#19 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 5-God, Ground and Mystics
GOD AS GROUND
Jung, Teilhard, and Tillich all experienced the divine immanence as a universal power underlying all that is. Experience of the ground is the experience of God. What is called “mystical union with God” can be translated as the ground of the individual ego in union with the ground of all that is and thus with the divine. It is the highest level of consciousness of the individual before the One who dwells within, that is, the One whose form has no knowable boundaries, who encompasses the whole person on all sides, fathomless as the infinite potential of light and as vast as the heavens themselves.
Mystical theology is a theology of the ground. Saint Augustine was the first depth psychologist who spoke of God as the Ground of being: “Yet all the time you were more inward than my inmost self.” Francis of Assisi described his experience of God in a simple phrase: “My God and my All” (Deus meus et omnia). Even more striking is the saying of Catherine of Genoa: “My Me is God, nor do I recognize any other Me except my God.”
Augustine had a similar question: “Where are You, O God?” He goes on to say, “I was looking without but You were within.” The universality of the mystical quest across religious traditions undergirds the depth of the psyche in its search for wholeness and meaning. The meaning of ground ranges from simply the earth to that which is most individual, one’s essence.
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The term “essence,” refers to that point where the divine and human coincide in human nature and eternity. Meister Eckhart describes a “breakthrough,” which he experienced an absolute identity of himself with the divine in the Godhead:
“The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing and one love.”
The experience he describes is one of unitive consciousness, whereby both self and God are dissolved in an abyss wholly stripped of all form and activity, yet one from which all form and activity flow. He writes: “Here God’s ground is my ground, and my ground is God’s ground. I and God are one.” Jung identifies Eckhart’s breakthrough as a moment when ego and unconscious, the human and divine, attain an identity beyond distinction.
Eckhart’s spirituality is what Jung called, “individuation,” the full flowering of the human person which is made possible by the actualization of divinity or incarnation through the reconciliation of opposites. Jung sees the religious dimension of human personality as essential to self-actualization and human fulfillment. To paraphrase Irenaeus of Lyons: The vitality of God is the human person consciously alive.
A GOD FOR SCIENCE AND RELIGION
Religion concerns relationship with ultimate reality—divine being—but it is precisely this point that stifles the dialogue between science and religion. Science describes the impersonal laws of nature while religion speaks of a personal and transcendent God. What could science and religion possibly have in common?
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Tillich focused on the human passion for meaning, namely, what gives fire to our lives. Rising up from human awareness of finitude is an awareness of the infinite. The background of everything that exists is another existence. Openness is the law of existence. God symbolizes the openness of life to more life. God is the ungraspable openness of life.
Divinity is not a super Being (that is, a “sky God”) but the excess of life itself, experienced as a personal invitation to the fullness of life. We constantly dwell in this depth without focusing on it. It is the milieu rather than the object of our experience. Everything exists in God and God exists in all things.
IS GOD PERSONAL?
The 20th century discoveries of the new science and depth psychology cannot be ignored or dismissed. Without them, theology will stumble into the future. Like Jung and Tillich, Teilhard realized that we need a renewed sense of the depth of matter, otherwise, the earth will continue to be plundered and the human species will be torn apart by war and violence.
Teilhard noted that the God of scholasticism, forged out of Greek philosophy, no longer speaks to the world of modern science. God has become too small to nourish in us the interest to live on a higher plane. The pace of scientific knowledge has outstripped our spiritual growth.
Teilhard felt that the world is searching for a God proportionate to the dimensions of the new universe. He combined insights from science with faith in the God of Jesus the Christ:
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- a God as wide as the universe and as warm as the human heart;
- a God who no longer “drapes” the world but a God who is the vitalizing center of a universe in movement.
Thomas M. King in Teilhard’s Mysticism of Knowing described Teilhard’s God as a God of matter:
“God is not found through opposition to matter (anti-matter) or independent of matter (extra-matter) but through matter (trans-matter).”
We take hold of God in the finite; God is sensed as “rising” or “emerging” from the depths of physical evolution, born not in the heart of matter but as the heart of matter. For Teilhard, God is rising up in and through evolution.
Evolution toward greater unity rests on the involvement of God in creation. The world is coming to be because God is coming to be, and God is coming to be because the world is coming to be. The complementarity of the created (matter) and the uncreated (the numinous) means that the two terms are brought together, each in its own way, and have an equal need both to exist in them-selves and to be combined with each other.
The two terms—God and world—are intertwined in such a way that the emergence of new being is the emergence of a new “cosmotheandric” wholeness, where cosmos (world), theos (God), and anthropos (human) are entangled or entwined. Nature’s dynamic becoming is God’s dynamic becoming; as nature becomes something new, God becomes new.
Teilhard wrote: “All around us and within our own selves, God is in process of ‘changing,’ as a result of the coincidence of his magnetic power and our own thought.”
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God is creating the world, and the world is creating God by giving birth to God (theogenesis).
GOD IS LOVE
If God is the numinous depth of all that is, we might think of the numinous (sacred/spiritual) depth as the core energy of love. Teilhard posited love as the core energy of the universe, the energy of the whole in evolution. Love is not sentiment or emotion alone. Rather, love is the affinity of being with being. It is the dynamic energy of all life and embraces all the forms successively adopted by organized matter.
If there were no internal inclination for unitive life, even at the basic level of molecules, it would be physically impossible for love to appear higher up, in this human form. It is love that draws together and unites.
Teilhard reflected that:
LOVE is the most powerful and still most unknown energy in the world.
Only love has the power of moving us toward something more
creative and unified.
The ultimate source of love is within and ahead of the evolutionary process.
LOVE is not something but a
supreme Someone, the Great Presence, moving evolution toward the fullness
of conscious life.
LOVE is the inexplicable core energy
that gives us identity and deep purpose. We do not train our minds to attain that which is impersonal; we train our minds to attain that which is most deeply personal, for only personal love can make us whole.
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The ultimate object of LOVE can only
be a personal God.
DIVINE LOVE
is an inexhaustible energy deep within the field of our infinite potential of Self.
When we listen to the depth of our hearts, we awaken to our soul’s desire,
break through our fears, and embrace the adventure of life.
LOVE
transforms because LOVE unites.
LOVE
pierces through the veil of divine mystery and enters into personal union
with the ground of life. What begins in this life endures for all eternity,
for God’s LOVE is an everlasting LOVE!
(Jer 31:3)
#19 ~ For Private Circulation Only September 2024
The above input is from Chapter 5 of the Précis by Helene O’Sullivan, MM, of Ilia Delio’s The Not Yet God: Carl Jung, Teilhard de Chardin and the Relational Whole, Published 2023 by Orbis Books, Maryknoll, NY 10545.