Alliance for Mystical Pragmatics

Alliance for Mystical Pragmatics

Harmonizing Evolutionary Convergence

Glossary Menus

Gnostic psychology

Within Panosophy, as the transdisciplinary Unified Relationships Theory and Theory of Everything, Gnostic psychology is the primary specialist science on which all other sciences are based, including physics, biology, and neuroscience. For we cannot understand how the brain works, for instance, until we have thoroughly mapped the Cosmic Psyche, which is inaccessible to our physical senses. Gnostic psychology thus resolves the challenges and opportunities of psychology that William James summarized in 1892 in the final paragraph of Psychology:

A string of raw facts, a little gossip and wrangle about opinions, a little classification and generalization on the mere descriptive level; a strong prejudice that we have states of mind, and that our brain conditions them: but not a single law in the sense in which physics shows us laws, not a single proposition from which any consequence can causally be deduced. We don’t even know the terms between which the elementary laws would obtain if we had them. This is no science, it is only the hope of science. … But at present psychology is in the condition of physics before Galileo and the laws of motion, of chemistry before Lavoisier and the notion that mass is preserved in all reactions. The Galileo and the Lavoisier of psychology will be famous men indeed when they come, as come they some day surely will. … Meanwhile the best way in which we can facilitate their advent is to understand how great is the darkness in which we grope, and never to forget that the natural-science assumptions with which we started are provisional and revisable things.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Eugen Bleuler, who coined the words schizophrenia and ambivalence, held a similar view as the director of the prestigious Burghölzli Mental Hospital in Zürich. As Sonu Shamdasani tells us in his introduction to Jung’s monumental The Red Book: “It was held that by turning psychology into a science through introducing scientific methods, all prior forms of human understanding would be revolutionized. The new psychology was heralded as promising nothing less than the completion of the scientific revolution.”

However, progress was slow. In 1935, Jung was bold enough to call psychology the ‘science of consciousness’ in the first of a series of five lectures he gave on the theory and practice of analytical psychology to the Institute of Medical Psychology (Tavistock Clinic). He added, “[Psychology] is the science of what we call the unconscious psyche,” a science he said had not yet left the cradle.

In the 1930s, Jung also set out to develop a coherent Weltanschauung, healing the fragmented mind with a synthesis of the sciences. As Sonu Shamdasani tells us in Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology, “To counteract this situation [the detrimental effects of specialization], and to provide a ‘complete picture of our world’, information from all branches of knowledge needed to be collated together. This could be attempted by finding a platform or idea common to many forms of knowledge.  … From the foregoing, it is clear that Jung conceived the cultural role of complex psychology to be to counter the fragmentation of the sciences, and to provide a basis for a synthesis of all knowledge. This attempt to counter the increasing fragmentation and specialization of disciplines was an enormous, and ultimately insurmountable task.”

Then, in 1957, in the second of four interviews with Richard I. Evans, Jung said, “The world hangs by a thin thread, that is the psyche of man,” going on to say, “The psyche is the great danger,” which could lead to catastrophe, global catastrophe. For Jung was speaking when the threat of the H-bomb—an invention of the mind—was hanging over the global population.

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