Three natures, three types of people Every universal movement tries to make human existence understandable by subdividing mankind into multiple types of people or levels of consciousness. In the hermetic gnosis of the first centuries people spoke of hyle, psyche and pneuma, a subdivision that is surprisingly modern.
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n The treatise of the three natures, found at Nag Hammadi in 1945, the hylic, the psychic and the pneumatic principle are mentioned. In this text these three concepts are connected to the different stages of consciousness of man. The first, the hylic type, is the earthly human, who has a rock-solid faith in this world. Hylikos is Greek for wood or material. In the second, the psychic human type, the desire for the light of the spirit has awakened in the soul, which creates a completely new direction, a new life. But: there is still no direct and permanent connection with that light. The spirit only can express itself in the pneumatic human type. In The seal of renewal Catharose de Petri writes about the pneumatic type: ‘The pneumatic human type is so open to the Gnosis, its essence has such a crying need for the touch and fulfilment by the Light, that when the Light appears, he immediately rushes towards it and attempts to build a school to serve the Light, in order to offer it a home.’ From this it becomes clear that people
differ in state of consciousness, though there is always the risk that we will classify our fellow human beings according to such a description. We may well ask ourselves: To what extent are we capable of judging them? To what extent do sympathy and antipathy play a role in this? It will be more inspiring to consider to what extent these three principles are present in ourselves and what role they can play within us. The hylic principle in us is the earthly, the physical; our body with which we are directly connected with matter. All of us are familiar with the experience that due to the worries of this world, we can be so absorbed that we forget the higher purpose of our lives. Then influences from outside can take over the helm from us, so that we are cut off from our own values and the spiritual core in our heart. We can see such an experience as negative, but at the same time we gain a lot of life experience because of it. It is important that we do not linger there, but always re-establish ourselves in the realization that there is more than matter.
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Three natures, three types of people
