What I’m wrestling
through is this: is there an Other/God/Sacred Mystery that we come into contact
with at the depths of our being, or do we continue to dive deeper into the
self….and are those things one in the same? Is the quest for deeper Self (Self
in the Jungian sense of that which encompasses our being, and the driving
archetype of wholeness) and the quest to experience God the same? I’m coming to
believe that as I make more of the unconscious (shadow) conscious and
integrated into my life, my self-awareness will continue to increase, I will become
a more authentic and loving human being able to serve the world from my depth,
and I very well may come in to contact with the Sacred Mystery/God (or stated
differently, my God consciousness will also increase). I also am beginning to feel a sense of deeper
connection to the anima mundi, the
soul of the world. I’ve started to view
events and cultural conditions through a depth perspective, which does not see
us/them and easy answers, but complexity, connection, and shadow. I also am starting to see that this is a
lifetime journey that is never complete.
It is a choice to experience the emotional depth and fullness of life,
as opposed to seeing life through only the eyes of ego awareness. If we make the choice for depth, as I have (I
don’t think I really had a choice) we realize that the unconscious is always
expanding, and always in need of reflection, illumination, awareness, and
integration. And so the journey
continues.
We have not really
discussed the role of archetypes that much to this point, but it
seems to me that this inner journey that I am called into is trans-cultural,
trans-historical, and is aided and described in metaphor, symbol, myth, and story by
both religious traditions and the work of depth psychology (as well as in other
disciplines). Of course the mystical and
religious traditions pre-date depth psychology, but the work of Jung and others
has given me another lens, another set of metaphors and images with which I can
try and make sense of the reality of the inner journey towards God/wholeness, a journey
that I believe has existed since humanity evolved into conscious awareness. I very much appreciate the struggle Jung
details in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, where the image of God he grew up with and that was/is still
dominant in Western culture just did not make sense of his experience and those
of his patients. He was bold enough to
“individuate” from the religion of his father, and in a sense felt sympathy for
the struggles his father had as a Protestant minister who had no place to
explore his doubts. Jung, as well as other places outside the church, has been a place for me to explore
my doubts about the God image I grew up with.
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