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by Len Cruz
Allow me to paraphrase Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The arc of history is long, but it bends toward the religious instinct.
Jung studied the symbols of religious traditions as a window into the nature of the psyche. His openness to different images of the Divine paralleled his openness to interior images that others might easily have relegated to the domain of psychosis.
The Jungian tradition emerged during a tremendously fertile period of scientific development in the late 19th and early 20th century. Remarkably, over a matter of a little more than six years of formal interactions between Jung and Freud, their professional collaboration ran its course. Jung departed from Freud, who had proposed in The Future of an Illusion that religious belief was an infantile defense against the ill-defined sense of an omnipotent deity. Jung recognized a universality in the religious instinct that made its appearance in myriad ways across vastly different cultures. Most importantly, Jung demonstrated that the journey of the spirit is unique to each and every person.
The streams that merge in any individual to find expression in matters of the spirit are limitless. Some of us are raised in an overbearing religious tradition while others arise with almost no instruction or outer structure. Something deep within us yearns and that yearning can become the cornerstone of faith or spiritual awakening. Psychology has the capacity to deepen the religious instinct and invigorate the spirit. According to Jung we are stamped with the imago Dei. Jung gave this stamp of God's image primacy:
“unity and totality stand at the highest point on the scale of objective values because their symbols can no longer be distinguished from the imago Dei.”(1)
"When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi troubles my sight"(2) ... Each of us must decide how we will respond to the encounter with the "vast image". When we become aware that deep calls unto deep seldom do we miss that the call appears to be unceasing. Martin Buber went so far as to claim that "Through the Thou a person becomes the I".
I thought about some of the steps I have taken in my own spiritual journey and it led me to frame it with a list of books that hold a special places in my formation. (Feel free to skip to the end of the list since the special quality of the list is that it is my list.)
A Wrinkle in Time (L'Engle)
Bhagavad Gita & Upanishads
The Teachings of Don Juan, A Journey to Ixtlan (Castaneda)
Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlen)
Seven Story Mountain (Merton)
The Secret Sharer, Heart of Darkness (Conrad)
For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Old Man and the Sea (Hemingway)
The Practice of the Presence of God (Brother Lawerence)
A Wizard of Earthsea, The Left Hand of Darkness (Leguin)
El Aleph (Borges)
Holy Bible
The Interpretation of Dreams, The Ego and Id, The Future of an Illusion (Freud)
Flatland (Abbott)
Tres Tristes Tigres (Cabrera Infante)
The Dancing Wu Li Masters, The Hidden Connections (Capra)
The Dark Night of the Soul (St. John of the Cross)
Aspects of a Theory of Syntax, On Langugage (Chomsky)
The Fractal Geometry of Nature (Mandelbrot)
Between Metaphysics and Protoanalysis (Ichazo)
The Way of the Pilgrim
Man and His Symbols, The Undiscovered Self (Jung)
Karate-Do Kyohan: the Master Text (Funakoshi)
Karate is a Thing of the Spirit, Car (Crews)
The Myth of Sisyphus (Camus)
Selected Poems (Tennyson)
Steps to Freedom, The Alchemy of the Heart (Field)
Markings (Hammarskjold)
Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Mind and Nature (Bateson)
Gödel, Escher, Bach (Hofstadter)
A Bell for Adono (Hershey)
The Structure of Magic (Bandler & Grindler)
Revolt of the Massess (Ortega y Gasset)
The Death of Artemio Cruz (Vargas Llosa)
I and Thou (Buber)
Twilight of the Idols, The Anti-Christ (Nietzche)
The Screwtape Letters (Lewis)
Morphic Resonance (Sheldrake)
Collected Poems (Auden)
The Tales of the Dervishes (Shah)
Holy Quran
Buddhism: It's Essence and Development (Conze)
The Universe in a Single Atom (HH Dalai Lama)
Facets of Unity (Almaas)
The Crooked Tiumber of Humanity (Berlin)
The Shadow of the Wind (Ruiz Zafron)
The list disturbed me for three reasons. First, it could have been much longer. Next, it lacked coherence. Whatever illusion I maintain about some unseen hand guiding the unfolding passage of my life is not revealed in the list of books I've included. Each book calls to mind some remembrance that holds special significance for me but it would be difficult for anyone else to discern a thread that binds them together other than I encountered these books (or they encountered me). Finally, this assemblage, compiled in my fifth decade of life, captures something essential about who I am while simultaneously missing the mark in profound ways. How can this be?
This brings me to the real point of this blog entry. EVERY exploration of spirituality holds the promise of bringing us closer to the Divine while reminding us of our separation. Such inquiries can delivers us to a threshold between unity and alienation, between merger and isolation, between eros and thanatos, between clarity and confusion.
Whether we explore the theme of Jung & Spirituality, as we intend to do with Dr. Murray Stein on December 1, 2011, or if we explore the themes of our own spirituality, the result likely to be enriching and incomplete.
Each of us has narrative voice suited to the task of telling about our spiritual journey. The tools that hone that voice include therapy, contemplation, journaling, writing, work, and the accumulation of life experience.
I believe the long arc of history keeps bending toward the religious instinct in me and in the world.
This ineffable realm is the subject of our next our next exploration with Dr. Stein scheduled for Thursday, December 1, 2011.
Registration is still open at http://ashevillejungcenter.org/upcoming-events/spirituality/registration/
For those unable to join the conference on Thursday, it is also available over the internet.
I will close with a quote from Martin Buber on the power of a story well told.
A story must be told in such a way that it constitutes help in itself … My grandfather was lame. Once they asked him to tell a story about his teacher. And he related how (his teacher) used to hop and dance while he prayed. My grandfather rose as he spoke, and he was so swept away by his story that he began to hop and dance to show how the master had done. From that hour on he was cured of his lameness. That's how to tell a story! (3)
1 Jung, CG. Coll. Wks., 9/2, pars. 60.
2 Yeats, William B. "The Second Coming - Yeats." PotW.org - Poem of the Week. Poem of the Week. Web. 26 Nov. 2011.
3 Buber,Martin. Tales of the Hasidism: Early Masters. New York: Schoken Books, 1974, pp.v-v1.
