Emotions

One of the things that I've come to learn through my inner journey over the past 6 years is that feeling emotions is not only a good thing, it is a healthy and authentic way to live.  For years, I was told by people that I was "too emotional", that I should "choose to not feel....insert emotion...", that I should "pray about it", etc.  Sadly, the church for me was/is one of the most emotionally stifling places.  If we feel, we may doubt, and doubt is bad...or if we feel we may not be happy happy joy and that is unbecoming a Christian...so the thinking goes.  I came across this old post from a blog I've really started to love.  Elizabeth Ester talks about her experience of feeling emotions. 

http://www.elizabethesther.com/2010/07/we-will-tell-you-how-to-feel.html

Thanks for the courage to share this story Elizabeth!

Jung, Religion, Unconscious

This is an excerpt of a paper I'm writing for my first year at the Guild.  This is about the role of Jungian thought to my spiritual journey.  

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.

Death of Religion?

Beyond Literal Thinking in Religion by David Tacey.  Link to article

This is one of the better things I've read this year.  Tacey proclaims literalism as the greatest sin of religion, the ultimate demise of religion that is wed to literalism, and proposes a return to the metaphoric/mythic if religion is to survive.  Some may say that is an extreme position, but I don't think he's that far off.  I may blog through the article in the near future.

Dreams, inner work, spirituality

Another fantastic post by Jean Raffa.  It's called Ruling the Inner Chamber, and she deals with dreams, inner work, and the spiritual journey.  I especially love this:

Contrary to popular belief, authentic spirituality is not just a function of how many souls we save or how well we know scriptures or how hard we pray or how many rules we keep or what we believe or how often we attend our place of worship or how much money we donate to the poor. Likewise, spiritual maturity is not limited to a particular religion or set of beliefs. Rather, it is a function of our willingness to further the unfolding of our capacity for full living, endless loving, and authentic being.


We’re supposed to discover our true selves and connect with the sacred Mystery within. We’re supposed to learn how to accept and love ourselves because that’s how we learn to accept and love others. Every religion has spawned mature spirit persons whose mystical experiences and intuitions taught them that God indwells the soul. This means that our spiritual growth is not just a function of searching for God outside ourselves but also of honoring the “kingdom” within.

Thanks Jean for continuing to be a friend on the journey!

Psychotherapy as Spiritual Practice, Purgation, Self, etc.

Okay, so I've been a little slack with postings on Answer to Job, I apologize.  So many other interesting readings have been also getting my attention lately, so this post is about one of them.

I have been reading over the past few months a book, by psychoanalyst and professor of religion and spirituality at Pacifica Graduate Institute Lionel Corbett, called "The Sacred Cauldron: Psychotherapy as a Spiritual Practice".  This morning, I came across the section below, where Corbett is talking about the psychological aspects of spiritual growth.  When he mentions the Self, he is referring to what Jungians refer to as the center of the total personality, which includes consciousness, the unconscious, and the ego. The Self is both the whole and the center.  It is through the Self, I believe, that we interpenetrate with, and find, God.  Some Jungians believe that Self=God (or the God archetype), or in other words, Self is all there is.  Others, like me, believe that Self is where we make contact with that which is totally Other, or God.  So, when he speaks below of the call of Self, I would offer that this call is the call of God through the organizing totally of our psyche, which is the Self.

This passage below really resonates with me, as I have been trying to find words for the journey I've been experiencing over that past 5 years or so.  I would say that I'm still in the period of purgation that he describes below.  Here is the passage, from pages 118-119:

Spiritual development may begin as a person gradually develops a spiritual longing; we realize there is something more within us, something more that we need besides our usual lives, a deeper source of meaning even when life seems to be proceeding well on the surface...We cannot produce this longing; it comes upon us autonomously.  Sometimes such an awakening seems to happen for no apparent reason, or it may be triggered by a numinous experience that makes us aware of spiritual reality...These experiences may be seen as a call from the transpersonal Self...[to answer the call] We have to give up our existing image of ourselves and face some hard truths. A sacrifice of time, money, and energy may be necessary.  It may be difficult to accept that the hegemony of the ego is over.  It may be difficult to let go if one suffers from fragmentation anxiety or if status and success have been used to buttress a fragile sense of self.  It is difficult to be responsive to the promptings of the Self if one is preoccupied with survival.

If one accepts the call, one has to develop a relationship with it.  There follows what was traditionally referred to (in mystic writers) as "purgation", meaning the necessity to face the shadow or problematic personality traits such as self-importance, possessiveness, greed, fear, and envy...Painful feelings are not obstacles to spiritual development but signposts that indicate...the doorways into the soul's deeper places.  After the awakening, the period of purgation is often experienced as a period of darkness; at times one does not have the strength to go on. This stage may last for years, during which the person may be in therapy.  At these periods, one reevaluates one's values and beliefs and may either recommit to a religious tradition or leave it entirely.

I would also offer, one can recommit to a religious tradition, but with a different lens and perspective on the richness and symbolic nature of their religious tradition, which is where my leanings are right now.

Encouragement on the Journey

It is always encouraging to find fellow travelers on the journey of life.  Anyone who knows me knows that I do not like comparing people's experiences.  It can tend to universalize an experience, and exclude those who do not share them.  There is nothing wrong with learning from others though, as long as we maintain the intersubjectivity between us and respect the experiences of the other.  Jean Raffa has an excellent blog post that resonates with me.  My experience is similar to her's that she describes in the first few paragraphs.  Take a read:

Gated Religions - Jean Raffa

I especially love this, as I could have written it myself if I could find the words:

For many years, literal belief in the doctrines of my religion (Christianity) was enough to satisfy my spiritual hunger. But the strain of containing my beliefs in a tightly enclosed, left-brained compartment labeled “Religion” while repeatedly coming up against a Mystery that encompasses the entire universe eventually wore me down. At the age of 37 my ego waved a white flag and surrendered its need to feel safe and in control. In leaving the gated community of my religion, I entered a Dark Night of the Soul that lasted nine years.


I returned from the desert with a new way of seeing and living.

For me, I am still learning what that new way of seeing and living could look like.  I know what I'm letting go of (inherited God images, etc), but I only have a glimpse of a new way at this point.  Depth psychology and the mystic tradition are helping to paint the picture of the future, but I'm still, daily, filling in that picture on the path of individuation.

Answer to Job - 1

Jung prefaces the book with a section called Lectori Benevolo.  He starts this section with this, which lays the groundwork for the rest of the book:

…For, in what follows, I shall speak of the venerable objects of religious belief.  Whoever talks of such matters inevitably runs the risk of being torn to pieces by the two parties who are in moral conflict about those very things.  This conflict is due to the strange supposition that a thing is true only if it presents itself as a physical fact…”Physical” is not the only criterion: there are also psychic truths which can neither be explained nor proved nor contested in any physical way. (LB, 553)

It is interesting to me that we still see this battle between two camps: literalists who claim that we can’t have faith UNLESS it is backed up by physical facts; and atheists who claim that we can’t have faith BECAUSE it cannot be backed up by physical facts.  I would not presume to think these are the two camps Jung had in mind, but it is something I see today.   Jung continues to describe the psychic nature as autonomous of the physical, and thus of religious experience and language arising out of transpersonal, unconscious processes.  These resultant religious statements…

are filtered through the medium of human consciousness…That is why whenever we speak of religious contents we move in a world of images that point to something ineffable.  We do not know how clear or unclear these images, metaphors, and concepts are in respect of their transcendental object.  If, for instance, we say “God”, we give expression to an image or verbal concept which has undergone many changes in the course of time.  We are, however, unable to say with any degree of certainty…whether these changes affect only the images and concepts, or the Unspeakable itself…There is no doubt that there is something behind these images that transcends consciousness…(LB, 555).

Jung is drawing the distinction between the conscious expressions of unconscious God images, and the ineffable God that these images point to.  He concludes this section by clarifying that he is addressing these images, these metaphors that we see in Job, and doing so not as an objective intellectual, but as an emotionally involved subject.  He concludes with an important statement for my theologically minded friends: “I do not write as a biblical scholar, but as a layman and physician who has been privileged to see deeply into psychic life of many people”.