Jung's Transpersonal Self (Imago Dei)

The question of man's relationship with what has traditionally been called God. the One, the Absolute, the Tao, the Void, the Reality has bothered me for quite a while and so far as remained unresolved. I am still trying to explore further into this question. However I am pleased that in the process, I have been able to clarify some otherwise confused notions and the complex relations between them. One of such problems that appears to have been partially resolved is the relationship between God as a metaphysical enitity, God as revealed, and God as experienced by the human psyche. Last night, I read a rather difficult article by Lionell Corbett entitled The Transpersonal Self: A Psychological Approach to the Divine. It is chapter 3 of his book The Religious Function of the Psyche (1996).

 

To Corbett, the personal experience of the divine is more important than any abstractly derived or doctrinal idea of God. He agrees with the Sufis that there is no God except the experience of God. To the depth psychologists, it is not important what the true objective or metaphysical nature of God in some absolute sense is: whether God is a human construct or whether God exists outside of ourselves. What is important is how an individual may best approach that spiritual search and how such personal emotional experience affects his psyche and his personality. To the psychologist and his subject, what is important is how the divine manifests himself/itself intra-psychically and how the subject may integrate such manifestation into his total psychology as an individual. In this respect, Jung proposes the concept of a Transpersonal Self which he explores through the use of symbols. To do so, we must adopt the "don't know" mind of Zen Buddhism and the "don't know what you know" attitude of the Taoists. 

 

To Jung, the idea of God is ubiquitous as a matter of social and often personal reality. Therefore it is unecessary to prove the existence of God as an extrapsychic or metaphysical divinity, which in any event is not the concern of the psychologist but the concern of the theologians. In this respect, he shares the pragmatist attitude of William James: God is real in so far as he produces real effects on people's lives. To Jung, there is pragmatically an a priori intrapsychic image of God as an entity who is transcendent and eternal and distinct from the everyday personality at the core of the human psyche which he calls a transpersonal "Self". This Self is an "unknowable totality of consciousness itself" and may manifest itself in an infinite number of possible images none of which is complete, in the same way that traditional theology thinks of God as an infinite mystery forever beyond complete human understanding and the idea that we may only know God insofar as he reveals himself in human history. This concept of the transpersonal Self is different from a personal self derived from the internalized accretion in the memory of an individual which he gradually builds up in time from a number of affectively important experiences as he grows, learns and develops them into his own sense or concept of his uniquely individual "I". Insofar as this transpersonal Self embodies and manifests itself in the personal psyche of an individual, this Self helps that individual to achieve coherence, cohesiveness and integration of his personal self. Thus the personal self is a complex intrapsychic image relatively enduring in time. Although the Self may manifest itself within the personal self, it is a mistake to think of the Self as existing only within the personal self. The Self is the field within which the personal self  lives and hasits being and is the "archetypal underpinning of the personal self". Jung refers to the Self as the "principle by which man is shaped.".

 

What exactly is the nature of the relationship between this Jungain Self and the personal self? To Jung, the individual ego gradually experiences itself as the object of a supra-ordinate subject: he feels that something/somone is experiencing itself through him e.g in our dream, we may feel a presence, a light or some other images or symbols which beckon us, show us the way so that we may go forward and further develop in such a way as to reduce our sufferings and enhance the firmness of our personal self structures, provide us with a meaning and allow us to feel that we are part of a greater unity or totality and hence reduce our sense of isolation, alienation, loneliness and the attendant fears and anxieties. The Self thus manifested in our dreams provides a good internal object and a reliable self-object. Hence encounters with this transpersonal Self or the Divine is often seen as an act of "grace" because the Self acts via the "particular needs of the individual psyche".  But although "the Self encloses and contains the individual pysche", the self often feels limited and that it is not part of a totality because this is the way our brain normally operates: we always perceive our "self" as existing within the boundaries of our physical body and likewise our "ego" or personal self. Therefore, although the Self is the medium or matrix of awareness and in fact it is the Self which manifests itself within our psyche under specified circumstances, we feel "as if" that Self were an "object" of our experience distinct from us.. We think we are having an experience of the "numinosum".  In traditional theological terms, we say the the self occurs within and by means of of the divine Ground of Being or that the Self contains all selves. To Corbett , the "oneness" often described in religious literature is actually "the continuity of consciousness." or the "totality of all consciousness". . 

 

To Corbett, Jung's theory is best understood as a "psychological restatement of the ancient Vedantic notion of the Atman, an element of the divine within the individual which is identical with the universal, absolute consciousness of Brahman." In the theistic school within the Hindu tradition, the task of the personal self is to regain its lost connection with the transpersonal Self and the relationship between the two is that between a devoted servant and a master. This is psychologically equivalent to the "ego/Self axis" or dialogue. The non-dualistic Hindu tradition believes that there is no real difference between the personal self and the transpersonal Self and the "apparent" separation is the result of the ego's intense conditioning and the task is for us to realize our identity with the divine. Psychologically, this is equivalent to the mystical notion of the union of man with God or in the words  of the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart, "my me is God" or in the words of the Upanishad, "thou art That". But some object that if the water merges with the wine (the God of traditional Christianity and Judaism being a personal and essentially separate entity) and we are part of God, then no worship or prayer is possible and there would be no need for grace. The Hindu monists Shankhara solves the problem by postulating a higher and a lower religion. If so, worhsip of a personal God would have to be a lower form of worship. But to me, the problem may be resolved not only through the concept of a hierarchy of different levels, we may also posit a scale of increasing unity in a continuum until we reach total unity with the One/Godhead etc which in practice can seldom be achieved even by the most devout or accomplished mystic. This is what I would call the concept of "imperfect unity" which in fact means most of the time, even for mystics because even for them, this sense of unio mystico can be achieved only rarely and such ecstatic episodes are often followed by what has been called "dark night of the soul" in which the mystic feels alienated and deserted by the object of their devotion or even complete indifference by such an object for him/her. In such periods, prayers become again possible and indeed necessary. But in pratice, it is most difficult for the ordinary folks to envisage a non-personal, amorphous, abstract God or consciousness because it is not an entity or being in the "normal" sense. In practice, we often need to fix our mind on a concrete image, therefore all kinds of anthropomorphism by thinking of God as if it were a fixed and concrete thing seem necesssary although strictly speaking, we must realize that it is not right to do so. An image is necessary to temporarily support an experience of the Self whose reality is otherwsie beyond our grasp. An image is intrinsically dualistic, or a statement of "this and not that". Ideally the image only hints at the essence to which it points, as a means to an end, after which it may be discarded. "It is only the autonomy of the Self images, from the standpoint of consciousness, which makes them appear to arise from outside of ourselves." By contrast, the non-dualists suggest that instead of developing a "relationship" of the self/ego with the Self, man with God, the ego has to "realize its radical, seamless continuity with all of consciousness", by constant expansion of the boundaries of the self to encompass more and more of the bigger field of consciousness of which it is a part. There is thus no need to get rid of our ego/self. Instead, we try constantly to dig deeper and deeper into it and discover its true nature, by knowing it as fully as possible until we attain that unity with the Self/God. As the Zen Buddhist Dogen said, to study the self is to forget the self. Under this conception, the personal self is seen as a system of habitual fixed set of learned concerns which keep us so firmly within its grips that it prevents us from experiencing Reality as it really is--undivided! According to non-dualist religious philosophy, Reality simply does not operate according to our habitual conceptual categories which always tends to classify reality in fixed ways, to reify them and to set its categories in absolute opposition to each other such that our narcissistic concerns and our structures of the self are threatened when events do not correspond to our wishes, our categories and if so, out of long habit, we immediately translate that into the situation of a parent/child struggle. Whichever of the two schools is right is an open question and may be a matter of personal preference. From the pragmatic psychological point of view, whether one or the other view should be adopted really depends on how effective each view shall prove in practice in helping a person to resolve his psychological problems. But for Jung, "the God-image is not something invented, it is an experience that comes upon man spontaneously." In practice, in the Christian West, God's image tends to be anthropomorphized as an old man in the sky and is laden with dogma and doctrine. To Jung, "Whatever is of the higherst importance within the psyche of the individual tends to become imbued with numinosity of the Self, so that Christ or many other objectivized figures may become such a symbol". But in principle, the idea or the experience of the Self could be carried out by other means. For some people, the place of the Self has been overtaken by something far more concrete: politics, social movements, money, status, artistic pursuits and which like the Self, act as supra-ordinate self-object which enhance the cohesion of the self.