Isaac Luria, the most Gnostic of all the Kabbalistic teachers
The religions of the masses demand obedience to God’s will, while the Gnosis demands both obedience and isobedience.
Not all commandments come from the true God, said the ancient Gnostics, for many come from a Demiurge, whose law may be useful to the unenlightened (the psychics, or men of soul) but is counterproductive to the true Gnostics (the pneumatics, or men of spirit).
The will of nature is not that of supernature; the law of the morning which is appropriate for spiritual infants must be broken by those who have progressed to the law of the evening, where the light of differentiated consciousness must be dimmed in order to admit the luminosity of the midnight sun of individuation.
The Jewish Gnosis of the Kabbalah recognized this when it capitalized on the divine statement (in Isaiah 45:7):
“I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace and create evil; I the Lord do all these things.”
In Kabbalistic writings we encounter the teaching of the two “inclinations” Qeser) and the advice that the Kabbalistic Gnostic is to love God with both of these.
The right-and left-hand pillars of the Tree of Life, and even more the doctrine regarding the terrifying klippoth or evil principles existing in conjunction with the same Tree, bring to our attention a doctrine that postulates evil as a metaphysical reality in God.
Isaac Luria, the most Gnostic of all the Kabbalistic teachers, said that the root of all evil lies in the very nature of divine creation, inasmuch as God created in order to manifest everything hidden in His own mysterious nature.
The Christian mystic Jacob Boehme similarly regarded God’s love and wrath, His brilliant light and burning fire, as belonging inseparably together, both being the effluence of God’s eternal word, for life can only be when good and evil exist together, both in God and in man.
The Kabbalah as well as the more daring forms of Christian mysticism are, of course, rooted in the wisdom of the ancient Gnostics who declared in the Gospel of Philip: “The light and the darkness, life and death, the right and the left, are brothers one to another.
It is not possible to separate them from one another.
Because of this, neither are the good good, nor the evil evil, nor is life a life, nor death a death.
Because of this each will be resolved into its origin from the beginning. “‘
We find then that the two manifest principles called in the Second Sermon God and Devil are the two Gnostic categories of our own being, which were ever experienced by those possessing Gnosis as a duality rooted in an underlying unity.
The Self of Jung’s psychology belongs to a transconscious realm, and therefore is not directly susceptible to conscious cognition; it is rather experienced through its good and evil manations.
The former of these might appear as the light and rectitude of the accepted values of consciousness, while the latter is the shadow that accompanies the light and acts as the demonic half of the psyche. ― Stephan Hoeller, The Gnostic Jung, Page 81-82
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