All faith is somewhat idolatrous because it depends on a psychic image. Psychologically faith is our connection, what psycho-analysis calls a cathexis, to an internal object. The energy that is holding your psyche together may be coming through your image of yourself. In other words your faith may be in your self-image. If that’s where you’re getting your energy and that’s pulling you together and enabling you to stand against the destructive forces in your life, then it’s working somewhat. Good.
American biologist and evolutionary theorist, Bret Weinstein’s trenchant critique of Dawkins’ view of religion as a “mind virus”. I take Weinstein’s view of religion as an evolutionary adaptation to be generally supportive of phenomenological approaches such as I am attempting here.
No, I wish to examine that which particular individuals have come to conclude about God and religion as that relates to the behaviors they choose from day to day as that relates to what they imagine the fate of “I” to be after they die.
And given how the lives individuals live around the globe can vary in many extraordinarily profound ways, what on earth would it even mean to “objectify” their conflicting accounts of God and/or religion?
Okay, let’s examine this in the context of human history. Countless people have either been indoctrinated as children to embody the one “true religion”, or they took to their own paths and came to conclude that the one “true religion” was their own. And, so far, historically, that has engendered a lot of paths: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_r … traditions
Now, how about you? What are the odds that the spiritual path that you are on “here and now” is indeed the one true path.
Or, instead, is the belief that there is one true path of more importance to the religious objectivists?
Their own is just what it happens to be.
As for the OP…
…let’s bring that down to earth and explore the idea of “wholeness” by intertwining it into a particular context where we might come upon conflicting points of view regarding that which is of most interest to me: the existential relationship between morality and immortality.
What might be wholly understood and communicated here.
Read my signature line. The approach to religion which you take over and over again is essentially off-topic as far as this thread is concerned. I’m not interested in getting into a dispute with you.
Note to others:
What does this tell you about his own “general description intellectual contraption” approach to wholeness?
Probably not the same thing it tells me. 
Not to worry: I’m outta here.
Iambiguous. To me wholeness is at least a mental image and an ideal. Symbols of wholeness in world mythology, dreams and art are evidence that it is more than just me who sees it that way. But my approach is phenomenological. I don’t make absolute claims to ultimate knowledge of morality or the afterlife which is what you say you’re are interested in.
A pyramid is a three-dimensional quaternal mandala and symbol of psychological integration and individuation.
In a pyramid the center is also the peak the highest place.
Jung was committed to the quarternio and double quarternio structure of the human Self. He believed that human preoccupation with the four-sided figures reflected the structural reality of the collective unconscious. Recall how in his book psychological types he explains the four functions of intuition, sensation, thinking and feeling. He represented the totality of the archetypal self including the conscious and the unconscious as an octahedron which is essentially one pyramid on top of another, the peaks facing in opposite directions.
It’s important to not try to become whole in one quadrant and neglect the other three. Figure out where you are weakest and start working on connecting with that part of yourself.
All healing comes through the numinous, the encounter with the sacred. Ordinary people are not going to make it through this time.
At least? Until you take the mental image and the ideal and situate them out in a world where there are conflicting moral and political assessments of “wholeness”, they remain [for me] just mental images and ideals.
What symbols relating to what human interactions in what dreams or works of art? And if you don’t make claims “to ultimate knowledge of morality or the afterlife” then how would you describe wholeness in particular contexts in which morality and the afterlife are clearly relevant?
My claims revolve around the components raised in the arguments I make in my signature threads. Thus I am always interested to how others react to them. And how they have come to understand their own “I” differently in regard to “morality here and now and immortality there and then”.
Wholeness there.
OK. No problem. Think of what I’m doing here however you like or not at all. Your mental images and ideals are unique and directly experienced only by you. My approach is based on archetypal psychology and involves becoming more aware of one’s own internal imagery. If it doesn’t work for you, I’m sorry.
See the link below for a description of some symbols of wholeness and some contexts in which they are found. I don’t know what your latter question means in the context of my provisional and phenomenological assertions. You have described your experience as fragmented which is the opposite of wholeness and implies an awareness of it. I’m on my own path and must do my own work. Only you can do the work for you using your inner knowledge of yourself. I can’t.
I see Blake’s song/poem to Tirzah as a Gnostic lament of the fall from the wholeness of the pleroma of pure potentiality into the limitations of corporeal existence.
This rediscovery of existentialism has a great significance for theology. It has seen the dark elements in man as over against a philosophy of consciousness which lays all the stress on man’s conscious decisions and his good will. The existentialists allied themselves with Freud’s analysis of the unconscious in protest against a psychology of consciousness which had previously existed. Existentialism and psychotherapeutic psychology are natural allies and have always worked together. This rediscovery of the unconscious in man is of the highest importance for theology. It has changed the moralistic and idealistic types which we have discussed; it has placed the question of the human condition at the center of all theological thinking, and for this reason it has made the answers meaningful again. In this light we can say that existentialism and Freud, together with his followers and friends (especially Jung and the archetypal psychologists*), have become the providential allies of Christian theology in the twentieth century. This is similar to the way in which the Marxist analysis of the structure of society became a tremendous factor in arousing the churches to a sense of responsibility for the social conditions in which men live.
PAUL TILLICH A History of Christian Thought From Its Judaic and Hellenistic Origins to Existentialism
- Felix
Reading Tillich’s systematic theology helped me transition from a Christian cult to an agnosticism in which I recognize that faith itself implies doubt. See how that is consistent with the polarities of Chinese philosophy and Carl Jung? Spiritual growth is the process whereby the polarities of the psyche become unified.
"From the Universe Next Door: christian existentialism (neo-orthodoxy) is a reaction against depersonalized orthodoxy. Sin to orthodox is breaking rules, to existentialist betraying a relationship, repentance is sorrow over breaking relationship vs admitting guilt, forgiveness is renewing fellowship vs cancelled penalty, faith is communicating vs belief in propositions and the Christian life is pleasing the personal Lord vs obeying rules. "
I suppose that the relationship with Christ (the personal Lord described above) is an imaginal phenomena.
“The interplay of opposites is the engine that runs the universe” Tom Robbins
“As above, so below”
Diagram illustrating the unification of the Light King and the Shadow King archetypes into the fully actualized King. This is a symbolic representation of the process of masculine individuation and integration toward Wholeness in one archetypal dimension. Other key archetypes of the male psyche include the warrior. the magician and the lover. Each are polarized when immature, and can be unified through growth and development and insight. Together they can be diagrammed as a four sided pyramid whose center is also the peak --the ideal of wholeness. This conceptualization of individuation is based on the work of Jungian psychoanalyst Robert Moore and mythologist Douglas Gillette.
The degree to which this approach becomes a meaningful mode of spiritual progress will depend on the degree symbols are experienced in one’s own internal imagery. What depth psychology since before Freud has shown is that our sense that we are a simply unified ego is an illusion. Jung’s concept of the persona–the character that the psyche uses to interface with others is itself an oversimplification. One has multiple personae which are used in different situations and in different moods. Perhaps the difference between someone who seeks treatment for multiple personality disorder and the rest of us is that they experience distress by the multiple archetypes that occupy their consciousness and we are either not aware of the different personalities or if we are, it doesn’t bother us.
Here’s another diagram based on the work of Moore and Gillette. Much research and analysis of the hero archetype including the works of Rank, Jung and Campbell. Moore and Gillette see the hero as an archetype of boy psychology. Initiation in traditional cultures involves the ritual death of the boy as a necessary step toward the birth of the man. The death and resurrection of Christ has been proffered by mythologists as an instance of the the initiation motif in the hero myth.
Here is Rank as his work pertains to comparisons of the birth of Christ with other hero myths:
Rank saw the Jesus birth story as fitting clearly into Freudian Oedipal theory. Jung had a very different interpretation in which incest taboo has a genetic basis.
In either theory, Freud’s or Jung’s the rivalry with the Father is central to a pattern of the developing male ego. In Jung’s theory the ego itself is itself an archetype of the psyche.
It should be remembered that it was Jung who proposed the Electra complex as “a girl’s psychosexual competition with her mother for possession of her father. In the course of her psychosexual development, the complex is the girl’s phallic stage; a boy’s analogous experience is the Oedipus complex.” [Wikipedia]
Jungian theory aside, the point of departure for this thread is the value of attending to one’s mental imagery as a means of becoming conscious of one’s own psychic depth.
Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan noted that in the course of his research he observed that the mind once freed from all critical pressures and school-bound habits offered images and not logical propositions. He noticed that the meanings patients attached to words are often fluid and seem to be attached to images. In the first phase of his work Lacon stressed the role of images and the imaginary in the workings of the human mind. His observations at this stage and similar to that of the archetypal psychology of James Hillman.
Imaginal exploration has lead me to entertain the possibility of an imaginal realm accessible by the human mind that has been the province of esoteric and perennial wisdom throughout the ages.
The hard-core materialist will dismiss such a proposition as pure fantasy. I’m okay with that. It’s not like I claim to “know” in the objective sense of the word. Let them consider it to be my personal religious predilection.
Four hypnagogic experiences from my childhood and one recent one:
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recurring dreams of nuclear Holocaust and panic attacks when the air raid sirens went off
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a dream of swallowing a bottle cap that led to a trip to the emergency room
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waking up in the middle of the night and being unable to find my parents anywhere which led to years of suspicion that my parents and other adults were deceiving me about what was really going on in the world
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walking up the stairs from the basement of the church building alone and reaching the sanctuary to find it empty and full of light like I had never seen before or after
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coming home to find my cat Widget dead after a vision of him filled my mind and made my heart heavy with grief as I lay in bed trying to sleep.