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ROBERTS AVENS
Roberts Avens is a Latvian poet and Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at Iona College. He is the author of Imaginal Body: Para-Jungian Reflections on Soul, Imagination, and Death.
The New Gnosis
THE NEW GNOSIS
Heidegger, Hillman, and Angels
Third, revised edition 2019
Paperback original, 160 pages, $22
ISBN: 978-0-88214-075-9
Kindle/Apple Books edition, $9.99 USD
ISBN: 978-0-88214-074-2
Gnosis, in the hands of Roberts Avens, is a perennial philosophy of the heart. This book provides a readable, uncom-plicated, and reliable introduction to Gnostic thought in the works of Martin Heidegger and James Hillman. As a psychological philosopher, Avens brings fresh meaning to the basic gnostic ideas about angels, salvation through knowledge, and the world as alive and ensouled. Therapies that encourage personified images and ecology movements concerned with the soul in things can find a profound philosophical ground in this new Gnosis.
 
Imagination Is Reality
IMAGINATION IS REALITY
Western Nirvana in Jung, Hillman,
Barfield, and Cassirer
Third, revised edition 2020
Paperback original, 136 pages, $22
ISBN: 978-0-88214-093-3
Kindle/Apple Books edition, $9.99 USD
ISBN: 978-0-88214-092-6
This small book is the first comprehensive essay to place archetypal psychology within a major tradition of modern thought—the tradition of mythical thinking—and to recognize imagination as the primal force and basic reality of human life. By drawing upon the writings of four twentieth-century thinkers, Roberts Avens clarifies the post-Jungian direction of psychology as it moves toward poetic and polytheistic imagination. He then compares the radical achievements of this direction in resolving the “ego-question” with the methods and ideas of the East: Buddhism, Tantrism, Zen, and Vedanta. Avens’s grasp of understanding, easy familiarity with his subject, and refined insights together make this book an introductory text and an advance into new territory.