In The Apocalypse of the Reluctant Gnostics: Carl G. Jung and Philip K. Dick, Stuart Douglas traces the similarities between two geniuses in the last century. One is the legendary science fiction writer, Philip K. Dick. The other is one of the founders of psychoanalysis, Carl. G. Jung. .
Douglas shows how both these thinkers proliferated a message that was very similar to the Gnostic message – a synthesis was made near the end of the book that is a very useful preview of what to expect from the book
Below is the first part of the synthesis.
1. Void and unknowable, the Pleroma is the ineffable nothingness before the beginning. It is neither created, nor not-created. It is non-being beyond being. It is the Godhead rather than God. The Pleroma is both the emptiness and the fullness. It has no qualities, yet it contains all qualities.
2. The Pleroma is fully transcendent and fully immanent. In the same way that light pervades the atmosphere, the Pleroma interpenetrates and pervades the created world. Split a piece of wood, or lift up a stone, and there will be found the Pleroma. Any distinction between the Pleroma and the created world is one of quality; the essence of the Pleroma is in the created world. There is no spatio-temporal separation.
3.Barbelo is the highest female principle. The Pleroma thinks, and his first thought, known as forethought, comes into being as Barbelo, his feminine counterpart, the first emanation and foremost of the aeons. One becomes Two as the Mother-Father. She is the creative power and the universal womb out of which everything else proceeds.
4. To assign gender to the One, the Pleroma, is incorrect. There can be no male without female; no female without male. The One, on its own, cannot have gender. Gender only arises when the One becomes Two.
5. Through the power of the Mother-Father, out of the emptiness of the Pleroma, the fullness of the Pleroma came into being through the emanation of male/female binary opposites known as syzygies. Individually, these emanated beings are the aeons. The last of these aeons is Sophia, Holy Wisdom, who forms a syzygy with her consort, Christ.
6. Creation occurred due to a primordial schism in which the perfect harmony of the primal syzygies was ruptured. If the primal syzygies had remained in perfect balance, unity would have persisted and the manifest universe could not have come into being. Creation required the harmonious balance to be disturbed and, as a result, disorder is not merely an unfortunate by-product of creation but one of the fundamental principles on which it is founded.
7. Creation is the result of the differentiation of pairs of binary opposites out of the Pleroma. Differentiation is creation. Without the differentiation of the opposites, there can be no world. Without differentiation, the syzygies of the Pleroma remain inert and in potentia only. Nothing can exist without the simultaneous existence of his complementary opposite. No hot without cold, no light without dark. In the Pleroma, prior to differentiation the opposites cancel one another out and are ineffective and not “real”. If they can be considered to exist at all in the Pleroma, then the opposites exist in a harmonious state of equilibrium. Only once differentiated do they come into effect and become what might be considered as “real”.
8. Life is born of the spark of opposites. Differentiation separates the opposites so that the resulting energy tension between the poles allows creation to come into being. Nothing can exist without a balancing opposite. Without differentiation, creation is an inherent potential of the Pleroma only, and the opposites remain in a state of perfect equilibrium. The created world is predicated on the differentiation of the opposites. This is the crux of Gnostic cosmogony.
9.Both/and rather than either/or. This is a Gnostic maxim. The opposites are not just part of life in this world, they are fundamental to it. No opposites, no world.
10. Non-differentiation of the opposites is unconsciousness; differentiation of the opposites is consciousness. If the opposites are not differentiated psychologically, a person risks the sin of unconsciousness. The reconciliation and integration of the fully differentiated opposites leads to psychological wholeness.
11. There is great danger in favouring one pole of a pair of opposites over its complementary opposite pole. Psychologically, an imbalance of the opposites results in a split in the psyche and a loss of psychological wholeness. The two poles of a pair of opposites may appear phenomenally distinct, but their essence is fundamentally one. The nature of the opposites in creation is diff rentiated-yet-inextricably-united. There is no hot without cold, no light without dark. Ultimately, the opposites can never be truly separated, they issue from a single root. The opposites are only meaningful in relation to one another. The essential nature of the opposites is always both/and rather than either/or.. Psychological wholeness demands the acceptance of both poles. We must walk the middle path between the opposites, being neither too attached, nor averse, to either pole. Both/and rather than either/or.
12. An imbalanced conscious position will invoke a compensatory unconscious counter-position due to the self-regulatory nature of the psyche. If the inner psychological state is not made conscious, in other words, if the conscious and unconscious counter-poles are not reconciled, then, out of necessity, the unresolved conflict will be encountered in the outer world in what is generally regarded as fate.
13. Enamoured by the Light of the Pleroma, Sophia wanted to conceive on her own. Striving only for the light evoked a counter-position of darkness. That darkness is the demiurge and the archons and their fallen creation. The demiurge, accompanied by his archons, is the blind, ignorant, dark abyss of the shadow of the Soul.
14.The demiurge and the archons are illegitimate. They are defective, and represent the disruption to the harmonious balance of the opposites that occurred in the Pleroma when Sophia conceived without her male counterpart. The archons are hermaphroditic. They are both male and female, yet not fully either. The harmony of the male/female syzygy has been disturbed within the archons, and the opposites are beginning to split. The archons are responsible for the severing of the original androgynous unity of the Pleroma into the duality of the created world.
15. The demiurge, and his archons, lacked the power to create on their own. They hijacked the creative power of Barbelo, via her daughter Sophia, the demiurge’s mother, in order to fashion the created world. The demiurge and the archons then created humanity in order to provide them with what they lacked, the Light of the Pleroma. They created humanity so that the Light of God reflected in humanity could illuminate them. In other words, the archons created humanity as an energy source. The archons are energy parasites who feed off us!
16. The archons’ powers are limited. It is a mistake to think that the archons have power over us. They cannot overpower the truth. The archons have soul, and what is of soul cannot take hold of spirit. They can enact their violence on our bodies, minds, and souls, but they cannot harm our spirit. The spirit, on the other hand, is immaculate, immune, incorruptible, and immortal.
17. Due to their limited powers, the archons control humanity through deception. They do this in order to take free people and enslave them. Their power is their deception. The power of the archons is mere occlusion of the truth.
18. We are the archons. Sophia sent her daughter Zoe (meaning Life) into each one of us granting us a living soul. She is our Mother, she is also mother to the demiurge. He is our half-brother and, along with his offspring the archons, he is our collective shadow. All humans are archons, but some humans are more archonic than others.
19.Abraxas is the god-above-god that humanity has disavowed. He is two-natures-in-one, embodying both good and evil, God and devil. Anything real casts a shadow that is as great as itself, and the shadow of God is the devil. There cannot be one without the other. Both/and rather than either/or.
20. Created as much as creator, Abraxas is distinct from the Pleroma, yet cannot be wholly identified with the world either. Like the archons, Abraxas exists in the liminal space between the Pleroma and creation. Abraxas is the demiurge.
21. Abraxas is nothing and everything, eternal emptiness and eternal fullness, eternal darkness and eternal brightness, above and below, old and young, yes and no. However, unlike the syzygies of the Pleroma, in which the opposites cancel one another out, God and devil stand opposed to one another within the figure of Abraxas. Effectiveness is both the differentiator, and the connecting link, that unites God and devil in the figure of Abraxas. The effectiveness of Abraxas gives both God and devil the ability to have effect in the created world. To encounter Abraxas is to experience the numinous, the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, in all its awful mystery.
22. With the head of a rooster, a human body, and the tail of a snake, Abraxas unites the opposites, God and devil, good and evil, Heaven and Earth; opposites which collide in the experience of being human.
23. Given that he is two-natures-in-one, both God and devil, Abraxas is to not to be feared or loved, yet both feared and loved. Yet, he is neither to be sought after nor rejected since, like the archons’ veil of deception, Abraxas surrounds us on all sides and will seek us out. We must walk the middle path between the opposites, being neither too attached, nor averse, to either pole. Both/and rather than either/or.
24. In the same way that the aeons and archons constitute the fullness of the Pleroma, the archetypes constitute the collective unconscious. The collective unconscious—and the archetypes—is, in essence, one and the same thing as the fullness of the Pleroma. The archetypes have their positive and negative aspects, and are thus capable of exerting both beneficial and/or detrimental effects. Thus, as their metaphysical counterparts, the aeons and the archons can influence the human psyche, indirectly shaping, if not controlling, human experience. Psychologically, the archons are the negative aspects of the archetypes. It was the archons who compelled St. Paul against his will: “For that which I do I allow not: for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I. … For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do” (Romans 7:15…19, KW).
25. Humanity has been imprisoned in the material world by the archons through an act of deception. This world is the Black Iron Prison. It is the shadow of death in which the human body is a tomb. This body-tomb has been created from the archons’ four elements of: matter, darkness, desire, and the artificial spirit respectively. The human soul, trapped in a body-tomb, has been bound by the veil of forgetfulness, and enslaved in the material world. How has the great wealth of the human spirit come to dwell in the poverty of the body-tomb?
26. This world is an illusory dream world that we have been deceived into taking for reality. So-called reality is an illusion, albeit a very persistent, archon-enforced one. We are controlled by the archons because they control the false reality we are living in. However, the archons are effectively powerless, and their power over us exists only to the extent that they can deceive us into thinking that the false reality is actually real. This dream world is “real” as long as it lasts. We need to awaken from this sleep of death.
27. When we awaken to the illusion of the prison world, then we are no longer at its mercy. It will no longer control us, we will have control over it. When we realise that this world is an illusion, we transcend its limitations and become co-creators of it.
28. The essence of the universe is information. It is not three-dimensional, it is outside space and time altogether. Our world is a mere phantasm, a fallen world, in which space and time are part of the delusion. We have been thrown into this world, and enslaved by an evil entity that projects information which we have been deluded into interpreting as our so-called reality. This world is nothing more than the misinterpretation of an underlying reality of which the essence is simply information.
29. We humans are co-creators, along with the archons, in creating this dream world. We hypostatise the information we are fed into the phenomenal world. We are forgetful cosmic co-creators who have become imprisoned in a universe of our own making without realising it. Our illusory world is a mass hallucination. We are the archons.
30.The phenomenal world does not exist. It is a three-dimensional holographic image, an illusion, generated from information, which we mistake for reality. Like the prisoners in Plato’s cave who mistake the shadows cast on the cave wall for reality, we, likewise, mistake our holographic world as being real. Our world is nothing more than a satanic interpolation of underlying information that results in a prison which occludes the information that will reveal our true situation. The fundamental nature of the fullness of the Pleroma is energetic information, and the archons have distorted this underlying information to project the illusory world in which we are
31. The Pleroma consists of analogue waveforms (undifferentiated opposites), and the created world consists of binaries (differentiated opposites). The poles of the pairs of opposites within the Pleroma can oscillate instantaneously, such that the male is not male, and the female is not female, whereas the created world, brought into existence through conscious observation, is binary in that it requires the tension between the differentiated opposites to spark creation into existence.
32. “The kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21, KJV). The innermost core of every human being is a divine spark of the Light of the Pleroma. The macrocosm is reflected in the microcosm, hence, we are within the Pleroma, and the Pleroma is also within us. The divine spark within is a fragment of the entire cosmic hologram, only dimmer. As a part of the Pleroma, the divine spark contains the entire Pleroma, only less so. The divine spark is the indwelling Christ. “In him dwelleth all the fullness of the [Pleroma] bodily” (Colossians 2:9, KJV).
33. Due to the archons, the divine spark has become estranged from the Pleroma and imprisoned in matter. We are divine sparks enclosed in corruptible sheaves. When the divine spark remembers itself as both a part, and yet the whole, of the Pleroma, this is the gnosis of the Gnostics.
34. Our essence is the divine spark. Spirit, the immaculate divine spark, is immortal. As a part of the hologram of the Pleroma, it is one with the Pleroma, and contains the fullness of the entire Pleroma, only dimmer.
35. Gnosis alone is not enough for salvation. Gnosis is imparted by the emissary who descends from the Pleroma to free humanity from it imprisonment in the world of darkness. “I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life” (John 8:12, KJV).
36. The Self is the unifying and ordering centre of the whole psyche. The Self is the psychological aspect of the Christ, and the Christ is the spiritual aspect of the Self. They are one and the same at different dimensions of being. Realisation of the Self is the goal of life. It demands the reconciliation and integration of all opposites within the psyche, principal among them the union of the conscious and unconscious psyches.