Wholeness

Rather than talking about God, it makes more sense to me to refer to Ultimate Reality or, even better, the Ultimate Mystery. That, I believe, is what “God” represents.

A phenomenon that in principle eludes unambiguous statement and explanation? Yes, I think that is an apt circumscription, although the apophatic seems to have been well-tried, and fitted as well as anything else.

I think our problem lies in the fact that our vocabulary wears out after a while, especially when words have become empty and lose their dynamic. That is why some mystics used the language of lovers, or used poetry to describe their relationship with that Ultimate Mystery that was so elusive.

Even if it cannot be expressed in words, the Godspell or immediate awareness of the Whole, can be discussed as a real experience. Were this not so, the concept of a God or the God would have faded from our vocabularies over the centuries.

Reply

Right, but the God that can be represented or talked about is not the ultimate one. That one is beyond human comprehension, language and representation. So, in a sense, everything we say about God is wrong. Everything we say about God is at best metaphoric. This includes the statement that God is one and the statement that God is. As absolutely unique and transcendent God is beyond one. One only points to God metaphorically as it were. And since God must be being itself, it cannot be said that God is. Rather, God is the ground of everything that is. In sum, though I am here using words, my words are paradoxical because God is beyond words. Therefore the word God represents that which cannot be spoken, the ineffable, the ultimate mystery.

Yes and…

Yes and we have only to consider the acts of supreme compassion and the heinous crimes committed in the name of God to begin to get some sense of the ambiguity involved in the word.

Those who know God as the Whole of which they are a part will not commit heinous acts in the name of God. Crusaders and inquisitors see Others as separate from God, not as a part of God. Them and us are trademarks of separatism; but the divisions only reflect the divider; they are not in tune with the ultimate Reality. Ambiguity comes from watching and judging the ways of others, not from direct experience of the Whole.

Let’s not forget that wholeness encompasses both the ego ideal and the shadow, the light and the dark, order and chaos. It exceeds the imagination in uniting opposites.

Also there is the fact that, whether we are talking about an entity present at hand, our own selves, or the metaphysical absolute we can only ever know the whole in part.

Felix,
Do you believe the Whole contains what we describe as good and evil, as was noted in the book of Job?

I’d say good and evil are human ways of thinking about loss or gain; and, perhaps have nothing to do with any description of God’s so-called attributes.

Sorry I missed your question until now. Everything must be contained in the whole. A disordered whole is chaos. An ordered integrated whole is a harmonious union of opposites including the opposites of good and evil. The goal of individuation is to bring the repressed shadow side of our being to consciousness and through this process to integrate it and transform it, and thus reach our full potential. Thanks for reminding me.

It is actually possible to become preoccupied with the evil shadow side of ourselves. For example a man might be preoccupied with his cowardice in the face of a threat. The threat could be quite serious such as a terminal disease. Focusing on this negative aspect of himself the man might lose sight of other resources of his psyche such as the ego ideal of his imagination which would give him a balanced view of the threat and enable him to face his fear heroically.

Then good and evil are the yin/yang of the soul? Perhaps Buddhists and Taoists have worked out problems of the human psyche better than we of the West can.

I contemplate the Tao everyday. Jung’s psychology was informed by Taoism. He understood that psychic health consisted of a unity of opposites. Western tradition shares this understanding at an esoteric level as one discovers when one studies the perennial philosophy.

See William Blake’s poem “The Tyger” for the yin/yang of God’s creations.

Blake’s poem has the virtue that it expresses astonishment at the phenomenal embodiment of dualism and leaves the matter there rather than to try to rationalize it in some metaphysical schema.

I’ve been reading Dunne, Claire. Carl Jung: Wounded Healer of the Soul: An Illustrated Biography and found the book to be very well laid out. For an ignoramus like me who struggles with Jung at times, it cleared up some things.

With reference to wholeness, the necessity of integrating the shadow and of course the anima/animus aspect of our characters in order to find completeness has become clearer to me. It has brought me back to the body/mind/soul idea that was so present in my thoughts when I was actively nursing, and the idea of holistic care, which tries to address all aspects of illness or disease. What I thought then seems right once again, that religion belongs to the soul, rather than the mind and people mix this up. A world-view is located in the mind, but religious experience is like experiencing art and music, which you can’t completely contain. It’s there and then it’s gone. If you are lucky, and you are an artist or musician, you can repeat it. With religious experience we can only re-enact it, but whether it comes to the experience one once had is a matter of grace.

Does that sound right?

Yes, that’s right. And the experience of feeling at one in a natural setting defies mental explanation.
Woody Allen parodied it thus—“I often feel that I am at two with Nature.” His parody only underscores the truth of an existential awareness. We are One.

Yes. Another Jung biography. I’ve read quite a few including his autobiography, Memories, Dreams and Reflections. I perused the synopses on the one you read on Amazon and it comes highly recommended.

I think of wholeness as a guiding vision, a mandala symbolically balancing the antimony of opposites that unfold across our lifespan. It isn’t achievable in this life for to do that one would have to achieve an end state, whereas life is dynamic.

But it is the opposite pole to wherever I am at the moment that pulls me out of myself toward greater individuation and self-realization. There’s no ecstasy without agony, no grace without its opposite.

For Jung it is the Self that is directing this process within in synchronicity with the Transcendent that is directing it from without. That’s a heroic vision of life compared to my everyday average understanding of things. What Jung called the Self may also be called the soul, the human spirit, the daimon, or the guardian angel.

In my Christian background the human spirit was radically differentiated from the soul. Now I’m entertaining the idea that the soul is the archetype of life while the search for meaning or the quest for higher consciousness has a different route. The soul finds its home in the ordinary details of everyday life and does not in itself have an urgent need for understanding or achievement. Soul resides in the valleys of life and not the peaks of intellectual spiritual or technological efforts. The soul is the psyche’s actual life including the present mess it is in its discontent dishonesty and thrilling illusions. The human spirit is that dimension of human experience that is vertical tending toward abstraction development evolution and transcendence. That is not inconsistent with my earlier Christian understanding. But the attitude toward the soul is newer and more accepting.