like these are never invented.
They came into being before man had learned to use his mind purposively. Before man learned to produce thoughts, thoughts came to him. He did not think he perceived his mind functioning. Dogma is like a dream, reflecting the spontaneous and autonomous activity of the objective psyche, the unconscious.
Such an expression of the unconscious is a much more efficient means of defense against further immediate experiences than any scientific theory. The theory has to disregard the emotional values of the experience. The dogma, on the other hand, is extremely eloquent in just this respect. One scientific theory is soon superseded by another. Dogma lasts for untold centuries.
The suffering God-Man may be at least five thousand years old and the Trinity is probably even older. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Pages 45-46.
For a certain type of intellectual mediocrity characterized by enlightened rationalism, a scientific theory that simplifies matters is a very good means of defense because of the tremendous faith modern man has in anything which bears the label "scientific."
Such a label sets your mind at rest immediately, almost as well as Roma locuta causa finita: "Rome has spoken, the matter is settled."
In itself any scientific theory, no matter how subtle, has, I think, less value from the standpoint of psychological truth than religious dogma, for the simple reason that a theory is necessarily highly abstract and exclusively rational, whereas dogma expresses an irrational whole by means of imagery.
This guarantees a far better rendering of an irrational fact like the psyche. Moreover, dogma owes its continued existence and its form on the one hand to so-called "revealed" or immediate experiences of the "Gnosis" [See Footnote #13] for instance, the God-man, the Cross, the Virgin Birth, the Immaculate Conception, the Trinity, and so on, and on the other hand to the ceaseless collaboration of many minds over many centuries.
It may not be quite clear why I call certain dogmas "immediate experiences” since in itself a dogma is the very thing that precludes immediate experience.
Yet the Christian images I have mentioned are not peculiar to Christianity alone (although in Christianity they have undergone a development and intensification of meaning not to be found in any other religion).
They occur just as often in pagan religions, and besides that they can reappear spontaneously in all sorts of variations as psychic phenomena, just as in the remote past they originated in visions, dreams, or trances. Ideas like these are never invented.
They came into being before man had learned to use his mind purposively. Before man learned to produce thoughts, thoughts came to him. He did not think he perceived his mind functioning. Dogma is like a dream, reflecting the spontaneous and autonomous activity of the objective psyche, the unconscious.
Such an expression of the unconscious is a much more efficient means of defense against further immediate experiences than any scientific theory. The theory has to disregard the emotional values of the experience. The dogma, on the other hand, is extremely eloquent in just this respect. One scientific theory is soon superseded by another. Dogma lasts for untold centuries.
The suffering God-Man may be at least five thousand years old and the Trinity is probably even older. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Pages 45-46.
Spirituality
http://fractalenlightenment.com/721/spirituality/serotonin-induces-deep-states-of-spirituality
Serotonin Facilitates Deep States of Spirituality
Serotonin a chemical present in your brain, that can be released through high states of meditation or through the use of psychedelic drugs, has been proved to make you susceptible to spiritual experiences. A team of Swedish researchers had found that the presence of a receptor that regulates general serotonin activity in the brain correlates with people’s capacity for transcendence, the ability to apprehend phenomena that cannot be explained objectively.
Because of the mystical experiences users of psychedelic drugs like LSD have had scientists have long suspected that serotonin influences spirituality. Although now they have proof from brain scans linking the capacity for spirituality with a major biological element.
Reporting in the American Journal of Psychiatry, the researchers see the evidence as contradicting the common belief that religious behavior is determined strictly by environmental and cultural factors. What it means is those with a higher concentration of serotonin receptors will therefore most likely show a stronger inclination towards experiences where they see God or they experience higher connections with themselves and the universe.
Those whose brain scans showed the most receptor activity proved on personality tests to have the strongest proclivity to spiritual acceptance. Apart from the elevate consciousness experiences, Serotonin is in charge of moderating mood, metabolism, and sexuality.
Study: The Effects Of Serotonin On Spirituality
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/07/21/study-the-effects-of-sero_n_114112.html
According to Psychology Today and referencing the American Journal of Psychiatry, serotonin, the brain chemical in charge of moderating mood, metabolism, and sexuality, has been linked to spiritual experiences. Psychology Today reports:
A team of Swedish researchers has found that the presence of a receptor that regulates general serotonin activity in the brain correlates with people's capacity for transcendence, the ability to apprehend phenomena that cannot be explained objectively. Scientists have long suspected that serotonin influences spirituality because drugs known to alter serotonin such as LSD also induce mystical experiences. But now they have proof from brain scans linking the capacity for spirituality with a major biological element. So what does this mean? Well, the researchers believe that it provides evidence that religiosity and spirituality are not defined necessarily or entirely by environmental or cultural factors, such as upbringing. Basically, those with a higher concentration of serotonin receptors will therefore most likely show a stronger inclination towards spiritual acceptance.
Serotonin Facilitates Deep States of Spirituality
Serotonin a chemical present in your brain, that can be released through high states of meditation or through the use of psychedelic drugs, has been proved to make you susceptible to spiritual experiences. A team of Swedish researchers had found that the presence of a receptor that regulates general serotonin activity in the brain correlates with people’s capacity for transcendence, the ability to apprehend phenomena that cannot be explained objectively.
Because of the mystical experiences users of psychedelic drugs like LSD have had scientists have long suspected that serotonin influences spirituality. Although now they have proof from brain scans linking the capacity for spirituality with a major biological element.
Reporting in the American Journal of Psychiatry, the researchers see the evidence as contradicting the common belief that religious behavior is determined strictly by environmental and cultural factors. What it means is those with a higher concentration of serotonin receptors will therefore most likely show a stronger inclination towards experiences where they see God or they experience higher connections with themselves and the universe.
Those whose brain scans showed the most receptor activity proved on personality tests to have the strongest proclivity to spiritual acceptance. Apart from the elevate consciousness experiences, Serotonin is in charge of moderating mood, metabolism, and sexuality.
Study: The Effects Of Serotonin On Spirituality
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/07/21/study-the-effects-of-sero_n_114112.html
According to Psychology Today and referencing the American Journal of Psychiatry, serotonin, the brain chemical in charge of moderating mood, metabolism, and sexuality, has been linked to spiritual experiences. Psychology Today reports:
A team of Swedish researchers has found that the presence of a receptor that regulates general serotonin activity in the brain correlates with people's capacity for transcendence, the ability to apprehend phenomena that cannot be explained objectively. Scientists have long suspected that serotonin influences spirituality because drugs known to alter serotonin such as LSD also induce mystical experiences. But now they have proof from brain scans linking the capacity for spirituality with a major biological element. So what does this mean? Well, the researchers believe that it provides evidence that religiosity and spirituality are not defined necessarily or entirely by environmental or cultural factors, such as upbringing. Basically, those with a higher concentration of serotonin receptors will therefore most likely show a stronger inclination towards spiritual acceptance.
Soul Travel, Gnosis & Metaphysical Knowledge
by Iona Miller
Gnosis is a transformative imperative that challenges conventional beliefs about the nature of reality. We take our world to be an objective reality, but is it? The assumption that the physical world exists in and of itself has struggled to assimilate the findings of modern physics for some time now. For example, an objective space and time would just "be", but in relativity, space contracts and time dilates. Likewise objective "things" should just inherently exist, but the entities of quantum theory are probability of existence smears, that spread, tunnel, superpose and entangle in physically impossible ways.
Cosmology tells us that our entire physical universe just "popped up", from nowhere, about 14 billion years ago. This is not how an objectively real world should behave! We are therefore forced to entertain the notion that we inhabit a "virtuality". This notion echoes unconventional subquantal or zero-point physics, Gnostic ideas about the Plenum and ancient Vedic concepts, such as maya that explore the ultimate nature of consciouness and matter.
This theory is not that all is one, or that the mind creates the universe, or that the universe is holistic, or that nothing really exists at all. It is that all physical reality is in essence virtual. The physical world is then a bubbling flux because, like a TV screen picture, it must be continuously refreshed to exist. This includes the phenomenal world of sensations, actions, causes and results, i.e. not just the physical body, but also the brain and the sensations and ideas it generates - including those of love, harmony, self, other selves or a universal I. So everything observed, done, said or thought is virtual, i.e. a quantum collapse.
To want to change the physical world to be of harmony and love is to want a better virtuality, a better looking screen output, while ignoring the program behind it. Wanting to "fix" the world assumes it is broken, but at the quantum level it is working perfectly, as a karmic output system of natural consequences. If each output is an input, etc, how can anything change, as this flawless machine grinds causality by trying every option?
Perhaps the way out is in. Consciousness information processing needs a source, here the grid, so our sense of being an observer, if that is what you mean by "I", may be valid. Even in a virtuality, the choices made are real. So if we have choice, we can rewrite the program at source by changing our being. A program can't change the operating system, nor other programs, but it could alter itself. Spirituality is then not about rearranging inputs and outputs, as in politics and power, but about changing the program source, i.e. not about changing the physical world but about changing ourselves.
Awakening the Impulse to Evolve
We're all looking for lives of greater purpose and meaning. The natural sacraments of the biosphere are the living visionary species, and their various molecular variants, which along with meditative techniques, provide all humanity with a capacity to witness first hand the immanence and transcendence of the conscious mysterium tremendum.
We want to discover how we can live in a way that is truly aligned with our soul's deepest calling, to live the life we were born to live. But, let's face it, it's not always clear what specific steps we need to take to awaken to this deeper purpose. And even if we have awakened to it, we're not necessarily sure how to make it the driving force for our lives. Buckminster Fuller speculated that the highest human purpose was as local Universe problem-solvers in support of the integrity of eternally regenerative Universe. ... that "I" seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process -- an integral function of the universe.
According to spiritual luminaries, to awaken the new capacities you need to actually live that purpose -- even if you think it's too late for you to change in a dramatic and profound way. You'll discover a new approach to life and discover exciting new vistas of your interior landscape--and new ways to apply those discoveries to make a difference in the world. You are ready to live your highest calling with essential wisdom, depth-sourcing, and soul-charging purpose.
Be at one with life and transform your life by a clear perception of what truly is going on in you and everything else -- because everything else is truly you, as well. There is only the oneness and beauty of life. We serve Life and the life force. What was formerly hidden is now revealed. The mythos and propaganda of the occult can be de-mystified and applied as spiritual technology to support a change in consciousness. Complete truth is complete love. First we awaken within the illusion, activate our purpose, then fully awaken to our true selves and the Source Truth.
It is the Feminine that possesses the empathy, compassion and guidance that the focused and systematic Masculine requires. That is what has made humans a successful species, and the suppression of it has pushed our world to the brink of destruction. Practically speaking, we seek solutions that address multiple problems without creating new ones down the road -- integrated strategies dealing with key social, economic, environmental, policy and cultural issues that have a transformative effect on the system as a whole. We need options to successfully surmount the crises of unprecedented scope and complexity facing all humanity.
By liberating your mind, you find your own sovereignty. Many of us sense that, for the world to change in a profound way, a significant number of us need to awaken to -- and align with -- our true purpose and calling in life. We know deep down that we have a meaningful contribution to bring into the world, and we sense that it's only in discovering and bringing forth this potential, that we will find our own spiritual fulfillment.
There is a universe within -- the deep labyrinth of the Quantum Feminine (the "wave aspect" of the psyche), pregnant with superpotential and bursting with pure Awareness and continuous creativity. The creation takes on shape and life with feminine energy. The sacred feminine points to a subtler level of reality that animates life and enables conscious experience and spiritual transformation. Quantum mechanics also points to a subtler level of reality that suggests a modern way of talking about the sacred feminine or invisible basis for creativity and the meaning of life. The sacred feminine is alive and well, providing the interface between the spiritual and material aspects of creative life. The heart of the Cosmos lies within.
Experimental metaphysics is an experiment we make on ourselves, delving into our own microcosmic nature, much as the Dragons have done throughout history, as a basis for vision, clarity and dialogue with dragon genius. Without "tuning" (with spiritual technologies), such potential remains latent. With transformation, procedures give way to Grace. Our experiment delves into the nature of 'reality' and primordial 'truth' -- the nature and experience of fuller awareness, unhindered by the transient contents of the mind.
Can we test and even transcend quantum reality by plunging into the abyss of the subquantal realm? To build a boundary is to create a place at which travel must cease. Metaphysics establishes boundaries of knowledge beyond which questions cannot pass -- they are interrupted and rendered void. The creation of such boundaries is the translation of the unknown into the familiar.
by Iona Miller
Gnosis is a transformative imperative that challenges conventional beliefs about the nature of reality. We take our world to be an objective reality, but is it? The assumption that the physical world exists in and of itself has struggled to assimilate the findings of modern physics for some time now. For example, an objective space and time would just "be", but in relativity, space contracts and time dilates. Likewise objective "things" should just inherently exist, but the entities of quantum theory are probability of existence smears, that spread, tunnel, superpose and entangle in physically impossible ways.
Cosmology tells us that our entire physical universe just "popped up", from nowhere, about 14 billion years ago. This is not how an objectively real world should behave! We are therefore forced to entertain the notion that we inhabit a "virtuality". This notion echoes unconventional subquantal or zero-point physics, Gnostic ideas about the Plenum and ancient Vedic concepts, such as maya that explore the ultimate nature of consciouness and matter.
This theory is not that all is one, or that the mind creates the universe, or that the universe is holistic, or that nothing really exists at all. It is that all physical reality is in essence virtual. The physical world is then a bubbling flux because, like a TV screen picture, it must be continuously refreshed to exist. This includes the phenomenal world of sensations, actions, causes and results, i.e. not just the physical body, but also the brain and the sensations and ideas it generates - including those of love, harmony, self, other selves or a universal I. So everything observed, done, said or thought is virtual, i.e. a quantum collapse.
To want to change the physical world to be of harmony and love is to want a better virtuality, a better looking screen output, while ignoring the program behind it. Wanting to "fix" the world assumes it is broken, but at the quantum level it is working perfectly, as a karmic output system of natural consequences. If each output is an input, etc, how can anything change, as this flawless machine grinds causality by trying every option?
Perhaps the way out is in. Consciousness information processing needs a source, here the grid, so our sense of being an observer, if that is what you mean by "I", may be valid. Even in a virtuality, the choices made are real. So if we have choice, we can rewrite the program at source by changing our being. A program can't change the operating system, nor other programs, but it could alter itself. Spirituality is then not about rearranging inputs and outputs, as in politics and power, but about changing the program source, i.e. not about changing the physical world but about changing ourselves.
Awakening the Impulse to Evolve
We're all looking for lives of greater purpose and meaning. The natural sacraments of the biosphere are the living visionary species, and their various molecular variants, which along with meditative techniques, provide all humanity with a capacity to witness first hand the immanence and transcendence of the conscious mysterium tremendum.
We want to discover how we can live in a way that is truly aligned with our soul's deepest calling, to live the life we were born to live. But, let's face it, it's not always clear what specific steps we need to take to awaken to this deeper purpose. And even if we have awakened to it, we're not necessarily sure how to make it the driving force for our lives. Buckminster Fuller speculated that the highest human purpose was as local Universe problem-solvers in support of the integrity of eternally regenerative Universe. ... that "I" seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process -- an integral function of the universe.
According to spiritual luminaries, to awaken the new capacities you need to actually live that purpose -- even if you think it's too late for you to change in a dramatic and profound way. You'll discover a new approach to life and discover exciting new vistas of your interior landscape--and new ways to apply those discoveries to make a difference in the world. You are ready to live your highest calling with essential wisdom, depth-sourcing, and soul-charging purpose.
Be at one with life and transform your life by a clear perception of what truly is going on in you and everything else -- because everything else is truly you, as well. There is only the oneness and beauty of life. We serve Life and the life force. What was formerly hidden is now revealed. The mythos and propaganda of the occult can be de-mystified and applied as spiritual technology to support a change in consciousness. Complete truth is complete love. First we awaken within the illusion, activate our purpose, then fully awaken to our true selves and the Source Truth.
It is the Feminine that possesses the empathy, compassion and guidance that the focused and systematic Masculine requires. That is what has made humans a successful species, and the suppression of it has pushed our world to the brink of destruction. Practically speaking, we seek solutions that address multiple problems without creating new ones down the road -- integrated strategies dealing with key social, economic, environmental, policy and cultural issues that have a transformative effect on the system as a whole. We need options to successfully surmount the crises of unprecedented scope and complexity facing all humanity.
By liberating your mind, you find your own sovereignty. Many of us sense that, for the world to change in a profound way, a significant number of us need to awaken to -- and align with -- our true purpose and calling in life. We know deep down that we have a meaningful contribution to bring into the world, and we sense that it's only in discovering and bringing forth this potential, that we will find our own spiritual fulfillment.
There is a universe within -- the deep labyrinth of the Quantum Feminine (the "wave aspect" of the psyche), pregnant with superpotential and bursting with pure Awareness and continuous creativity. The creation takes on shape and life with feminine energy. The sacred feminine points to a subtler level of reality that animates life and enables conscious experience and spiritual transformation. Quantum mechanics also points to a subtler level of reality that suggests a modern way of talking about the sacred feminine or invisible basis for creativity and the meaning of life. The sacred feminine is alive and well, providing the interface between the spiritual and material aspects of creative life. The heart of the Cosmos lies within.
Experimental metaphysics is an experiment we make on ourselves, delving into our own microcosmic nature, much as the Dragons have done throughout history, as a basis for vision, clarity and dialogue with dragon genius. Without "tuning" (with spiritual technologies), such potential remains latent. With transformation, procedures give way to Grace. Our experiment delves into the nature of 'reality' and primordial 'truth' -- the nature and experience of fuller awareness, unhindered by the transient contents of the mind.
Can we test and even transcend quantum reality by plunging into the abyss of the subquantal realm? To build a boundary is to create a place at which travel must cease. Metaphysics establishes boundaries of knowledge beyond which questions cannot pass -- they are interrupted and rendered void. The creation of such boundaries is the translation of the unknown into the familiar.
Dragon Mysteries
The Dragon Mysteries preceded all others. These "enlighteners" were fully aware of the 26,000-year cycle of Precession of the Equinoxes. When their line arose, the star Thuban in the constellation Draco was the pole star. They were a hereditary caste of seers, philosophers, political advisors, priests, natural scientists, historians, doctors of medicine, judges, poets, royal advisors, musicians, geometers, orators, navigators, and magicians. They were teachers, scholars, mystics. The Bards sang oracular songs. They preserved 'knowledge' or gnosis. In Druid lore myth is not plot, but image; not action, but rhythm; not character, but ghosts. Images animate the soul with guidance from higher dimensions.
Mysteries are primal 'secrets' regarding all human evolution. But those secrets are in the experiential aspects of the process. It is not the conceptual part that is secret, but the lived reality unique to each individual -- the realization of self and spirit. They are the signposts along the primal path of alchemy leading to Gnosis. The first masters on Earth were all Dragons and Serpents. They bestowed wisdom and the means of experiencing Gnosis. Unbound consciousness is the basis of metaphysics.
Physics and metaphysics are not so separate as some philosophers and physicists indicate. In fact they are in a sense symbiotic. Physics cannot exist without metaphysical postulates upon which it can rest its own theories, while metaphysics can, in turn, be directly influenced by physical experiments.
The search for truths in metaphysics should be supplemented by progress and advances that occur in physics, while physics should regard itself as being able to provide not final truths about reality, but truths that are dependent upon a more general metaphysical scheme. If metaphysics rejects physics as a valid partner in the search for truth, then its explanations can be valid to those who need final and ultimate answers, but the goal of metaphysics should not be to pose as any arbiter, but as the one that provides the best final and ultimate answers. Where do explanations cease?
Absolute Space
There is no consensus in physics, and foundational questions remain open, so the next theories may be more creative than quantum physics. Some physicists hope to retrieve a classical concept of realism in which properties of the world about us exist regardless of whether or not we observe them. Information theory is the key to understanding quantum behavior, and since the total information that can be carried by a quantum system is finite, the system’s answers to some questions will contain an element of randomness. The unexplored microcosm of the Ground-state, the universe of the subquantal domain, may be the key to higher consciousness.
The vacuum of Absolute Space is the central ingredient of 21st-century physics. It is the space between particles, inside and outside the atom. You breathe air that carries the vacuum between its molecules. It is technically metaphysical (nonobservable) -- beyond the realm of physics because it is virtual, rather than manifest. Paradoxically, the vacuum is both the absence of matter and the universal substance.
Subtle Energy
This zero-point energy is alive with life force. Such invisible subtle energy is a turbulent whirlpool of unconditioned creative potential. Even empty space can be excited from the non-ground state, as prana, chi or qi. This roiling sea of energy contains photons, torsion waves and massless particles that collide and slow down giving rise to mass.
Radiant and convergent energy weaves the fabric of space. Virtual photons carry torsion waves, electromagnetic and gravitational waves. The waviness of photons comes from subquantal buffeting. The perturbed spin pattern persists in space as an information field, or long lasting torsion field. This history of all prior events is this Akashic Field. We can tune into and read this web with our own body's torsion field.
These causeless fluctuations in energy create force fields that emerge seemingly from nowhere. Particles flit in and out of existence at the threshold of matter. Virtual subatomic particles pop out of nothing and instantaneously disappear in matter/anti-matter annihilation that unergirds manifestation. Therefore, so-called "empty" space is not empty at all, but a seething sea of activity that pervades the entire Universe.
The Void is not devoid. Mystic Veil
Today's 'mystic veil' lies at the threshold of this subquantal world, which cannot be directly observed, but whose results are apparent. The world of matter arises from the virtual vacuum fluctuation or virtual photon flux -- a war in which photonic and baryonic matter barely beats out anti-matter as the process of creation. Yet, our being arises from the Void (zero-point, akashic field, torsion field, energy body) which is also the Plenum of full consciousness.
The question "Why?" can always be asked again, whether of physics, metaphysics, or any other discipline, but the ultimate goal of the question is common: to grasp truth. But "Truth" does not merely exist -- it creates. Metaphysics is the only discipline which can undertake the examination of "Truth" in reference to both its existence and its self-creation, and as such it is indispensable.
Anticipatory Design Science
Metaphysics provides a framework within which questions can be replaced by Answers, of ultimate and final authority. At the same time, the construction of a boundary of knowledge by metaphysics through a structuring of Answers gives rise to the possibility for asking Questions posed directly to the present boundary of knowledge which are designed to pull it down from the outside.
The construction of a boundary is never complete, and Questions seek out the inconsistencies inherent in Answers in order to re-mystify and challenge the authority of the Answers by liquifying their foundation. Once a boundary has been infiltrated, a horizon of knowledge becomes apparent. A horizon is an ever-receding line stretched between the knowable (but not necessarily known) and the unknowable, which cannot be either encompassed or reached.
Fuller Awareness
Consciousness is a quantum mechanical entity with an independent existence. It localizes in the human brain when the electron is in a particle state. This provides the necessary quantum mechanical base conducive to interacting with and functioning in the brain. In the wave state, consciousness takes flight and is unbound. It takes with it at least a part of the contents of the personal memory and immerses in the collective unconscious. It possesses the ability to acquire felt-sense, visual, auditory and olfactory information in spite of the fact that there are no sense organs associated with it. This information is produced by the consciousness projection of a different reality caused by the state change, which one may interpret later as a vision or dream that comes from an altered perception of reality.
The Akashic records are an energetic pattern, a frequency like a tuning fork vibration. Laszlo described the "Akashic field” as a subquantum field which holds a holographic record of all the events that have happened in the phenomenal world -- the source from which creation flows, the divine domain. Zero Point energy is a self-orbit (spinergy, tiny whirlpools of vacuum energy) -- the converence of radiation both from the past and the future. Space carries a twisting motion (torsion wave) as well as curvature. Spinning particles carry complex rotating fields of energy, creating flux.
In the universal 4-D hologram every electron, particle and object is stabilized by balanced outflowing and inflowing radiation. Changing the way (advanced and retarded) waves converge changes their focal point, shifting the hologram. Poetically, we can suggest that the vibrational threads of a single life permeates the entire universe, interacting with all other vibrational energies. We collapse time by fully realizing each perfect moment.
Quantum Biohologram
Gariaev describes it in modern physics terms: the quantum holographic DNA-wave biocomputer model describes the morphology and dynamics of DNA, as a self-calibrating antenna working by phase conjugate adaptive resonance capable of both receiving and transmitting quantum holographic information stored in the form of diffraction patterns (which in MRI can be shown to be quantum holograms). The model describes how during the development of the embryo of the DNA's organism, these holographic patterns carry the essential holographic information necessary for that development.
Is the Akashic field the imprint of the Self on the eternal, universal, electromagnetic atmosphere of primary substance? It reciprocally informs us even as we create it. Is this subquantal virtuality -- a cosmic information field -- everywhere, filling the gaps of spacetime with a consciousness plenum? Besides being a zero-point "energy sea," this vacuum transports light, pressure, and sound. This torsion field (the Vortex of Anu) that interpenetrates the body is the true life force.
DNA has highly non-linear behavior. DNA absorbs photons which leads to other actions by the DNA. Biophotons synchronize the DNA in the body, creating a coherent field. Changes in gene expression are mediated by the biophoton field. We navigate the "welter" of wave patterns by a phenomenon similar to "resonance". Thoughts and intentions influence biophotonic patterns that affect DNA expression.
Entanglement
All infolded information is non-locally interconnected through entanglement. Empathy is an example of psychobiological entanglement. Synchronicity is quantum entanglement between the psychic realm known as the "unconscious" and the classical world in which a significant coincidence appears between a (subjective) mental state and an event occurring in the (objective) external world. It may be a significant coincidence between the psyche of two individuals, or between a mental state and a physical state, or a correlation at a distance between several individuals.
When we also consider that our bodies are entangled through a quantum field of electrical bio-photon resonance, it explains how we are affected by and from others -- via wave/field interference. This information is significant when considering a shift towards heightened empathy between people both near and at-a-distance (via digital communications) as well as the potential for catalyzing future abilities for telepathic communication between individuals. Our bodies then, as well as our brains, appear to function like receivers/decoders within an information field that is in constant flux. We can refer to this form of "field awareness" as quantum field consciousness, or simply as quantum consciousness (because quantum implies non-local field effect).
Holographic images are pictures captured in light and hold the feeling of events and emotions so they may be viewed again as a learning tool. We can "consult" with our ancestors. In recent decades modern science has verified what the ancient traditions intuited long ago. In both tangible and mysterious ways, we are all interconnected, and any one of us can have a profound effect on the whole. Can we finetune synchronicity phenomena at the level of consciousness?
We become too accustomed to particular perceptual patterns and ignore other sensory inputs or influences. Also, as a species we have been collectively uninformed about methods obtainable to shift among various frequency bands and patterns. This knowledge has been available within various wisdom traditions (such as shamanism and occult and mystery schools) yet kept out of the public domain. The end result is that we become fixed and dogmatic in our sensory "beliefs" and cling desperately to the small section of reality that we perceive as the whole. Yet the human brain, and nervous system, is flexible enough to shift between frequency patterns and to interpret "realities" beyond the consensual pattern.
Universal Dragon
The Dragon is the universal energetic field, slumbering at the center of the Cosmos. A hidden Dragon sleeps within our deep nature and guides our collective destiny. Virtual and electromagnetic waves bathe all things in this radiation, in their motion. Through miniscule perturbations, waves can change to forms and images that can speak, becoming voices that can be heard by our sensitive energy bodies, feeding on biophotonic light. Transformed to vision and dreams they produce presentiments in us. Your state tells you about how you're related to other things in the multiverse just as a reference frame tells you how you're related to other stuff in classical physics. In both cases denying the existence of the real thing that underlies those relations results in a bad explanation. We must learn to see through our Dragon Eyes.
Soul Travel
Soul travel is one of the inherent "wild talents" of the Dragon family. Historically, soul travel began as a shamanic practice of visionary healing. While still practiced in its ancient form, it was also refined in Central Asia into very sophisticated psychophysical meditation practices rooted in the Perennial Philosophy -- a spiritual psychology. More than "astral" out of body explorations about the globe or even Remote Viewing, soul travel journeys to imaginal, mythical and ancestral realms, to the very heart of matter. You don't have to "leave" the body.
In the journey process, we can 'travel without moving', accessing nonlocal information from the Source Field that informs our cellular core. We can be many places at once, reflecting the qabalistic notion "Kefitzat Haderech" (literally: "The Way's Jump"), related to teleportation, or contracting the path. Tayy al-Arḍ (طيّ الأرض "folding up of the earth") is the Arabic name for this thaumaturgic soul travel in mystical Islamic traditions. The concept has been expressed as "traversing the earth without moving".
Luminous Reality
Such vision has been applied to social prediction and control. Soul travel may include initiations in the dream, meditative, and waking state. We learn lessons our bones remember. Trance miracles and magical art are just a warm up for emergent capacities, creativity, and infusions of transcendent experiences (Knowledge-contact ecstasies). Shamanic journeys take place in the trance state, whereas Merkabah and other "diamond" techniques do not involve the possession or diminishing of the ego, which cooperates with the systematic process that focuses on union.
The true Lght and inner sound -- the Audible Life Stream (Voice of the Silence; sonic bio-flow) supports and sustains all life. The holographic projection is glued together by sound. The divine sound current carries us like a raft on the waveform of consciousness. As we travel deeper into ourr DNA we become absorbed by it. The resonant field provides the link between pur physical brain and the holographic Mind. All memory of past experience, including ancestral, may ultimately be the final impediment. When we relinquish the illusions of 3-D constraint, deeper realities support fuller life. Truth is right perception of existing things, and Knowledge of the non-existent.
Once we truly embrace our nonlocal nature (Diamond Soul, self-luminous Radiant Form), we understand experientially that distance is no obstruction to exploring our psychohistory, deep time and the Cosmos. Time dies at the birth of Forever. The soul unites with the sound current. It is all right here, right now, and we are the dynamic nexus of everything. Activating the "no-gene" confers "cloaked" prescience, but who can withstand that full awareness experience of the eternal, indestructible Self without fragmentation?
This is the value of mystical communities, sacred psychologies, and mystery schools. There are moral concerns to manipulating nature with the issue of the gene pool. There are several potential timelines for our species which may or may not be realized for species-wide evolution. The necessities in our vision constrain the "secret" path from all possible futures. The Dragon remains the Godzilla of Reality, a paradox of chaos and evolution, the vast panorama of gene and mass/energy flow.
Twisted Descent
If you accept the perennial mystical teaching that, at the level of consciousness, we are not only interconnected, but are actually one Self seeing through many eyes, then it should be clear that, like it or not, in the way we conduct our inner and outer lives, each of us is in fact always having an effect on the whole. What would you do if you realized that the entire human endeavor, the evolution of consciousness itself, depended on your willingness to transform your own consciousness? There is a science to self-awareness, there’s no voodoo to it. First, you realize that there is something to be realized. Once you do, your realization has begun. Reflect on this now. You are realizing it even now, as you reflect on this.
Second, who’s reflecting? What part of you is conscious of being conscious? How conscious are you? What part of you knows how conscious you are? In other words, how conscious are you of your own consciousness? Do you recognize being in different states of consciousness? Most people don’t think about these things. Why are you different? Are you conscious of that? Are you conscious of what is guiding you to become more conscious? Do you realize you are being meaningfully guided?
Third, most people identify with their habitual thought patterns and emotional reflexes. Such neurological responses become the matrix of our personality, character and behavior through altering our chemistry and endocrinology. Still, there is always some part of you watching these thoughts and feelings…as an observer. There is also a life force energy, spirit or innate intelligence animates our existence. As our own mind begins to realize the presence of this spirit within us that is us, this light awakens us.
That presence causes us to seek. Engage the feeling, the presence within, the direct connect to the Self. Move from your mind into the energy. You may begin to feel the spirit within bubbling up within. Now, just enjoy that feeling.
The Dragon Mysteries preceded all others. These "enlighteners" were fully aware of the 26,000-year cycle of Precession of the Equinoxes. When their line arose, the star Thuban in the constellation Draco was the pole star. They were a hereditary caste of seers, philosophers, political advisors, priests, natural scientists, historians, doctors of medicine, judges, poets, royal advisors, musicians, geometers, orators, navigators, and magicians. They were teachers, scholars, mystics. The Bards sang oracular songs. They preserved 'knowledge' or gnosis. In Druid lore myth is not plot, but image; not action, but rhythm; not character, but ghosts. Images animate the soul with guidance from higher dimensions.
Mysteries are primal 'secrets' regarding all human evolution. But those secrets are in the experiential aspects of the process. It is not the conceptual part that is secret, but the lived reality unique to each individual -- the realization of self and spirit. They are the signposts along the primal path of alchemy leading to Gnosis. The first masters on Earth were all Dragons and Serpents. They bestowed wisdom and the means of experiencing Gnosis. Unbound consciousness is the basis of metaphysics.
Physics and metaphysics are not so separate as some philosophers and physicists indicate. In fact they are in a sense symbiotic. Physics cannot exist without metaphysical postulates upon which it can rest its own theories, while metaphysics can, in turn, be directly influenced by physical experiments.
The search for truths in metaphysics should be supplemented by progress and advances that occur in physics, while physics should regard itself as being able to provide not final truths about reality, but truths that are dependent upon a more general metaphysical scheme. If metaphysics rejects physics as a valid partner in the search for truth, then its explanations can be valid to those who need final and ultimate answers, but the goal of metaphysics should not be to pose as any arbiter, but as the one that provides the best final and ultimate answers. Where do explanations cease?
Absolute Space
There is no consensus in physics, and foundational questions remain open, so the next theories may be more creative than quantum physics. Some physicists hope to retrieve a classical concept of realism in which properties of the world about us exist regardless of whether or not we observe them. Information theory is the key to understanding quantum behavior, and since the total information that can be carried by a quantum system is finite, the system’s answers to some questions will contain an element of randomness. The unexplored microcosm of the Ground-state, the universe of the subquantal domain, may be the key to higher consciousness.
The vacuum of Absolute Space is the central ingredient of 21st-century physics. It is the space between particles, inside and outside the atom. You breathe air that carries the vacuum between its molecules. It is technically metaphysical (nonobservable) -- beyond the realm of physics because it is virtual, rather than manifest. Paradoxically, the vacuum is both the absence of matter and the universal substance.
Subtle Energy
This zero-point energy is alive with life force. Such invisible subtle energy is a turbulent whirlpool of unconditioned creative potential. Even empty space can be excited from the non-ground state, as prana, chi or qi. This roiling sea of energy contains photons, torsion waves and massless particles that collide and slow down giving rise to mass.
Radiant and convergent energy weaves the fabric of space. Virtual photons carry torsion waves, electromagnetic and gravitational waves. The waviness of photons comes from subquantal buffeting. The perturbed spin pattern persists in space as an information field, or long lasting torsion field. This history of all prior events is this Akashic Field. We can tune into and read this web with our own body's torsion field.
These causeless fluctuations in energy create force fields that emerge seemingly from nowhere. Particles flit in and out of existence at the threshold of matter. Virtual subatomic particles pop out of nothing and instantaneously disappear in matter/anti-matter annihilation that unergirds manifestation. Therefore, so-called "empty" space is not empty at all, but a seething sea of activity that pervades the entire Universe.
The Void is not devoid. Mystic Veil
Today's 'mystic veil' lies at the threshold of this subquantal world, which cannot be directly observed, but whose results are apparent. The world of matter arises from the virtual vacuum fluctuation or virtual photon flux -- a war in which photonic and baryonic matter barely beats out anti-matter as the process of creation. Yet, our being arises from the Void (zero-point, akashic field, torsion field, energy body) which is also the Plenum of full consciousness.
The question "Why?" can always be asked again, whether of physics, metaphysics, or any other discipline, but the ultimate goal of the question is common: to grasp truth. But "Truth" does not merely exist -- it creates. Metaphysics is the only discipline which can undertake the examination of "Truth" in reference to both its existence and its self-creation, and as such it is indispensable.
Anticipatory Design Science
Metaphysics provides a framework within which questions can be replaced by Answers, of ultimate and final authority. At the same time, the construction of a boundary of knowledge by metaphysics through a structuring of Answers gives rise to the possibility for asking Questions posed directly to the present boundary of knowledge which are designed to pull it down from the outside.
The construction of a boundary is never complete, and Questions seek out the inconsistencies inherent in Answers in order to re-mystify and challenge the authority of the Answers by liquifying their foundation. Once a boundary has been infiltrated, a horizon of knowledge becomes apparent. A horizon is an ever-receding line stretched between the knowable (but not necessarily known) and the unknowable, which cannot be either encompassed or reached.
Fuller Awareness
Consciousness is a quantum mechanical entity with an independent existence. It localizes in the human brain when the electron is in a particle state. This provides the necessary quantum mechanical base conducive to interacting with and functioning in the brain. In the wave state, consciousness takes flight and is unbound. It takes with it at least a part of the contents of the personal memory and immerses in the collective unconscious. It possesses the ability to acquire felt-sense, visual, auditory and olfactory information in spite of the fact that there are no sense organs associated with it. This information is produced by the consciousness projection of a different reality caused by the state change, which one may interpret later as a vision or dream that comes from an altered perception of reality.
The Akashic records are an energetic pattern, a frequency like a tuning fork vibration. Laszlo described the "Akashic field” as a subquantum field which holds a holographic record of all the events that have happened in the phenomenal world -- the source from which creation flows, the divine domain. Zero Point energy is a self-orbit (spinergy, tiny whirlpools of vacuum energy) -- the converence of radiation both from the past and the future. Space carries a twisting motion (torsion wave) as well as curvature. Spinning particles carry complex rotating fields of energy, creating flux.
In the universal 4-D hologram every electron, particle and object is stabilized by balanced outflowing and inflowing radiation. Changing the way (advanced and retarded) waves converge changes their focal point, shifting the hologram. Poetically, we can suggest that the vibrational threads of a single life permeates the entire universe, interacting with all other vibrational energies. We collapse time by fully realizing each perfect moment.
Quantum Biohologram
Gariaev describes it in modern physics terms: the quantum holographic DNA-wave biocomputer model describes the morphology and dynamics of DNA, as a self-calibrating antenna working by phase conjugate adaptive resonance capable of both receiving and transmitting quantum holographic information stored in the form of diffraction patterns (which in MRI can be shown to be quantum holograms). The model describes how during the development of the embryo of the DNA's organism, these holographic patterns carry the essential holographic information necessary for that development.
Is the Akashic field the imprint of the Self on the eternal, universal, electromagnetic atmosphere of primary substance? It reciprocally informs us even as we create it. Is this subquantal virtuality -- a cosmic information field -- everywhere, filling the gaps of spacetime with a consciousness plenum? Besides being a zero-point "energy sea," this vacuum transports light, pressure, and sound. This torsion field (the Vortex of Anu) that interpenetrates the body is the true life force.
DNA has highly non-linear behavior. DNA absorbs photons which leads to other actions by the DNA. Biophotons synchronize the DNA in the body, creating a coherent field. Changes in gene expression are mediated by the biophoton field. We navigate the "welter" of wave patterns by a phenomenon similar to "resonance". Thoughts and intentions influence biophotonic patterns that affect DNA expression.
Entanglement
All infolded information is non-locally interconnected through entanglement. Empathy is an example of psychobiological entanglement. Synchronicity is quantum entanglement between the psychic realm known as the "unconscious" and the classical world in which a significant coincidence appears between a (subjective) mental state and an event occurring in the (objective) external world. It may be a significant coincidence between the psyche of two individuals, or between a mental state and a physical state, or a correlation at a distance between several individuals.
When we also consider that our bodies are entangled through a quantum field of electrical bio-photon resonance, it explains how we are affected by and from others -- via wave/field interference. This information is significant when considering a shift towards heightened empathy between people both near and at-a-distance (via digital communications) as well as the potential for catalyzing future abilities for telepathic communication between individuals. Our bodies then, as well as our brains, appear to function like receivers/decoders within an information field that is in constant flux. We can refer to this form of "field awareness" as quantum field consciousness, or simply as quantum consciousness (because quantum implies non-local field effect).
Holographic images are pictures captured in light and hold the feeling of events and emotions so they may be viewed again as a learning tool. We can "consult" with our ancestors. In recent decades modern science has verified what the ancient traditions intuited long ago. In both tangible and mysterious ways, we are all interconnected, and any one of us can have a profound effect on the whole. Can we finetune synchronicity phenomena at the level of consciousness?
We become too accustomed to particular perceptual patterns and ignore other sensory inputs or influences. Also, as a species we have been collectively uninformed about methods obtainable to shift among various frequency bands and patterns. This knowledge has been available within various wisdom traditions (such as shamanism and occult and mystery schools) yet kept out of the public domain. The end result is that we become fixed and dogmatic in our sensory "beliefs" and cling desperately to the small section of reality that we perceive as the whole. Yet the human brain, and nervous system, is flexible enough to shift between frequency patterns and to interpret "realities" beyond the consensual pattern.
Universal Dragon
The Dragon is the universal energetic field, slumbering at the center of the Cosmos. A hidden Dragon sleeps within our deep nature and guides our collective destiny. Virtual and electromagnetic waves bathe all things in this radiation, in their motion. Through miniscule perturbations, waves can change to forms and images that can speak, becoming voices that can be heard by our sensitive energy bodies, feeding on biophotonic light. Transformed to vision and dreams they produce presentiments in us. Your state tells you about how you're related to other things in the multiverse just as a reference frame tells you how you're related to other stuff in classical physics. In both cases denying the existence of the real thing that underlies those relations results in a bad explanation. We must learn to see through our Dragon Eyes.
Soul Travel
Soul travel is one of the inherent "wild talents" of the Dragon family. Historically, soul travel began as a shamanic practice of visionary healing. While still practiced in its ancient form, it was also refined in Central Asia into very sophisticated psychophysical meditation practices rooted in the Perennial Philosophy -- a spiritual psychology. More than "astral" out of body explorations about the globe or even Remote Viewing, soul travel journeys to imaginal, mythical and ancestral realms, to the very heart of matter. You don't have to "leave" the body.
In the journey process, we can 'travel without moving', accessing nonlocal information from the Source Field that informs our cellular core. We can be many places at once, reflecting the qabalistic notion "Kefitzat Haderech" (literally: "The Way's Jump"), related to teleportation, or contracting the path. Tayy al-Arḍ (طيّ الأرض "folding up of the earth") is the Arabic name for this thaumaturgic soul travel in mystical Islamic traditions. The concept has been expressed as "traversing the earth without moving".
Luminous Reality
Such vision has been applied to social prediction and control. Soul travel may include initiations in the dream, meditative, and waking state. We learn lessons our bones remember. Trance miracles and magical art are just a warm up for emergent capacities, creativity, and infusions of transcendent experiences (Knowledge-contact ecstasies). Shamanic journeys take place in the trance state, whereas Merkabah and other "diamond" techniques do not involve the possession or diminishing of the ego, which cooperates with the systematic process that focuses on union.
The true Lght and inner sound -- the Audible Life Stream (Voice of the Silence; sonic bio-flow) supports and sustains all life. The holographic projection is glued together by sound. The divine sound current carries us like a raft on the waveform of consciousness. As we travel deeper into ourr DNA we become absorbed by it. The resonant field provides the link between pur physical brain and the holographic Mind. All memory of past experience, including ancestral, may ultimately be the final impediment. When we relinquish the illusions of 3-D constraint, deeper realities support fuller life. Truth is right perception of existing things, and Knowledge of the non-existent.
Once we truly embrace our nonlocal nature (Diamond Soul, self-luminous Radiant Form), we understand experientially that distance is no obstruction to exploring our psychohistory, deep time and the Cosmos. Time dies at the birth of Forever. The soul unites with the sound current. It is all right here, right now, and we are the dynamic nexus of everything. Activating the "no-gene" confers "cloaked" prescience, but who can withstand that full awareness experience of the eternal, indestructible Self without fragmentation?
This is the value of mystical communities, sacred psychologies, and mystery schools. There are moral concerns to manipulating nature with the issue of the gene pool. There are several potential timelines for our species which may or may not be realized for species-wide evolution. The necessities in our vision constrain the "secret" path from all possible futures. The Dragon remains the Godzilla of Reality, a paradox of chaos and evolution, the vast panorama of gene and mass/energy flow.
Twisted Descent
If you accept the perennial mystical teaching that, at the level of consciousness, we are not only interconnected, but are actually one Self seeing through many eyes, then it should be clear that, like it or not, in the way we conduct our inner and outer lives, each of us is in fact always having an effect on the whole. What would you do if you realized that the entire human endeavor, the evolution of consciousness itself, depended on your willingness to transform your own consciousness? There is a science to self-awareness, there’s no voodoo to it. First, you realize that there is something to be realized. Once you do, your realization has begun. Reflect on this now. You are realizing it even now, as you reflect on this.
Second, who’s reflecting? What part of you is conscious of being conscious? How conscious are you? What part of you knows how conscious you are? In other words, how conscious are you of your own consciousness? Do you recognize being in different states of consciousness? Most people don’t think about these things. Why are you different? Are you conscious of that? Are you conscious of what is guiding you to become more conscious? Do you realize you are being meaningfully guided?
Third, most people identify with their habitual thought patterns and emotional reflexes. Such neurological responses become the matrix of our personality, character and behavior through altering our chemistry and endocrinology. Still, there is always some part of you watching these thoughts and feelings…as an observer. There is also a life force energy, spirit or innate intelligence animates our existence. As our own mind begins to realize the presence of this spirit within us that is us, this light awakens us.
That presence causes us to seek. Engage the feeling, the presence within, the direct connect to the Self. Move from your mind into the energy. You may begin to feel the spirit within bubbling up within. Now, just enjoy that feeling.
Gnosis, as a special kind of knowledge, should not be confused with. "Gnosticism." ~Carl Jung, Footnote #13, Psychology and Religion, Page 45.
We find in Gnosticism what was lacking in the centuries that followed: a belief in the efficacy of individual revelation and individual knowledge. This belief was rooted in the proud feeling of man's affinity with the gods. ~Carl Jung, Psychological Types, Page 242.
At the Reformation two things happened which upset the absolute attitude of that day: (a) Crucifixes were found in Mexico, which undermined the belief in the uniqueness of the Christian religion where the crucifixion was the central teaching, (b) The rediscovery of Gnosticism, the Dionysian myth and so forth, which showed that teachings similar to Christianity had been prevalent before the birth of Christ. ~Carl Jung; Cornwall Seminar; Page 15.
A woman is oriented towards the animus because it is the son of the unknown father, the Old Sage, whom she never comes to know. This motive is hinted at in the Gnostic texts where Sophia in her madness loves the Great Father On the other hand a man does not know the mother of the anima. She may be personified, for example, in Sophia or the seven times veiled Isis. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 30.
This process of becoming human is represented in dreams and inner images as the putting together of many scattered units, and sometimes as the gradual emergence and clarification of something that was always there. The speculations of alchemy, and also of some Gnostics, revolve around this process. It is likewise expressed in Christian Dogma, and more particularly in the transformation mystery of the Mass. ~Carl Jung; “Transformation Symbolism in the Mass"; CW 11, par. 399.
I . . . have the feeling that this is a time full of marvels, and, if the auguries do not deceive us, it may very well be that . . . we are on the threshold of something really sensational, which I scarcely know how to describe except with the Gnostic concept of [Sophia], an Alexandrian term particularly suited to the reincarnation of ancient wisdom in the shape of ΨA. ~Carl Jung, The Freud/Jung Letters, Page 439.
Further, according to an early Christian-Gnostic idea, the spirit which appeared in the form of a dove was interpreted as Sophia-Sapientia—Wisdom and the Mother of Christ. Thanks to this motif of the dual birth, children today, instead of having good and evil fairies who magically "adopt" them at birth with blessings or curses, are given sponsors—a "godfather" and a "godmother." ~Carl Jung, The Portable Jung; Page 63.
The doctrine that all evil thoughts come from the heart and that the human soul is a sink of iniquity must lie deep in the marrow of their bones. Were that so, then God had made a sorry job of creation, and it were high time for us to go over to Marcion the Gnostic and depose the incompetent Demiurge. Ethically, of course, it is infinitely more convenient to leave God the sole responsibility for such a Home tor Idiot Children, where no one is capable of putting a spoon into his own mouth. But it is worth man's while to take pains with himself, and he has something in his soul that can grow. It is rewarding to watch patiently the silent happenings in the soul, and the most and the best happens when it is not regulated from outside and from above. I readily admit that I have such a great respect for what happens in the human soul that I would be afraid of disturbing and distorting the silent operation of nature by clumsy interference. ~Carl Jung, The Portable Jung; Pages 362-363.
Therefore the center of the circle which expresses such a totality would correspond not to the ego but to the self as the summation of the total personality. (The center with a circle is a very well-known allegory of the nature of God.) In the philosophy of the Upanishads the Self is in one aspect the personal atman, but at the same time it has a cosmic and metaphysical quality as the suprapersonal Atman.
We meet with similar ideas in Gnosticism: I would mention the idea of the Anthropos, the Pleroma, the Monad, and the spark of light (Spinther) in a treatise of the Codex Brucianus:
This same is he [Monogenes] who dwelleth in the Monad, which is in the Setheus, and which came from the place of which none can say where it is. . . . From Him it is the Monad came, in the manner of a ship, laden with all good things, and in the manner of a field, filled or planted with every kind of tree, and in the manner of a city, filled with all races of mankind. . . . This is the fashion of the Monad, all these being in it: there are twelve Monads as a crown upon its head. . . . And to its veil which surroundeth it in the manner of a defense. there are twelve gates. . . . I his same is the Mother-City-begotten. ~Carl Jung, The Portable Jung, Page 367.
In alchemical literature this prophetess is taken to be Maria Prophetissa, also called the Jewess, sister of Moses, or the Copt, and it is not unlikely that she is connected with the Maria of Gnostic tradition. Epiphanius testifies to the existence of writings by this Maria, namely the "Interrogationes magnae" and "Interrogationes parvae," said to describe a vision of how Christ, on a mountain, caused a woman to come forth from his side and how he mingled himself with her. ~Carl Jung, The Portable Jung, Page 406.
So the union of the two is a kind of self-fertilization, a characteristic always ascribed to the mercurial dragon. From these hints it can easily be seen who the philosophical man is: he is the androgynous original man or Anthropos of Gnosticism, close parallel in India is purusha. Of him the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad says: "He was as large as a man and woman embracing. He divided his self [Atman] in two, and thence arose husband and wife. He united himself with her and men were born," etc. The common origin of these ideas lies in the primitive notion of the bisexual original man. ~Carl Jung, The Portable Jung, Pages 407-408.
The Son of Man is an anticipation of the idea of the self: hence the Gnostic adulteration oi Christ with the other synonyms for the self among the Naassenes, recorded by Hippolytus. The also a connection with the symbolism of Horus: on the one hand, Christ enthroned with the four emblems o\~ the evangelists—three animals and an angel; on the other. Father Horus with his four sons, or Osiris with the four sons of Horus. Horus is also the rising sun and Christ was still worshiped as such by the early Christians. ~Carl Jung, The Portable Jung, Page 443.
That there is a general interest in these matters a denied, however much it offends against good taste. I am not thinking merely of the interest taken in psychology a science, or of the still narrower interest in the analysis of Freud, but of the widespread and every interest in all sorts of psychic phenomena, including spiritualism, astrology, Theosophy, parapsychology, and so forth. The world has seen nothing like it since the end of the seventeenth century. We can compare it only to the flowering of Gnostic thought in the first and second centuries after Christ. The spiritual currents of our time have, in a deep affinity with Gnosticism. There is even an "eglise gnostique de la France," and I know o( two schools in Germany which openly declare themselves Gnostic. The most impressive movement numerically is undoubtedly Theosophy, together with its continental sister, Anthroposophy; these are pure Gnosticism in Hindu dress. Compared with them the interest in scientific psychology is negligible. What is striking about these Gnostic systems is that they are based exclusively on the manifestations of the unconscious, and that their moral teachings penetrate into the dark side of life, as is clear!) shown by the refurbished European version of Kundalini-yoga. The same is true of parapsychology, as everyone acquainted with it will agree. ~Carl Jung, The Portable Jung, Page 467.
Modern man, in contrast to his nineteenth-century brother, turns to the psyche with very great expectations, and does so without reference to any traditional creed but rather with a view to Gnostic experience. The fact that all the movements I have mentioned give themselves a scientific veneer is not just a grotesque caricature or a masquerade, but a positive sign that they are actually pursuing "science," i.e., knowledge, instead of faith, which is the essence of the Western forms of religion. Modern man abhors faith and the religions based upon it. He holds them valid only so far as their knowledge-content seems to accord with his own experience of the psychic background. He wants to know —to experience for himself. ~Carl Jung, The Portable Jung, Pages 467-468.
I have purposely cited the ecclesiastical allegories in greater detail here, so that the reader can see how saturated Gnostic symbolism is in the language of the Church, and how, on the other hand, particularly in Origen, the liveliness of his amplifications and interpretations has much in common with Gnostic views.
Thus, to him as to many of his contemporaries and successors, the idea of the cosmic correspondence of the "spiritual inner man" was something quite familiar: in his first Homily on Genesis he says that God first created heaven, the whole spiritual substance, and that the counterpart of this is "our mind, which is itself a spirit, that is, it is our spiritual inner man which sees and knows God." ~Carl Jung; Aion; Page 215.
The Pleroma, or fullness, is a term from Gnosticism. It played a central role in the Valentinian system. Hans Jonas states that "Pleroma is the standard term for the fully explicated manifold of divine characteristics, whose standard number is thirty, forming a hierarchy and together constituting the divine realm" (The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity [London: Routledge, 1992], p. 180).
In 1929, Jung said: "The Gnostics ... expressed it as Pleroma, a state of fullness where the pairs of opposites, yea and nay; day and night, are together, then when they 'become,' it is either day or night. In the state of 'promise' before they become, they are nonexistent, there is neither white nor black, good nor bad" (Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930, ed. William McGuire [Bollingen Series, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984], p. 131)
(c)2015-2016; All Rights Reserved, Iona Miller, Sangreality Trust
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This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.