Fullness occupies a pivotal station in depth-psychological and contemplative literature, functioning simultaneously as an ontological category, a psychological ideal, and a cosmological principle. In Jungian and Gnostic frameworks, the term carries its Greek avatar Pleroma: the primordial ground of undifferentiated being from which all polarities—including fullness and emptiness themselves—emanate as pairs of opposites. Jung’s Red Book and the Seven Sermons to the Dead treat this polarity with characteristic dialectical precision, insisting that the human being stands between the two poles and that the capacity to shape fullness rather than be consumed by emptiness is the very motor of individuation. Welwood, writing from a Buddhist-psychotherapeutic vantage, relocates fullness within the experiential body: it is the suppressed plenitude of one’s own being that inflation, rightly understood, momentarily restores. Easwaran’s Vedantic reading insists that the Self is already full, rendering the ego’s hunger for accumulation a cosmic misunderstanding. The Philokalia tradition, drawing on Pauline language, construes fullness as the measure of Christ attained through spiritual perfection and the Holy Spirit. The Gnostic gospels position fullness and deficiency as a dyadic question put directly to the master. Across traditions, then, fullness names what is most real, most interior, and most endangered by the ego’s compulsive relation to emptiness.
The qualities are PAIRS OF OPPOSITES, such as— The Effective and the Ineffective. Fullness and Emptiness. Living and Dead. Difference and Sameness.
Jung’s Seven Sermons establish fullness as one of the primordial pairs of opposites constituting the Pleroma, whose differentiation is the first act of individuation.
, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 1963thesis
Man stands between emptiness and fullness. If his strength combines with fullness, it becomes fully formative. There is always something good about such formation.
The Red Book presents fullness as the pole of creative formation, contrasted with emptiness as the pole of dissolution, and places human will as the decisive factor between them.
, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009thesis
God is distinguished from the created world, however, inasmuch as he is less definite and less definable than the created world in general. He is less differentiated than the created world, because the ground of his being is effective fullness.
Hoeller, glossing the Seven Sermons, identifies God’s ground as ‘effective fullness’ of the Pleroma, distinguishing divine being from created differentiation.
, The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead, 1982thesis
Nothing is more valuable to the evil one than his eye, since only through his eye can emptiness seize gleaming fullness. Because the emptiness lacks fullness, it craves fullness and its shining power.
Jung dramatizes the dynamic between emptiness and fullness as a predatory relationship in which the void’s desire for the luminous plenitude of being is the root of evil.
, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009thesis
In this fullness of undifferentiated potentialities, all opposites are still in a state of equilibrium. Only much later do they stir into gradual effective manifestation, first as two polarities.
Hoeller situates the Pleromic fullness as the pre-differentiated ground common to all Gnostic systems, from Valentinus through Kabbalah, where opposites exist in suspension.
, The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead, 1982thesis
Such is the state of spiritual perfection, such the fullness of Christ that St Paul exhorts us to attain when he says: ‘… so that you may be filled with the whole fullness of Christ’ (cf. Eph. 3:19).
The Philokalia deploys Pauline fullness as the telos of hesychast practice, defining spiritual perfection as assimilation to the complete stature of Christ through the Holy Spirit.
, The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995thesis
The disciples asked him, ‘What is fullness and what is deficiency?’ He answered them, ‘You are from fullness and you are in a place of deficiency. And look, his light has poured down on me.’
In this Gnostic gospel dialogue, fullness names the divine origin of human beings while deficiency denotes their present alienated condition, making the dyad soteriologically central.
, The Gnostic Gospels of Jesus: The Definitive Collection of Mystical Gospels and Secret Books about Jesus of Nazareth, 2005thesis
he was letting himself be infused by the fullness that had been missing in his life—the fullness of his own being. To his surprise, he found it a tremendous relief and release to allow this expansion at last.
Welwood reframes ego-inflation therapeutically, showing that what feels like dangerous inflation is the patient’s first genuine contact with the suppressed fullness of his own being.
, Toward a Psychology of Awakening Buddhism, Psychotherapy,, 2000thesis
As long as we live on the egocentric level, we will never suspect what fullness and security lie within ourselves. We will always have an emptiness inside that only Self-realization can take away.
Easwaran’s Vedantic reading locates fullness as an already-present interior reality that ego-consciousness persistently fails to recognize, requiring Self-realization rather than accumulation.
, The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living: A Verse-by-Verse Commentary, 1975thesis
humans are joined to angels in the fullness of divinity. As Gospel of Philip 58 states, in a prayer, You who have united perfect light with holy spirit, unite the angels also with us, as images.
The Gospel of Philip locates sacramental union within the fullness of divinity, presenting the bridal-chamber rite as the restoration of the androgynous completeness lost at the Fall.
, The Gnostic Gospels of Jesus: The Definitive Collection of Mystical Gospels and Secret Books about Jesus of Nazareth, 2005supporting
She helped the whole creature, laboring with it, restoring it to its fullness, teaching it about the descent of the seed, teaching it about the way of ascent, which is the way of descent.
The Secret Book of John presents the divine feminine Epinoia as the restorative agent who returns fallen creation to its fullness by teaching the soul its path of ascent.
, The Gnostic Gospels of Jesus: The Definitive Collection of Mystical Gospels and Secret Books about Jesus of Nazareth, 2005supporting
devotional practice requires us to relinquish fixation, so that we may discover the fullness of love as the treasure of our own heart.
Welwood argues that genuine devotion, precisely because possession of its object is impossible, catalyzes the discovery of love’s fullness as an interior rather than relational reality.
, Toward a Psychology of Awakening Buddhism, Psychotherapy,, 2000supporting
Disturbance in the soul is caused ‘by some plesmoni [fullness].’ A healthy soul is ‘conquered neither by fullness nor by emptiness, nor by anything intrusive from outside.’
Padel’s survey of Greek medical thought shows that pre-Platonic psychology treated excessive fullness, like emptiness, as a pathological condition threatening psychic equilibrium.
, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994supporting
the glorious eschatological vision of the liberation of the soul from the bonds of darkness, oppression and ignorance and its reunion with the Pleroma, the transcendental fu[llness].
Hoeller characterizes Gnostic soteriology as the soul’s eschatological reunion with the Pleroma, framing fullness as the eschatological destination that redeems cosmic pessimism.
, The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead, 1982aside