Descriptions:
Video Description
Strip away the surface and our favorite films keep telling the same story: a world revealed as a prison, the creator who controls it, and a redeemer who shows the way out. This episode from Modern Intuitionist traces that pattern from the Matrix to the Shawshank hammer all the way back to the Gnostics. The liberating message is ancient and simple — whatever will save you is already within you.
Full Video Transcript
I watched all of these movies before the human race existed to try to figure out the answer to
something that most of us can feel intuitively even if we can’t explain exactly why it is that
there seems to be a pattern that keeps showing up again and again in some of the most popular films
maybe you’ve noticed it too in movies like the matrix wall e the shawshank redemption and even
in shows like severance and black mirror they seem very different on the surface and yet if
If you look a little deeper, they share almost exactly the same meaning.
A symbolic message that’s hiding in plain sight.
Here’s what we find.
First, we’re shown a world that turns out to be deeply flawed.
In many cases, it’s revealed to be a kind of prison.
Then we see the creator of that world, who’s trying to control and manipulate everyone inside of it.
And then we find a Redeemer figure, who shows everyone how to break free.
This is the basic story arc in all these films.
Now, you might look at this and say, isn’t that just the hero’s journey?
Well, there are some elements of that for sure, but it’s actually a lot deeper than that.
Because there’s a very specific symbolism going on.
And what it’s hinting at is the idea that there are dark forces in this world that are trying to keep us distracted and confused.
They’re leading us onto paths that are harmful not just to the mind, but to the soul.
And whether we know it or not, they’re trying to get us to give up the very things that make us who we are.
are freedom, autonomy, consciousness.
It goes back to a philosophy known as Gnosticism,
a very old set of ideas that’s often misunderstood,
and it’s been maligned throughout history.
And even today, there’s no shortage of people attacking it
without really understanding what it is.
But I think one of the reasons Gnosticism
has endured for so long and why it continues
to be the subject of so much discussion and debate
is that at its core, it’s really a story.
It’s a myth that mirrors a lot of the things
we still deal with today.
And like any story, it answers three basic questions.
Where did we come from?
What are we doing here?
And where are we going?
The psychologist Carl Jung saw within these ideas
a hidden process for psychological change
that any of us can use to break free from our conditioning.
And it’s how we grow into who we were really meant to become.
So today, we’re gonna look at what these teachings are.
We’ll look at why these ideas have found their way
into so many films and TV shows,
and we’ll look at what it all means for you.
Because once you understand these symbols,
and once you see these patterns,
you’ll never unsee them again.
Let me show you what I mean.
The first pattern we find in these films
is the idea of a paradise,
a world that was once perfect in every way,
but the closer we look,
the more we find that things aren’t really what they seem.
In Free Guy, the hero lives in an impossibly bright
colorful place filled with excitement and stimulation. My name is Guy and I live in
paradise, he says. But the world he’s living in is completely fake. It’s a computer game,
a digital illusion that’s been programmed by a powerful corporation to make huge amounts of
money. In the Truman Show, the hero lives in a beautiful suburb of a place called Seahaven,
where everyone is wholesome and pleasant. There’s no crime, no conflict, and nothing ever changes.
but it’s a false paradise because the town of sea haven is actually a gigantic tv studio he has no
idea that his whole life is being filmed and broadcast to the world as a television show
everybody in town is an actor except him even his wife his mother and his best friend are all actors
his whole life is a lie and of course the matrix is probably the clearest example
of the fallen paradise. Agent Smith sums it up when he says, just look at it. Billions of people
living out their lives, oblivious. The first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world
where none suffered. Everyone was happy, but it was a disaster. No one would accept the program.
So what does it mean that so many of these movies tell the same story of a seemingly perfect world
that is revealed to be broken and corrupt? Well, they’re all different versions of the same story.
the original paradise in the Garden of Eden. It’s here that God tells Adam and Eve that
they can eat anything they want except the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge,
warning them that if they do eat it, then on that day they will surely die. But one day an evil
serpent tricks Eve into eating it. She shares some of the fruit with Adam, and for this, God makes
them leave the garden forever. They can never come back, and the rest of their lives are painful and
hard. Traditionally, the lesson of the story is that disobeying God is what led to the fall of
humanity. It’s what introduced sin into the world and it ruined what should have been a perfect
paradise. But a lot of people have raised questions about this interpretation of the story because
why is there an evil serpent in the garden? Why doesn’t God want us to have knowledge of good and
evil? And why does he punish Adam and Eve for being tricked? After all, how could they have
known that what they were doing was wrong? Because they didn’t have knowledge of good and evil until
after they ate it? Well, it turns out there’s another version of this story that answers these
questions in a completely different way. We find it in an archaeological discovery that happened
in December of 1945 in an upper Egyptian town called Nag Hammadi. It was here that a farmer
was digging in the desert when he hit a very old jar almost a meter high. He broke it open,
and inside the jar he found 13 very old books bound in leather. Together, they came to be known
as the Nag Hammadi library. And inside one of these books, there was a text called The Testimony
of Truth. And this text gives us a version of the Adam and Eve story where the serpent isn’t evil at
all. Why? Because the serpent tells Eve that it’s not true that you’ll die on the day you eat the
fruit. What will happen is that your eyes will be opened and you’ll understand the difference
between good and evil. And that’s exactly what happens. They don’t die. They gain moral
understanding. And so in this version of the story, the serpent is actually the revealer of
truth. Of course, this is a controversial idea for a lot of people because, well, isn’t the serpent
evil? And isn’t the Garden of Eden a good place? The author Graham Hancock makes the point that
there’s a fundamental problem with any paradise. If you live in a place where you have everything
you could ever want and you never have to struggle or make any moral choices, then there’s nothing to
learn and nowhere to grow. There’s just endless self-indulgence. And if you stay there, you’ll
stagnate as a person. The movie Wall-E shows us exactly this kind of world where in the 29th
century, humanity now lives on a giant spaceship called the Axiom. It’s built like a high-tech
vacation resort where we’re told that everyone has everything they need to be happy. It’s an
artificial paradise where the robots do all the work and life is one long never-ending holiday.
And yet, because they have nothing to work towards
and no reason to push themselves,
they’ve all become weak and helpless, like babies.
They just jump from one distraction to another.
Until finally, the captain of the ship realizes
that humanity has lost its way and it’s time to go home.
What this means is that symbolically,
we have to eat from the fruit.
Because how else do you grow
if you don’t learn to make choices between good and evil?
Our lives are defined by the choices we make
and it’s through those choices that we grow
which means that understanding good and evil is a central part of what it means to be human.
We see the same choice in The Matrix where Morpheus plays the role of a serpent and he
offers Neo a choice. This is your last chance. After this, there’s no turning back. You take
the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.
You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.
The red pill is the forbidden fruit.
It’s a metaphor for illumination.
It represents the first step in humanity’s awakening,
and it’s the initiation to which every seeker of truth has to take.
This forms a core idea in what would come to be known as Gnosticism,
a collection of teachings that emerged in the late first century among early Christians.
They were looking for something called Gnosis, which is Greek for knowledge.
But it’s more than just intellectual knowledge.
It’s experiential knowledge.
The kind of spiritual insight that can only come from direct experience with the divine.
And they saw Gnosis as the true secret teaching of Jesus Christ.
And they believed that he came into the world to awaken humanity
by sharing a set of instructions that were meant to show us how to free ourselves
from our ignorant condition.
As you can imagine, this was a very controversial idea.
And even today, Gnosticism is a very debated area among scholars because
it paints a very different picture of Jesus than the one we’re used to. But you might wonder,
how do we know that any of this is true? What reason is there to think that Jesus even had a
secret teaching? Most people agree that the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all
form the New Testament canon. And together, they describe the life of Jesus and the things he
taught. But let’s look at the Gospel of Mark chapter 4, verses 11 and 12. Here, Jesus says
to his disciples, the secret kingdom of God has been given to you, but to those on the outside
everything is said in parables, so that they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever
hearing but never understanding, lest they should turn again and be forgiven. This is a really
strange passage because it implies that Jesus had a deeper teaching that he purposely held back.
But why? What is the secret kingdom of God? And why doesn’t he want people on the outside to know
what it is. We see it again in the Gospel of Matthew in chapter 13, verse 11, where Jesus says
to his disciples, to you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them
it has not been given. So how do we explain this? Elaine Pagels is a professor and historian of early
Christianity. In her book, The Gnostic Gospels, she explains that Jesus would have taught in much
the same way that other Jewish rabbis did in the first century, which means he had one set of
teachings that he used when speaking to crowds of people in public, but he also had another set of
teachings that he kept secret. These would have been advanced lessons that he shared only with
his personal disciples, and they weren’t written down. They were passed orally from teacher to
student because that was the only way you could judge the maturity of the seeker and see if they
were really ready to be initiated into Gnosis, the secret knowledge. Pagels points to 1 Corinthians
chapter 2, verses 6 and 7. We speak a message of wisdom among the mature, but not the wisdom of
this age or the rulers of this age who are coming to nothing. No, we declare God’s wisdom a mystery
that has been hidden. So Pagel says that Jesus would have taught in both of these ways,
a public teaching that was written down in what became the New Testament of the Bible
and a secret esoteric teaching that contained hidden mysteries that he revealed only to the
mature. Both of these teachings were meant to complement each other, and many rabbis today
still teach this way. We see the same theme of secret teaching in The Matrix, where Morpheus
takes Neo into the construct. It’s a private simulation room where he gives him one-on-one
training. But why does he keep them secret? Why not share them with everyone? Because most people
are not ready to be unplugged. Look around. What do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers,
the very minds of the people we’re trying to save but many of them are so
inured so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect
it so if we suppose that Jesus had a secret teaching what were they what did
they say the New Testament Gospels don’t tell us what they are but Pagel suggests
that some of the books found at Nag Hammadi may hold the key to some of
these secret teachings one of these texts the Gospel of Thomas identifies
itself as a secret gospel. What’s interesting about it is that Professor Helmut Kester of
Harvard University has said that although the Gospel of Thomas was most likely compiled around
140 CE, it may include some traditions that are even older than the Gospels of the New Testament,
possibly as early as the second half of the first century, which would make it as early or possibly
even earlier than the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. But unlike the other Gospels,
Thomas doesn’t tell the story of Jesus’s life. Instead, it’s a collection of 114 lessons that
purport to be the secret sayings that the living Jesus spoke. In one of his most important sayings,
number 70, Jesus says that, if you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will
save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.
In other words, salvation lies within. It’s a powerful idea that we see in a lot of Gnostic
films, and it’s a major theme in the Shawshank Redemption. In the scene where the warden meets
with Andy Dufresne for the first time in his jail cell, we learn that the warden is a Christian who
likes to quote from the Bible. I am the light of the world, he says. For almost the whole scene,
he’s holding Andy’s Bible in his hands, and yet he totally misses the fact that there’s something
hidden inside, a rock hammer, that Andy will later use to dig his way through the wall and escape
the prison. But what’s the deeper meaning of this scene? Well, the warden represents the kind of
person who studies and memorizes the words of the Bible, but doesn’t understand its true meaning.
He doesn’t see the hidden mysteries. He’s ever seeing, but never perceiving. He’s ever hearing,
but never understanding. He thinks that salvation comes from the literal words of the text, and so
he misses the secret teaching that’s hidden in plain view. And that’s what the hammer represents.
It symbolizes the secret that will set you free.
And there’s a lot of biblical symbolism in the film.
Andy represents the Gnostic Christ.
From the beginning, he’s an innocent man who comes into the fallen world of the prison,
much like Jesus does.
And his first miracle is making a deal with the guards
so they can all enjoy a beer on the rooftop.
It’s a scene that mirrors Christ’s miracle of turning water into wine.
Andy’s escape from his jail cell also mirrors the empty tomb of Christ.
after his resurrection. But more importantly, Andy reveals the Gnostic secret. He teaches the
other prisoners that the way to become free is by bringing forth what’s inside them. It’s why he
helps them build and expand the prison library. It’s why he teaches people how to read and why
he helps them develop their inner world. Gnosis is doing the things that cultivate the soul,
the part inside all of us that no one can touch or take away. When we experience it through beauty,
art or music, it gives us a glimpse of the divine. This is how we transcend the pain and suffering of
this world. It’s how we hang on to hope. And it’s really what keeps him going after 19 years of
wrongful imprisonment to finally escape. So you might ask at this point, why don’t Christian
churches teach any of these Gnostic ideas today? Why is their portrayal of Jesus so different from
the Gnostic one? Well, if we go back to the time of early Christianity, after Jesus died in the
first century, we find that there was no single organized church authority. Early Christians had
many and radically differing religious beliefs and practices. Each group practiced Christianity
in their own way, and each followed their own interpretation of Jesus’ teachings. But this
began to change with figures like Irenaeus. In his massive work against heresies, he tried to
argue for a single universal church that followed one set of doctrines and rules. He claimed that
this church alone was the true Orthodox church and that any other kind of teaching was heresy.
And yet Gnostic theologians didn’t see themselves as heretics. They saw themselves as Christians.
But in the fourth century, after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire
and the Orthodox gained military support, the penalty for heresy was severe. Just having a
book that was denounced as heresy became a crime. These books were confiscated and burned, which is
why hundreds of years ago someone living in Upper Egypt took their books and hid them in a jar
to save them from being destroyed. They buried that jar in the desert at Nag Hammadi where it
stayed hidden for almost 1,600 years. But why were the authorities so threatened by these Gnostic
ideas? What made them so dangerous? Well, some of the texts found at Nag Hammadi show us that
the Gnostics had a radically different story for why the world is the way it is. And they offer
very different answers to a lot of the questions that are often asked in Christianity. For example,
if God is a good and all-powerful being, why do we live in a world with so much suffering
and tragedy in it? So let’s look at the traditional explanation for human suffering.
According to the Orthodox view, suffering was introduced into the world because of Adam and
Eve’s disobedience in the Garden of Eden. This was the original sin. Before that the world was
a perfect paradise. After they eat the forbidden fruit, God says to Eve, I will make your pains
and childbearing very severe. With painful labor you will give birth to children. And then God says
to Adam, cursed is the ground for your sake. In toil you shall eat of it all the days of your
life. And so according to this view, disobeying God is what led to the fallen condition of our
world. And this is really the root of all our pain and suffering. Just as sin entered the world
through one man and death through sin, in this way death came to all people, because all sinned.
But the Gnostics give a very different reason for human suffering. They say it’s not because of any
act of disobedience. We suffer because of what our bodies are made of, matter. If you think about why
we feel pain or why we get sick or grow old, it’s because our bodies are made of flesh and bone,
cells and tissue. By nature, these things don’t last forever, and so we die. It’s why our lives
are temporary, and it’s why we experience tragedy and loss. But if that’s the case, why did God make
the world out of such an imperfect material? Why did he use matter to create the world? Well,
according to the Gnostic myth, he didn’t. They imagined the creation of the world in a very
different way. Here’s how they saw it. In the beginning, there was a perfect divinity called
the Monad. This is the one God of the universe and the source of everything. The Monad then starts
emanating other divine beings in pairs called dyads and with permission from the monad each
of these pairs then creates more divine beings and soon there’s a whole spiritual realm called
the pleroma which literally means fullness. One of these beings is Sophia and she decides to create
a being on her own but she doesn’t get permission from the monad but in doing this she makes a
terrible mistake. She creates an ignorant and malformed creature known as the demiurge. She’s
ashamed of what she’s done and so she falls out of the Pleroma taking the Demiurge with her and
hides him in a separate reality. The Demiurge has no idea that there’s another divine world.
He looks around and sees that there’s no other gods and so he assumes that he must be the only
god in the universe. Demiurge means craftsman or artisan and so he starts building the material
world as we know it and then he takes Sophia and splits her into billions of tiny pieces
and puts each of these fragments of the divine into human beings.
And so each of us is really a divine spark that’s been sealed inside a material body.
But the demiurge doesn’t do this alone.
He creates lower beings to help him.
The archons, these are his agents and they become the rulers of the material world.
And because they have no divinity of their own,
they feed off the divine sparks of humanity, creating a system of control.
Sealed inside this world are sparks of fallen asleep.
we’ve forgotten our divine origin. And most of us don’t realize that the soul is the only thing
that’s real and enduring, that our bodies are temporary. And as long as we can’t remember who
we are, we stay in the material world. Which means that for the Gnostics, it wasn’t God who made the
world out of matter, it was the Demiurge. And it’s the Demiurge who put Adam and Eve in the garden.
And the reason he doesn’t want them to eat from the tree of knowledge is to keep them ignorant
of the truth. But there is a way out. The monad sends a divine being into the material world
to help set us free. This being is Christ, and his true teaching is to show us how to free
ourselves, to transcend the physical suffering of this world, and to awaken the spark within.
This is Gnosis. And so according to the Gnostic point of view, salvation isn’t found by believing
in a set of doctrines or following a church authority. It’s found through Gnosis, the direct
revelation of divine experience, which means that anyone at any time can access it. And you do it by
bringing forth what is within you. That’s the source of your real power, because the kingdom
of God is within you. Now these are very controversial ideas, I know, but this is what
the Gnostics believed. It’s the Gnostic story, and it’s the symbolic myth we find in so many films
today. We see all the same elements, the Demiurge, the powerful figure who’s trying to control
humanity and keep us ignorant of the truth. We see the false world he’s built that turns out to
be an illusion designed to keep us trapped here. And we see a Gnostic Christ figure who comes into
the world to set us free and to help restore our connection to the divine. So why is this same myth
being told over and over again in so many different movies? And why does it seem to resonate so much
with people? Psychologists tell us that we all have a storytelling mind. We naturally tell stories
about ourselves to explain who we are, why we do the things we do, and where we’re going in the
future. Dan McAdams calls it narrative identity. And whether you know it or not, you’re living out
some form of story. Some people are living out the story of the tragic hero, or the misunderstood
rebel, or the wounded healer. But let me ask you a question. If we imagine that our society itself
is living out a kind of story, what would it be? Well, let’s look at the architects of our world.
oligarchs corporations big tech and government they’re all trying to shape
the world in their image and whether it’s through the media technology the
monetary system or military conflict they see themselves as the gods of the
modern world and so whether they know it or not they’re acting out the story of
the demiurge because symbolically the demiurge is really a way of looking at
the world it’s a mechanistic worldview that sees people not as free autonomous
beings with their own value and dignity, but as cogs in a machine, as resources to be extracted,
replaceable parts in a much larger system of control. These forces have never been more
powerful than they are today, and yet no amount of power ever seems to be enough.
Graham Hancock says that the Gnostic myth is really a metaphor for our time. It’s an allegory
for the idea that there are forces in this world that are trying to keep us ignorant and docile.
It’s trying to snuff out our divine spark and stop us from figuring out the real source of our power.
How do we know this is happening?
Well, what would you say is the philosophy that pretty much every student is taught to believe
in almost every school and every university?
It’s materialism, not just in the consumer sense, but philosophical materialism
is the idea that the primary thing in the universe is matter,
and it’s made up of four main beliefs.
One, all of life came into being by accident.
Every living thing we see in the world today
can be traced back to a random interplay of chemicals and molecules.
And through millions of years of evolution, we came into the world.
Two, as human beings, we are nothing more than the physical parts of our brain and our body.
We’re a collection of selfish genes,
and we have no purpose other than to reproduce, survive, and then replicate those genes.
Three, matter is the only thing that’s real.
Some even argue that consciousness is an illusion,
which reverses the order of what almost every spiritual tradition tells us
that the soul is the only thing that’s real
and the material world is the illusion
for there’s no such thing as the divine
and so after we die the brain stops working
and everything about who we are disappears along with it
I’ve argued against these points in other videos
so I won’t do it again here
but the point is that when the modern world tries to convince us
that we’re nothing more than our material bodies
it’s doing exactly what the demiurge does
He makes their sparks fall asleep and so they actually forget that they’re divine
beings. And this materialist view is now so widespread that most people don’t
even recognize it for what it is, a story. Because it’s not a fact, it’s an ideology.
It’s just one possible explanation for the world and how we came to be in it.
And it happens to be a very disempowering one. The psychologist
Viktor Frankl said that the legacy of philosophical materialism is that many
Many people today experience what he calls an existential vacuum, where the average person
struggles with a feeling of alienation, meaninglessness, and disconnection from the world.
I think that’s why movies like The Matrix feel so relevant even today, more than 25
years after it was made.
Because the architect of The Matrix is such a clear example of the demiurge and the materialist
worldview.
He’s the godlike figure who tries to reduce all human experience to a mathematical equation.
He’s trying to build an algorithm that predicts everything we do, so he can control and steer
the choices we make.
But he’s not God.
As intelligent as he is, all of his power is derived from a system that’s built on rules.
He’s a machine, and so he has no choice but to obey those rules.
It’s a lot like the AI and the large language models we use today.
They’re fast and impressive in what they can do, but they aren’t thinking.
When you ask it a question, what it’s doing is taking huge amounts of information from
the internet, and then it uses statistical rules to try and predict what the next word in the
sentence will be. And it’s all based on the words that came before it, which means that they aren’t
reflecting or discovering meaning in any way close to what a person would do. They’re using algorithms
and rules to rearrange information that people have already made. And this is why the architect
is doomed to fail, because he’s ignorant of one very important fact. His formulas will never
capture what it really means to be human, our consciousness. This is the spark of the divine
that gives us the power of choice. We can choose what rules to follow and which ones to break.
We can make up our own rules. And the history of humanity is filled with stories of people who
fought and died for what they believed in. And this is what’s so threatening to the Demiurge,
because as he tries to control and suppress humanity, he’s also bringing about its opposite,
the Gnostic Christ. Jesus represents the awakening of a higher consciousness. And so just as there
are forces outside of us that are trying to snuff out the divine spark. There’s a force inside of
you that’s working towards your own reawakening and it points to the single most important thing
you can do in this lifetime. So what is that? The psychologist Carl Jung was really interested in
Gnosticism and it was the Jung Institute that acquired one of the first books at Nagamari
which came to be called the Jung Codex. He saw within the Gnostic story a metaphor for the
different parts of the mind, a kind of symbolic map that shows us how to awaken our higher
consciousness. In his book Ion, Jung says that the myth of the ignorant demiurge who imagined he was
the highest divinity illustrates the perplexity of the ego when it can no longer hide from itself
the knowledge that it has been dethroned by a superordinate authority. What does that mean?
Well, in Jung’s model, if we imagine the ego as a circle, then it would be one small part inside a
much bigger circle that represents the self as a whole. The ego is the conscious part of who you
are, the part that’s aware of what you’re thinking and feeling right now. But there’s this whole area
outside of it that’s unconscious. These are the parts of yourself that you don’t yet know about.
The problem arises when the ego makes the mistake of thinking that it is you, that it’s the entirety
of who you are. When it does this, the ego is acting in a similar way that the demiurge does
when he makes the mistake of believing that he’s the supreme authority. This creates an imbalance
in the mind. Because as long as the ego believes that it’s the whole of who you are, it sees any
challenge to itself as a threat. And if that’s where you are, then there’s nowhere for you to
grow or develop as a person. So what can you do about that? Here’s how Jung explains it. Let’s
say you have a hidden artistic talent, but your ego doesn’t know about it. As long as this talent
is unconscious, nothing will happen to it. It might as well not even exist. It’s only when
your ego notices it that you can then bring it into reality. This is true of every part of the
self that’s unconscious. And so this is how we grow. Little by little, as the ego notices more
and more of the unconscious parts of the psyche, it expands. And so Jung says that the proper role
of the ego is to act like a light that illuminates the whole mind, which allows it to become
unconscious, and thus to be realized and fully lived. The thing is, most people don’t do the
self-reflection that’s needed to bring these unconscious parts of themselves to the surface.
Most of the time we go through life on a kind of autopilot, just chugging along. But then one day
we’re hit with something unexpected, a crisis that derails us from the path we’re on. Maybe
your health takes a hit, or you lose a loved one, or you lose your job. Symbolically, these events
are a lot like the gnostic serpent and the garden of eden they’re the unforeseen elements that come
into your life and disrupt everything that’s happening they’re painful but they also bring
the possibility of awakening because like the serpent every crisis is also offering you a choice
you either stay where you are protecting your ego falling into the same patterns and doing the same
thing you’ve always done or you try something new you explore the undiscovered parts of yourself
you find all kinds of undeveloped talents that can help you expand beyond the old ideas of what you
thought you were supposed to be. In other words, if you bring forth what’s inside you, what you
bring forth will save you. If you don’t bring forth what’s inside you, what you don’t bring
forth will destroy you. And this is why Jung considered Christ to be the ultimate symbol
of the self. Christ came into the world to heal the divide between heaven and earth,
to bring unity to the divine and the material. And so he’s the total timeless person who stands
for the mutual integration of conscious and unconscious. Jung saw within the Gnostic myth
a metaphor for the ego’s psychological journey toward wholeness, a way of integrating all the
different parts of who we are. It’s a lifelong process he called individuation. The Gnostic
awakening that frees humanity from the ignorance of the Garden of Eden is really a metaphor for
the individuation process that lifts us out of unconsciousness and sets us free from our social
conditioning these ideas feel especially relevant today a time when we’re facing all kinds of
threats and challenges we’ve never seen before what can we do about a world that seems to be
falling further and further into chaos every day jung dealt with these same questions he lived
through two world wars and witnessed the rise of the cold war which brought the west and the
the Soviet Union dangerously close to nuclear conflict. For the people who lived in these times,
it felt like the world could end at any moment. These were problems that seemed impossible to
solve. But Jung saw that the greatest and most important problems of life are all in a certain
sense insoluble. They can never be solved, but only outgrown. This consists in a new level of
consciousness. It’s not solved logically in its own terms, but faded out when confronted with a
new and stronger life tendency. This is why he saw the work of raising human consciousness
as the most important thing you can do. In as overwhelming as it seems, this is where it starts.
As any change must begin somewhere, it is the single individual who will experience it and
carry it through. The change must indeed begin with the individual. It might be any one of us.
Which means that when you do the work of finding your talents and cultivating your soul,
it’s not a selfish act because as you raise your own consciousness you also raise the collective
consciousness as a whole and as you do this work you’re not alone. You become a powerful strand
in a vast tapestry of souls, a legacy of generations of people who brought insight
and illumination each in their own way. Humanity is both darkness and light but history is shaped
by those who bring the light forward and somehow find a way to hold on to hope and optimism even
when going into the darkest places. And that brings us to the second way of becoming more
conscious. You do it by confronting the darkest parts of who you are, the things in yourself that
you’re most afraid to look at. It’s one of the most crucial things you can do because knowing
your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darkness of other people. It’s called
shadow work and if you haven’t seen it yet you can click on the video on the right side of the
screen. I also want to invite you to join my free email newsletter where I share original never
before-seen content and videos you won’t find anywhere else. You can find that link in the
description of this video. As always, thanks so much for watching, take care, and I’ll see you in the next one.
Source: Modern Intuitionist