Personal Spirituality and the Holy.1

Prompted by a number of recent experiences and my visit to one of the websites of another fellow blogger who is a constantly praying Christian and an NLP (Neuro-Lingusitic Psychology) clinical psychologist, my interest on the question of whether there is some kind of Supreme Being and if so, what form it may sometimes take is piqued. So I looked at an essay called "Personal Spirituality based on contact with the Numinosum" which is chapter 2 of part of a book by Lionell Corbett called The Religious Function of the Psyche" (96). This book considers religious phenomenon and religious experience from the point of view of the so-called "depth psychology" of C. G. Jung

 

The author starts with the definition of what is holy. He adopts the definition of Rudolf Otto in his book The Idea of the Holy (1958) to whom the essence of the religious or holy experience is an "inexpressible quality.. which eludes apprehension in terms of concepts". Otto thinks that the divine, the holy which he calls "numen " (which in Latin indicates a god who nods or beckons to us to indicate his approval of us ) is a sui generis, non-rational (not irrational), irreducible primary datum which really cannot be defined, only suggested, evoked and experienced. It is "felt" to be "objective" and outside of our "self". To Otto, the "numinous" grips and stirs our soul with a particular affective state or feeling which he calls "mysterium tremendum" which he describes as follows: "The feeling of it may at times come sweeping like a gentle tide, pervading the mind with a tranquil mood of deepest worship. It may pass over into a more set and lasting attitude of the soul, continuing, as it were, thrillingly vibrant and resonant, until at last it dies away and the soul resumes its "profane", non-religious mood of everyday experience. It may burst in sudden eruption up from the depths of the soul with spasms and convulsions, or lead to the strangest excitements, to intoxicated frenzy, to transport, and to ecstasy." It reads to me remarkbaly like a decription of the ecstasy of the love act! It may have crude, wild and demonic forms and sink to an almost grisly horror and shuddering. It may also develop into something beautiful, pure and glorious. It may become the hushed, trembling and speechless humility of the creature in the presence of something felt to be inexpressible, transcendent and "wholly other",

 

And some say God is love. In God, we merge, as a foetus merges into the womb of her mother, a drop of water merges into the sea. But in the case of God, there is the additional element of holy terror, of awe, of dread, of a paralyzing fear: "I will send my fear before thee" (Exodus 23: 27) or "Let not dread of him terrify me (Job 9: 34). This objectifies in myths and folklore as demons or gods. To Otto, it is the rationalization of this dread before something more powerful than man, something which he does not understands which  lies at the root of all religious feelings. In modern life, it expresses itself as our sense or experience of the inexplicable, bizarre, the uncanny or the supernatural. Such fear, such awe, such dread may be overwhelming or as gentle as a tiny still voice, quite different from "ordinary" fear. It may often produce a shudder within the soul which is "held speechless, trembles inwardly to the farthest fibre of its being" and has a quality of "absolute overpoweringness" such that we feel ourselves to be extremely small, powerless and completely humbled. Abraham feels that he is "but dust and ashes" before God (Gen. 18:27) At the same time, for a brief moment, the creature loses his sense of separate personal identify and "identifies" himself with that "transcendent reality"

 

What about the quality of the mysterious in that sense of the holy?  That feeling of mystery is a sense that one is in contact with something much bigger,  or as stated previously, something which is "wholly other", beyond what is familiar, usual, intelligible, something which fills our mind with "blank wonder and astonishment", a sense of stupor which has no place in our ordinary reality. This may be the sense of "Void" felt by the Buddhist, the "nothingness" felt by the western mystic. But at the same time as this sense of wonder, of awe, of humility or even of dread, we may also feel entranced, captivated, transported, elated, a sense which is thus so attractive and so alluring that the mystic will try to seek that experience again and again and when he does not find it, will long for its return with great fervor. Jung felt shortly after his heart attack, in which he was close to the edge of death and during which he had a "visionary" experience , thought that an encounter with the numinous may be the secret of release from psycho-pathology. In a sense, Jung's theory of the healing power of the numinous may be called a "religious theory" and those who follow it may be returning to a "spiritual practice." Usually, in psycho-therapy, we hear such terms as insight, as making the unconscious conscious, resolving unconscious conflicts, binding intensely painful affects, focusing on infantile destructiveness, improving the sense of mastery, combating demoralization, freeing creativity, reparenting, providing a corrective emotional experience, understanding one's complexes, integrating the shadow, getting to know the the animus, facilitating individuation, strenghening the self. etc. But to Corbett, if the patient finds exposure to the numinosum healing, then the therapist will  most likley to be drawn thereto. 

 

Although in the last analysis, for most people, it would be most difficult to get in touch with the gods or to be spoken to by the transpersonal Self because that is a matter of "grace", it still helps if the therapist knows when in fact the numinous does appear in the psyche of his patient. The numinous or the divine may appear in the form of an archetype ( an organizing principle originating in the objective psyche rather than in the empirical personality) in a dream, as a waking vision, as a bodily experience, in transference or countertransference relationship, in the wilderness, as an esthetic or creative experience or as a synchronistic event. Yet such an experience may harm as well as heal the patient and if harmful may be inflated, hysterical or even psychotic.But harmful or helpful, the archetype's ultiamtely source is the transpersonal Self (the form of the divine in the psyche) and it is always through the archetypes that such transpersonal Self will appear inside the patient's psyche  and if they do, they will affect the development and the structure of the relevant transferences: they either mirror or idealize the relevant transferences.

 

What characterizes all archetypal or numinous experience is its "affective intensity" or in Jung's words, its "gripping emotionality" , both developmentally and psycho-therapeutically. When the divine spirit appears, it behaves objectively (not subject to personal control): the patient will say that "something is happening to me/my soul." or that something is seizing control of his soul. When it does, it is often greeted by fear or bewilderment and will often be denied, disavowed, reduced, ignored, medicated simply because the psycho-therapist may not know how to deal with it and in the West, such an experience will be regarded as "authentic" only if it fits in with particular religious dogmas. If it is unique in form, it will often be distrusted or misunderstood or separated from the person's "official" spirituality. Thus a patient has described how from the age of 33, he felt shut up in a cocoon, in complete isolation until he was so tired in fighting it that he said to himself, "I can do no more. Let Nature or whatever is behind the universe, look after me now" and within a few days, he passed from hell to heaven, as if the cocoon had burst and his eyes were open and he saw the world as infinitely beautiful, full of light as if from an inner radiance: everything was alive and God was present in all things: the earth, all plants, animals and people seemed to be made of God and all things were one and he was one with creation and was held safe within a deep love, filled with peace and joy and deep humility and could only bow down in the holiness of the presence of God and as if the scales had been taken from his eyes and he saw the world as it truly was.

 

Some psychologists might try to downplay the numinous experience by reducing the experience of the unio mystica to an infantile wish to merge with mother in oceanic bliss or argue that the experience of the divine may simply be the result of a defensive operation derived from the personal unconscious arsing from a need to sooth unbearable terror or loss, or that it is the projection of parental imagos, infantile wishes for parental protection, failure of sublimation of libidinal ties to the father, a special type of transitional object, failures of object love which lead to the creation of a libidinal relationship with an internal object, the concretization of the idea of perfection or an intense need for an unfailing self-object (in the theories of Freud, Winnicott, Adler, object relationship theory and Kohut as they may be mis-applied to this question).To Corbett, whilst such ideas may explain how the transpersonal is personally "coloured", they do not account for the "reality" of such experiences. Contrary to popular psycho-analytical belief, religious experience is not regressive but represents a progressive level of psychological development! Such experience may occur to the healthy as well as to the sick. As the old saying goes, the difference between the mystic and the schizophrenic is that the mytic knows who not to talk to because when they were children, their precious experience was often envied, ridiculed, attacked or stolen and they are thus understandably reluctant to re-expose themselves to such wounding again: sometimes this type of experience is the only thing which keeps an abused child alive!

 

The holy may change established psychological structures and may also produce resistance against changing it. Thus Moses experienced it as a burning bush which is not consumed by fire but needed some encouragement before accepting it. Job was overcome by its intensity when God appeared out of a whirlwind which changed him forever and Saul experienced God as a blinding light and voice on the road to Damascus and the Holy Spirit descended as a wind and as tongues of fire at Pentecost causing the disciples to speak in tongues in glossalia so that those who witnessed it were so astounded that 3000 of them were baptized  that day. A patient dreamt that he was in a large room in which he had to walk down a hallway and come face to face with the devil and was terrified to look at the devil in the eye but knew that he must do so to get on with his life. He slowly looked up and found his eyes were pale blue but looked empty. He said, "All of a sudden, I feel a tremendous rush of love entere me from above and behind me. It floows through my heart, up to behind my eyes, then out through my eyes into his eyes. His face twists with anguish and he crumples to the floor in pain. The love was more powerful than he.".

 

When the patient is totally unable to grasp the meaning of his dream, it may be necessary for the therapist to step in to amplify it for him to enable the latter to realize its psychological signficance. But sometimes, the patient may resist partially to be changed by the experience of the numinous which may appear in the form of a feeling in the body in the waking state. For example a 35 year-old patient was running through a park on a pleasant summner day and as if in reply to a question, he suddenly felt seized and pushed from behind as if a giant hand was forcing him forward and he noticed that he was running faster than he had before and was unable to slow down at all and ran faster and faster until he felt he was completely out of control, running or being run at a pace that seemed dangerously fast. Then at a point just prior to actual panic, the pressure suddenly evaporated and he was able to stop, exhausted but awed. This event was structure altering because its reflection helped him destroy the illusion of autonomy or separation from the archetypal realm previously unconsciously held by him: it helped him realize that he might not be in total control as he previously thought and thus reduce his narcisstic sense of grandiosity. It was an example of an emotionally significant  symbolic event marking a milestone in his psychological development. That patient had an introverted intuitive temperament and so finds the body particularly remote and unconscious. God or the numinous might challenge us but it seldom challenges us beyond our capacity: in a relatively stable personality like the runner in this case, his psycholgical health both enabled him to have a revelatory experience but at teh same time, it also prevented any further revelations.

 

The more cohesive and firmly established the self, the more it can safely experience the Self or the numinous by reordering itself rather than by fragmenting such that the individual's psychopathology becomes the point of entry of the intervention by the holy. In the case of the runner, the emotional force of the experience helped to break down the established pattern of his controlling personality structure and forced him to change that rigid structure so that henceforth, he allowed a role to chance and accept that he could not control everything in his life. But this example is rather unusual. More frequently, we see gradual pressure from the unconcscious in the form of dreams or symptoms. This restraint is purposeful because what is happening is an attempt to initiate a person into a higher state of consciousness and change always involves risk and it is possible that if the experience is too powerful, it may cause excessive anxiety or even a psychosis when the personality structure is not strong enough. In general, the holy always produces a sense of humility. The ego is so awed that it is radically relativized: suddenly we realize that we are not who we thought we were: our childhood condition is loosened a little. We realize that suddenly we are thrust into a relationship with the totality of the Mind/Self/God instead of being trapped within an internal solipsism. It eradicates our sense of grandiosity by making us feel small. But if our personality structure is fragile, psychosis may result as a way of managing the kind of terror which our personality structure cannot handle.

 

Sometimes, the numinous may intervene to tell us a message that we are healed. After two years of therapy following a masectomy, a woman dreamt that her missing breast has regrown and was more beautiful than it had been. Another woman who was dying of colon cancer had spent most of her time working on her difficult childhood during which she had very strained relationship with her constantly quarelling parents and suddenly woke up one day in bed with a very strong sense of the presence of her parents at her bed and then saw a vision of a small golden bowl containing oil  shooting off golden rays of light and felt that her parents was communicating to her the message: "You are to use this to bless others". After this, she felt a sense of reconciliation with her parents and a deep sense of peace .