"Jung uses the name
Abraxas
to refer to illusory reality in his
neo-Gnostic
text entitled Seven Sermons to the Dead. This was written
‘semi-automatically’ in 1916 by a part of himself he happened to call
Basilides. AUTOMATIC WRITING is more typical of
spiritualist mediumship
than of scientific method, but the result is a core text in depth
psychology. The writing immediately followed Jung’s break with Freud and
his experiences of poltergeist phenomena. Unlike the Gnostics, Jung did
not teach the return of human essence to the Gnostic PLEROMA, where
individuality was lost, but individuation, which maintained the fullness
of human individuality."
(Page 1)
"For the second-century Alexandrian GNOSTIC Basilides,
Abraxas
was the name of the Supreme Being.... The Supreme Being first generated
Mind, from which came LOGOS, Understanding, Wisdom, Power and a whole
succession of powers, principalities and angels in a complex spiritual
hierarchy.... Basilides believed that there were 365 Aeons,
personifications of the emanations from the Godhead which effected the
creation of matter. The first of these aeons was Christ, also called
Nous. Basilides differed from other Gnostic schools in his concept of
God as being essentially unknowable, an idea that can be traced to
Indian sources, whose notions of MAYA and NIRVANA he also included in
his philosophy."
(Page 1)
"Jung again: ‘The collective unconscious is common to all: it is the
foundation of what
the ancients called the sympathy of all things.’ It is through the
medium of the collective unconscious that information about a particular
time and place can be transferred to
another individual mind. ... It was in the area of the collective
unconscious that Jung
believed he met and talked with the ‘intelligent entities’ Philemon,
Elijah and Salome during his periods of ACTIVE IMAGINATION."
(Page 63)
Links and quotes
Jungian Psychology and Spirituality
- Welcome to the Journey community!
"Journey into Wholeness conferences and seminars explore
the relationship between modern
spirituality and the psychology of Carl Jung."
The Journey Into Wholeness Mission:
"Journey into Wholeness is a community committed to individual and collective transformation
through an exploration of the relationship between modern spirituality and the psychology of Carl Jung.
...For Jung, unlike Freud, God was no 'illusion.' He believed many of our modern ills were due to our being cut off from our religious roots and, therefore, from meaning. Jung's psychology offers us an alternative to the rationalistic materialism of our culture to which even religion has fallen victim. It serves to remind us that religious dogma is not enough. To find meaning each of us must live in relationship to The Great Mystery through our relationship with all of inner and outer creation. Jung's psychology can help us come to this awareness of God's all-encompassing reality, of religious truth as relevant today - that it does indeed work and that it can act as a transforming, relational, and renewing power if we open ourselves to it."
The symbol for the
above two pages consists of a small yin/yang at the junction of the two lines in a traditional Christian cross
which fills the center area where two interlocking circles overlap.
The New Alchemy Website - Jung on Active Imagination:
"But active imagination, as the term denotes, means that the images have a
life of their own and that the symbolic events develop according to their own
logic - that is, of course, if your conscious reason does not interfere....
"The
symbol of the mandala has exactly this meaning of a holy place, a temenos, to
protect the centre. And it is a symbol which is one of the most important motifs
in the objectivation of unconscious images.....
"The
suggestive influence of the picture reacts on the psychological system of the
patient and induces the same effect which he put into the picture. That is
the reason for idols, for the magic use of sacred images, of icons. They cast
their magic into our system and put us right, provided we put ourselves into
them. If you put yourself into the icon, the icon will speak to you. Take a
lamaic mandala which has a Buddha in the centre, or a Shiva, and, to the extent
that you can put yourself into it, it answers and comes into you. It has a magic
effect. You begin by concentrating upon a starting point....
"When
you concentrate on a mental picture, it begins to stir, the image becomes
enriched by details, it moves and develops. Each time, naturally, you mistrust
it and have the idea that you have just made it up, that it is merely you own
invention. But you have to overcome that doubt, because it is not true.
"We
can really produce precious little by our conscious mind. All the time we are
dependent upon things that literally fall into our consciousness.... We
depend entirely upon the benevolent co-operation of our unconscious."
The Origin of Alchemy and the Image of God in Man:
"The essential duality which characterised alchemy from the very
beginning.... Alchemy combined the Gnostic spirit of Greek natural
philosophy with the highly developed magico-techne of old Egypt,
particularly in relation to metallurgy.... and the embalming process associated
with the regeneration mysteries of Osiris. This ancient god of
resurrection provided a close analogy with the Gnostic doctrine of the
Anthropos, the androgynous original man caught in the embrace of Physis and
in need of redemption....
"Right up
until its high water mark in the seventeenth century it was this myth, above all
else, that motivated, consciously or otherwise, the practica of alchemical
operations....
"A
parallel form of alchemy also developed in the East, in which the liberation of
the 'true man' from within was sought in forms of Indian yoga and Chinese
Taoism....
"For
as science freed itself of religion in an Age of Enlightenment and work in the
laboratory finally shed its arcane symbolisms... so the philosophical side of
the work forfeit the creative medium - the living soul - of its projections only
to become the inanimate preserve of secret societies such as the Rosicrucians....
"Jung
showed that the problem... of the body in general developed in Western alchemy
as a compensatory undercurrent to the Christian conflict between the
opposites, particularly the moral opposites of good and evil, which
ever since the first day of Creation had been rent apart into upper and lower
worlds. ... Alchemy represented the search for the divine spark of God's
reflection in the darkness of the lower world, under the motto ascribed in
antiquity to Hermes Trismegistus; 'as Above, so Below'....
"As
the power of faith upheld by the Church waned, it was left to psychology to
uncover the source of this sickness in modern man, a sickness and distress which
Jung argued can only be cured through greater knowledge and individual
experience....
"The opus of alchemy
was essentially concerned with the union of opposites....
"The stone, the
lumen novum, arising from the conjunction of the reconciled
opposites Sol et Luna was personified as the rounded, bisexual
Anthropos and proclaimed... the saviour of the macrocosm and
counterpart to Christ.... Because the experience of wholeness
re-connects the individual with the universal life of the collective
unconscious, Jung called the mandala 'a window on eternity',
a moment of 'redemption' transcending the ego-personality as the whole
transcends the part." 18
Jung on Active Imagination:
"Brief Extract from Analytical Psychology :
its Theory and Practice The Tavistock Lectures (1935)"
On the nature of tao - From Jung's Collected Works 6 Psychological Types (1921):
"This psychological attitude is...an essential condition for obtaining the
kingdom of heaven, and this in its turn - all rational interpretations
notwithstanding - is the central, irrational symbol whence the redeeming effect
comes. The Christian symbol merely has a more social character than the related
conceptions of the East....
"According
to the central concepts of Taoism, tao is divided into a fundamental pair of
opposites, yang and yin. Yang signifies warmth, light, maleness; yin is cold,
darkness, femaleness. Yang is also heaven, yin earth. From the yang force arises
shen, the celestial portion of the human soul, and from the yin force comes kwei,
the earthly part....
"As
a microcosm, man is reconciler of the opposites, Heaven, man, and earth
form the three chief elements of the world.... Man is a microcosm uniting the
world opposites is the equivalent of an irrational symbol that unites the
psychological opposites.... The existence of two mutually antagonistic
tendencies, both striving to drag man into extreme attitudes and entangle him in
the world, whither on the material or spiritual level, sets him at variance with
himself and accordingly demands the existence of a counterweight....
"The
aim of Taoist ethics, then, is to find deliverance from the cosmic tension of
opposites by a return to Tao."
Symbol at the bottom of
this page is the phoenix
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