INTUITIONS OF THE SELF AS GOD
God is within
1. The essential dynamism of every religion lies in the experience of the numinous – which is labelled ‘God’ in theistic religions – by a gifted and committed core of adherents whom we have tended to describe as mystics.
2. Testimony as to this experience has always indicated that it occurs ‘within’ – that is, except in the minority of cases which are projected externally as visions or other apparently paranormal phenomena. Thus it is said in Luke 17:21, “Neither shall they say, Lo here! Or, lo there! for behold, the kingdom of God is within you.” And in the Mandukya Upanishad: [the wise speak of]”the pure Self alone. Dwelling in the heart of all, it is the lord of all, the seer of all, the source and goal of all.” “The pure Self alone, that which is invisible, which cannot be described, the supreme good, the one without a second…” The Chandogya Upanishad: “Now that Being which is the subtlest essence of everything, the supreme reality, the Self of all that exists, That Art Thou.”
3. Apart from the Hindu tradition, and from the insights of quite exceptional minds throughout history, it has taken all the generations of human evolution down to modern times to recognize what is so overwhelmingly obvious: that what is subjectively experienced, that which comes to us from within, comes from the psyche. What has changed is that in the twentieth century we began to have a psychological understanding of religious experience.
4. Speaking of an experience of the numinous erupting into a person’s life, Jung says, “if you understand it rightly, this recognition of the psychogenic factor is the first recognition of the Perusha – the Lord, the Master, the Christ within, the personified symbol of that archetype of archetypes, that Supreme Being in the collective unconscious – The Self.” (Jung quoted by Stevens in “Archetype Revisted.”) Stevens continues: “The Self is thus the living embodiment in each and every one of us of the numinous power that has always and everywhere been attributed to ‘God.’”
5. Jung states that the Self, “should be understood as the totality of the psyche. The Self is not only the centre, but also the whole circumference which embraces both conscious and unconscious; it is the centre of this totality, just as the ego is the centre of consciousness.” (CW 12, para. 44)
6. Stevens writes that the Self is, “The psychic aspect of the genome; the entire archetypal system of the unconscious; for Jung a dynamic concept at the heart of personality development and individuation.” (356)
7. Edinger in “Ego and Archetype”, lists themes and images that he declares, ”all refer to the Self, the central source of life energy, the fountain of our being which is most simply described as God. Indeed, the richest sources for the phenomenological study of the Self are in the innumerable representations that man has made of the deity.”
8. Having acknowledged (above) that what comes to us from within comes from the psyche, does not, of course, preclude us from adding ‘and through the psyche’ – thus preserving the metaphysical dimension that is the domain of theology, and permitting speculation as to something, some ultimate influence, that enters the psyche from beyond. God is generally regarded in the religious context as both immanent and transcendent. Jung himself consistently refused to deny this as a possibility on the ground that he was an empirical scientist and not concerned with the absolute status of belief.
9. But the archetypal ground of the psyche, the collective unconscious, that Jung calls ‘the objective psyche’, is transpersonal and wholly ‘other’ as far as the ego is concerned. Once this is admitted the ‘sufficiency’ of the psyche is adequate to encompass all that is – the personal and the transpersonal. These two terms can therefore be substituted for immanent and transcendent, and the projection of a ‘beyond’ is itself brought home within the sphere of the all-encompassing psyche.
10. Ultimately, however, the metaphysical question cannot be determined conclusively because the psyche is all that we experience and know, and we probably experience and know ( and probably only can experience and know) only a fraction of the psyche. The absolute nature and full extent of the psyche remain beyond our comprehension and conception.
11. What we learn from the mystics in every age and culture is that the experience of the transpersonal psyche brings with it an overwhelming sense of the numinous. Experiencing this, we experience what most human beings throughout our history have called ‘God.’
The Self is God
12. Who and what is God? At last we can begin to frame an answer. First and foremost, Jung posited that the Self and the God-image in the human psyche are synonymous. This seems to me to be incontrovertible. I believe that the Self as God indeed is God, God as ‘Person’, formless ‘Person’, who may become personified to us in human terms of his own choosing, as, for example, Jesus Christ, Krishna, the Divine Child, etc., These forms or representations are, as it were, masks, that the Self puts on in order to relate with an individual consciousness. Such forms might therefore be said to personify the ego-Self axis. When I say that ‘the Self as God is God,’ I am mindful once again of the psyche’s all-sufficiency – there is no need to look to a speculative metaphysical reality beyond it. The psyche alone can support the intuition, “In him we live and move and have our being.” (Paul, perhaps quoting Epimenides, Acts, 17:28) This conclusion raises profound inferences as to the ultimate nature of reality.
13. “Jung associates the godhead with the unconscious and associates ‘God,’ ‘Anthropos,’ and ‘Christ’, with the Self” (Segal, “The Gnostic Jung”). It is said that “The godhead symbolizes the unconscious before the emergence of the ego out of it.” “The godhead, which Jung takes to be a largely impersonal principle, embraces the whole psyche because it is not yet divided, or differentiated, into opposites. God, who for Jung is a full-fledged personality, encompasses the whole psyche because he mediates the opposites within himself. He thereby symbolizes the ideal state of wholeness, selfhood or individuation.” (Segal)
14. My own conviction is that the Self is God, and is identical with the God-image; the Self is God as formless Person who may at his choosing becomes personalized in human form in relating to a human consciousness. The relationship that is established sustains the ego-Self axis. But I also believe that in God one must also include the unconscious, especially the collective unconscious, because its resources are the organs of God, and it is this inclusion which makes God the One and universal; otherwise God would be infinitely plural. Further, I believe one must speak of the whole psyche as God. I feel that one cannot truly distinguish between God and Godhead, and that God – the Self – is constellated in the whole which then comprises a single reality justifying the axiom of Paul/Epimenides. Reality is then ‘immaterial’, matter does not exist as something different from the ‘non-substance’ of the psyche. This is irrefutable, from the psyche’s point of view at least.
15. The Hermetic axiom, “God is a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere”, chimes strangely with the concept of an all-inclusive psyche.
16. The abstract or immaterial nature of the psyche, that is, of God, is movingly conveyed by Meister Eckhart in sermon 28 of the German series, Renovamini spiritu in which the Meister says: “You should love God non-mentally, that is to say the soul should become non-mental and stripped of her mental nature. For as long as your soul is mental, she will possess images. As long as she has images, she will possess intermediaries, and as long as she has intermediaries, she will not have unity or simplicity. Therefore your soul should lose all her mental nature and should be left non-mental, for if you love God as ‘God’, as ‘Spirit’, as ‘Person’, as ‘Image’, then all this must be abandoned. You must love him as he is, a non-God, a non-Spirit, a non-Person, a non-Image. Indeed, you must love him as he is One, pure, simple and transparent, far from all duality. And we should eternally sink into this One, thus passing from something into nothing. So help us God. Amen.”
17. The Self, and therefore ‘God’ (the God-image) will have the same gender as each human being.
God is not his name
18. “But when Zarathustra was alone he spake thus within his heart: Can it indeed be possible! This old Saint in his forest hath not yet heard that God is dead! –“ Nietzsche.
19. “If you encounter the Buddha, kill him” Zen Master Rinzai.
20. “The Mind is the great Slayer of the Real. Let the Disciple slay the Slayer.” Voice of the Silence.
21. These three quotations all carry the same message: that in order to experience reality, to become enlightened, we must rid ourselves of our conceptions. Our concept of a thing is no part of the thing-in-itself, and has the effect of screening us from the direct experience of reality – “we see through a glass, darkly” (1 Corinthians 13:11).
22. ‘God’ is a concept for almost all of us, and a very shadowy and imprecise concept as is demonstrated by all the anomalies, contradictions and divergent content revealed when people try to amplify what that concept means for them. We might say that the word ‘God’ is only a concept; indeed, it is hardly more than a mere word which signifies a psychological imperative to clothe with a personal concept something that is inconceivable and beyond comprehension. But the existence of that inner imperative and the personal nature of the response carry significant inferences for us.
23. In himself (the pronoun is as unsatisfactory as the name) God is not a concept – God is! That ‘is’ can only refer to the Self and the psyche.
24. Thus Meister Eckhart says with his typically extravagant use of metaphor, “Strip away from God, therefore, everything which clothes him and take him in his dressing room where he is naked and bare in himself. Thus you will remain in him.”
25. The twentieth century saw a momentous advance in our understanding as rational beings, an advance as tremendous as any in the whole previous course of human history. The credit for this enlightenment must largely go to the visionary genius of C. G. Jung whose ‘discovery’ of the psyche (for one must acknowledge that the East has always been far in advance of the Middle East and the West in terms of introspective knowledge and religious insight) and whose empirical delineation of it have finally lead to the inescapable identification of the psyche with God. Suddenly, for the theistic temperament, the existence of God (as herein defined) is no longer a matter of belief and metaphysical speculation: God demonstrably exists and we have a degree of insight into his essential nature.
26. It is likely to be many generations before the full significance of this advance in understanding is fully or widely recognized.
27. Jungians describe as ‘contemporaries’ that growing minority of people in the world whose development has led to their alienation from the traditional forms of religion. “Because contemporaries are sensitive both to the existence of nonrational inclinations and to the demise of past means of fulfilling them, [organized religion] they comprise a select minority…” (Segal) These people are alienated from their unconscious because they have been deprived of all traditional means of connection, yet they are acutely aware of a spiritual hunger in themselves, and finding no satisfaction for that hunger they are prey to malaise and emptiness: their lives lack all meaning. These people cannot regress to the forms of the past, their only option is to live the symbolic life in a totally personal way, confronting the reality of the psyche directly and following the path of individuation. It is a lonely fate, lacking the support and community of collective religion, and the way is fraught with dangers of all sorts. Those who take this journey do so of necessity, for the survival and salvation of the soul: they are the direct heirs of the Gnostics, and of their medieval successors, the Alchemists.
God the Creator
28. The religious orthodoxy of Judaism, Christianity and Islam states that God created the material universe. For religious fundamentalists and those of what might be described as ‘extroverted belief’ this is accepted as being literally the case. For such persons a successful attack by scientific atheism would topple the whole edifice of religion. This is why Darwinism is so feared and contested.
29. When God is equated with the psyche it becomes self-evidently true that God is, indeed, the Creator, who creates all that is ‘in’ and ‘for’ each sentient being who is possessed of full self-consciousness.
30. With regard to the existence of the material universe the crucial question is, ‘what is the nature of being?’ The answer is that the nature of being is explained when we recognize that the ’world’ has neither substance nor location – it is an experience, an experience contained within the non-material medium of consciousness. Consciousness and being are interchangeable terms.
31. Once again, it was the genius of C. G. Jung who gave unforgettable expression to the rediscovery of this truth. Of his travels in Kenya and the insight which resulted, he writes: “There the cosmic meaning of consciousness became overwhelmingly clear to me. ‘What nature leaves imperfect, the art perfects,’ say the alchemists. Man, I, in an invisible act of creation put the stamp of perfection on the world by giving it objective existence… Now I knew…that man is indispensable for the completion of creation; that, in fact, he himself is the second creator of the world, who alone has given to the world its objective existence – without which, unheard, unseen, silently eating, giving birth, dying, heads nodding through hundreds of millions of years, it would have gone on in the profoundest night of non-being down to its unknown end. Human consciousness created objective existence and meaning, and man found his indispensable place in the great process of being.” (MDR)
32. A second creator? Jung’s approach is always empirical. Elsewhere he says, “I do not mean to imply that only the psyche exists. It is merely that, so far as perception and cognition are concerned, we cannot see beyond the psyche.” (MDR 384) Whether God and the material universe exist in a truly objective sense outside of the psyche are questions Jung never addressed, regarding such matters as belonging to the realm of metaphysics and quite beyond the possibility of verification by any means at the disposal of rational science.
33. The religious perspective, however, can hardly refrain from considering these questions; although in the end we are obliged, if not invoking faith or revelation, to accept the limitation identified by Jung’s analysis. The psyche is all we know and can know, and when we consider the nature of the psyche, insofar as it can be understood, we surely cannot help being struck by the fact of its all-sufficiency. It seems to me that this raises a powerful inference that the psyche is the ultimate and only reality.
34. The following are points that I believe support that conclusion:
35. In the psyche everything that appears to be ‘other’ (other to, and therefore external to ourselves) and to possess material substance is, in fact, contained within the psyche as the receiver of all perceptions -that is, non-self is identical with self, while all things are without substance.
36. This totally contradicts the natural inference to be drawn from our experience – that the other is truly so and that therefore an external and material world exists.
37. One might say that materiality is simply a cognitive devise imposed so as to better differentiate between subject and object, knower and known, as structural prerequisites for any form of perception and cognitive experience.
38. As noted above, we are psychic beings and wholly such: we are contained absolutely within the psyche receiving experiential data from presumed external sources which is processed and represented to us as mental formulations. Material (whether it takes the form of thoughts, emotions, moods, fantasies or dreams) which we regard as originating from purely inner processes is no way different in kind from the formulations representing external experience because (a) they both exist in the same medium, and, therefore, (b) they share a common lack of substance. They have content and duration, but substance, as we conceive of it in relation to external materiality, is not a property of consciousness.
39. On careful analysis of our experience, it is found that the world does not exist in time and space, and it does not possess material substance. The world is not a place, it is an experience that exists only within the insubstantial medium of consciousness. As to oneself, the body is in the mind, not the mind in the body.
40. This is the great paradox of experience that what appears to be external and substantial exists, so far as we can ever know, only in the insubstantial medium of consciousness. Truly the psyche contains all things within itself; we can never pass beyond its boundaries, and maybe it has no boundaries because it is, indeed, as previously suggested, the only reality.
41. Science considers consciousness to be an efflorescence of neural activity. This suggests a verification of external materiality until we stop to recall that our ‘physical’ observations and the conclusion reached, once again, occur only in consciousness itself.
42. The contrasting terminology we naturally use to refer to interior states, such as ‘in me’ or ‘in here’, and that which refers to the world and its contents as ‘out there’ might seem grounds of a sort for positing an external reality. In fact, such usages indicate mere categories of experience whose contents obey different sets of rules. The inference of externality can be drawn, but never proved by reference to these expressions which cannot be shown to be more than linguistic aids to the cognitive process.
43. If the psyche is held to be the only reality, does this inevitably lead to solipsism? Is there more than one of us? That we are truly plural is represented by our inner and supposedly outer experience. Human beings we encounter resemble what we conceive ourselves to be; they have the same autonomy. This is incontrovertible fact. We can interact with other beings, but we do not share consciousness with them and therefore have no direct access to their interior states. Although this can be taken as evidence of their reality external to us in a material sense, they are not, as perceived external beings, external to our consciousness. Their ultimate externality in an external material world is not proven because all that is demonstrated is that the beings encountered comply with different experiential categories.
44. Our apparent framing between states of non-existence prompts the further speculation that none of us might exist as the defined, continuing entities that we suppose ourselves to be; that we might, in fact, be less ‘entities’ than constellated nuclei or centres for experience generated temporarily within a universal psyche, reflecting the ancient intuition, “In him we live and move and have our being.”
45. Towards the end of his life the distinguished analyst and life-long friend of Jung, Erich Neumann, gave an address in which he declared, “that there was a ‘Self field’ outside the psyche, which created and directed the world and the psyche, and manifests itself to the Ego in the shape of the Self. And this Self in man is the image of the creator.” (Reported by Gilles Quispel)
46. Gilles Quispel emphasises the correspondence between Gnosticism and Jungian psychology, preferring a synchronistic rather than a projective interpretation of Gnosticsm. In “Gnosis and Psychology” he writes: “…obviously the outside world is in full sympathy with our inner emotions, without any causal connections. Obviously the rationalistic approach towards reality is one-sided: the principles of time, space, and causality should be supplemented by the principle of synchronicity. And this means that both the absurd world of the unconscious within and the absurd nonsense of the world outside is pervaded by a mysterious and awe-inspiring Sense. Old-fashioned people would call it the hand of God.”
47. Quispel daringly speculates that Gnosticism may even be true metaphysically, not just psychologically. (Segal) Quispel writes: “But they [Gnostics] did not agree that God is a projection of man. They rather expressed in their imaginative thinking that the world and man are a projection of God…I suggest that this is a correct definition of the truth of imaginative thinking as revealed by the Gnostic symbols. The world and man are a projection of God. And the consummation of the historical process will consist in this: that man and the universe are taken back and reintegrated into their divine origin…Certainly this is a plausible, spirited, and provocative hypothesis concerning the nature and end of the psyche, the universe, and ultimate reality.”
48. I find it very striking that these and related conceptions are entirely consonant with the ideas expressed since ancient times in the religions and philosophy of the East. It is the understanding of God in psychological terms which permits this virtual unanimity as to the ultimate nature of reality.
49. The question of the material reality of an external cosmos can never be answered. But perhaps we should take note of the fact that our absolute containment within a wholly self-sufficient psyche can be seen as suggesting an answer. We cannot exceed the boundaries of the psyche, which would have the effect of insulating us from anything that did happen to exist outside of it. So it is possible that the question as to whether or not reality has such a further dimension should be regarded as meaningless.
The consequences of equating God with the Self
50. Knowledge (Gnosis) of God replaces a hoping belief. The reality of God is immediate and total, the bond with God indissoluble. God is personal; able to be experienced; available to be loved.
51. The way is opened up to realize the spiritual destiny of one’s unique wholeness through conscious participation in the symbolic life and the process of individuation.
XENOPHANES
Xenophanes (c.570-c.475 BC) was born in Colophon, an Ionian Greek city of Asia Minor. He emigrated in western Greece and he activated as a poet in Sicily and southern Italy. For this reason he was probably related to the Pythagorean School. He wrote especially didactic poetry and ‘Lampoons’ (Silloi): satirical poems in hexameters. Some verses of these poems survive from his work.
Religion Criticism
Xenophanes is well-known for his criticism of the traditional view-image of the Gods. In his poems he clearly attacks the Homeric and Hesiodic anthropomorphic descriptions of the divine deities. The image of the Gods is relative to the region and the culture which is expressed (black gods for the Africans, white gods for the Greeks). Such portrayals should be denied because of their subjectivity.
Single God
For Xenophanes there is one single god beyond any human or physical description. It is the greatest among the Gods without organs or body. This God is motionless, intelligent, with complete perception of the world, activating everything just by the sheer power of thought. It is this Xenophanes’ account of God that probably affects the Eleatic conception of the oneness and immobility of Being.
Cosmology
Xenophanes asserts that all natural phenomena are not divine deities but formations of material substances (the rainbow is not Iris but a special cloud formation). Earth stretch down ad infinitum and the horizontal border between air and earth is the only visible one. More significantly he distinguishes between divine knowledge and human opinion. Divine knowledge is the only true knowledge, while human opinion is totally subjective and probable. Xenophanes is aware that even his own views are only an assumption.
zen
Buddhas don't save buddhas. If you use your mind to look for a buddha, you won't see the Buddha. As long as you look for a buddha somewhere else, you'll never see that your own mind is the Buddha. Don't use a buddha to worship a buddha. And don't use the mind to invoke a buddha. Buddhas don't recite sutras. Buddhas don't keep precepts. And buddhas don't break precepts. Buddhas don't keep or break anything. Buddhas don't do good or evil. To find a buddha, you have to see your nature.
[bloodstream text]
[WU]
BE YOURSELF!
No comments:
Post a Comment