The Gnostic Jung Quotes

“Moderns consider themselves wholly rational, unemotional, scientific, and atheistic. Where earlier humanity had realized its unconscious through religion, moderns dismiss both religion and the unconscious as prescientific delusions. Instead, moderns proudly identify themselves with their ego and thereby boast of their omnipotence: “nowadays most people identify themselves almost exclusively with their consciousness, and imagine that they”
― C.G. Jung, The Gnostic Jung: Including "Seven Sermons to the Dead"

“More accurately, the ego is in fact supplemented, not replaced, by the self. For the aim of both Gnosticism and therapy is, once again, the integration of ego consciousness with the unconscious, not the rejection of either one for the other: When, in treating a case of neurosis, we try to supplement the inadequate attitude (or adaptedness)”
― C.G. Jung, The Gnostic Jung: Including "Seven Sermons to the Dead"

“and doctrinairism are the disease of our time; they pretend to have all the answers.”44 Where primitives identify themselves with the world itself, moderns identify themselves with the part of them that controls the world: the ego.”
― C.G. Jung, The Gnostic Jung: Including "Seven Sermons to the Dead"

“Perhaps because alchemy combines the ancient, Gnostic focus on the immaterial and transcendent soul, or spark, with the modern, scientific-like focus on the transformation of worldly matter, it serves to connect the two. Despite his professed closer kinship to alchemy,”
― C.G. Jung, The Gnostic Jung: Including "Seven Sermons to the Dead"

“If we seek genuine psychological understanding of the human being of our own time, we must know his spiritual history absolutely. We cannot reduce him to mere biological data, since he is not by nature merely biological but is a product also of spiritual presuppositions.”
― C.G. Jung, The Gnostic Jung: Including "Seven Sermons to the Dead"

“In short, Jung’s insights need to be considered as one of the latest and greatest manifestations of the stream of alternative spirituality which descends from the Gnostics.130”
― C.G. Jung, The Gnostic Jung: Including "Seven Sermons to the Dead"

“ego-tendencies. Like a magnet, the new centre [i.e., self] attracts to itself that which is proper to it.80 As a”
― C.G. Jung, The Gnostic Jung: Including "Seven Sermons to the Dead"

“adaptedness) of the conscious mind by adding to it contents of the unconscious, our aim is to create a wider personality whose centre of gravity does not necessarily coincide with the ego, but which, on the contrary, as the patient’s insights increase, may even thwart his [sheer] ego-tendencies. Like a magnet, the new centre [i.e., self] attracts to itself that which is proper to it.80”
― C.G. Jung, The Gnostic Jung: Including "Seven Sermons to the Dead"

“the unstable,” by bringing order into chaos, by resolving disharmonies and centring upon the mid-point, thus setting a “boundary” to the multitude and focusing attention upon the cross, consciousness is reunited with the unconscious, the unconscious man is made one with his centre … and in this wise the goal of man’s salvation and exaltation is reached.77”
― C.G. Jung, The Gnostic Jung: Including "Seven Sermons to the Dead"

“As Jung says more clearly of Christ: This Gnostic Christ … symbolizes man’s original unity and exalts it as the saving goal of his development. By “composing”
― C.G. Jung, The Gnostic Jung: Including "Seven Sermons to the Dead"

“unified self. Misleadingly identifying the Demiurge with the Anthropos, Jung says: The primordial image of the quaternity coalesces, for the Gnostics, with the figure of the demiurge or Anthropos. He is, as it were, the victim of his own creative act, for, when he descended into Physis, he was caught in her embrace. The image of the anima mundi or Original Man latent in the dark of matter expresses the presence of a transconscious centre which, because of its quaternary character and its roundness, must be regarded as a symbol of wholeness.76”
― C.G. Jung, The Gnostic Jung: Including "Seven Sermons to the Dead"

“Jung identifies the “Anthropos” (“Primal Man” or “Original Man”), “Christ,” and the “Son” with God. The Anthropos begins as part of the unconscious godhead, emerges as an independent ego, eventually forgets his unconscious origin, must be reminded of it by the godhead, and then returns to it to form a unified”
― C.G. Jung, The Gnostic Jung: Including "Seven Sermons to the Dead"

“If ignorance alone, according to Gnostic orthodoxy, keeps humans tied to the material world, knowledge frees them from it. Because humans are ignorant, that knowledge must come from outside them. Because the powers of the material world are ignorant, too, that knowledge must come from beyond them as well: it can come only from the godhead. The dependence of humanity on the godhead matches the dependence of the ego on the unconscious to reveal itself.”
― C.G. Jung, The Gnostic Jung: Including "Seven Sermons to the Dead"

“As a symbol of the all-encompassing unconscious, the godhead is appropriately androgynous rather than exclusively male or female.59 For Jungians, the initially androgynous godhead ordinarily becomes a female god, whose bearing of a son symbolizes the emergence of the ego out of the primordial unconscious.60 The emergence of matter alongside the immaterial godhead symbolizes the beginning, but just the beginning, of the emergence of the ego out of the unconscious. Inert matter itself does not symbolize the ego, which”
― C.G. Jung, The Gnostic Jung: Including "Seven Sermons to the Dead"

“primordial. It is the source or agent of everything else. Prior to its emanating anything, it is whole, self-sufficient, perfect. The godhead thus symbolizes the unconscious before the emergence of the ego out of it.58 As a”
― C.G. Jung, The Gnostic Jung: Including "Seven Sermons to the Dead"

“Only Gnostics and contemporaries qualify, for they alone are both severed from their unconscious and aware of the fact.”
― C.G. Jung, The Gnostic Jung: Including "Seven Sermons to the Dead"

“Like Gnostics, contemporaries feel alienated from their roots and are seeking to overcome the alienation. They are seeking new outlets for their unconscious. Where Gnostics feel cut off from the outer world, contemporaries feel cut off from the inner one. Contemporaries do not, like Gnostics, project their alienation onto the cosmos; through Jungian psychology they seek to discover their true selves within rather than outside themselves. They alone, then, have the chance fully to overcome their alienation.”
― C.G. Jung, The Gnostic Jung: Including "Seven Sermons to the Dead"

“spite of the suppression of the Gnostic heresy, it [the heresy] continued to flourish throughout the Middle Ages under the guise of alchemy.”30 For Jung, the alchemical process of extracting gold from base metals is a continuation of the Gnostic process of liberating fallen sparks from matter. Both processes are seemingly outward, physical or metaphysical ones which in fact are inner, psychological ones. Both represent a progression from sheer ego consciousness to the ego’s rediscovery of the unconscious and reintegration with it to forge the self. In alchemy the progression is from base metals to the distillation of vapor out of them and the return of that vapor to the metals to form gold. In Gnosticism the progression is from the Gnostic’s sheer bodily existence to the release of the immaterial spark within the Gnostic’s body and the reunion of that spark with the godhead. In both cases the state truly sought lies within human beings—between the ego and the unconscious—rather than outside them—between the vapor and the metals or between the spark and the godhead. The human state is simply projected onto the external world.31”
― C.G. Jung, The Gnostic Jung: Including "Seven Sermons to the Dead"

“But the Gnostics were too remote for me to establish any link with them in regard to the questions that were confronting me. As far as I could see, the tradition that might have connected Gnosis with the present seemed to have been severed, and for a long time it proved impossible to find any bridge that led from Gnosticism—or neo-Platonism—to the contemporary world. But when I began to understand alchemy I realized that it represented the historical link with Gnosticism, and that a continuity therefore existed between past and present. Grounded in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, alchemy formed the bridge on the one hand into the past, to Gnosticism, and on the other into the future, to the modern psychology of the unconscious.27”
― C.G. Jung, The Gnostic Jung: Including "Seven Sermons to the Dead"

“Jung found that evidence in two sources: alchemy and Gnosticism. Interpreted psychologically, both served as hoary counterparts to his brand of psychology and therefore as evidence of its objectivity: The experiences of the alchemists were, in a sense, my experiences, and their world was my world. This was, of course, a momentous discovery: I had stumbled upon the historical counterpart of my psychology of the unconscious. The possibility of a comparison with alchemy, and the uninterrupted intellectual chain back to Gnosticism, gave substance to my psychology.24”
― C.G. Jung, The Gnostic Jung: Including "Seven Sermons to the Dead"

“Where Gnosticism regards the world as demonic and hostile, existentialism considers it natural and indifferent.14 In short, Jonas is far less intent than Voegelin in making Gnosticism modern.”
― C.G. Jung, The Gnostic Jung: Including "Seven Sermons to the Dead"

“Where Voegelin seeks to show the Gnostic nature of modernity, Jonas seeks to show the modern nature of Gnosticism. Jonas draws parallels between ancient Gnosticism and modern, secular existentialism to prove that Gnosticism is existentialist, not that existentialism is Gnostic. For Jonas, both philosophies stress above all the radical alienation of human beings from the world.”
― C.G. Jung, The Gnostic Jung