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"For the alchemist, the one primarily in need of redemption is not man, but the deity who is lost and sleeping in matter." - C. G. Jung, CW 12, Page 312

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The titles of the Gospel of Thomas and the Book of Thomas the Contender (attributed to Jesus' "twin brother") may suggest that "you, the reader, are Jesus' twin brother." Whoever comes to understand these books discovers, like Thomas, that Jesus is his "twin," his spiritual "other self." Jesus' words to Thomas, then, are addressed to the reader:

"Since it has been said that you are my twin and true companion, examine yourself so that you may understand who you are ... I am the knowledge of the truth. So while you accompany me, although you do not understand (it), you already have come to know, and you will be called 'the one who knows himself.' For whoever has not known himself has known nothing, but whoever has known himself has simultaneously achieved knowledge about the depth of all things.”

Like circles of artists today, gnostics considered original creative invention to be the mark of anyone who becomes spiritually alive. Each one, like students of a painter or writer, expected to express his own perceptions by revising and transforming what he was taught. Whoever merely repeated his teacher's words was considered immature. Bishop Irenaeus complains that

every one of them generates something new every day, according to his ability; for no one is considered initiated [or: "mature"] among them unless he develops some enormous fictions!

He charges that "they boast that they are the discoverers and inventors of this kind of imaginary fiction," and accuses them of creating new forms of mythological poetry. No doubt he is right: first- and second-century gnostic literature includes some remarkable poems, like the "Round Dance of the Cross" and the "Thunder, Perfect Mind." Most offensive, from his point of view, is that they admit that nothing supports their writings except their own intuition. When challenged, "they either mention mere human feelings, or else refer to the harmony that can be seen in creation":

They are to be blamed for ... describing human feelings, and passions, and mental tendencies... and ascribing the things that happen to human beings, and whatever they recognize themselves as experiencing, to the divine Word.

On this basis, like artists, they express their own insight-their own gnosis-by creating new myths, poems, rituals, "dialogues with Christ, revelations, and accounts of their visions.

Like Baptists, Quakers, and many others, the gnostic is convinced that whoever receives the spirit communicates directly with the divine. One of Valentinus' students, the gnostic teacher Heracleon (c. 160), says that "at first, people believe because of the testimony of others..." but then "they come to believe from the truth itself." So his own teacher, Valentinus, claimed to have first learned Paul's secret teaching; then he experienced a vision which became the source of his own gnosis:

He saw a newborn infant, and when he asked who he might be, the child answered, "I am the Logos."

Marcus, another student of Valentinus' (c. 150), who went on to become a teacher himself, tells how he came to his own firsthand knowledge of the truth. He says that a vision

descended upon him ... in the form of a woman ... and expounded to him alone its own nature, and the origin of things, which it had never revealed to anyone, divine or human.

The presence then said to him,

"I wish to show you Truth herself; for I have brought her down from above, so that you may see her without a veil, and understand her beauty."

And that, Marcus adds, is how "the naked Truth" came to him in a woman's form, disclosing her secrets to him. Marcus expects, in turn, that everyone whom he initiates into gnosis will also receive such experiences. In the initiation ritual, after invoking the spirit, he commands the candidate to speak in prophecy, to demonstrate that the person has received direct contact with the divine.

- Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels

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As little as we would accuse Christ of fraternizing with evil, so little should we reproach ourselves, that to love the sinner, who is oneself is to make a pact with the devil.

- C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy

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The way is not straight, but appears to go around in circles. More accurate knowledge has proved it to go in spirals: the dream motifs always return after certain intervals to definite forms, whose characteristic it is to define a center.

- C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy

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The passage of the mythological hero may be over-ground, incidentally; fundamentally it is inward-into depths where obscure resistances are overcome, and long lost, forgotten powers are revivified, to be made available for the transfiguration of the world. This deed accomplished, life no longer suffers hopelessly under the terrible mutilations of ubiquitous disaster, battered by time, hideous throughout space; but with its horror visible still, its cries of anguish still tumultuous, it becomes penetrated by an all-suffusing, all-sustaining love, and a knowledge of its own unconquered power. Something of the light that blazes invisible within the abysses of its normally opaque materiality breaks forth, with an increasing uproar. The dreadful mutilations are then seen as shadows, only, of an immanent, imperishable eternity; time yields to glory; and the world sings with the prodigious, angelic, but perhaps finally monotonous, siren music of the spheres. Like happy families, the myths and the worlds redeemed are all alike.

- Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces

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Only birth can conquer death– the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new. Within the soul, within the body social, there must be– if we are to experience long survival– continuous “recurrence of birth” (palingenesia) to nullify the unremitting recurrences of death. For it is by means of our own victories, if we are not regenerated, that the work of Nemesis is wrought: doom breaks from the shell of our very virtue. Peace then is a snare; war is a snare; change is a snare; permanence a snare. When our day is come for the victory of death, death closes in; there is nothing we can do, except be crucified– and resurrected; dismembered, totally, and then reborn.

- Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces

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“There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you're high it's tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people. Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible. Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence, and euphoria pervade one's marrow. But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humor and absorption on friends' faces are replaced by fear and concern. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against-- you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. You never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality.”

- Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: a Memoir of Moods and Madness

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“Bipolar robs you of that which is you. It can take from you the very core of your being and replace it with something that is completely opposite of who and what you truly are. Because my bipolar went untreated for so long, I spent many years looking in the mirror and seeing a person I did not recognize or understand. Not only did bipolar rob me of my sanity, but it robbed me of my ability to see beyond the space it dictated me to look. I no longer could tell reality from fantasy, and I walked in a world no longer my own.”

- Alyssa Reyans

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"How do you move on? You move on when your heart finally understands that there is no turning back."

- J.R.R. Tolkien

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“Synchronicity is like a waking dream in which we experience the point of intersection of the timeless with time, where the impossible union of spheres of existence is actual, and where what is inside of us and what is outside of us is unseparated. Like a dream, synchronicity reveals something we dimly grasp, glimpses of the underlying Tao.”

- Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D., Synchronicity and the Self

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I have just realized that it is by no means a sign of weakness to be overwhelmed by the current state of our world. It is a sign that you are conscious. It is a sign that you are alive, and that you are not willing to believe that what we see in our world today is normal. If you feel radically uneasy at the current state of affairs, you are not broken or skewed. You are alive.

Locked within the circumstances of the shadow of the world, you can hold that realization like a flame to light your path.

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“The negative view of self may not always penetrate conscious awareness, and may even masquerade as its opposite: high self-regard. Some people incase themselves in an armored coat of grandiosity and denial of any shortcomings so as not to feel that enervating shame. That self-puffery is as sure a manifestation of self-loathing as is abject self-deprecation, albeit a much more normalized one. It is a marker of our culture’s insanity that certain individuals who flee from shame into a shameless narcissism may even achieve great social, economic, and political status and success. Our culture grinds many of the most traumatized into the mud, but may also—depending on class background, economic resources, race, and other variables—raise a few to the highest positions of power. “

“The most common form of shame assumes in this culture is the belief that “I am not enough.” The writer Elizabeth Wurtzel, who died of breast cancer at age fifty-two in 2020, suffered depression from an early age. Her childhood was traumatic, beginning with a secret deliberately kept from her about who her actual father was. “I was intensely downcast,” she chronicled in an autobiographic piece for New York magazine, “with a chronic depression that began when I was about 10, but instead of killing my will, it motivated me: I thought if I could be good enough at whatever task, great or small, that was before me, I might have a few minutes of happiness.” That conviction of one’s inadequacy has fueled a great many glittering careers and instigated many instances of illness, often both in the same individual.”

- Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal

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“We are not caught in some kind of universe where human beings are completely outside of the plan, rather, I think that history is somehow part of the plan, and by anticipating or somehow trying to come into resonance with what history’s part in the plan is, I think we can lift the pall of existential doubt that is the legacy of modern thought; in other words, there can be a post-modern philosophy that is organic, biological, human-centered, humane, and even psychedelic.”

- Terrence McKenna

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“There are no accidents in the meandering and vicissitudes of historical process. It is going somewhere, producing a specific image that needs to be mirrored and reflected in human consciousness. There is a light side and a dark side to this image. This same mode of reflection can be applied to an individual's life history as well as to collective history, and indeed the two can (and indeed should be) seen in relation to one another and joined in a meaningful way. Each of us is the carrier of a bit of the consciousness that is needed by the times in order to advance consciousness of the underlying motifs unfolding in history. Individual dreams of an archetypal nature, for instance, may be in the service of the times, compensating for the one-sidedness of culture, and not only of the individual's consciousness. In this sense, the individual is a cocreator of the reflection of reality that history as a whole reveals.”

- Murray Stein, Jung’s Map of the Soul

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“Existence is only real when it is conscious to somebody. That is why the Creator needs conscious man even though, from sheer unconsciousness, he would like to prevent him from becoming conscious.”

C. G. Jung, Psychology and Religion, CW 11, par. 575.

“The process of becoming conscious, requires both seeing and being seen, knowing and being known.”

“The pursuit of consciousness, then, does not allow one to rest in the attitude of being known and contained in God: the ego has a responsibility to the Self to be it’s knowing subject as well as it’s known object.”

- Edward F. Edinger, The Creation of Consciousness: Jung's Myth for Modern Man

“God makes us to know him, and his knowing is his being, and his making me know is the same as my knowing, so his knowing is mine: just as, in the master, what he teaches is the same as, in the pupil, the thing that he is taught. And because his knowing is mine, and his knowing is his substance, and his nature and his essence, it follows that his substance and his nature and his essence are mine. And his substance, his nature and his essence being mine, therefore I am the Son of God. Behold, brethern, what manner of love God hath bestowed upon us that we should be the Sons of God!”

- Meister Eckhart, ed. Pfeiffer, vol. 1, p. 31.

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“The union of opposites in the vessel of the ego is the essential feature of the creation of consciousness. Consciousness is the third thing that emerges out of the conflict of twoness. Out of the ego as subject versus the ego as object; out of the ego as active agent versus the ego as passive victim; out of the ego as praiseworthy and good versus the ego as damnable and bad; out of a conflict of mutually exclusive duties- out of all such paralyzing conflicts can emerge the third, transcendent condition which is a new quantum of consciousness.”

- Edward F. Edinger, The Creation of Consciousness: Jung’s Myth for Modern Man

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“The bigger the organization, the more unavoidable is its immorality and blind stupidity (Senatus bestia, senatores boni viri). Society, by automatically stressing all the collective qualities in its individual representatives, puts a premium on mediocrity, on everything that settles down to vegetate in an easy, irresponsible way. Individuality will inevitably be driven to the wall. This process begins in school, continues at the university, and rules all departments in which the State has a hand. In a small social body, the individuality of its members is better safeguarded, and the greater is their relative freedom and the possibility of conscious responsibility. Without freedom there can be no morality. Our admiration for great organizations dwindles when once we become aware of the other side of the wonder: the tremendous piling up and accentuation of all that is primitive in man, and the unavoidable destruction of his individuality in the interests of the monstrosity that every great organization in fact is. The man of today, who resembles more or less the collective ideal, has made his heart into a den of murderers, as can easily be proved by the analysis of his unconscious, even though he himself is not in the least disturbed by it. And in so far as he is normally "adapted" to his environment, it is true that the greatest infamy on the part of his group will not disturb him, so long as the majority of his fellows steadfastly believe in the exalted morality of their social organization.”

- C. G. Jung, The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious