The Seven Sermons To The Dead

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The Seven Sermons To The Dead was a text written in 1917 by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung and ascribed to the gnostic teacher Basilides. The text speaks cryptically about the Pleroma, the Abraxas and the soul; therein, Jung also discusses his principle of Individuality and warns of the mystical tendency to 'unite' with God, which he interpets as a dangerous psychological desire to identify with the unconscious.

“	That is one of the great difficulties in experiencing the unconscious -- that one identifies with it and becomes a fool. You must not identify with the unconscious; you must keep outside, detached, and observe objectively what happens.... it is exceedingly difficult to accept such a thing, because we are so imbued with the fact that our unconscious is our own -- my unconscious, his unconscious, her unconscious -- and our prejudice is so strong that we have the greatest trouble disidentifying.	”
—Jung, C. G. (1996), The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1922 by C. G. dung, Sonu Shamdasani (Ed.). Bollingen Series XCIX. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.[1]

The text was written by Jung in a time of difficulty around his break with Freud, which stemmed primarily from their differing concepts of the unconscious (see Carl Jung: Relationship with Freud).

A commentary upon the work was written by the gnostic bishop Stephan A. Hoeller^[2].

[edit] Notes and references

[edit] External links

• Septem Sermones ad Mortuos, The Seven Sermons to the Dead written by Basilides in Alexandria, the City where the East toucheth the West., transcribed by Carl Gustav Jung 1916