In The Gospel of Thomas, the saviour says that whoever is near to him is near to the fire.
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The Apocalypse of the Reluctant Gnostics by Stuart Douglas
Similarly, Jung taught that we must pass through the inferno of the passions in order to overcome them.
In contrast to the Gnostics, whose goal was to escape from this prison world and return to the Pleroma, Jung believed that life needed to be lived to the full.
Only by living life can we be freed from it (2009).
However, there is no growth in consciousness without pain, and unfortunately, most people will do anything in order to avoid facing their own soul, according to Jung.
Likewise, in The Gospel of Thomas, the saviour says that whoever is near to him is near to the fire.
To realise the reunion of spirit and soul necessitates that one endures the fire.
It is incumbent upon every true Gnostic to burn away all that gets in the way of liberating the living soul.
In a not dissimilar vein, Western Buddhist nun, teacher, and author, Pema Chödrön (2000), teaches that we can only find the indestructible part of ourselves to the extent that we repeatedly expose ourselves to the annihilation of our false sense of self.
In Gnostic terms, the indestructible within is the divine spark and its counterpart is the living soul.
Paraphrasing Chödrön, only to the extent that we descend into the unconscious and expose ourselves over and over to the annihilation of the animal soul can we recover the lost living soul.
~Stuart Douglas, Apocalypse of the Reluctant Prophet, Page 138
