#17 Awakening Consciousness

The Not-Yet God:

Carl Jung, Teilhard de Chardin and the Relational Whole by Ilia Delio, OSF

Précis by Helene O’Sullivan, MM

Chapter 3

CARL JUNG AND THE  COSMIC PSYCHE

Teilhard was influenced by Jung’s ideas, and Jung knew Teilhard’s work as well. The more I read Jung and Teilhard together, the more I am convinced that the paradigm shift needed to rekindle the religious spirit and the Christian spirit requires the integration of psychology, theology, cosmology, and quantum physics as we understand these sciences within the process of evolution.  Diogo Valadas Ponte and Lothar Schaefer expand this idea by linking Jung’s ideas to quantum reality and to David Bohm’s implicate order:

Jung’s teaching is more than psychology:  it is a form of spirituality …. By “spirituality” we mean a view of the world that accepts the numinous (filled with a sense of the presence of divinity) at the foundation of the cosmic order. 

In the same way, Quantum Physics is more than physics: it is a new form of mysticism, which suggests the inter-connectedness of all things and beings and the connections of our minds with a cosmic heart. 

Jung’s abiding sense of a radical immanence led him to see divinity as approaching consciousness from no other source than one’s own inner being. 

= 2 =

In recovering a wider sense of the holy, humanity gives birth to a new myth, the co-redemption of the divine and human in one single and historically prolonged process. To state this in brief: we are God-makers. 

This shocking idea startles us. But Jung makes a bold move that corresponds to the insights of quantum physics: the mind must connect to its deepest self if we are to be made whole.  What does Jung mean by the “psyche”? It is not a question easily answered. His conception of “psyche” is the immensity of consciousness and uncon-sciousness, the realm of the Self: 

“The psyche, as a reflection of the world and the human, is a thing of such infinite complexity that it can be observed and studied from a great many sides. Jung’s philosophy rests on the goal of the unconscious becoming progressively conscious, as the core meaning of personal and collective history.”

Jung’s relentless pursuit of the inner universe emerged from a felt need to reconcile body and soul. He felt that Christianity had become a “dead system,” imprisoned in isolated dogmatic certitudes; religion had become a matter of the head and not of the total person. Teilhard similarly lamented “Christianity” no longer stimulates the need to worship for the modern mind, but rather paralyzes it.

  THE PROBLEM OF THE SKY GOD

Jung’s exploration of the human psyche was based on the premise that religion is a natural part of the process of individuation, of becoming a person, that is, a fully integrated and relational being. 

= 3 =

This process of personal formation challenged the traditional notion of God as a transcendent wholly other being who sustains and governs all life. 

The notion of finding oneself in God rather than in oneself is not an invitation to leave oneself behind by focusing attention on a transcendent being.  Rather, it is to enter into the unreconciled self, the field of the mind, to see what we are being called to, as well as to face our fears, doubts, and anxieties.   

Jim Marion distills supernatural theology into plain talk by describing a “sky God.” The sky God is the “supernatural” God, dwelling outside this world and intervening in the world periodically to accomplish the divine will. In Marion’s view, many Christians have become stuck on the level of mythic consciousness ~ a level of adolescent consciousness that functions within the narrow limits of law and order. 

It is the level of what we might call binary thinking. God is seen as a being who lives in the sky (heaven), a (male) being separate from humans and all creation, a being who, in response to prayer, supernaturally inter-venes in the human condition.  At the level of mythic consciousness, one has not made the conceptual leap from a lawful God to true universality.   

= 4 =

Personal talk of God is universalized; in other words, the only real God is my God. The mythic conception of God has almost completely painted Christianity’s under-standing of Jesus and his teachings. 

Jesus has been primarily understood not as a human being who realized his own divinity but as a god or divine being who was sent down from the sky. This god died on the cross to appease his Creator, the sky God, for the sins of humanity, supposedly incurred by the first humans, Adam and Eve, in the Garden of Eden. 

Marion notes that “Christians go to church on Sunday as if entering a time warp, putting the modern scientific worldview aside for an hour or two to submit to the old mythic worldview. Then they emerge to take up once again the scientific worldview that guides their lives and professions during the week.” 

Marion’s caricature of the “sky God” reflects a fundamental concern Jung and Teilhard shared.   If religion is a cosmic and personal phenomenon and God symbolizes the interior depth of consciousness, then how do we still preach and teach a sky God?

As our consciousness evolves up the ladder of consciousness, we become less and less egocentric and more and more universally compassionate. An infant (archaic consciousness) has what Freud called “primary narcissism.” It is not that the infant is selfish in the moral sense, it is just that the infant can recognize only itself, at first not even distinguishing itself from its mother. 

At the magical level, one identifies with one’s family and blood relatives, one’s tribe. At the mythic level, 

one identifies with one’s ethnic group, race, nationality, or religious sect. 

= 5 =

Thus, the mythic level is ethnocentric or sociocentric. Each level of consciousness broadens one’s concern, compassion, and identification until finally, at the causal or Christ Consciousness level, one no longer identifies with the human personality at all but with Spirit in whom resides the entirety of creation … the highest levels of human consciousness ~ the causal (or Christ) consciousness and nondual consciousness.

THE NOTION OF TRANSCENDENCE

Jung makes us aware of the unity that extends in nature from objects to perceiving minds. Thus, our individual consciousnesses also have the capacity to merge beyond time and space into “a single continuous stream of life,” something which Teilhard also realized. Transcendence is no longer above or ontologically beyond us; transcendence is the openness of incomplete matter or matter in evolution toward wholeness. 

Transcendence is the stretching of matter into the future, the orientation of matter toward the absolute wholeness of life, toward God Omega. Transcendence has to do not with God’s transcendence 

but with matter’s transcendence; divine transcendence is the transcendence of matter. 

Matter is never at rest; rather, it is restless and always yearning for something more, because matter is open to divinity. We are so conditioned by dualism that it is difficult for us to think that matter itself is open to divine life: however, the quantum world invites us to consider anew both God and matter. 

= 6 =

Quantum physics suggests that matter is transcendent by nature because matter reflects mind and mind has no limits. If mind is the matrix of consciousness as Teilhard claims, then God is the name of transcendent wholeness of mind or consciousness. There is no transcendence without immanence and no immanence without transcendence; there is no God without matter and no matter without God. God and matter form a complementary whole.The transcendence of matter invites a new model of God-world relationship 

that allows Jung’s insight to be situated within the paradigm of relational holism, with its underlying fundamental concept of entanglement. Entanglement holds everything together  in a relational whole. The language of entanglement describes the God-matter or God-world relationship because it is the most modern symbol for conveying the mystery of matter in its divine potential.