15th August 2014
7.00pm Discussion facilitated by Annette Lowe
Note: Latecomers will not be admitted into the Discussion after 7.10pm
Elaine Pagels - Whose Church is the True Church? - extract from "The Gnostic Gospels"
(a video and extended interview of Elaine Pagels can be found here)
Stephan A Hoeller - What in the World Are Gnostics? - extract from "The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead"
(for more information see the Gnostics Society Library)
8.00pm Guest Lecture
The Chemical Philosophy:
Alchemy and the Questing Mind
“The experiences of the alchemists were, in a sense, my experiences, and their world was my world.”
Jung was fascinated by the symbolic images of alchemy and devoted the second half of his life to acquiring and studying alchemical writings. For Jung the key to the riddle of alchemy was the relationship if the individual alchemist to his work. Jung proposed that what the alchemist was doing was metaphorically submitting his own psyche (the prima materia) to a process of transformation equivalent to the process of individuation.
IN this lecture we shall step back and try to understand the world of the alchemist within the context of the pursuit of knowledge about Nature and the desire to act upon and transform Nature. At the risk of over-simplification, we can see their work as part of the history and development of the psyche's attempts to understand Matter and its relationship to Spirit. Of course, on the other side of the coin we find the baser motives of the charlatans who imitated them.
We shall look at both sides of the coin by examining some of the basic notions of alchemy, tracing the ideas of alchemy fro their ancient origins and looking briefly at the lives and work of some of the alchemists and the way the alchemist s were portrayed by their contemporaries.
Anne Di Lauro
Anne Di Lauro
Anne's interest in the psychology of C G Jung began several decades ago. She grew up in Brisbane and then spent most of her adult life living in Europe and North America, working mostly for various agencies of the United Nations. She particularly enjoys the art and history of Europe. Anne practices as a psychotherapist from a Jungian perspective and is in private practice in Brisbane. She is a former President of the C G Jung Society of Queensland.