Psyche and the Sacred

Spirituality Beyond Religion

Lionel Corbett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367820503
• eBook ISBN: 9781000031263
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book presents an approach to spirituality based on direct personal experience of the sacred. Using the language and insights of depth psychology, Corbett outlines the intimate relationship between spiritual experience and the psychology of the individual, unveiling the seamless continuity between the personal and transpersonal dimensions of the psyche. His discussion runs the gamut of spiritual concerns, from the problem of evil to the riddle of pain and suffering. Drawing upon his psychotherapeutic practice as well as on the experiences of characters from our religious heritage, Corbett explores the various portals through which the sacred presents itself to us: dreams, visions, nature, the body, relationships, psychopathology, and creative work. Referring extensively to Jung's writings on religion, but also to contemporary psychoanalytic theory, Corbett gives form to the new spirituality that is emerging alongside the world's great religious traditions. For those seeking alternative forms of spirituality beyond the Judeo-Christian tradition, this volume will be a useful guide on the journey.

Part One
Meeting The Mystery: Developing a Personal Spirituality

Chapter One
The Numinosum: Direct Experience of the Sacred

INTRODUCTION: WHAT IS SACRED EXPERIENCE?

This chapter describes a variety of ways in which we may experience the sacred, many of which do not conform to traditional Judeo-Christian expectations. We all have moments in life when we know we are touched by a force that is larger than ourselves, something very real that transcends our experience of the ordinary world. Such encounters are much more common than we have been led to believe. Consider the experience of a woman who was gathering flowers when suddenly:

I looked at the large bunches we had gathered with growing amazement at their brightness. … A wonderful light shone out from every little petal and flower, and the whole was a blaze of splendor. I trembled with rapture—it was a “burning bush.” It cannot be described. The flowers looked like gems or stars … so clear and transparent, so still and intense, a subtle living glow … what a moment that was! I thrill at the thought of it.¹

This woman was given an experience of the sacred quite different from the traditional images of the divine with which she was raised. She had been uncomfortable in her Church all her life, because the Biblical God worshipped there seemed to have no connection to her profound feelings for nature. As a child she felt like a wicked skeptic, all the time hiding a deep vein of sadness from her family. She knew that something was missing in her life because she could not reach the depths of her own nature. She yearned for something more, like a creature that had outgrown its shell yet could not escape from it. Eventually, exhausted by her search, during a period of surrender, she was confronted with experiences of the sacred irrupting as a holy Presence pervading nature. She was enrapt in the fragrance of flowers, and describes the experience as follows:

The pleasure I felt deepened into rapture; I was thrilled through and through, and was just beginning to wonder at it when deep within me a veil, or curtain, suddenly parted, and I became aware that the flowers were alive and conscious. … The feeling that came to me with the vision was indescribable.²

This experience filled her with “unspeakable awe.” She had never been satisfied with the traditional images of God with which she had grown up, but here was the real thing. The crucified Christ and the sky Father of the Hebrew Bible did not reflect her personal experience of the sacred. However, her experiences of nature gave her a sense of an authentic spiritual ground. The power of an experience such as this is overwhelming and convincing.

Most of us do not expect to encounter the holy in our gardens. Traditional religions want us to experience it instead through prescribed rituals and prayers. Yet this woman knew that this was an experience of the holy because of the special feelings it produced. In his 1917 book, The Idea of the Holy,³ Rudolf Otto used the word “numinous”⁴ to describe this unique quality of the encounter with the sacred. Otto felt that the word “holy” had lost its original meaning and had come to indicate merely a feeling of moral self-righteousness. He pointed out that direct contact with the sacred produces a particular type of experience that forms the basis of all religion. He described this experience using the Latin phrase mysterium tremendum et fascinans, a mystery that is at once tremendous and fascinating, and thus produces the sense that we have been addressed by what he called the “wholly Other.”⁵ We feel stunned, astonished, and filled with wonder because we have been addressed by something uncanny, not of our ordinary world, something very difficult to put into words. We may be cowed by the experience because its sheer force overpowers us, making us feel very small. Or we may feel entranced, captivated, and transported. Contact with the numinosum (whatever it is that produces the numinous experience) may also produce a profound sense of union or oneness with the world and with other people. At such times we may feel unworthy, or perhaps blessed. Another possible reaction is the realization that much of what we have worried about is actually trivial. We are fascinated by our contact with the numinosum because it stimulates a kind of spiritual desire within us, a longing for the holy and the promise of love and peace that it holds out. If we were not too terrified by it, we long to experience it again. The crucial point is that experiences of the sacred may occur in novel ways that do not correspond to the expectations of traditional religions.

Our religious traditions have used stories such as those of Moses and St. Paul to illustrate how the divine can be experienced directly in a way that permanently changes the person who has the experience. While tending sheep, Moses is drawn by the sight of a bush that is burning but is not consumed by the flames (Ex. 3:2-6). He then hears the voice of God speaking to him out of the bush. On the road to Damascus, Paul sees a blinding light and hears Jesus say, “Why do you persecute me?” (Acts 9:1-9). This numinous experience produces a radical change in Paul—he stops persecuting Christians and becomes an apostle of Christ. However, numinous experiences are not confined to special people. They may happen to anyone at any time, and they are more common than is generally acknowledged.⁶ There are various vehicles or portals through which they may be expressed.

THE NUMINOSUM IN DREAMS

Personal experience of the sacred does not depend on doctrine, dogma, or sacred texts, and it may actually contradict the authority of organized religion. For example, Father Tom had been a traditional priest for many years, although never quite happy with the Church. During a period in which he was questioning his vocation, he had the following numinous dream:

I am Melchizedek. A radiant, blue image of the Venus of Willendorf looms over me. The Goddess is five times larger than I am. I am holding a chalice up to her left breast, and milk is flowing into the chalice. I am deeply aware that I am in the presence of something intensely holy.

This numinous dream had an electric effect on Father Tom. Since he was a Biblical scholar, he knew that Melchizedek was the high priest who blessed Abraham.⁷ According to tradition, Melchizedek became a priest by divine appointment, long before Moses’ brother Aaron was appointed high priest for the Israelites wandering in the wilderness; his exact origins are unknown, but his name means “King of Righteousness.” In the dream, the dreamer is given this name as a title, as if to reassure him that he need not worry about his vocation because the priesthood he belongs to is of a truly ancient line—one could say that his priestly vocation came from the soul, not from the Church.

A dream such as this carries its own authority because of its emotional power. Father Tom realized that he had not been happy in the Church because it did not sufficiently recognize the feminine aspect of the divine. The dream tells him that the milk of the Goddess—her nourishment— is sacramental to him. He realized that he had been trying to force-fit his spirituality into the Church’s official container, but in fact what was truly sacred to him was highly personal. The dream tells him that the divine appears to him in a feminine form that is much older than the God-images of the Bible. The Venus of Willendorf is one of the oldest religious images known to us, dating back to about 20, 000 B.C.E., when the Goddess was understood to be the source of life. Clearly, this dream does not fit with traditional Church teaching. But it is typical for numinous experiences to disregard traditional norms, especially when the experience is relevant only to the concerns of a particular individual. Numinous experience allows us to discover our authentic spirituality by giving us a personal symbol of the sacred, in contrast to collective symbols such as the cross.

In this case, the numinosum appeared by means of a dream. According to Jung, such a dream does not arise from the personal levels of the mind. The psyche can be thought of as analogous to an iceberg. The visible tip of the iceberg represents the personal field of consciousness that we call the ego, or the sense of “me.” Below that is the personal unconscious, which consists of experiences that are unique to the individual, such as events from childhood that are too painful or traumatic to recall. Deeper still, a transpersonal or archetypal level of consciousness links us all. Jung called this level the collective unconscious or the autonomous psyche. However, it is important to immediately note that the personal and the transpersonal aspects of the psyche do not exist in discrete layers, but are intimately and inextricably intertwined. (See Chapter 2 for a fuller discussion of the structure of the psyche.)

Jung theorized that numinous dreams, such as Father Tom’s, arise from the autonomous psyche. Father Tom’s dream is then the modern equivalent of the dreams that Biblical writers believed were sent by God. Examples are Joseph’s dream that Mary had conceived by the Holy Spirit (Matt. 1:20) and the dream that told Joseph to flee to Egypt because King Herod was about to destroy the baby Jesus (Matt. 2:13). The notion of the dream as divinely created for the dreamer has faded within the Judeo-Christian tradition,⁸ but numinous dreams still occur with astonishing regularity. They give us the impression of a larger Intelligence that has its own message for the dreamer.

I hope it is clear, in both this dream and in the examples that follow, that numinous experience is often specifically relevant to the psychology of the individual who experiences it. Such specificity, although striking, is not necessarily proof that the experience arises from a transpersonal dimension of the psyche, since it can be argued that the personal psyche could produce the necessary imagery in an attempt at self-healing. A prior spiritual commitment might make us interpret a numinous event in terms of contact with the transcendent, while people who do not have a religious outlook on life might see such an event purely as one’s own inner voice, a manifestation of the personal unconscious.⁹ However, every aspect of the psyche contains both personal and transpersonal elements, and a rigid separation between them is impossible. It is therefore not surprising that a numinous experience would contain features of both. To argue that numinous experience arises purely from within one’s own psyche makes an artificial distinction that ignores Jung’s insistence that an element of the divine is located deep within our subjectivity. For Jung, unlike for Rudolf Otto, the divine is not wholly Other, because there is no sharp distinction between a transcendent divinity and what Jung refers to as the Self, an innate image of the divine. This level, which is the core of our being, is the ultimate source of numinous experience.

Given that a debate exists about the extent to which a numinous experience provides adequate reason for believing in a transcendent realm, it seems that the choice of whether to accept a spiritual or a non-spiritual understanding of numinous experience depends on which of these explanations feels most in keeping with one’s own psychology. My personal commitment is to agree with Otto and Jung¹⁰ that spontaneous numinous experience is a real seat of faith. Such experience feels as if it arises from the transpersonal unconscious, which is the reason Jung claims that the psyche has an “authentic religious function.”¹¹ Here we must bear in mind that we do not know the nature of the unconscious; this word only means that aspect of the psyche that is unknown to us.

THE HEALING EFFECT OF THE NUMINOSUM

Numinous experiences often have a healing effect.¹² The following experience happened to Rebecca, a woman who had suffered an extremely bleak, abusive childhood in which she was often neglected and hungry. As a result, she was tempted to lose faith and give up on life—in her words, to be “small and hard and rageful.” In the midst of a period of questioning the meaning of what had happened to her, this numinous vision irrupted into her life:

One night, when the moon was dark and my bedroom lay in inky blackness, I sensed a presence in the corner of the room. I was afraid. I knew I was not dreaming. The presence grew and grew, until, pulsating, it filled the entire room, throbbing within the confining walls. The whole room seemed to tilt, as if accommodating itself to another dimension. I lay in terror, with my eyes tightly closed. A voice, deep and gentle, said, “Love; the whole thing is love.” Slowly the energy ebbed from the room, leaving me in paralyzed terror in the darkness.

Although Rebecca’s felt experience was one of fear, she reported that the event had “called me back to life,” and to the challenge of discovering what “love” means. This is a good example of the way in which a numinous experience can affect one’s behavior in everyday life. It is of course not new to stress the importance of love. However, when a teaching about love is given directly to someone from such an emotionally deprived background in the form of a numinous encounter, its impact is enormous. It is through this kind of experience that we develop an authentic spirituality.

In contemporary society, numinous encounters such as Rebecca’s and Father Tom’s are often considered to be hysterical, the product of an overheated imagination, or frankly insane.¹³ Because of this societal prejudice, people are reluctant to speak of them, so we really do not know how common they are. Many people have told me that it was years before they could share their numinous experience with another person, because they were afraid they would be disbelieved or ridiculed for holding on to something that was to them precious and holy.

Although numinous experiences may come to us with no preparation, they can also be consciously invited by intense ascetic practices. In the Bible, long periods of isolation and fasting typically precede the appearance of the numinosum. Think of Moses on Mt. Sinai, fasting for 40 days before receiving the Ten Commandments (Ex. 34:28), and Jesus fasting for 40 days in the wilderness before his encounter with Satan (Matt. 4:1-11). It seems that severe deprivation or exhaustion can provide an opening that allows the numinosum to overwhelm our everyday consciousness and irrupt into our awareness. Numinous experiences may also occur during an illness—the sacred does not appear only to healthy people. Starvation or high fever may produce visionary experiences, which materialistic thinking would dismiss as merely the result of a disordered brain. Yet it is equally possible that serious illness and overwhelming stress can render the brain incapable of sustaining ordinary consciousness, with the result that the transpersonal dimension has a better opportunity to get through to us.

The feelings of awe, dread, and amazement that accompany a numinous experience are important not simply because they help us to identify the experience as sacred. These emotions tell us that the experience has been embodied. Emotions are felt in the body as a result of the action of the autonomic nervous system. They make the heart beat faster, make us pale, and produce muscle tension and sweating. Our hair may stand on end, and a variety of hormones may be secreted. A powerful emotional reaction provokes the response of the whole organism. William James, the great scholar of religious experience, also emphasizes feeling rather than concepts when discussing the essence of religious experience. James thought that theological formulas are secondary to the primacy of feelings,¹⁴ and he realized that feelings “are genuine perceptions of truth.”¹⁵ That is exactly why we stress the emotional quality of experience of the sacred. We know an experience is numinous not only by its content but also by the way our bodies respond to it.

Sometimes a numinous experience does take a specifically Christian form, in which case the Christian tradition is still alive for that individual. A man was walking down a dark passage when suddenly

… a light shone on the wall of the passage with a cross clearly displayed, as though intense sunlight was coming through a window with the cross casting an intense shadow. There was in fact no window or source of light to account for what I saw. The curious factor to me was that although in those days I was nervous of the dark and very impressionable, I had a curious feeling of comfort and a deep feeling of intense emotion.¹⁶

This vision presents a Christian message, confirming the validity of this tradition for the man who experienced it, since it contains the uniquely Christian symbol of the cross and the typically Christian imagery of light and darkness.

THE NUMINOSUM EXPERIENCED IN NATURE

The following is a typically numinous experience of the natural world:

At the foot of our garden was a very old large pear tree, which at the time wa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I—Meeting the Mystery: Developing a Personal Spirituality
• Part II—Through Psyche’s Lens: A Depth-Psychological Approach to Spiritual Questions
• Notes
• Index