Anarchy and Gnosticism
(Gathered from Carl Jung's Sermons to the Dead)

When Jesus said that the kingdom of God is within, he meant gnosis, the knowledge of the heart. The Gnostics of the early Christian era never hoped that any political or economic revolution could, or even should, do away with all the iniquitous elements within the system wherein the human is entrapped. Their rejection was not of one government or form of ownership in favor of another: rather it concerned the entire prevailing systematization of life and experience.

The Gnostics were persecuted out of existence because they knew something: that human life does not fulfill its promise within the structures and establishments of society. No one comes to his or her true selfhood by being or doing what society wants.

Churches and governments could not afford to have this secret known. That is why Jesus was killed, and that is why anyone since who knows with his or her heart is persecuted. One cannot free oneself by bowing to the yoke but only by breaking it.

When the Gnostics said that the system around them was evil and that one had to get away from it in order to know truth and discover meaning, they acted, not only as the forerunners of innumerable alienated dropouts, but they also stated a psychological fact since rediscovered by modern depth psychology.

Gnosis is formless, since ultimate reality is always beyond conceptual grasp. Experience itself is always individual and can never be adequately expressed or interpreted by arranging sets of concepts and doctrines, for concepts are only indications of similarities within experience. We must not mistake formulae for wisdom.

Churches have substituted faith for knowing. To know, one must have experience. The growth of a human has as its goal a state of integrated wholeness rather than a condition of moral perfection. Even at best goodness is no substitute for wholeness.

Thinking alienates us from our true nature. Ambrose Bierce defined philosophy as a route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing. Happiness and contentment, equability of spirit and meaningfulness of life -- these can be experienced only by the individual and not by a State. As long as vast numbers of individuals expect all problems to be solved and all ills to be remedied outside themselves, they will be beset by inhumanity upon inhumanity, holocaust upon holocaust. Not your thinking but your being is differentiation.

Anyone who has insight into his or her own action, and has thus found access to the unconscious, involuntarily exercises an influence on the environment. This deepening and broadening of consciousness produce an unintentional influence on the unconscious of others, and its effect lasts only so long as it is not disturbed by conscious intention.

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assume the best or violate right

pride is wrong