This episode of Distraction Therapy explores Carl Jung’s vision of the Pleroma and the Seven Sermons to the Dead. It considers how differentiation and imagination give shape to the soul, and how Abraxas symbolises the unity of opposites. Framed through metamodern thought, the episode reflects on music and sound as early practices of perception and aesthetic experience, helping us navigate beyond postmodern fragmentation toward new forms of meaning.
When Jung turned to the voice of his inner depths, he composed what he called the *Seven Sermons to the Dead*. These strange, visionary writings framed the human soul in relation to the Pleroma—the fullness in which all opposites dissolve, where every distinction is undone and nothing can be grasped. In this place, there is no light without darkness, no life without death, no spirit without matter. The opposites are swallowed in the totality. To lose oneself entirely in the Pleroma is to be reduced to formlessness.
But Jung’s sermons do not leave us there. They insist that to live as a human being is to draw lines of distinction. Out of the fullness we must shape a self. The act of separating, differentiating, and distinguishing is not hubris but necessity: it is the birth of the soul out of the abyss. Each imagination, each creative act, each aesthetic gesture is a thread spun from the fullness into form. The Pleroma remains the background, but we are called to live as figures that stand forth against it.
To orient this task, Jung introduces the figure of Abraxas, a power greater than gods and devils, who holds together the union of opposites. Abraxas is the symbol of that which cannot be captured by moral categories alone, the dynamism that fuses life and death, creation and destruction. Where the gods of light and order insist on purity, Abraxas insists on wholeness. This, Jung suggests, is closer to the truth of the human condition. We are not meant to dissolve in perfection, but to struggle with and hold together the tensions of opposites.
The challenge of metamodernism resonates here. Postmodern critique showed us the fragments, the deconstruction of all grand narratives, the endless relativity of meaning. Yet when relativism becomes an ideal in itself, it collapses into a sterile return to the Pleroma, stripped of its living mystery. Metamodern life asks something different: to oscillate between the fragments and the whole, to recognise the flux of meaning while still daring to weave forms of sense that can guide our living. It is an Abraxas-like act, combining what seems irreconcilable.
Music and sound mark this practice at its earliest level. Long before speech, we learn to distinguish rhythm, tone, and resonance. To listen is to begin the work of differentiation, of separating harmony from chaos, pattern from flux. Aesthetic experience is not trivial: it is how we practise being souls who both belong to the fullness and also stand apart. In listening, we are reminded of the archetypal dance of opposites. Each beat affirms time and silence. Each melody affirms form and dissolution. In this sense, sound is an early sermon of its own, teaching us how to live amid contradiction.
Schopenhauer, who called music the most direct expression of the Will, saw in it a disclosure of life’s essence. Jung, through the Sermons, pointed to the same root: the hidden dynamism of existence where gods, devils, and Abraxas contend. Both recognised that aesthetic experience offers a way of shaping the self without losing touch with the source. To listen is to be drawn close to the Pleroma, yet to remain distinct enough to create meaning.
In this episode of *Distraction Therapy*, the music mix is offered as a modern sermon. Not a dogma, but a resonance. A chance to hear the fullness and yet carry back a thread of form. To listen is to participate in the metamodern art of oscillation—between dissolution and distinction, chaos and coherence,