Know Thyself: Making Peace with Christianity

I grew up with an image of God the Father, a god who created the world but did not live in it. I was told that God was a being much greater than any person and in fact greater than anything I could imagine. I was told that God is all good, all-powerful, and all knowing. God the Father created the world and although he decides what will happen in the world, he lives outside of the world in heaven. I was led to believe that God is invisible and lives in an invisible world.

Since I was an empiricist as a child when I learned in Sunday school that we go to heaven to be with God when we die, I decided to perform an experiment. I found a dead rabbit in the woods near our house, and after asking my mother if rabbits went to heaven, I buried the rabbit and waited for what seemed like a very long time. When I dug it up, the rabbit was considerably less but it had not gone anywhere. I grabbed what was left of its body and ran to my mother demanding to know why this rabbit had not gone to heaven. After getting me and the smelly carcass out of the kitchen, my mother explained that it was souls which go to heaven. “A soul is not a body,” she told me. “The soul lives in the body. The soul is what makes the body move and breathe. When the rabbit’s body stopped moving and breathing, her soul went to be with God.” The soul is also invisible.
 
Although I continued to question my mother about the nature of God and the soul, I focused much more on the visible world as I was growing up. As a teenager I found organized religion increasingly puzzling and often completely absurd. By the time I went away to college I had stopped going to church and began to find answers to my questions in the study of philosophy. I felt an affinity with the idea of God found in Eastern philosophy. There, God is not separate from the world at all. According to Eastern teachings God does not rule the world from an invisible world above but rather is in everything—the world is God playing hide-and-seek with Godself.

In the 1970’s I became very involved in feminism, not just as a political movement, but also as a revolution in consciousness and spirituality. Mary Daly’s book Beyond God the Father convinced me that all of the major world religions function to legitimate patriarchy and the oppression of women, and that the myths and symbols of Christianity are essentially sexist—if “God is male, the male is God.”1  I came to understand the women’s revolution as a “postchristian spiritual revolution.”2 This was a very exciting and empowering time and I joined with other women in what Daly calls “an Otherworld journey” which is “both discovery and creation of a world other than patriarchy.” 3

One of my colleagues and friends at this time, Inie Bijkerk, was a Jungian analyst. After reading Daly, I told Inie that I had rejected religion and God altogether but that I still had a sense of “something greater” and that calling it “Goddess” instead of “God” didn’t really help because I had no image of Goddess. Inie explained to me that Jung found in his work with patients that everyone has a “religious function,” that there is an inborn urge within each one of us to know who we are, to discover our undivided wholeness and that although I may reject religion, that function is still operative in my psyche.

According to Carl Jung, in the early years of life, consciousness is directed outward, and emphasis is placed on developing a strong ego and functioning well in the world and with other people. But in the second half of life we often feel compelled to turn inward.  Even in the first half of life, as the ego is developing and becoming the center of consciousness, there is a sense of being an “agent” of a greater being—“the individuated ego senses itself as an object of an unknown and supraordinate subject.” 4 It is this unknown, transcendent or unconscious “subject” that we are drawn to in later life. Sometimes the ego loses touch with this unknown realm and becomes inflated, convinced that what is available to conscious awareness is all there is. This was evidently the position I was in when I first embraced “radical feminism” as seen in the dream I had shortly after I read Beyond God The Father.

With Inie’s help, I recognized this as my internalized version of patriarchy. The Mayor was my own ego which had become inflated and was under the illusion that it was the controlling center of consciousness. By deflating the ego I began the decent into the unconscious and from a Jungian perspective, into the realm of the archetypes and the experience of the divine. The young man who accompanied me was, from a Jungian perspective, an animus figure—an archetype at home in the unconscious and thus a competent guide.

For a number of years I kept a record of my dreams and worked with Inie. At the same time I continued to study and teach philosophy and developed an interest in Goddess religion and Wicca. When I realized that philosophy meant “love of Sophia,” I began to develop a real sense of the living presence of the Goddess of wisdom. This was a very personal, “inner” experience and seemed to satisfy my “religious function,” until I entered my second Saturn return at age 58. Then it seemed I had entered the dark tunnel again. My dreams became very disturbing and I once more turned to my old friend Inie who helped me see that I needed to turn inward once more and make peace with the religion I was born into. Through a series of synchronistic events, I found Sancta Sophia Seminary and Carol Parrish.

In this paper I want to outline the process of individuation developed in Jungian psychology and relate this journey to Esoteric Christianity, as I understand it at this time. Jung included discussions of various aspects of Christianity in his writings including essays on the Mass, the Trinity, the book of Job, and the Assumption of Mary. When Christians objected that he had psychologized the Christian revelation Jung answered that psychology is the modern myth and only in terms of the current myth can we understand the faith.5

For someone familiar with Eastern spirituality and philosophy, Jung’s notion of the unconscious is at first confusing. In the East consciousness is everything—it is everywhere and always has been. There is nothing outside of consciousness; it is pure, whole and sacred. Creation could be thought of as the point where pure consciousness desires to become many and make itself manifest.

The Western conception of consciousness is different—consciousness is something to be achieved and evolves out of the unconscious. Consciousness is the end product of the evolutionary process. Further, in the Western view, consciousness necessarily involves duality because consciousness (the subject) is always conscious of something (the object). This is expressed by saying that consciousness is “intentional,” it always takes an object.

Jung, with his discovery of the collective unconscious and the process of individuation, provided those of us educated in the Western tradition with a way to experience what is called Pure Consciousness or Cosmic Consciousness in Eastern philosophy. According to Jung, individual consciousness evolves from childhood out of the unconscious. The root or source of consciousness is thus, paradoxically, the unconscious. The unconscious in Jungian terms is all that is unknown to conscious awareness. The collective unconscious is the realm of the archetypes, the ordering principles of reality.

According to Jung, all of humanity and, perhaps, all of creation shares a common pool or substratum of wisdom and experience through the collective unconscious or objective psyche. Each life contributes its experience to it, and each individual has the potential capacity to tap into it. It lies beyond or beneath the personal unconscious, that part of the individual psyche that contains the suppressed and repressed personal memories of our present life. Just as our individual consciousness contains archetypal content with different functions such as the anima or animus and the shadow, humanity collectively shares a pool of archetypes on a mythological scale.

Despite all our differences as human beings, we share a common physical maturation process, a common skeletal form and structure. We also share common psychic patterns. The development of consciousness, which is analogous to physical evolution, begins in a state of undifferentiation at birth and evolves to an increasingly more differentiated awareness. In Jungian terms, the center of consciousness is called the ego; it is all that we are consciously aware of. Yet most of us have the sense that there is something more, something just at the periphery of our awareness, an unknown transcendent realm. Depending on our temperament and experience, this “something more” may not take the form of a spiritual force or being, but rather one may have a sense that there are values or ethical principles that influence us yet are somehow outside or prior to our individual experience. According to Jung there comes a point when this sense of a reality larger than our day-to-day activities compels many of us to explore beyond the limits of ego consciousness. This exploration leads us to the inner world that Jung says one has to come to terms in later life.

The process of the evolution of consciousness is guided by the religious function and is called the process of individuation. The natural urge to individuate means for Jung to fulfill one’s destiny or fate or live out one’s myth. This process is what Carol Parrish calls the spiritual path which all of us are on, whether we recognize it or not.7 We can consciously participate in and speed up the process through spiritual practice, but spiritual growth is a natural part of human evolution. From a psychological perspective, this is a gradual process that involves shifting the seat of consciousness from the ego to the Self. From the spiritual perspective it is the path of initiation that requires a shift from personality to soul. Shifting the center of consciousness to the Self is analogous to the process of soul infusion.8

Although the ego is the center of consciousness the Self is the center of the psyche. The psyche includes the unconscious. The process of becoming whole requires embracing all that we are which includes the unconscious. In the therapeutic process this involves going inward, into unconscious material, to discover our complexes and identifications and become free of them. Ego consciousness evolves within the context of a certain family, society, and culture. As such we identify with certain aspects of experience which are acknowledged and preferred by the world we are born into and refuse to allow others into the realm of our consciousness.
   
We must free ourselves from these one-sided projections if we are to individuate and come into our own. This is accomplished by a “dialogue” between the unconscious and conscious. “The ego must ‘submit’ to some other directions than simply its own conscious willing and striving; some ‘listening’ must be done.”9 Listening to our dreams, inner promptings, and the content of our active meditation are examples of such a dialogue.

The language used in a dialogue between the conscious and unconscious is one of symbols. Symbols are the bridge between the unconscious and the ego or conscious mind, between the visible and invisible worlds. Symbols maintain both conscious and unconscious aspects: they can be approached by consciousness but continue to participate in that which transcends the world of intentional consciousness. Symbols—dream images, or seed thoughts—provide the “channels” for psychic energy,10 allowing consciousness to participate in two worlds. “Symbols are not allegories and not signs: they are images of contents which for the most part transcend consciousness.” 11

The word ‘symbol’ comes from two Greek words meaning, “to throw together,”12 – the symbol bridges two realities, brings them together in a new unity. Jung said, “As the mind explores the symbol it is led to ideas that lie beyond the grasp of reason.”13 This is accomplished through the process of active meditation: “We know that energy follows thought so in active meditation we use thought forms to make the bridge. Meditation is a process of placing our mind in harmony with the ‘Great Mind’ and in that harmony we discover ever-expanding new growth and development of human capabilities.”14

Through the process of individuation we enter and participate in the “larger reality” merely sensed by ego consciousness. By paying attention to symbols through the imagination we move forward with life, conscious integration, and reunion with what Jung calls the unconscious and religion calls the source and ground of being. Through the use of religious symbols, we experience the esoteric meaning of religion and move from religion to spirituality. According to Jung, our reconciliation with God (God as experienced in the manifestations of the unconscious) opens the door to our reconciliation with each other and nature. Carol Parrish expresses this: “By opening up to higher consciousness we experience ourselves as part of a whole, participating in the life of a greater being. Gradually we will come to see each other as divine beings.”15

On the individual level the symbols that open the door to the larger reality are often presented in dreams, meditation, and active imagination. On the collective level, the transcendent is communicated through the symbols of mythology and religion. A myth is a story that gives meaning, value and orientation to life.16 It is a story dealing with matters of ultimate, divine, significance.

In distinguishing between personal symbols and social or collective symbols, Jung said, “Many of the collective symbols are religious images. The believer accepts them as revealed, as being of divine origin.”17 Through participation in the rituals or sacraments of religion, that which is ultimate and infinite is brought into or made present in the limited and finite.  That which is transcendent is made immanent. The sacred is experienced in the mundane. Mythology and religion function to provide values that give significance to life and lift us out of the humdrum of daily existence. “And the only way this kind of transcendent value can be talked about is in stories.”18

In the basic Christian story God created the world, but the world, in its freedom, became separated and alienated from its Creator. Yet God so loved the world that at a particular time, God’s son came to earth to redeem (reunite the world to God) through the power of love. In their state of separation, humans killed the one God had sent. God’s love however was not thwarted. The story goes on to say that God demonstrated the power of love by using that death as a means that humans might be reunited with the creator after all. The one God sent was raised from the grave, empowering humans with the Holy Spirit, and offering humans a new life as participants in a new creation.19

From a Jungian perspective the incarnation of the Christ describes the process of individuation. It is the story of the differentiation and separation of ego consciousness from its source and the reunion on a new level. This can be interpreted on both an individual and collective level as the evolution of consciousness.

The spiritual vitality of a religious tradition is maintained, Jung said, “only if each age translates the myth into its own language and makes it an essential content of its view of the world.”20 Jung thought that Christianity could not remain true to itself in the overly rationalistic, materialistic worldview of patriarchy – because it has no appreciation of symbolic language.

In the history of Christianity, the stories used to point to the esoteric meaning or experience have become doctrine and something people are supposed to believe, or accept on faith. Jung says that this may have been necessary and helpful in the evolution of consciousness. “However, in our continued movement toward ever higher levels of consciousness, personal experience becomes the only possible authority.”21 The Christian myth has become dogma that is either rejected entirely or simply “believed” without really penetrating one’s daily life. It no longer formulates the truths of inner experience for people. Jung said, “It has become a tenet to be accepted in and for itself, with no basis in any experience that would demonstrate its truth.”22

For esoteric Christians, the birth, death, and resurrection are not necessarily historical events that happened at a certain point in time. The story is a prototype for the initiation process that each seeker must undergo. Every religious tradition has an esoteric or inner practice which is an enactment of the outer form of the tradition within the soul or psyche of the individual.23

By interpreting religious stories in terms of personal psychological experience we may be able to return to the direct, personal experiences of transcendence upon which all world religions are based. As explained above, the ego is the center of consciousness but it is not the center of the psyche, which includes the unconscious. The ego encounters the unknown as the “other,” as something outside the realm of conscious experience. That means we experience the content of the unconscious and the events and objects of the external world alike as “other.” Although God is experienced as other by ego consciousness, God is something that is experienced; it is not simply made up or hypothesized. God is something that has an effect on one who experiences God. Jung speaks of the  “God-image” in the psyche, rather than simply “God,” because he wants to limit himself to the realm of psychological study of religion. He says that the imprint of the God-image on the psyche constitutes the Self and, “it should be obvious that when he spoke of an imprint on the psyche that something caused it.”24 God transcendent imprints Godself as a psychic reality; it is by coming to know our own psychic structure that we come to know God. This is why the philosopher, the lover of wisdom, is admonished to “know thyself.”

Ego consciousness is able to encounter God or the Self because of what Jung calls the “transcendent function.” The transcendent function is the uniting quality of the symbol.25 It is the process, inherent in the psyche, by which unconscious content can be related to consciousness and thus the way in which the ego could be related to the Self. “For the Christian, symbolic language (the language of the sacraments) is the doorway to a living relationship with God.”26

Ego consciousness is able to encounter God or the Self because of what Jung calls the “transcendent function.” This function has the capability of uniting all the opposing trends in personality and of working toward the goal of wholeness. I believe what Jung is here calling the transcendent function is, from the esoteric perspective, an activity of Sophia. Sophia is the mediator, the connecting principle. It is Sophia who reveals the illusion of separateness. Thus for the esoteric Christian the symbol of the Self includes Sophia. By calling this “Christo-Sophia” we are expressing not the incarnation of a being but the activity of love operating with wisdom in our psyche’s (and the world) to bring about a union of opposites and integrate the notions of transcendence and immance.

As a psychological process, transcendence facilitates the integration of the individual personality. This is illustrated by considering how a man integrates what Jung calls the anima, the feminine archetype, within his psyche. The man who has integrated his anima with his maleness expresses “both sides” of his nature in all that he does. He is not part man and part woman nor does he sometimes function from his “masculine side”
and at other times from his “feminine side.” The same would be said of a woman who has integrated her animus, when she is acting in a forceful way, it is not that she is behaving from her “masculine side” or acting like a man.  Rather, in an integrated personality, a true union of opposites has been achieved so that it may be said that transcendence has abolished gender except in a biological sense.29

It is essential that the archetype of the Self, the God-image, or the Christo-Sophia, is a union of opposites—male and female, dark and light, good and evil. From the perspective of the ego and the rational orientation of consciousness this is difficult to grasp. When we leave the language of symbol and attempt to speak about God we tend to develop a one-sided, one dimensional, anthropomorphic image. Thus within a male dominated society the image of God is male. There has been an attempt to counter this by referring to God as Father-Mother, instead of Father God, but this merely shifts the identification to the parent side of the parent-child polarity. Furthermore, if we are to realize “ye are god” and become co-creators with God, thinking of ourselves as children is not useful. Within patriarchal Christianity, the image of Christ is, by itself, an inadequate symbol of the Self because it does not adequately express the union of opposites which is the Self. Although the Self is often referred to as the “Christ Within” in esoteric Christianity, I find it more consistent to speak of “Christo-Sophia.”

In Jungian psychology neurosis in an individual is a result of a person’s experience of two forces in opposition to one another. The conflict may be between the sensual and the spiritual aspects of the person, or between the ego and the shadow. The current crisis in the Catholic Church may be an example of this conflict. The Priest who believes that his sexual nature is evil and therefore pushes all “carnal knowledge” into the unconscious, gives up all control over his instinctual nature and will act in inappropriate and often disastrous ways. Healing this conflict requires moving the center of the psyche from the ego to the Self and the union of opposites—recognizing and integrating both sexual and spiritual aspects. This is the path to psychological health, individuation, and wholeness.

Religious experience also involves a similar process of healing the split and accepting ourselves. “We must find a way to live our own lives and remain true to ourselves, to our own inner calling, just as Jesus lived his own life and remained true to himself. For Jung, this was the true meaning of the “imitation of Christ.”30 The personal experience of the union of opposites is difficult to bear and often results in what is called “the dark night of the soul” in the literature of the mystics. Jesus’ own difficulty with this experience was reflected, Jung felt, in the story of the temptations—which occurs right after his baptism and acceptance of God’s call.31

Religious experience ultimately for Jung was an experience of the union of opposites. What was “new” in the New Testament was Jesus’ teachings of forgiveness and love. “Love your enemies.” The experience of “unconditional acceptance” by God.  In this experience there is a coming together of opposites – the awareness of unacceptableness and an experience of acceptance.32 This is the basic message of the Christian story. 

The union of opposites does not eliminate polarity or the tension of opposites; it involves a shift in our relationship to our experience of opposites. This requires that we withdraw our projections and become a witness to the play of polarity, which is going on in the realm of the psyche. In esoteric Christianity this is called “discernment.”

The dominant paradigm grounded in left-brain, dualistic logic and thinking creates a seeming split between us and the world and between us and God. We cannot conceive of a One which is also Many, or a Transcendence which is also Immanence. We experience ourselves as separate from one another and the things around us. We tend to experience ourselves as a point of consciousness somehow hermetically sealed within a bag of skin. The psychological process of individuation and the spiritual process of initiation bring us to the experience of our connectedness and wholeness through the union of opposites. In order to achieve this union we must be able to shift our point of consciousness; this shift is made possible by “a gift of the Spirit” or Sophia.

Jung challenged Christianity to (a) recognize the fact that symbolic language is the necessary language of religion, and (b) for Christians to appreciate their treasure of religious symbolism and set about recovering it’s meaning for people today.34

Esoteric Christianity is stepping up to this challenge by giving fresh consideration to the Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit is the symbol by which Christians and Jews have expressed the personal experience of God by the individual.  As we have seen above, the power of discernment is a gift of the Spirit and is essential in our personal individuation process. The gifts of the Spirit are available to anyone, as Carol Parrish points out, “By refocusing inward, one discovers a wellspring of inner resources—guidance, inner knowing, healing energies, powers of mind that escape outer notice as long as the inner is neglected.”35 The presence of the Holy Spirit means that we have the benefit of help from beyond our own conscious willing and striving. When humanity collectively enters the path of individuation we will move into a new age and activate the symbol of the Holy Spirit and recognize the role that Sophia has played all along.

Our religious symbols are a response to our developing consciousness. The new age, the Age of Aquarius, requires a symbol system which can carry us into an age in which the wholeness of the psyche will be experienced. The “Christian era,” the age of Pisces, represented by two fish swimming in different directions, emphasized the split between conscious and unconscious, personality and soul, God transcendent and God immanent.

Spirituality for the new age is non-dual. Transcendence is not opposed to immanence, the spiritual is not opposed to the physical, and the Self is not opposed to the other. Our concern is not for transcendence but for transformation and relationship. The emphasis is on the experiencing, the cultivating, and the expressing of the unique spirit that is each one of us, taking responsibility for self-transformation and opening toward others.

The experience of the connectedness between all beings is at the heart of Sophianic spirituality – the result of the union of opposites in Jungian terms.  The experience of connectedness is not an obliteration of difference – it is a differentiated connectedness—a connectedness precisely because of our separation from one another.  It is a connection by virtue of our psychological separateness, by virtue of our ability to feel and to know and to imagine deeply about others.

EndNotes