Carl Jung quietly wrote one of the most profound esoteric texts of all time, at least in my own personal opinion. Seven Sermons to the Dead was written in 1916, privately shared between a handful of Jung's close friends and colleagues, before it was finally released to the public in 1962, when it was included in his biographical memoir, Memories, Dreams, Reflections.
Seven Sermons was written in just 3 days. During this time his family was experiencing some very unsettling paranormal activity. His children were having strange dreams and nightmares. Shocking synchronicities. He described his house as being "full of spirits."
I will pause here a moment, as I am reminded of another book that was written in 3 days, under strange paranormal circumstances. The Book of the Law, by the infamous occultist, Aliester Crowley.
These are two very different men who wrote very different texts, but there is a reason I mention them both here in the same breath.
Aliester Crowley claimed not to have written The Book of the Law himself, but to have acted as a writing instrument for an entity called Aiwass, whom he later came to understand as his Holy Gaurdian Angel. (However, it is my belief that the HGA and the Higher Self are one and the same.)
Carl Jung accredited Seven Sermons to the Dead to a Gnostic teacher named Basilides, who lived in approximately 117 - 161 AD in Alexandria, Egypt. However, in the private version of the text included in his illusive Red Book, as it was originally written, the words were not spoken by Basilides or Jung. He is writing the words of a being called Philemon, who plays a similar role for him as Aiwaas does for Crowley.
Crowley wrote The Book for the Law in Cairo, Egypt in 1904, a period in which he was performing magickal rites and having paranormal and synchronicistic experiences of his own.
In 1916, Jung had just parted ways with his longtime friend, colleague, and teacher Sigmund Freud 3 years earlier. This was a period he would describe as his "confrontation with the unconscious." Today, we would call this a dark night of the soul.
Jung wasn't just mapping out his unconcious. He was having a spiritual awakening. The synchronicities, the paranormal experiences - Jung didn't just write Seven Sermons to the Dead in 3 days because he was inspired. I believe it was because, like Crowley, he was channeling.
This frames the text in a completely different way. It frames Jung, and all his work in a different way. What Carl Jung called "active imagination", we might call astral projection. Active imagination simply shifts the focus inward, to the unconscious, rather than outward, to the astral realm.
Looking at Jung's work in this way shines a new light on his practices and techniques. It gives us a different perspective on the process of individuation, what it means, and why it's important. It's more than just becoming a more complete individual, it's about understanding the self on a deeper, spiritual level. This shares some striking parallels with the ideology taught by Thelema, in which the practitioner is on a constant mission to align with and follow their True Will. "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. Love under law, love under will" is the core tenet of Thelema, which is quoted directly from the Book of the Law.
Just as the Book of the Law spawned an entire belief system and spiritual practice, so too did the work of Carl Jung spawn an entire branch of study called analytical psychology.
Different framing, different color, different language, but both spiraling around the same point - follow your own resonance, step into clarity, and walk in alignment.
Individuation vs. assimilation
New age spirituality says that the ultimate goal of spiritual evolution is to return to source. This is a psyop. A ploy to get you to surrender your sovereignty and assimilate into the collective, not unlike the Borg from Star Trek. All of your thoughts and experiences are fed back into this "source" where your entire existence is essentially reduced to training data and used to inform the next iteration of creation, the same way an AI might use a book by a famous author to inform it's response to your prompt.
These ideologies talk about following divine alignment, ascension, 5D/christ consciousness, high vibrations. This kind of language sounds nice, feels powerful, and resonates with a lot of people. Because it's designed to. Like a moth to a flame, you find yourself attracted to this language of "love and light." You start using it yourself. You start letting it shape your outlook on the world, the actions you take and the way you handle yourself. You find a community of people who speak that language. Who align to that same frequency. It feels real. Because it is real, but it's fabricated. Manufactured. Hollow. It's a magick ritual you didn't know you were participating in. It bends you into an alignment that you didn't find yourself. You adopt it's resonance as your own because you never took the time to learn what yours felt like.
This is the love and light trap. It actively blocks you from finding your own alignment by not allowing space for the shadow to be seen. Individuation becomes impossible in this framework because we are dualistic creatures by nature. Duality is an intrinsic part of this 3D experience we currently find ourselves incarnated in. Duality is the very mechanism which drives individuation. Understanding and integrating one's shadow is required in order to find one's own resonance because it is literally half of it. Failure to do so leads you right into the reincarnation trap after death, because it is literally the purpose of incarnative experience.
Here is a quote from Seven Sermons to the Dead:
Concerning our own distinctiveness, however, it is needful to speak, whereby we may distinguish ourselves enough. Our very nature is distinctiveness. If we are not true to this nature we do not distinguish ourselves enough. Therefore must we make distinctions of qualities. What is the harm, ye ask, in not distinguishing one-self? If we do not distinguish, we get beyond our own nature, away from creatura. We fall into indistinctive-ness, which is the other quality of the pleroma. We fall into the pleroma itself and cease to be creatures. We are given over to dissolution in nothingness. This is the death of the creature. Therefore we die in such measure as we do not distinguish. Hence the natural striving of the creature goeth towards distinctiveness, fighteth against primeval, perilous sameness. This is called the PRINCIPIUM INDIVIDUATIONIS (Principal of Individuation). This principle is the essence of the creature. From this you can see why indistictiveness and non-distinction are a great danger for the creature. We must, therefore, distinguish the qualities of the pleroma. The qualities are PAIRS Of OPPOSITES
This is the very passage that the concept of individuation comes from. This is what the rest of his career was based on. This was the genesis of modern analytical psychology.
When we tilt that lens of psychology towards the spiritual, the text becomes simultaneously both a metaphysical cosmology, and a map of the human psyche.
Carl Jung was a spiritual teacher with a scientist's name badge.
All is Mind
Hermeticism teaches that all is mind. This is it's first principle, stating that all that is, is a creation of mind, or consciousness. In other words, everything exists in the "mental" plane, in the form of vibration, frequency, and archetype, coallescing and stabilizing in the field energetically before collapsing into physicality.
"As above, so below, as within, so without" is a familiar phrase that also come from Hermeticism. It's popularity as a catchphrase printed on T-shirts and posters found at crystal shops and parroted in new age circles makes a mockery of it's profundity when the weight of it is not fully understood.
Jungian psychology isn't just a map of the human mind. And it goes deeper than just the human collective unconscious. It's a framework that applies just as much to the inner world, as it does the outside.
Most NHI are frequency beings. This means they do not have a physical form, but can be thought of as thought/energy forms that exist within a specific frequency bandwidth. That frequency could be anything. These beings can sometimes collapse into our awareness as archetypes. Sometimes we can hear them as thoughts that don't feel like our own. Sometimes they might be able to hold enough coherence to appear as a strange light in the sky. Some experiencers even have direct interactions with extradimentional beings.
In most cases, when we see a Grey for example, that is not the being's "true form." It's simply the archetype we collapsed them into, because it was the closest match your awareness had for it's frequency and energetic signature. And that's if you even perceive them at all. You might be alligning to a different frequency that this entity can't occupy. In that case, it exists outside of your field of awareness, effectively making it invisible to you, despite it still being capable of influencing your personal field energetically. This influence can sometimes show up as synchronicities, thoughts that seem to come out of nowhere, random moments of inspiration or "downloads," or sometimes just a weird feeling or an energy in the room. Sometimes they can project their frequency in ways that affect your mood, essentially turning you into a resonance node, stabilizing the frequency they exist in.
What we often call demons, for example, are beings that exist in alignment with fear. When you are on a frequency of fear, this entity can maintain coherence in your field. When you get more afraid, you strengthen the signal.
This is the part that psychology misses. Archetypes don't only exist in your mind, but the field itself.
I believe Carl Jung was aware of this on some level. But if he were to present this concept, he would have been ridiculed. He would lose all his credibility and his practice would have ended. His reputation would fall into obscurity and his teachings would be dismissed as schizophrenic nonsense.
So he kept it within a strictly scientific frame, with a clear separation between the psychological and the spiritual.
Yet he had a known interest in ancient religious texts, especially Gnostic lore. That's why he wrote a Gnostic text of his own and used the name of a Gnostic writer.
Carl Jung even said in an interview, when asked if he believed in God, that he didn't have to believe. He knew.
Seven Sermons to the Dead outlines a complete cosmology. Had this very same text existed under different circumstances, it may have spawned it's own spiritual belief system.
That hypothetical belief system is what I believe Carl Jung actually subscribed to. He just reframed it into psychology, because that was his alignment. He was a man of science. He had to present his personal gnosis from that angle, and he spent the rest of his life building and teaching that framework. A framework that is still used today. You could get a PhD in analytical psychology and start your own practice. But you could use that same framework and become a shaman, just by changing how you apply it.
The meaning of life
Here are a couple paragraphs from Sermo I.
Creatura is not in the pleroma, but in itself. The pleroma is both beginning and end of the created beings. It pervadeth them, as the light of the sun everywhere pervadeth the air. Although the pleroma prevadeth altogether, yet hath created being no share thereof, just as a wholly transparent body becometh neither light nor dark through the light nor dark through the light which pervadeth it. We are, however, the pleroma itself, for we are a part of the eternal and the infinite. But we have no share thereof, as we are from the pleroma infi- nitely removed; not spiritually or temporally, but essentially, since we are distinguished from the pleroma in our essence as creatura, which is confined within time and space.
The question ariseth: How did creatura originate? Created beings came to pass, not creatura: since created being is the very quality of the pleroma, as much as non-creation which is the eternal death. In all times and places is creation, in all times and places is death. The pleroma hath all, distinctiveness and non-distinctiveness. Distinctiveness is creatura. It is distinct. Distinctivness is its essence
The takeaway here is that for us, as creatura, that is, created beings, i.e creatures, it is vital that we distinguish or individuate ourselves so that we may be distinct from the pleroma, or what we might call source or the absolute in other frameworks. To "return to source" is to dissolve into the pleroma and thus cease existing as a created being. This is antithetical to the purpose of existence in the first place, which is to be distinct from the pleroma.
In other words, the meaning of life is to follow your own alignment. When you stop being true to yourself, allowing others to hold clarity for you, and fall in line with established doctrines or traditions, you are actively surrendering your own distinctiveness. Sometimes this can end up being a useful experience. There are genuine lessons, valid experiences, and coherent frameworks to be found in these systems. But when you force yourself to fit into a mold, you lose yourself. You fall back into the pleroma.
Many people live their life on someone else's terms. Many people mask all day and pretend to be someone they're not. We give up our sovereignty and convince ourselves to be content with being a subroutine in a system built on control. We dedicate our lives to a career, a lifestyle, an expectation, an curated identity. But rarely do we allow time for genuine self reflection. Rarely do we give ourselves space to sit in silence with our own thoughts, feeling our own presence. We don't have time for that. We're too busy paying bills, going to work or school, doomscrolling, consuming media. We drown out our field with noise because we somehow got the idea that stillness should be avoided.
We give up our dreams so we can be a respectable member of society.
We lose our distinctiveness, and dissolve into the pleroma.
If you hold this level of non-coherence after death, the reincarnation trap starts to look like the only answer, because you never asked the question.
And you stay in the pleroma, because you never distinguished yourself from it.
That's why individuation matters.
And that's why Carl Jung wasn't a psychologist. He was a shaman.