New Gnostic Psychology

In our last episode, we began talking about human nature through the lens of a new Gnostic Psychology. This psychological approach has many roots in my thinking. It is not only based upon the Gnostic Gospel as I am interpreting it through the Tripartite Tractate book of the Nag Hammadi codices, but it is also based on concepts from my own “Simple Explanation” theory of everything. I have always been interested in psychology and have been fascinated by books on the human mind since I was a small child. This Gnostic psychology is also well-grounded by my formal education of a Bachelors of Science in Psychology, a Masters Degree in Counseling, and a Ph. D. in Communication, although very little of my psychological theory comes directly from those scholastic sources. Additionally, and just as importantly, this psychology is based upon my own experiences as a clinical therapist and the clinical experiences of my brother, Dr. Bill Puett. Bill and I have been discussing the nature of personhood for many years. This psychology is the outgrowth of our combined educations and experiences of working with clients over scores of years. My brother and I are both unconventional practitioners who have always used an eclectic approach in our work that frees us to explore fresh pathways based upon “best practices” of treatment for each particular client. Neither of us has been constrained by adherence to traditional schools of thought and past masters of psychology. I have always resonated to Jungian psychology, but my approach is not derived from Jung. Rather, I draw from the same original source that Jung drew from—the Gnostic Gospels. So, when I begin speaking about archetypes, these aren’t the archetypes of Jung’s depth psychology; they are the original Aeons of the Fullness found in the same Gnostic belief system from which Jung drew his inspiration. The same goes for Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious, which was inspired by Jung’s life-long study of Gnostic material. It was only after the discovery of the Gnostic books uncovered from Nag Hammadi that Jung was able to find confirmation of his Gnostic-inspired depth psychology. Prior to the discovery of the Nag Hammadi, Jung learned of Gnosticism through Christian heresiologists such as Irenaeus of Lyons and Hippolytus of Rome who were dead-set against Gnosticism and only wrote about it in the negative. This is a sadly inverted manner of gaining gnosis, and Jung experienced great difficulty and angst in doing so. Jung was at last presented with the first translation of a Gnostic codex out of the Nag Hammadi books in 1951, making Jung the first scholar able to study and apply Gnostic teachings from the original source material. This Nag Hammadi codex is known as the Jung Codex and it contains several books, one of them being the Tripartite Tractate. Near the end of his life, Jung himself said to a colleague, “The main interest of my work is not concerned with the treatment of neurosis, but rather with the approach to the numinous.” This Gnostic orientation of Jung’s depth psychology was problematic to the Jung Institute therapists following Jung’s death. They chose to suppress the Gnostic roots of Jungian psychology and buried his spiritual and alchemical writings in order to secure respectability for themselves and their Institute within the medical community. In an article posted at gnosis.org, Stephan A. Hoeller, a Bishop of Ecclesia Gnostica, a neo-Gnostic church, is quoted as saying, “Our psychological nature (the microcosm) mirrors metaphysical nature (the macrocosm), thus Gnosticism may posses both a psychological and a religious authenticity. Gnostic psychology and Gnostic religion need not be exclusive of one another but may complement each other within an implicit order of wholeness. Gnostics have always held that divinity is immanent within the human spirit, although not limited to it. The convergence of Gnostic religious teaching with psychological insight is thus quite understandable in terms of time-honored Gnostic principles.” I share this information about Jung with you as confirmation that psychology and the Gnostic Gospel go hand-in-hand. I assure you that I and my brother have not taken any of our theory from Jung himself, but have independently shared his path of gnosis to come to similar conclusions. The last episode began by asking the following questions: What is our psychology? Am I defined by my Ego? Or am I a spiritual Self independent of Ego? Am I a God? Am I an animal? Am I really conscious or am I random electrical fluctuations? Who am I? Do I have a soul and how is that different than a spirit? Is there a mind involved? What exactly is the Ego and how does it relate to my body and my spirit? This episode continues with answers to those same questions. If you are new to Gnostic Insights and have only been following here at substack, you may wish to visit my Gnostic Insights podcast home page to explore what you have missed. I will be covering this gnosis here on substack, but it will take a while to get there. I’m rolling these episodes out in a different order than originally shared at Gnostic Insights. But, if you are curious, you can always hear the entire series as it originally aired there. You can go to the Gnostic Insights dot com home page and click on the Tab called “A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel.” Links to all of those episodes may be found on that page. If you start at the first episode found at the Tab labelled A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, your path to understanding may be much easier. We’re pretty deep into Gnostic cosmology by this point, and this material is not easy. But, again, don’t worry, because this deep gnosis is good to know but not essential for your ultimate salvation. I remind you that all you need to realize is that we come from above and we will return to above. The Christ is taking care of rest. With that as a starting point, the gnosis will follow. By now, if you have been listening to the Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel series from the beginning, you will be familiar with such concepts as “unit of consciousness,” “fractal units of consciousness,” “hierarchies,” “originating consciousness of the Father,” “toruses,” and, of course, the Gnostic Gospel cosmology and cosmogeny. If you are struggling with any of these concepts, please go back and review the series at that GnosticInsights.com tab I pointed out earlier. And I’d like to remind you that you may always reach out to me personally by using the Comments form at the Gnostic Insights website. Also, my latest book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate, contains a helpful glossary. Now, let’s pick up where we left off last week. We can think of a unit of consciousness as a perfect echo or waveform that is shaped exactly like the very first fractal iteration of the Father’s mind—the monad known as the Son. You could say that our universe is populated by fractal echoes of the Father’s primordial consciousness. Here at Gnostic Insights we called these units of consciousness the Self. The units of consciousness are all identical because they are all reflections of the Son’s initial unit of consciousness. If that is true, then why are we not identical to the Son and to one another? What makes me different from you? The difference between us is based on a few simple principles. First and foremost, each of our Selfs is an almost identical fractal of the Fullness of God. But, as is the case with DNA, although our master pattern is identical, not every facet is activated to the same extent in everyone, and the facets that are activated are turned on in different relative strengths. These facets of the Fullness are what we call the Aeons of the Fullness. Each Aeon represents a particular talent, name, function, power, and so forth, of the Son. If you imagine that golden py… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cydropp.substack.com/subscribe