Archive for the 'bible' Category

Dream as psychopomp

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Ken
on April 13, 2009
in bible, bible commentary, carl jung and depth psychology
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Psychopomp: Psy”cho*pomp\, n. [Gr. ?; psychh` the soul + ? to send: cf. F. psychopompe.] (Myth.) A leader or guide of souls . –J. Fiske. [Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc.]

Jung … describe[s] the dynamic of humanity and divinity as functions of each other in some detail. Basically this dynamic takes on the form of a never-to-be-completed psychic cycle. In the first moment the soul regresses to an immersion in and identity with the energies of the divine. In the second moment the soul then mediates these energies to consciousness. When the cycle is taken in its totality, Jung is found to be saying that the moment of the soul’s identity with God is the necessary prelude to the birthing of the divine in human consciousness. His Answer to Job describes the same process in terms of a baptism, the baptism of consciousness into and from the pleroma, the creative and formless source of all form and consciousness. In every analysis reliant on dreams this process is at work as the dreams take the soul into the depths of the psyche and then speak directly to consciousness through the soul from her immersion in these depths. This process makes of the analyst both the observer and the catalyst in the baptism of the individual into the life of the individual’s evolving myth as that individual’s greatest contribution to the emerging societal myth. [Dourley, John, “Jung and the Recall of the Gods,” Journal of Jungian Theory and Practice (2006) vol. 8 (1) pp. 43-53. Emphasis added]

Dourley’s description of the dream resonates with me like nothing I’ve read by Jung. There are moments when Jung waxes poetic as when he describes the dream as “a little hidden door in the innermost and secret recesses of the soul, opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego-consciousness, and which will remain psyche no matter how far our ego-consciousness extends.” [Jung, CW 10, par. 304.] But most of what I’ve read by Jung concerning dreams has been more clinical: “impartial, spontaneous products of the unconscious psyche,” [Jung, CW 10, par. 317.] “autonomous psychic complexes which form themselves out of their own material,” [Jung, CW 8, par. 580.] “a highly objective, natural product of the psyche,” [Jung, CW 7, par. 210.] “a psychological adjustment, a compensation absolutely necessary for properly balanced action.” [Jung, CW 8, par. 469.] While these characterizations offer invaluable insight into the mechanisms, causes, and purposes of dreams, Dourley’s one-line commentary provides a palpable connection for me. It undoubtedly has to do with my current life-path coordinates which place me in the domain and under the strong, seemingly autonomous influence of reevaluating my connection with Christianity.

For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. [Galatians 3:27]

The symbolism of the soul being immersed in the psyche which has the Self (the imago Dei, of which the Christ is a symbol) at the center is a very powerful, personal statement of the role of the dream. It evokes Paul’s words of being “baptized into Christ” with the dream initiating the baptism. In the Greek, “put on” has the meaning of donning clothes but with the idea of “sinking into” the garment. Could there be a better descriptor for our soul, under the influence and following the urging of the dream, falling down into the depths of the psyche to be immersed, clothed, as it were, in the psyche as the Self is? As we are immersed, “baptized into Christ” each night, we “put on Christ” both inwardly, as our soul is enveloped in the unconscious, and outwardly, as we integrate the dream contents – the direct communication of the dream with our consciousness through our soul – into our waking, outer life. The dream, then, is the psychopomp, the conduit between us – the “outer world” us – and the numinous. It brings the soul face to face with the Self, our imago Dei, the Christ, and it then brings to consciousness the words, ideas, concepts, from the Self, from the Christ. In both extremes – deep in the unconscious and in consciousness – the dream allows us to be in the presence of the numinous.

Our Father

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Ken
on February 2, 2009
in bible and bible commentary
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I’ve been motivated to look at The Lord’s Prayer in some depth. We never (or rarely) recited this prayer in the church I grew up in and, for the most part, these were just verses that I memorized at one point. There was not a lot of significance attached to them.  But, as I approach Christianity anew, after several decades of separation from it, and under the influence of Jungian Depth Psychology, something is drawing me to rethink this model prayer which Jesus has given us.

I want to start with the first two words: “Our Father.”

This signifies a change in the human psyche and how we approach and relate to God. The Old Testament was the story of our infant years where God was a (seemingly) capricious, loving/hating being out there somewhere, up there in the sky somewhere. Starting with Jesus, we now relate to God as child and, sometimes, like a teenager. We have a more conscious relationship with him and he treats us less arbitrarily (at least it seems like that to us).

Consider an infant who is crying because she is hungry and her father is offering a bottle but she really wants her mother’s breast. The infant is confused and hurt that she’s not getting what she wants and her father must seem so cruel. At other times, the father puts her in her mother’s arms and she gets exactly what she wants. There is no rhyme nor reason to this. Why does her father not always give her to her mother when she cries out of hunger? Why does he sometimes (seemingly) punish her by only offering that wretched bottle? The issue is that she has no other way of relating because she does not have enough consciousness.

Now, skip ahead to a 4 or 14 year old. Now, the child can address his father as “Father” and ask for exactly what he wants. The child is capable of understanding, in some cases, why the father gives what he does. With the child’s increased consciousness, the father’s actions seem less arbitrary. And this is where Jesus was taking us. He was showing that we have an increased consciousness and, therefore, can relate to God in a different way.

What this two-word phrase also identifies is our relation to God in an essential way. That is, by calling God “Father” we are acknowledging that we are of the same essence. My daughter has my genes and is made up of the same things that I am. We have matching DNA. Our basic reality or essence is the same. In the Old Testament, or as an infant, we do not recognize this. We cannot grasp the idea that this great, powerful being who gives us what he wants to give and not what we want to receive is of the same stuff as we are. But with increased consciousness comes increased awareness of what we are and what he is. We can recognize the imago Dei, the “in our likeness” that is within us from God. “Our Father” is not only said out of respect or out of love. It is also said out of identification — we are of the same essence as God. We share the same DNA.

A local church has a quote from Hafiz on their sign: “Little by little you will turn into God.” We do turn into our fathers. How many times have I done something or said something or caught a glimpse of myself and thought, “My God! My father does that! I’m turning into my father.” And this is the case with God, our Father. But it’s also the reality that we already are our father. Our DNA tells us that from the moment of conception. What appears to be a “turning into” is really nothing more than a “realizing that we already are.”

Experiencing the experience

Published
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Ken
on December 5, 2008
in bible and vedanta
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In thinking about my recent post on ritual, it occurred to me that my problem with ritual is that I’m intellectualizing it too much. I am trying to force onto the ritual a meaning which, when absent, leaves me empty. Instead, perhaps, I should be just experiencing the ritual experience — as I said in my post: Just for the hell of it.

Intellectual knowledge and experiential knowledge are two very different beasts. Carl Jung, when talking about using amplification in dream analysis (the process of pulling in collective symbols — mythology, religious, &c.) says that it cannot be done by head-knowledge but only by someone with long experience.

When I was a child, I had all the head knowledge about Christianity. I was the best at Bible drills, could memorize scripture, had all the right answers. But, I had no experience — my personal Christian life was in shambles. My intellectual knowledge allowed me to fool everyone but there was nothing really there.

In The Eight Upanishads it says:

Of these, the lower [knowledge] comprises the Rig Veda, Yajur Veda, Sama Veda, Atharva Veda, the science of pronunciation, &c., the code of rituals, grammar, etymology, metre, and astrology. Then there is the higher [knowledge] by which is realized the Immutable.

(What a great word to describe God: The Immutable.)

With the Bible as with the Upanishads, the real, higher meaning is not learnt from reading, studying the texts, memorizing, &c. The real meaning is learnt by practice, by experiencing God and not by reading about God. The intellectual part is all too simple and all too public and allows us to deceive others all too easily.

Circular or iterative reasoning?

Published
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Ken
on August 29, 2008
in bible, biblical interpretation and god
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I think that many, if not most, mainstream Christians would say that experience alone cannot tell us anything about God. We need to filter our experience through the Bible for it to be reliable and “true.” So, the Bible is the authoritative word on how we experience God and what we know about God. But, at the same time, the Bible is what it is because of who and what God is. So, the Bible tells us about God but God’s nature gives the Bible the authority to inform us about the God whose nature gives the Bible … Isn’t that a bit of the-chicken-n-the-egg reasoning?

But what to do to break this circular cycle? I think we need to iterate.

There are many “problems” that people struggle with. God’s actions do not always make sense to us. We don’t understand what happens in the world because it doesn’t fit with our understanding of God. The Bible has difficult passages because it seems to say two, or three or four, different things. It seems that most mainstream Christians just hunker down and hope that when they get to Heaven God will explain all. They take refuge in the fact of God’s love and omniscience and leave it all up to him. But most of the time, that doesn’t seem to provide much real comfort.

And this is where iteration enters the picture. If something doesn’t make sense then perhaps what we need to do is change something—iterate toward a more consistent solution. The problem is that we get so stuck in our current mindsets that we don’t even consider revising our basic assumptions. Our concept of God should not be static. Our handling of the Bible should not be the same today as it was yesterday. But these are too often not even considered to be variable and so we sit and spin and get no where.

And God saw that it was good … but

Published
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Ken
on July 4, 2008
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I thought I knew the creation story in the Bible. Now, I couldn’t tell you what was created on what day but I knew the basic order and knew when man and woman were created. It’s been a LONG time since I’ve read it but I thought I knew it.

Not so!

I reread it today and several things jumped out at me that I had never noticed.

First, in Genesis 1:31 God pronounced everything to be “very good” yet in Genesis 2:18 he says that something is “not good,” specifically, man’s being alone. What happened here? God says that it’s all good and then realizes something is a tad askew? He made two of every animal but only the human male and it took him a minute to realize he should have made a female human as well? That doesn’t seem very omniscient of him.

But there’s more. Look at Genesis 1:27 and here it sounds like God made male and female together, at the same time and in the same way. Both were made in the image of God. But that’s not the impression I get from Eve’s being created from Adam’s rib.

Now, I do not recall ever hearing a sermon on this and I do not know what the “party line” is but here is an explanation that makes sense to me. God did create man and woman together, in the same way and at the same time, just as with all the other animals. This is what he pronounced as “very good.” Then something happened that left Adam alone, which was “not good,” and so God created Eve.

Hmmmm. Does the name Lilith ring any bells?

Anyway, it seems that God’s first choice of creation method for woman did not work out so well so he chose an alternate method the second go round. If you look at how God addresses man and woman in Genesis 1 they seem to be equals — he says the same things to both. But apparently someone couldn’t handle all this equality and so Eve was made from Adam’s rib.

I know you think you understand what you heard me say …

Published
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Ken
on May 3, 2008
in bible, christianity and zen and the birds of appetite
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… but you don’t realize that what I said is not what I really meant. Language sure is a sneaky little bugger. A quote from Thomas Merton in Zen and the Birds of Appetite:

The language used by Zen is therefore in some sense an antilanguage, and the “logic” of Zen is a radical reversal of philosophical logic. The human dilemma of communication is that we cannot communicate ordinarily without words and signs, but even ordinary experience tends to be falsified by our habits of verbalization and rationalization. The convenient tools of language enable us to decide beforehand what we think things mean, and tempt us all to easily to see things only in a way that fits our logical preconceptions and our verbal formulas. Instead of seeing things and facts as they are we see them as reflections and verifications of the sentences we have previously made up in our minds. We quickly forget how to simply see things and substitute our words and our formulas for the things themselves, manipulating facts so that we see only what conveniently fits our prejudices. Zen uses language against itself to blast out these preconceptions and to destroy the specious “reality” in our minds so that we can see directly. Zen is saying, as Wittgenstein said, “Don’t think: Look!”

In light of this, think about the Bible as the inerrant, inspired, yada, yada, yada, Word of God. Feel free to fill in as many adjectives as you deem appropriate. The transfer from God to the original writers to the words printed in your KJV or NIV or NAS or 21CKJV may be perfect. But the transfer from the words on the page to your mind to what you say is definitely not. Our interpretation of the words is subject to the falsification that Merton discusses. Why do you think so many different people can get so many different interpretations from the same Bible?

As a child, I believed the same things my parents did. I was naturally influenced by the biases and rationalizations of my parents and those who taught me in the church and so I saw things in the world as they did. As I was not exposed to very much influence other than my parents and our church, my logical preconceptions and verbal formulas were the same as my parent’s. Hence, what fit nicely into their way of thinking also fit nicely into mine. Even though I struggled with those beliefs and even though I felt they didn’t “work” for me, I did not have the tools to change my habits and rationalizations and so I could not accept any other belief. I had to get to a point of desperation and throw everything away — telling everyone that I no longer believed anything anymore.

But even though I made this declaration, the beliefs still stuck with me and troubled me. I still had a very difficult time accepting any belief different from those with which I was raised — I still felt they were all “false.” But since I couldn’t go back to my old beliefs, I had no where to turn; I had nothing to believe. Eleven years after my denouncement, I was still trying to find common ground among different beliefs. Not between Islam or Buddhism and Christianity but between the Lutherans or Methodists or Episcopalians and the “real” Christians (i.e. how I was raised)

It took a long time and a large separation between me and my parents and the religion of my youth before I was able to step out of my preconceptions and look at things differently. And, at least for me, that separation was crucial. I needed the physical and emotional space to be there before I could relax my defenses, so to speak, and allow new ideas to seep in without immediately judging them from my old perspective.

One of the easiest ways to get stuck in the rut of “see[ing] things only in a way that fits our logical preconceptions and our verbal formulas” is to limit our exposure to new ideas and differing opinions. As a child, I only listened to preachers who agreed with the pastor of our church and I only read approved books, etc. All else was off limits because it was dangerous to expose ourselves to wrong ideas — at least ideas that we said were wrong because of our preconceptions. I would bet that many, if not most, of determinations of what was appropriate and what was not was made because someone else — someone trusted as a spiritual leader — said so. The books were not read first hand but were simply dismissed because so-and-so said it was evil. And so, we were constantly exposed to in-bred ideas and as a result, our minds atrophied and became inflexible which made it harder for us to entertain differing opinion. A vicious, downward spiral.

One solution is to do what Cliff Martin proposes in the comment thread to a post at OutsideTheBox: “Just as The God Delusion should be required reading for all believers, the McGrath’s wonderful little answer[, The Dawkins Delusion,] should be required reading for all atheists!!”

Did God forget to consult his omniscience?

Published
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Ken
on April 26, 2008
in bible and god
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In The Creation of Consciousness, Edinger talks about the “new myth” initiated by Jung with his book, Answer to Job.

On the basis of our emerging knowledge of the unconscious the traditional image of God has been enlarged. Traditionally God has been pictured as all-powerful and all-knowing. Divine Providence was seen as guiding all things according to the inscrutable but benevolent divine purpose. The extent of divine awareness did not receive much attention. The new myth enlarges the God-image by introducing explicitly the additional feature of the unconsciousness of God. His omnipotence, omniscience and divine purpose are not always known to Him. He needs man’s capacity to know Him in order to know Himself.

And I just realized that the rescuing of Lot from Sodom is an excellent example of this. Lot and his wife and two of his daughters were rescued because they were “righteous” in the eyes of God. But, look at what Lot’s family does immediately after being rescued. Lot’s wife immediately disobeys God’s command and turns to look at the burning cities and is turned into a pillar of salt. Both of Lot’s daughters get their father drunk, sleep with him, and bear sons. Furthermore, Lot’s two grandsons are the fathers of the Moabites and Ammonites. Now, God was not fond of either of these civilizations, to say the least. Neither of them were allowed to enter the assembly of the Lord (Deut 23:3). The Isrealites slaughtered the Moabites: they killed 10,000 “robust and valient men” (Judges 3:25) on one occasion and an untold number on another (2 Kings 3:24). Saul slaughtered the Ammonites and scattered them so that “no two of them were left together” (1 Sam 11:11). Jeremiah makes prophesies against both the Moabites and Ammonites.

So, God considered Lot and his family righteous but immediately after he saves them from destruction, they disobey a direct command and father two civilizations that are Israel’s mortal enemies and the cause of many Israelite deaths. This does not seem very consistent with an omniscient God.

What do you think? Why were Lot’s daughters saved only to sin and father civilizations that God hated?

Now that’s a REAL God

Published
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Ken
on January 14, 2008
in bible, carl jung, fear and god
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This quote from Just Genesis via a comment on Chris Tilling’s blog:

The silence was broken again, this time by a middle-aged man. “I’ll tell you the meaning this story has for me. I’ve decided that I and my family are looking for another church.”

“Why?” I asked in astonishment. “Why?”

“Because when I look at that God, the God of Abraham, I feel I’m near a real God, not the sort of dignified, businesslike, Rotary Club god we chatter about here on Sunday mornings. Abraham’s god could blow a man to bits, give and then take a child, ask for everything from a person and then want more. I want to know that God.”

If you read the rest of the post, you’ll see a classic example of an archetype at work. A Sunday School class views a movie about Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac and the reaction is unexpected, unfounded, and totally un-comprehended — all the tell-tale signs that something from the unconscious is rearing its ugly head.

But the man’s reaction I quote above is particularly interesting to me. This man essentially is longing for a return to the monster-God of the O.T. If he characterized any human with the same words, that human would be a merciless tyrant. But that’s what this man expects from a God. Why would someone long for the kind of God who “tests” people the way the Christian God “tested” Job? Or Abraham? Why regress so far into the past when we have the God of the N.T.? Is it because it is easier to follow the O.T. concept of God in the same way that it is easier for a toddler to obey his parents? The toddler, you see, has no relationship with his parents because there is not enough consciousness for a relationship. There is simply a list of rules to follow and a list of consequences if the rules are not followed, a.k.a. The Law. (Having just written that statement, I’m instantly reminded of The Island of Doctor Moreau where the “beasts” are reciting The Law.) There is less freedom and so we don’t have to be conscious in order to please that kind of God. Of course, we also don’t have much of a relationship with that kind of God — what relationship there is is simply awe and fear and trembling and worry that our sacrifices are not good enough. We’ve come so far in our relationship with God but that means it’s harder work and so some would rather go back to the way it was.

The psychic mediator

Published
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Ken
on December 18, 2007
in bible, god, quotes and religion
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According to the psychological standpoint man cannot get outside his own psyche. All experience is therefore psychic experience. This means that it is impossible, experientially, to distinguish between God and the God-image in the psyche.

Edward F. Edinger
The Creation of Consciousness: Jung’s Myth for Modern Man

The Bible, it seems to me, (and especially the O.T.) is all about how God relates to people. And it was recorded by those people to whom God was relating. So, we end up with several layers of mediation: God — absolute truth, unchanging, eternal — interacts with people who mediate this interaction through their psyches — including all their biases, prejudices, preconceptions — and then record this interaction. We then have other people (like you and me) reading about those interactions but we are mediating what we read through our own psyches — including all our biases, prejudices, preconceptions — to arrive at “God” which is really just the God-image in our own psyches (reflected from the God-image in the Biblical writer’s psyches). And some people have the nerve to say that this IS God.

Suppose my daughter, in a few years, starts writing about me in a journal. Then, 20 years later, you read this journal. How close will the picture you have of me be to the “real” me? Now think about someone reading this journal in 2000 or 4000 years! Unlike you, they will have almost nothing in common with my daughter — culturally, socially, technologically. How close will their picture of me be to the “real” me? For them to say that they know me, in any definition of the word, seems almost ludicrous.

 

Jesus for the modern man

Published
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Ken
on November 24, 2007
in bible, jesus, myth and rudolf bultmann
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Rudolf Bultmann in Jesus Christ and Mythology writes:

This raises in an acute form the question: what is the importance of the preaching of Jesus and of the preaching of the New Testament as a whole for modern man?

For modern man the mythological conception of the world, the conceptions of eschatology, of redeemer and of redemption, are over and done with. Is it possible to expect that we shall make a sacrifice of understanding, sacrificium intellectus, in order to accept what we cannot sincerely consider true—merely because such conceptions are suggested by the Bible?

Or ought we to pass over those sayings of the New Testament which contain such mythological conceptions and to select other sayings which are not such stumbling-blocks to modern man? In fact, the preaching of Jesus is not confined to eschatological sayings. He proclaimed also the will of God, which is God’s demand, the demand for the good. Jesus demands truthfulness and purity, readiness to sacrifice and to love. He demands that the whole man be obedient to God, and he protests against the delusion that one’s duty to God can be fulfilled by obeying certain external commandments. If the ethical demands of Jesus are stumbling-blocks to modern man, then it is to his selfish will, not to his understanding, that they are stumbling-blocks.

What follows from all this? Shall we retain the ethical preaching of Jesus and abandon his eschatological preaching? Shall we reduce his preaching of the Kingdom of God to the so-called social gospel? Or is there a third possibility? We must ask whether the eschatological preaching and the mythological sayings as a whole contain a still deeper meaning which is concealed under the cover of mythology. If that is so, let us abandon the mythological conceptions precisely because we want to retain their deeper meaning. This method of interpretation of the New Testament which tries to recover the deeper meaning behind the mythological conceptions I call de-mythologizing—an unsatisfactory word, to be sure. Its aim is not to eliminate the mythological statements but to interpret them. It is a method of hermeneutics.

. . .

To de-mythologize is to reject not Scripture or the Christian message as a whole, but the world-view of Scripture, which is the world-view of a past epoch, which all too often is retained in Christian dogmatics and in the preaching of the Church. To de-mythologize is to deny that the message of Scripture and of the Church is bound to an ancient world-view which is obsolete.

This is something about which I’ve been thinking lately: if the Bible is the timeless, eternal Word of a timeless and eternal God then how can it depend on a particular time or world view or world philosophy? It absolutely must be able to speak to me, right now, right here and to you, right then, right there. This is only common sense. Therefore, while figuring out the exact intent of each word based on the writer’s time, place, and current mindset may provide some insight into what the passage meant for the writer and the writer’s contemporary audience, it really has precious little insight for me because I, in my time and place and mindset, am so completely different than the target audience. And forcing me to think of the text as if I were living in the time of the author only causes un-rational, un-defensible beliefs that must be defended at all cost because they are too fragile to be intelligently discussed.

Of course, the major problem I see with this is the four letter word myth. We have a difficult time using the word myth when talking about the Bible or Jesus or God. I’m hoping to discuss myth in more detail later but for now all I’ll quote Bultmann again:

Myths speak about gods and demons as powers on which man knows himself to be dependent, powers whose favor he needs, powers whose wrath he fears. Myths express the knowledge that man is not master of the world and of his life, that the world within which he olives is full of riddles and mysteries and that human life also is full of riddles and mysteries. … Mythology expresses a certain understanding of human existence. … Mythology speaks about this power inadequately and insufficiently because it speaks about it as if it were a worldly power. … Myths give worldly objectivity to that which is unworldly.

So, myth does not mean false, untrue, naive, or a fairy tale—even though that is how we commonly think about myth in this age of science. Myth means that there is a deeper, esoteric meaning beyond the outer, exoteric meaning. It turns the words into symbols charged with inner meaning and gives them eternal life because the inner meaning is able to speak to all times and not just when the words were written. The problem is that we need to learn how to deal with myth again, recognize the mythological nature of the Bible, and “rework” the myth to fit our world. This does not, as Bultmann says, mean rewriting the Bible or rejecting the Bible. It means applying the symbols of the Bible to our day and age.

More later …