Unlocking Imaginal Religion — Part 8: Job, Jesus, & Jung
On Living Wholeness
Choosing to become conscious of the unconscious is choosing to be conscious of suffering. This is a highly responsible decision: it is the only way that this suffering can be met by the love, compassion and transformative imaginative power of waking consciousness. And it is the doorway to a life of ongoing inner Alchemy: the creative metamorphosis of the coarse, solid, rigid contents of the mind into the subtle, soulful and sacred perceptions of the imaginal.
Healing the Past, Energising the Now
The personal unconscious is filled with suffering that we have not yet felt, processed or healed. Events and experiences from the past, and also from past lifetimes, the emotional and energetic “residue” of which has not been consciously felt. Beneath this, the collective psyche of humanity is filled with untold oceans of suffering: all the wars, genocides, massacres, famines and horrors of our past are stored in the collective unconscious and are, with the right conditions, accessible to consciousness. Creating those conditions, showing up for emotional healing processes, becomes part of the path, so that we can go through the doorways and retrieve the diamonds hidden in the unconscious depths.
The pain locked up in the unconscious past is the “prima materia” or “solid chaos” which, when felt, understood and melted down in the furnace of the alchemical heart, is transformed into gold. Into wisdom, beauty, life and soul.
It is as if our consciousness is diffuse, fuzzy and “spread out” over many different moments of time, our life-energy snagged on all manner of past events, such that it is not clearly focussed and directed into our creative embodied flow that is happening right NOW. As we continue to process and heal the past, our energy, attention and awareness all begin to arrive, become more subtle, and intensify into an elevated and expanded embodied consciousness. The “locked-up” energy of previously unconscious feelings can now flow into our conscious waking bodies, hearts and minds, bringing ever-more aliveness and intelligence. As a result we become increasingly able to live and create within a “minimised now” (Callahan).
Choosing to contact — that is, to become conscious of — the suffering locked up in past events is healing. It allows energy that has long been stuck, frozen in survival-mode patterns to loosen, liquidise and move. This newfound movement of energy always evolutionary. It furthers the progressive incarnation of the deity, the ongoing embodiment of divine love in ever-more free, conscious and creative human beings. This process can only continue when we make the conscious choice to feel the pain, and to allow this pain to fuel our ongoing evolution and transformation, drawing us deeper and deeper into divine embodiment and into the sublime intelligence of the living cosmos.
Really, it’s about allowing the pain to break open our self-centered ego-structure, surrendering to a collaborative relationship with the cosmic intelligence — and with our fellow embodied souls. This breaking open is the necessary death that allows the births a new form of ego: the matured and refined individuality of the radically responsible adult.
We are learning that the universe (or divine mind) did not create individuals in order to then dissolve and obliterate them back into oneness, but to refine and evolve these individuals over many lifetimes, to reintegrate them into oneness while retaining their soul’s unique individuality, and through this process to birth countless new realisations of the embodied — and infinite — divine. The next part will investigate this idea in detail. For now, we need to suffer a little more. Sorry, folks. But as we will see, suffering is the integral element that makes evolution and individuation possible in the first place!
And it’s time to go mythic on this process.
We now turn to a profound and ancient archetypal story that perfectly symbolises this process (of awakening through consciousness of pain and suffering): the Biblical tale of Job.
Job lived in the Land of Uz (somewhere in modern-day Syria or Jordan, it isn’t clear precisely). After a relatively blessed and comfortable life, he was plunged (by God, so the story goes) into immense and constant suffering. His wife, children, and health were taken from him. He lived in pain, disease and desperation, cursing the day of his birth. He did not curse his God, however. He understood that his suffering was God’s will for him.
Jung’s great insight into this archetypal story is expressed in the dense and powerful little book Answer to Job, one of the last books he wrote and the only one he said he would not rewrite, if given the chance.
The insight was this: in the depths of suffering, Job attained consciousness of his God (Yahweh)’s injustice, immorality, and violence against humanity.
Yahweh, as a God-image of the collective unconscious and creator of the universe, was recognised through Job’s awareness to contain massive unconsciousness and amorality. How else could he let Job suffer so deeply?
Job’s conscious confrontation with Yahweh prompted that same God (the collective unconscious) to respond with a compensatory function: an embodied revelation of psyche’s infinitely compassionate, generous and loving side. This revelation was later delivered in the life and love of Jesus: a full-blown incarnation of the light and a living embodiment of God’s compassion for humanity.
It is both possible to read this Bible story with the understanding that Yahweh, as God-image, represents the (collective) unconscious with which Job is interfacing (or becoming conscious of) and against whose violence he protests and makes a stand.
Yahweh’s contradictory nature is explained by the unconscious’ containment of all psychic opposites (such as good and evil). Job’s own consciousness of his personal affects (his diseases, anxieties, emotions and neuroses) which were caused by Yahweh’s violence, combined with Job’s integrity and perseverence in finding meaning in his abject suffering, transformed the blindness and unconsciousness of Yahweh: Yahweh was raised to higher level of consciousness and morality, the result of which was Yahweh’s compassionate and decidedly moral act of incarnating in and through Jesus, an act of love and compassion for all humanity.
This interpretation allows us to read the Bible not as a literal historical document but as a symbolic, archetypal and imaginal tapestry expressing the evolution and transformation of human consciousness, through the act of consciously interfacing with the collective unconscious (thereby transforming its contents, as well as the structure of the person, the conscious ego, doing the interfacing).
Job’s personal transformation (his consciousness of suffering and his devotional ability to keep his heart open to that suffering, seeing it as an ultimately meaningful and necessary part of divine wholeness) is the intervention that precipitated the the evolution of the collective unconscious (and its God-image) from the aloof and amoral Yahweh to the embodied compassion of Jesus. Not bad for one depressed guy with boils all over his body.
When Jung came along two thousand years later, his own conscious confrontation with the collective unconscious (and the immense suffering tangled up therein), as documented in his Red Book, precipitated a further evolutionary shift the God-image, from Jesus Christ to the infinite polytheistic, imaginal, religious landscape of the psyche that is accessible to — and expressed by — every single human being. Jung included. It was Jung’s consciousness of his own soul’s identity with the infinite potentiality of the psyche that opened the door for an experience of divine embodiment: a revelation of himself and really of everything in material reality, as images of the divine.
This is not to say that countless other souls have not been confronting and becoming conscious of the collective unconscious — of their Gods — in their own way, and thereby arriving at newfound and ever-evolving images — and incarnations — of the boundless divine psyche. Indeed, this is the quest that each and every human being is invited to undertake, so that each can arrive at their own soul’s utterly unique expression and understanding of divinity, in and through the imaginal perceptual fabric and creative love-explosion that is their own embodied human life!
Jung describes Yahweh, in his wrath and totalitarianism, as a being like an “archaic king”. It’s obvious from the horrors of history that the human unconscious can also have the qualities of a vengeful archaic king. This is evidenced by countless individuals and collectives (the tyrants, dictators and war-mongerers of the world) who are identified very much with unconscious powers, living in service to shadow principles like hatred, manipulation, control and violence. Studying these archaic kings (through contemporary figures like Vladimir Putin, for example) can shed light on our own, harder to detect, inner archaic king: the coercive, vengeful, and violent one who acts — or tries to act — through us at times when we are threatened, dissociated and unaware.
Seeing the archaic king outside can help us to see the archaic king within. And in the same way, seeing our own inner tyrant enables us to better discern and distinguish the violent, self-serving and exploitative behaviours of others. We learn to see the unconsciousness of collective unconscious! Of course, when this happens, it is no longer unconscious at all! The suffering of the archaic king (within or without) can now touch our heart, likely accompanied by a strong affect such as sadness or rage. It these intense energies are powerful enough to change the structure of the ego. Grief at the suffering of the mad king and the people he hurts; the rage of the warrior’s NO! to continuing such violence: these conscious feelings can act like an alchemical fire, liquidising and thus allowing reconnection (a religion) of the rigid ego-structure with the unconscious motif (the archaic king, in this case). As a result, both the conscious person and the collective unconscious are forever changed, updated and evolved.
You can read my piece “Vladimir Putin and the Redemption of Evil”, as well as Paul Levy’s incredible book “Dispelling Wetiko” for further explorations of this topic.
The archaic king is a key example of a figure who dwells in the unconscious, but can be brought to light and raised to higher morality and responsibility through the transformative intervention of loving consciousness. In turn, the person or individuality becomes more responsible and enters into a richer relationship with her God.
Consciousness is the catalyst for the transformation of the psyche, both in its personal and transpersonal aspects. One cannot change without the other.
Jungian scholar Edward Edinger’s comment on Job’s story is insightful:
“By knowledge of God’s inner antinomy [containment of paradoxical opposites like good and evil], Job attains a divine numinosity [a conscious transcendence and integration of these opposites]. If Job’s knowledge, his consciousness, attains a divine numinosity, that means he’s become a partner in Yahweh’s divinity.”
By recognising his God as a Complexio Oppositorium, Job himself is consciously initiated into the status — or identity — of a Complexio Oppositorium. He becomes a a living imaginal expression of psyche’s wholeness – in human form!
Edinger continues: “The realization that is being expressed here is that of the ego/Self partnership; their partnership in creating consciousness. It is that realization which conveys meaning to Job’s experience and amounts to an experience of justification. He is justified, through his awareness that his experience is part of the ego/Self partnership which provides him with a role in the divine drama”.
A role in the divine drama.
An essential role.
And every single human being is participating in this way, whether they are conscious of it or not. Completely essential and completely responsible for the whole play. That is why we cannot abandon any being, not least the crazed archaic kings, the unconscious cosmic creators like Yahweh, or the forgotten and wretched creatures of the earth. And it is why welcoming the life and suffering of these beings into our hearts contributes to the ongoing process of universal healing, reintegration and individuation. Everyone has a piece of the puzzle.
Again that line from Richard Rohr: “When you realise that your wound is a sacred wound, your story becomes a sacred story”.
It’s just a matter of time, time spent with our wounds, until we begin to sense that each and every wound is a gift, and a offering of divine generosity. All suffering is noble. This is exactly what Job discovered by maintaining his dignity and devotion through deepest suffering; as a result, that suffering was transmuted into higher consciousness and embodied compassion. Our wounds, and the wounds of the collective, can all come to be known as vital opportunities for transformation and evolution, into ever-vaster circles of consciousness, compassion and unity. It is just a matter of time. And the transformation all rests upon our conscious choice to not reject our suffering but to open our hearts to it. Only then can the alchemy take place.
Our consciousness of suffering can restore meaning and divinity to that suffering. Suffering which, in the obscurity of the unconscious, is meaningless, and has not (yet) contributed to furthering the beauty and harmony of the cosmic play.
We have discovered that we can become aware of, and integrate into consciousness, the darkness in, and suffering of, God (the collective unconscious). In turn, we may become painfully aware of the darkness and suffering in ourselves. Expressing this pain in the prayers, tears and cries of our heart, the collective becomes aware of this, too. We are learning that the living human and the living cosmos exist in a state of constant communication and exchange. The universe and the infinite divine psyche are always listening. And what is human awareness but a listening to the song of the world, the mind of God?
The love of the transpersonal psyche manifests now as a steadfast non-interference which allows us to choose the path of our own individuation, such that our freedom and learning are not compromised. The God(s) will not intervene until we truly long, in the depths of our hearts, for transformation. Until we ask for and choose that transformation. Inseparable as we are, this divine intervention is no other than our own conscious decision for change!
We have been living unconscious of this dynamic for millenia. Goddess has been waiting for us for billions of years, suffering unspeakably through the evolution of the cosmos into its current state. Now is the time that we may awaken to the life of the world as the life of a divine creative intelligence who loves us unspeakably, who wishes to evolve with us and through us, and who longs for our creative contribution to the play, such that our conscious interventions into materiality might catalyse countless breakthroughs into ever-more sublime and soulful living.
Job’s story is therefore one of mutual, co-dependent transformation between self and God (or ego and Self, in Jungian terminology).
More precisely, it is a co-dependent transformation of self-image and God-image. This leads us to an important transformation principle which Edinger spells out very clearly:
“To the extent that an individual finds the transpersonal meaning in the painful experience of the unconscious, to that extent he is contributing to the transformation of the God-image.”
Finding meaning in a painful experience is holding that experience in love and awareness with the full intensity of our feelings, processing that experience until the energy locked up in past events (that is, in the collective unconscious) can flow into the present and open up new possibilities for soulmaking, beautymaking, and connection. The past event which was previously deemed abhorrent and meaningless has now contributed to a heart-opening aliveness; an imaginal sensibility of soulfulness which will inevitably carry the quality of “meaningfulness”. See “An Intro to Soulmaking” for the additional 27 qualities of imaginal perception(s).
Healing, Big and Small
As a species we are currently undergoing a collective “dark night of the soul” in which the vast ocean of painful experiences stored in the collective unconscious is being contacted, confronted and processed. We are thereby coming to find meaning in the millenia of horrific and violent human experiences, seeing that every single moment of every single human life is a contribution to the Great Learning process that is underway. Our conscious confrontations with the past are redeeming the soul of humanity and in turn bringing ever-more meaning, energy and aliveness into the present. Our expanded consciousness makes us increasingly open to perception of, and encounter with, the imaginal realm. We are more aware of and open to connection with our God-image. Our embodied presence is increasingly infused with perceptions of soulfulness and sacredness. Through this process we are both individuating and contributing to the ongoing evolution of the God-image, of the psyche, of the living cosmos (and yes, they are the same thing, seen from different perspectives).
Interestingly, we may note that we are individuating at both the personal and the collective levels. It is not just the individual human soul that is learning and finessing itself over many experiences and lifetimes, but also the collective soul of humanity, and indeed of the entire living planet.
“All will be healed” Jesus once told me in a waking vision (or particularly religious daydream). He was looking out over a vast field of hellish scenes, dark and twisted and fiery, stretching all the way to the horizon and beyond. He didn’t keel over or fall into despair. He simply turned to us, a little ragged band of people following him, and with an expression of such kindness, of such profound and unstoppable LOVE, told us that the impossible is possible: all will be healed. The words have stayed with me, and return in times of hardship.
It is indeed a foundational principle of Tantric Buddhism that if all is energy, and all energies are eventually transformed, then all phenomena of the psyche (all events, experiences, memories, selves, images, demons) will ultimately be transformed, and therefore all suffering will be touched by the radiant love-awareness that is the boundless heart of the buddha (the primordial nature of all living beings).
Knowing this, that all will be healed, we may take up the warrior’s task of facing our past, and the past of humanity: going into the underworld, facing the demons, and bringing back our hero’s gold to the village. That gold is choice: to live differently. To not repeat the patterns of the past; to stop feeding the unconscious dynamics of violence and exploitation and separation.
There is an unrealised meaning — or meaningfulness — that hides latent within every event of the past, no matter how painful.
We find the meaning when we feel the pain. The pain breaks down our conscious ego-identity structure, we expand to embrace ever-wider levels of ourselves and the collective. In our new liquidised state, we gain access to new ways of seeing and relating to suffering. We reclaim our responsibility for past events and for the life-energy that we left there, and can access perceptions of soulfulness and sacredness where before there was no such possibility. The more pain, the more energy, the more choice we have in the present, and so the more meaning we can unlock, the more beauty we can create. It’s no secret that people’s biggest traumas often come to form the biggest doorways to finding their soul’s unique work, purpose or desire. Of course we don’t want to go there. But at some point we realise that, in order to be as fully present and alive as we long to be, we have to go there in order to reclaim lost and abandoned parts of ourselves, and with so much love, to bring those parts (and their vital intelligence and life-energy) into the present moment, into our embodied presence, such that we live, connect and create within ever-vaster fields of awareness, responsibility, and compassion.
Working With God
The unconscious psyche, as it expresses itself in both human and non-processes, causes us living humans untold suffering, pain and emotional torment. That’s no secret! And it’s the exact reason that so many people conclude that God must be malevolent, sadistic — or at the least, uncaring and indifferent. This conclusion leads many people to turn their backs on the light and loving side of God (the unconscious) and thus to disconnect from the imaginal guidance that is continually being offered them, and indeed from the infinite divine love that is continually holding them and expressing itself through/as the song of the world. What a tragedy!
The alternative is to meet God (the collective unconscious) and with full consciousness of suffering and pain, to accept and embrace this suffering as opportunity for healing and transformation; a necessary part of God’s progressive incarnation and embodied evolution in(to) human form.
This conscious confrontation transforms God, the collective unconscious, as if we have reached our hands down into the depths of the collective psyche and lifted up a black pulsing mass of suffering, out and above the surface where it is visible — and feelable — in the light of consciousness. Removing this psychic-energetic mass from the field of the collective unconscious changes the shape of the collective unconscious psyche. It leaves a hole, a vacuum, an opening to the infinite void (of infinite potential, you got it) which can now be filled with love and creativity. Genuine creation can then occur, here and now (the only time and place that it can ever happen), whereas before it was blocked by the stagnant energetic residue of past, unprocessed, forgotten events. We regain access to the infinite — to our own boundless nature and creative potentiality — at the rate at which we liberate the obscuring mental and emotional formations locked up in past events, allowing us to ARRIVE, with ever more awareness and presence, in the now.
The compensation for this metamorphosis is the that the structure of our waking consciousness must also change shape. To change shape, it must be liquidised by the intensity and emotionality of the encounter with the unconscious material (or memory). The energy that was previously unconscious is now free to move and evolve within the intentionality, love and light of a conscious responsible self. Old identities die, only to be reshaped by the ancient forces of nature — the elemental, archetypal, mythical, and religious — into all manner of radiant, free, wild and inexpressibly NEW identities, identities which were impossible until this precise moment on the cosmic world-stage of the hyperconnected globalised post-tragic metamodern magical-realist zeitgeist. Oweeee! Let’s fly!
The Art of Dying
Death is the necessary precondition for a rebirth — or resurrection — in a new identity, one that is larger and richer (for it can now consciously contain the psychic material that was previously confined to the unconscious). Our consciousness expands and our ego-structure is less rigid. Our self-image is more congruent with the infinite wholeness of the God-image. We are increasingly conscious of the identity of all our identities with psyche, the boundless source of all possible identities! As such, no identity is true (or final, or ultimate). And yet no identity is false, either… no identity is not a sacred and irrefutable revelation of the divine creative psyche. We are free as actors in an infinite play to experiment, and refine and finesse our character-roles — without limit. To craft speeches of untold eloquence, dances of the most sublime beauty, songs of raucous and bawdy celebration!
A conscious being — someone like Job, or Jung, or you — is necessary to initiate the alchemical act of transforming the unconscious and unlocking its latent energy and power. This is the intentional transformation of the God-image, and the surrender of the human person to be transformed by the encounters with numinous imaginal persons (with their God, with the collective unconscious).
Transformation of the God-image occurs in precise tandem with transformation of the Self-image, given that the two are essentially and practically indistinguishable. The whole, boundless, infinite Self is an image of God, and vice versa — they’re simply different labels for the same phenomena (which Jung called psyche).
We begin to gain skill, courage and tenacity in this exercise of consciously connecting to and working with the contents of the collective unconscious.
This is no other than the practice of the art of dying. Consciously. Because every time we connect to the contents of the unconscious, whether personal or collective, some element of our current conscious structure (our ego, personality, identity) will be challenged, pushed and possibly totally broken down. The new energy entering into consciousness will interact with the energy-structure of our current self(-image) and change its shape — or dissolve it completely. In turn, our God having an effect on us.
As Edinger reminds us, “the unconscious is the source of transpersonal wisdom, support and guidance. It’s the pathway to our being, to our wholeness.”.
Neither “us acting on God” nor “God acting on us” is the “primary” action (the one that causes the effect). Rather the two actions co-exist as a bi-unity in a cyclical and eternally co-dependent nature. This is the nature of our constant and endless exchange (or conversation) with the Beloved Other. And it is a necessary condition for our embodied incarnation as an individual soul, for otherwise there could not be an “outside world” (a living, intelligent cosmos) or other freely individuating souls for us to relate to, interact and create with.
All creation is co-creation. You effect me, and I effect you. It’s kind of like a contract that we enter into, as co-dependent beings, in order to even experience ourselves as beings, or individuals. The demands of this contract (that we are responsible for all beings, that our every action is felt by all beings, and that the actions of every other being registers in our awareness) can be so intense that we choose to forget and deny the contract. But the undeniable and irrefutable evidence of our signature, signed in blood, is that we are here on earth living in a body dependent on countless other bodies, and on the cosmic body of the Goddess.
The Cross
Richard Rohr describes the cross as a symbol of “divine solidarity with every act of suffering since the beginning of time”. It is a symbol which can live through us if we allow (or want) it to, thereby acting as an imaginal portal for us to connect with our own latent potential for embodying this universal solidarity. Allowing this God-image of divine compassion to really touch and open our hearts, our soul responds accordingly by updating our self-image (our conscious embodied identity) to include and express this quality of compassion. No doubt our old identity will be melted or possibly exploded by that process.
Jesus showed a willingness to face, forgive and be in solidarity with the very depths of psyche’s darkness. In the Bible he is often casting out demons and confronting the devil, and eventually makes an intentional and conscious descent into hell: to the depths of the collective unconscious. Opening his heart to those depths and the untold suffering entangled within them, he became more whole than ever; he demonstrated the universality of his compassion and, crucially, his human embodiment of that compassion. Interestingly, he could only descend to those depths after he had died on the cross, as if the devotional surrender of his physical body was the necessary act of love that gave him access to the hell-realms as a forgiver, healer and redeemer.
As such, Jesus’ life can be read as a symbolic union of opposites (a Complexio Oppositorium) which countless people evidently find to be an instructive guide — or mirror — to their own inner psychic wholeness and divine transcendent-immanent nature. If you forget that Jesus chose to go down into the underworld out of pure compassion, and enter into conscious loving relationship with the beings who dwell there, then you may well stick with a distorted, incomplete and one-sided image of the all-good Jesus who lives in opposition to the forces of darkness (Satan, the devil, the antichrist, not to mention those who condemned and executed him). But Jesus wasn’t against the lost, dark and evil beings of the world (whether human or supernatural). He was steadfastly with and for all of them, praying that their confusion would pass and that they too would come to bathe in the love and radiance of the divine.
Christ is indeed a symbol of one who chose to become conscious of the unconscious, who entered into intentional suffering for the benefit of all people, and indeed all beings, throughout time and space. He died and was reborn in the process. And this personal transformation was a living expression of the transpersonal transformation (of God) effected by the previous conscious intervention of Job!
This is the ‘Christ Mystery’ into which all people are invited to partake, once we realise that our awareness of the world’s suffering is exactly what is needed to begin the process of healing that suffering – and the unique way that healing wants to unfold through us. It is a process which will naturally move and unfold through us as we go about our lives in a more compassionate and caring way. But we have to choose it. That is an essential part of remembering and declaring our responsibility for and solidarity with all living beings. It is itself an alchemical act which transforms the identities we hold that we hiding from our universality, responsibility and all-embracing compassionate nature. And what is that but allowing God’s boundless love to live through us?
Jesus came to “reconcile all things in himself, everything in heaven and everything on Earth”, including the depth and extent of unconscious evil. We are each called to do the same, only in a completely unique way. That is our quest, our path, our soul’s journey to wholeness.
The Complexio Oppositorium can be only be symbolised in God-images. It cannot be explained, described or communicated due to its paradoxical supra-rational nature, by which it contains all opposites, both psychic and logical. Communing with a God-image raises consciousness from the binary logic of “either/or” into four-valued logic and the ‘freedom of all possible views’.
This has to be lived and experienced; symbols and explanations only point the way. What it amounts to is a liberation of the self from lack of insight into the fabricated nature of all views. This lack of insight manifests as clinging or attachment, and reification: taking things and perspectives to be real and true, rather than simply ways of seeing. If we can recognise that even ‘self’ or ‘I am’ is an empty view, we can transcend self to the inconceivable space of wholeness which includes “I am”, and “I am not”. Both are views, both are valid.
We thus realise that we are neither real, unreal, nor both, nor neither. The same applies to others, the world, and to God. We realise that we are completely indefinable and incomprehensible — and this amounts to a limitless freedom to employ any view that we wish! The imaginal dance of embodied perception continues but now we are fully conscious of its emptiness and therefore its utterly miraculous, magical unfathomable, and divine nature!
Jesus and the Goddess
Here in Ixtlan de Juarez, a lush green mountain town in south-west Mexico, perched in the deep green hills of Oaxaca state’s “Sierra Norte” of Oaxaca, I’ve been going to evening church as part of my research. Catholic mass. I turn up late and sit at the back, like any self-respecting spiritual anarchist. I arrive just in time to hear a few heartwarming Spanish songs, and for the hot chocolate and piece of bread (to be dipped in the chocolate) at the end. Then we mill about outside under the black sky, the moon just visible through the soft cloud cover, kids running about and laughing and the adults huddling together and laughing, though less piercingly than the shrieking kiddos. It has been an excellent exercise in testing the authenticity of my imaginal religiosity and my relationship to an imaginal Goddess, divine creative intelligence of the universe. Can it stand, can it be alive, in the face of an extremely rigid and repetitive religious ritual? This is what I wrote in my notebook:
I saw her. Yesterday night, in the church, where the little group of local elders were singing their heartfelt prayers to Jesus. I saw her and she was the church: the physical structure holding the whole scene. The walls, the sky, the ground, the vastness of space all around. I felt the aliveness and all-embracing LOVE of that space, our living cosmos. I felt sad, because nobody in this town sees her, or prays to her. Not anymore. So I did. I went outside. I bowed to the moon. I felt the creative intelligence permeating the entire physical universe, an intelligence flowing through my body and every body around me, every moment. I felt the purity of the hearts of the praying singing elders, praying so sincerely that they were weeping with sadness and weeping with gratitude at the generosity of their God and Christ. I saw Her, and she saw me. She sees everything. She sees through every pair of eyes, senses through every soul, loves through every heart. This living universe, this blossoming world, is the revelation of her love and I feel such joy at the triumph of this world, that it is even here at all, and when I drop my petty resentments there is just overflowing gratitude for and devotion to the ongoing evolution of ALL OF IT and ALL OF US… onwards and onwards into ever-deeper beauty, harmony and refinement. We are her dream, her loves, her children. And she is ours, is she not?
It was beautiful to allow this to come through, quite naturally and spontaneously. Because I have been hanging out, praying to, and contemplating this Goddess for some time now. And yet, part of me wishes that a heartfelt soulmaking connection with Jesus as God-image was more accessible. It simply appears that right now, given my prejudices and the cultural distortions present in the Church, it’s not an open channel. And that’s okay! I know he loves me all the same. And I know that he knows that he is not an inch more – or less – divine than any person on the entire earth. That is the divine equality that he embodied so perfectly, and which the church, in its denunciation of sinners and the impure flesh, has so tragically disconnected from.
As Chris Bache says,
“Jesus’ story is one of divine incarnation, of this process [of individuation and divine incarnation] brought to fruition. But he was not unique or special. He was a “prototype”, a living example of what is possible, even destined, for all humanity.”
Indeed, Jesus the Nazarene is a shining example of a gloriously, beautifully, and powerfully individuated consciousness seamlessly integrated with the universal consciousness of oneness shared by all beings.
Another evening, in that same church, things were not nearly so comforting or ecstatic:
Today I can see this space from the outside, as a gameworld, totally constructed on unconscious stories and beliefs. Totally groundless, because anyone can believe anything about anything! Looking at it all, the priest and the robes and the pews and the saints and the cross, I can see that it is pretty fucking absurd, really. And so is any gameworld that doesn’t know it’s a gameworld, any construct that doesn’t know it’s a construct. That doesn’t appreciate and celebrate its own absurdity! That’s why we have to become conscious of our creative participation in our religiosity, in our culture, in the contexts we create together. That’s why we need to see and realise emptiness: only then can all form can be seen as non-real, imaginal and divine.
Today I can see that the church is highly pernicious and manipulative. It is low drama on a truly epic scale. Victims look for their rescuers in Jesus, in God the Father, and in the Holy Spirit, in the spiritual authority of the priest, rather than assuming responsibility for sourcing divine love, clarity and power within themselves.
This gameworld is far from harmless. It has killed MILLIONS of people and destroyed beautiful natural cultures and cosmologies and languages around the world. The cruel irony is that an authentic religion serving universal unconditional love got hijacked as a vehicle for the shadow: for patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism, for endless low drama. And maybe this is because it was all bullshit, all along, only it didn’t know it was: Christianity didn’t know it was a story, didn’t know that Jesus and Yahweh are empty images… and no good Christian would admit that because of the FEAR of being responsible for all of it, of being an equal to Jesus, a living embodiment of the infinite divine, not a victim to anything or anyone, not needing to be rescued by any man or deity, rapturously recreating life and the universe every moment.
Any religion that takes a God-image to be REAL or EXCLUSIVE (the only true image of God) will fail to see it’s own absurdity, non-reality, emptiness. This arrogance produces the over-sincerity (“we know the truth, you don’t”) that gives rise to the utter exploitative horror show of modernist religion. It’s no coincidence that Christian missionaries have, century after century, laid the foundation for colonialist expansion into indigenous lands.
In fierce reaction to this violence we see postmodern the LACK of sincerity for anything (except deconstructing and destroying modernism).
Being for nothing and against everything creates the postmodern void of meaning; which is really a lack of taking responsiblity for sourcing meaning oneself, lack of willingness to create, to imagine, to take a stand for something that you know is constructed and empty simply because you love it and it brings you alive, is divine to your heart, and so you create it and protect it without any rational bullshit justification for doing so – just the fierce, post-tragic innocence of your free and boundless soul.
And the only way to do THAT is within the always-evolving, always-alive, always-open-ended metamodern attitude of IRONIC SINCERITY. Viewed from this yo-yo movement, or oscillation, between the earnest utopian visions of modernism and the critical ironic analysis and self-reflexivity of postmodernism, the universe is both deadly serious, and a cosmic joke! It is both dense and weightless, opaque and transparent simultaneously. The joke is at once cruel, horrific and boundlessly, lovingly good-humoured. It’s up to us how to receive it, and we need both sides to be whole. Responsibility is key. If it is cruel, we made it so. We let the violence happen. If it is glorious and blissful, this is the manifestation and reflection of our own loving praising heart.
And we come fully alive and authentic, within this paradoxical complexio oppositorium. For now we can freely be as reverent as we are irreverent, rational as we are irrational, grounded as we are groundless!
Well-located by our conceptual maps and reference points as we are hopelessly lost in an infinite void, now we can really get going with this “magical realism” thing. For it is a void of total, boundless, inconceivable possibility!
Those postmoderns thought that they were just gonna sit there forever, staring into the void and feeling sick! Perhaps writing the occasional book to kill time – and pay the bills. Why didn’t they realise that they are completely unified with that infinite void, and that the void is so throughly void that it appears and dances as infinite forms and beings?
We proceed (with tentative boldness) knowing that “NO STORY IS TRUE”, and going ahead to collaboratively write and live mythical, archetypal, earth-bound stories ANYWAY, in constant reverence and thanksgiving to the sheer miracle that it is possible at all.
No identity, no explanation, no God-image is real or true… and so we enter the dance between fun and horror, tragedy and comedy, theatre and reality, fiction and fact, creative play and serious work — like all good art! And I have to say that the “serious work” element, by which I mean serious and courageous confrontation with the human underworld, the shadow psyche, the global transpersonal matrix of unconscious violence and the intelligence(s) that direct it — is dangerously under-practiced right now. If we actually want to build a globally responsible and ecological culture that is not parasitic to the earth or the spirits that support it (and I do want this). That work is the subject of other essays — and experiments. For now it is enough to say that the PAIN of evolution has been massively underestimated and overlooked as a necessary DRIVER of ongoing transformation, and survival, and beauty-making. Modern culture’s bullshit belief that “PAIN IS BAD”, might just kill us all, keeping us numb to the pain that we could be using to wake up, evolve, and become responsible incarnated beings. Pain can be welcomed. It has to be. It will be.
Love hurts, but it’s worth it.
Jung’s Great Innovation: Psyche as God-image
We now turn to Jung and the astounding prowess of his discovery that Psyche can – and perhaps has to be – related to as a God-image.
Jung was an avid and devoted student of the symbology of Christian tradition, and he embarked on a lifelong religious quest to find an authentic God-image within that tradition. He was keenly aware of the biases within the existing Christian symbology that prevented the emergence of a Complexio Oppositorium, at least within his own fragmented psyche. Longing as he did to connect to the divine through Christian symbology, this weighed heavily on his soul. The courage and authenticity, really the agonising necessity of inquiry led him to make profound discoveries about the nature of Christian God-imagery.
In incarnating as Jesus, the good aspect of God (the unconscious) was symbolised in a pure form. The crystal clear compassion of the embodied and crucified Christ is visible evidence of God’s goodness and love. To account for this, the opposing archetype of the unconscious, the archetype of God’s evil, cruelty and injustive, had also to be symbolised — and incarnated — in the figure of the anti-christ or Satan, the “accuser”.
A one-sided God-image gives rise to a one-sided self-image, as we have seen. It prevents alchemical transformation of the darkness by the light of consciousness. Acts of violence remain invisible to us, residing within our (personal and collective) unconscious, allowing them to continue unchallenged.
Jung sought to resolve this split in the God-image and thus in the self(-image) of modern humanity, and he did this by equating God with the unconscious or with the psyche in its wholeness.
Psyche is a God-image which contains the infinite totality of psychic phenomena, encompassing all contradictory and opposing aspects of human, cosmos, and transcendent beyondness: a bonafide Complexio Oppositorium.
Psyche, who may or may not be personified, is a symbol for a wholeness which holds everything conceivable and inconceivable within her fold. She is an image-of-all-images, representing the totality of all infinite possibilities for perception. Truly a Goddess worthy of praise!
The emergence of this symbol (which is at once a God-image and a Self-image) within the soul results in a liberation of the ego-self who is trapped in a state of clinging and identification to certain psychic poles, while rejecting and disidentifying with others. This ego is delivered to a consciousness of its divine wholeness and the infinite possibilities for its ongoing transformation, evolution and individuation. It is truly a transformed ego: a divine individuality that has hatched from its chrysalis of initial self-development to consciously embrace its infinite selfless nature.
The Ever-Evolving God-Image
Personal consciousness reflects — is an image of — the collective unconscious, and vice versa. We are each tasked with attuning to the God-image that shapes our perception (even if we are athiest!), witnessing the evolution of our entire experiential reality from fragmentation towards wholeness. This allows the self(-image) to similarly evolve towards wholeness (the union of psychic opposites). It can equally be said that God (Love) is drawing us from fragmentation into wholeness. We had to become fragmented in order to incarnate and attain a separate autonomous free self, so there isn’t anything wrong or problematic happening here. It’s rather that we are still learning how to be consciously fragmented, uniquely and richly individuated, and universally whole at the same time! This is a painful process, as we continually make mistakes, hurting ourselves and one another when disconnected from our oneness; and also knowing the pain of clinging to oneness, like a baby to its life-giving mother, in fear of really casting out on our own to create a wildly independent and authentic individuality.
We will likely begin this journey towards wholeness with fragmented God-images, like a child with a set broken toys in need of love and repair, biased as we are towards images of power, strength, light, and love and even cruelty and male dominance (Old testament style). Our God-and-Self-images must expand to encompass and embrace the full extent of psychic darkness. Evil, Satan or Wetiko (as it is known by various Native American peoples) must find his home again in the divine community; wholeness is not possible without his presence. And, just maybe, welcoming him home with boundless compassion may turn out to be a transformative event for everyone involved. Are you ready to prepare that dinner table?
In our journey towards wholeness and harmony, we inevitably move towards a God-image (and in turn, a Self-image) that encompasses the full psychic extent of light and dark, good and evil, being and nonbeing, form and formlessness… we allow all of these opposites to come into relation with one another and thus to exist in harmony. Infinite compassion meets infinite suffering, and the each gain meaning — and transcendence — through this encounter.
The two are now known to be inseparable, not really two at all. Not one, either! And again that dear old paradox we might call “love”. Hello, old friend.
The Exclusivity Principle and Low Drama
Now we approach the necessity of recognising and claiming our radical responsibility for all of creation, if we are to rise, humbly and in universal unconditional service, to our primordially-ordained status as living revelations of the infinite creative divine.
We are nearly there, friends. I end this article by covering three primary obstacles to consciously recognising our radical responsibility: the Exclusivity Principle, Low Drama, and the Two Perennial mistakes.
The Achilles’ heel of Christianity, as I see it, is what I call the “Exclusivity Principle”. This is the belief that this man, Jesus Christ, is more divine than you are. Taken to an extreme in some Christian belief systems, the Exclusivity Principle manifests as the belief that Jesus is the only divine human who ever lived! THE Son of God. Which of course blocks the notion that we are children of God, let alone the living walking breathing incarnations of God him/herself.
So what do you do, if you believe in this Exclusivity? You give your centre to this man, so he will rescue you from your victimhood as a non-divine (and probably downright sinful) human being. It’s the logical way forward, if he really is the the only divine being in the universe. But that’s just a belief, totally ungrounded. It’s as ungrounded as the belief that all humans are divine, yes. But if we operate within the context of the groundlessness of all beliefs, we can let go the necessity to be “correct” and proceed with crafting and entertaining the ways of seeing that allow us to live most authentically and soulfully.
The insight that conventional Christianity is based on a victim-rescuer relationship likewise exposes almost all conventional guru/prophet/teacher/saint/God-following religion as downright Low Drama(s) by which incarnated souls attempt to avoid responsibility for being living incarnations (or avatars) of the creator — which is of course the ultimate responsibility!
In the Low Drama triangle, a victim seeks a rescuer who will save them from a persecutor. Each of these roles is unconsciously played out by an individual in order to avoid assuming responsibility for creating one’s life. It is quite an insight that all conventional is playing out such unconscious relational dynamics.
Indeed the very flavour of most modern Christianity is the exact situation of “poor me”, the suffering victim, pleading with a transcendent Father God (or his Son, the only certified redeemer in town) for rescue and salvation from earthly suffering (which is perpetrated by the devil, other people, or even that same God’s more malicious actions).
The conscious creator plays no such games and is responsible for everything and everyone, without exception. This is radical responsibility, a context that is borne out of a continually growing consciousness of our universal interdependence. Ever-expanding circles of conscious awareness (for more and more beings, or elements of creation) correspond to ever-expanding circles of responsibility. And it is a context that will inevitably blast through the confines of what Chris Bache calls “the two perennial mistakes”: the neglect of nature, earth and the biosphere and the neglect of the feminine, both in human women and as a cosmic archetypal principle, or intelligence. Returning to the ecological roots, the forest womb of humanity, to the divine mother who birthed us; there is a healing here that the collective psyche is longing for. To reconvene with the Goddess, and know and enjoy ourselves as angelic rays of her infinite divine love. An image worth dying for?
Radical responsibility is the foundation for the future of Imaginal Religion and for a newly emerging global culture in which every individual soul grows into their full empowerment, infinite creativity and conscious responsibility for the entirety of creation.
In this way, we each come to consciously express and embody the love, awareness and infinite creative power of the creator. “God created everything” becomes an equivalent statement to “we created ourselves”. We chose all of this, working together in sacred collaboration as an infinite divine multiplicity, so seamlessly connected as to form an infinite divine oneness. And if we aren’t 100% happy with the state of our creation, and by looking at the earth today I’ll wager that this is the case, then our radical authorship and participation in everything without exception means that the door is eternally open for ongoing re-creation. Of anything. Anyone. Anytime!
Onwards!
Check back in soon for the final (promise!) instalment of this imaginal-intellectual odyssey. If you’ve followed me this far — wow, thank you, I’m so grateful to your commitment to this inquiry! I would love to hear from you. Do leave a comment if you feel like it. What’s unfolding in that vast and magical soul of yours?
Love, Will
