Gnose and Alchemy, from Jesus the Living to Jung
Today, we would like to speak of a well-anchored illness in all societies, it presents itself under the guise of a savant word, flushed and denounced, we name it simply "entropy", and it characterizes to itself the unconscious but necessary process of the drifting of thinking, that tends to take the inert object for the subject of one's inner search by denaturalizing all fundamental spiritual message.
And to clearly see the drifts of entropy, we refer you to the study of the gnostic text The Gospel Of Thomas, Primeval Christianity's jewel, where the word of Jesus-called the Living- expresses itself and radiates to the point of unsettling the simple-minded, ready to sincerely receive this timeless teaching which has survived the past centuries. By the grace of Divine Providence, these scripts were buried underground, as if for protection from all untimely alterations by zealous church legislators who would've intended to rewrite these logions in order to orient them according to their feeble visions. Unfortunately for them, this text got through to us in its whole, in its simplicity and its revealing power, having not suffered any change, and no oriented addition. The information of Jesus the Living's message is presented in its bare truth, and this is where the testimony of these gospels which we know, are nothing more than the sickly sprout of this mystical text which hasn't suffered entropy, emerging from an ideology alienating man from matter, to the glory of social and moral domination, and of the multiple political powers which have succeeded to serve the designs of unenlightened despots.
This Gospel, which by a fortunate accident was discovered by two young peasants laboring their field in 1945 in Nag-Hammadi, High-Egypt, finds a strange resonance with this blooming of Sages coming from India in the 20th century, like Ma Ananda Moyi, Ramana Maharshi and Nisargadatta Maharaj are its worthy representatives among others. What strange synchronicity is this emergence of Gnostic thought dictated by the necessity to a return back to the source, induced by Divine Providence which looks after equilibrium in the balance. But much more than the excavation of these forgotten manuscripts that disturb the church, it's the resurgence of a thought, which most thought lost but which was simply resting underground, waiting to suddenly resurface to flourish the crowded shelves of our library. What stupefies, beyond this marvelous discovery, is the powerful sobriety of this text which emerges after reading, and the doctrinal unity which we find between all those indian Masters and these 114 logions, they enlighten on fundamental notions such as the Awakening, the Inner Quest and the question " Who am i ? " coming from the Direct Path called cardiac. This very same Heart which Jesus indicates on many of those statutory representations, far from intending to indicate the symbol of love, relegated by the faithful to a sterile sentiment, invites us to penetrate in ourselves to recover the source, the spiritual center. But this Gospel did not have at the time the fame we could have decently hoped for, the church having attempted by different means, to hide and discredit this Sacred text.
If we speak here about Gnosis, it isn't to oppose this Philosophy to a religious doctrine in the aim to show the deficiencies of one to magnify the other. We assure you that Gnosis, such as we've briefly expressed, is the natural pendant of a learned and well lead practical alchemy. Jung had clearly sensed it as he reminds in his work " My life" : "The tradition between gnosis and the present time seemed to me ruptured, and during a long time it was not possible for me to find the bridge between Gnosticism - or Neoplatonism - and the present time. Only when I began to understand alchemy, I recognized that she constituted a historical link with gnosis, and thus, by alchemy, continuity between the past and present times was restored. Alchemy, as philosophy of nature highly honored in the Middle Age, sets a bridge from the past with gnosis to the future with our modern psychology of the unconscious.". We will allow ourselves to show the reader that contrarily to what affirms the famous psychiatrist, Gnosis and Alchemy do not belong to the past because even today, numerous seekers study these ways of the Liberation of the Being and the Adepts of these disciplines are present in our society and very well alive. We secretly hope that the few pages of this blog will comfort in this idea and can give you faith, for those who would be guided there, to meet a Master capable of instructing you as it was the case for us.
By Jean de Lisle-Deyfran