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In Search of Enlightenment

© Bonnie McCarson

I have talked in previous articles about the religious nature of mankind and about the value of myths in our lives and history. For some time now the Jungian study group of which I am a part has been studying Jung and others on the subject of alchemy as a metaphor for the individuation process. At the same time I have been reading about the ancient manuscripts now called the Nag Hammadi Library. Many of the works in that group have been labeled by scholars as Gnostic texts dating back to the early centuries of the Christian era. As I tell my students, we as humans like to separate things into categories to study them, but in life everything goes together. Likewise, we may talk of myth, religion, alchemy and gnosis as four separate things, but in fact, they all flowed together into the long process of humankind seeking enlightenment. This process in humanity mirrors that of the individual on the path of individuation and wholeness.

Jung himself delved into all the areas I have mentioned above and even more. He sought to look at humanity from as many directions as possible in order to arrive at an understanding of how the psyche works. We have the benefit of his long years of study and writing in the Collected Works where he gives much of his process reflecting his own work with often obscure material to find meanings in it. At one time he was in possession of one of the codices of the Nag Hammadi Library. Not only did he read and study a variety of texts, but he also traveled and studied other cultures to gain perspectives other than that of the western European culture from which he sprang.

Among his conclusions were that mankind is inherently religious. A study of Mircea Eliade’s work reveals to us the long history religion and the role of myth in it. We have cheapened the word “myth” in our current usage to mean something untrue. However, in its truest religious sense, myth is the truth though perhaps in metaphorical terms. Myths bear those recollections which have the power to evoke the archetypes and reconnect us as part of the cosmos in which we live and to transform and reconnect our fragmented selves. What is represented in the world outside ourselves is a macrocosm; each individual is a microcosm that reflects the greater reality. A study of the history of religious thought, such as Eliade writes in his three-volume work by that title, shows us mankind’s journey toward spiritual enlightenment, which reflects the developing consciousness of humanity. Gnosis and alchemy, like myths, were a part of that long history, a part which, going hand in hand, are in themselves metaphors for the individuation process. Jung did a great deal of study on the two because he considered alchemy in particular to be one of the purest metaphors of individuation.