Carl Jung’s Gnosis: Mystical Experiences as Signposts of the Individuation Process
There is a central problem in the field of Analytical psychology that is the elephant in the room:
in more than six decades, no one has been able to reach Jung’s level
of individuation. In his corpus, Jung clearly stated that three mystical experiences or experiences of the Self appear as the signposts of a successful individuation, yet none of his followers seems to have reached them.
We know that Carl Jung found in Gnosticism and Alchemy, two systems that explained the process leading to mystical experiences. Almost every one of his books after 1928 is dedicated to that study.
It was in AION-Researches into the phenomenology of the Self (1951) and
Mysterium Conjunctionis (1956) that he delivered his most profound comprehension of those phenomena.
Unfortunately, the Jungian community has been unable to understand Jung’s most precious teaching up to this day.
This paper examines three possible explanations for that complex problem.
Edward Edinger jokingly said1 that no one has understood Jung after his book Psychological Types (1921) and he may have been right.
This is the principal problem that Jungian psychology has been facing in the last 60 years.
No one has been able to decipher the meaning of Jung’s most difficult books, his gnosis, even though they are the key to understand his whole psychology.
Our observations can be taken a step further by saying few people really understand the central notion of Jungian psychology: the Self.
That psychological concept is at the center of Jung’s book AION, researches into the phenomenology of the Self, a book that no one understands.
These statements are the elephant in the room that no one sees, no one understands and no one wants to talk about.
In order to do the proper analysis of the elephant in the room of
Analytical psychology, we will bring out the meaning of AION and Jung’s gnosis concerning mystical experiences.
Jung’s Gnosis About Mystical Experiences
AION revolves around Jung’s theory that the Self is composed of pairs of
opposites. He supports his assertion by showing that the fish (Pisces), the magnet and Christ, as symbols of the Self, are always combination of opposites.
Opposites never merge in the real world, they only do during a special momentary experience that occur in consciousness, the mystical experience.
So, when Jung spoke about the union of opposites, he was, in fact, talking about mystical experiences.
It was Jung’s lifetime goal to explain psychologically the phenomenon of mystical experiences and he used alchemy, Gnosticism and hermeticism to talk about them almost freely.
First and foremost, the Self is Jung’s hypothesis to explain mystical experiences.
It is defined as that part of the psyche that contains all opposites. As such, the Self is a complexio oppositorum or a combination of opposites.
The Self is always experienced as a conjunction of opposites which is a mystical experience, an extremely numinous symbol that enters consciousness during a short moment.
When we understand that fundamental fact, there is no need to be afraid or terrified by AION.
This book is not about the coming of the antichrist or any other catastrophe.
Jung simply states that the Self is experienced as a conjunction of opposites.
In Mysterium Conjunctionis, he said:
“Experience shows that the union of antagonistic elements is an irrational
occurrence which can fairly be described as ‘mystical,’ provided that one means by this an occurrence that cannot be reduced to anything else or regarded as in some way unauthentic.” (CW 14, ¶ 515)
Jung wrote profusely about mystical experiences and few, if any, have
understood him.
The terms mystic, mystical or mysticism appear 673 times in his
Collected works but it seems that just a few of his interpreters had been able to understand him.
Yet, he was sometimes very clear about his goal. In Mysterium
Conjunctionis (1956), he wrote:
“For thirty years I have studied these psychic processes under all possible
conditions and have assured myself that the alchemists as well as the great
philosophies of the East are referring to just such experiences, and that it is chiefly our ignorance of the psyche if these experiences appear ‘mystic.’” (CW 14, ¶ 762)
His first mention of the mystical experience phenomenon occurred in Symbols of transformation when he wrote about the union of opposites.
Speaking about the Mithraic sacrifice of the bull, he wrote:
“In the act of sacrifice the consciousness gives up its power and possessions in the interests of the unconscious.
This makes possible a union of opposites resulting in a release of energy.” (CW 5, ¶ 671)
The chapter 5 of Psychological Types (1921) was almost entirely dedicated to the analysis of the mystical experience phenomenon and Jung used many terms to refer to those experiences: the uniting symbol, Pandora’s jewel, the treasure in the lotus, the
symbol of union, the Grail, the divine service, the precious pearl and the treasure in the field.
His fundamental hypothesis was that mystical experiences occur when the libido is withdrawn from external objects and, therefore, sufficiently accumulated in the unconscious.
Then the God-image, symbol of the union of opposites, appears:
“From the empirical standpoint of analytical psychology, the God-image is the symbolic expression of a particular psychic state, or function, which is characterized by its absolute ascendency over the will of the subject, and can therefore bring about or enforce actions and achievements that could never be done by conscious effort.
This overpowering impetus to action (so far as the God-function manifests itself in acts), or this inspiration that transcends conscious understanding, has its source in an accumulation of energy in the unconscious.
The accumulated libido activates images lying dormant in the collective unconscious, among them the God-image, that engram or imprint which from the beginning of time has been the collective expression of the most overwhelmingly powerful influences exerted on the conscious mind by unconscious concentrations of libido.” (CW 6, ¶ 412)
Jung found early in his career that the gnosis of the Gnostics were mystical
experiences. In AION, he referred extensively to the Gnostic system of mystical experiences which was based on the three forms of the magnet or magnetic agent (a symbol of the conjunction of opposites: the magnet contains two opposite poles).
He wrote:
• It is a passive substance: water. It is drawn from the bottom of the source.
• It is an animated being: the snake or the serpent. It arises spontaneously or is discovered by surprise. It represents Christ.
• It is the Logos, an abstraction of the son of God (from the prologue of the gospel of John) and the power of thought or of speech. (CW 9ii, ¶ 293)
In paragraph 295, Jung explains:
“All three symbols are phenomena of assimilation that are in themselves of a numinous nature and therefore have a certain degree of autonomy.”
Which means that the terms water, serpent and Logos are Gnosticism’s three mystical experiences.
To Jung, they are experiences of the Self. The term phenomena or
phenomenon of assimilation is only used 12 times in the Collected Works but it is important.
As an autonomous numinous experience, the phenomenon of assimilation is a brief encounter with the Self which appears as a symbol of the conjunction of opposites.
Speaking of the third experience, Jung was clear about the link between the
magnet and mystical experiences as a “ray of light from above” and a “composition and mixture” therefore, a conjunction of opposites:
“The third reference to the magnet is to be found in Hippolytus’ account of the SETHIAN doctrine.
This has remarkable analogies with the alchemical doctrines of the Middle Ages, though no direct transmission can be proved. It expounds, in Hippolytus’ words, a theory of ‘composition and mixture’:
the ray of light from above mingles with the dark waters below in the form of a minute spark. At the death of the individual, and also at his figurative death as a mystical experience, the two substances unmix themselves. This mystical experience is the divisio and separatio of the composite.” (CW 9ii,
¶ 292)
His research into the Gnostic experiences have led Jung to understand that
mystical experiences were linked to the integration of the unconscious. The integration of the shadow and the anima were the necessary steps to mystical experiences.
He also figured out that Gnostic experiences constituted a process in which each mystical experience was a prerequisite to the next.
They were part of what he called the individuation process.
Further in AION, Jung added:
“The world-embracing spirit of Meister Eckhart knew, without discursive
knowledge, the primordial mystical experience of India as well as of the Gnostics, and was itself the finest flower on the tree of the ‘Free Spirit’ that flourished at the beginning of the eleventh century.” (CW 9ii, ¶ 302)
When, in 1928, Jung received the book The Secret of the Golden Flower from
Richard Wilhelm, he realized that alchemy was also about mystical experiences.
Nowadays, it is popular, although incorrect, to see alchemy as a precursor of chemistry and a pseudo-science.
Yet, the alchemists were among the most educated people of their
generation and it is silly to think that their goal was to transform lead into gold or to fabricate a precious stone that would give them immortality.
What is most probable is that they used the chemical terminology to propagate a special knowledge that needed to be hidden from the Church but revealed only to those who knew what their writing was all about.
That secret knowledge was their personal recipes to attain mystical experiences in the shade of the Christian Inquisition.
Only ingenuous alchemists tried to make gold or achieve immortality, the real alchemists knew that their books were symbolic of a psychological process.
When Jungian interpreters propagate the idea that alchemists were
unfit scientists, they are projecting their own unconsciousness on them.
Jung found, in the writings of Gerhard Dorn, the alchemical twin to the Gnostic ystem of mystical experiences.
His model contained three conjunctions of opposites or mystical experiences instead of two in standard alchemy (which are albedo and rubedo).
In Mysterium Conjunctionis, Jung relied extensively on Dorn’s system.
The first conjunction is unio mentalis, the union of the spirit and the soul.
The second conjunction is known as the Philosopher’s Stone (lapis philosophorum) and consists of the conjunction of spirit and matter.
The third conjunction is called the rotundum and is a
conjunction with the unus mundus.
In the foreword of Mysterium Conjunctionis, Jung wrote:
“it now appears that the ‘alchemystical’ philosophers made the opposites and their union one of the chief objects of their work. In their writings, certainly, they employed a symbolical terminology that frequently reminds us of the language of dreams, concerned as these often are with the problem of opposites.”
In AION, Jung made clear that these mystical experiences were the goal of
individuation:
“Therefore, anyone who wants to achieve the difficult feat of realizing something not only intellectually, but also according to its feeling-value, must for better or worse come to grips with the anima/animus problem in order to open the way for a higher union, a conjunctio oppositorum. This is an indispensable prerequisite for wholeness.” (CW 9ii, ¶ 58)
Jung also underlined the relation of wholeness with mystical experiences:
“The union of opposites in the stone is possible only when the adept has become One himself. The unity of the stone is the equivalent of individuation, by which man is made one; we would say that the stone is a projection of the unified self. This formulation is psychologically correct. It does not, however, take sufficient account of the fact that the stone is a transcendent unity.” CW 9ii, ¶ 264) ~Benoit Rousseau April 25, 2024, Carl Jung’s Gnosis: Mystical Experiences as Signposts of the Individuation Process, Page 1-7 [ex]cerpt
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