"Ancient philosophers stated that whatever we see when awake is death; and what we see when asleep is a dream. Plato is said to have revealed this identical view to Cebes, and commenting on the beliefs held by the practitioners of the Mysteries, the great expositor of Greek thought Thomas Taylor wrote that the Greeks 'believed that human souls were confined in the body as in a prison, a condition which was denominated by genesis or generation; from which Dionysus would liberate them. This generation which linked the soul to the body, was supposed to be a kind of death to the higher form of life. Evil is inherent to this condition the soul dwelling in the body as in a prison or a grave....' Even the aforementioned egregious involvement of ancient Egyptian religion with the idea of death has been reinterpreted by some scholars as referring, not primarily to the souls who have departed their earthly habitation, but to the living, who philosophically, or as one might say today psychologically, might be referred to as dead. There is much indication of the possibility amounting to near fact that the three pivotal words death, the dead and to die bore the same esoteric meaning and reference in Gnostic and other Christian scriptures as they did in the Greek philosophical discourses and in the Egyptian books of old. C. G. Jung, a man as deeply versed in classical literature as he was in Gnostic spirituality, was aware of this meaning of death, and the dead to him undoubtedly meant the unregenerate hyletic representatives of humanity, who by identifying with physicality to the exclusion of their psychic and pneumatic natures, have allowed physical life to render them spiritually dead."
-The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead (Quest Books)
No comments:
Post a Comment