Last week I interviewed John P. Dourley, a Jungian analyst, professor of religion, and Roman Catholic priest. He has written many books – more than I have time to read at the moment. So when I had the opportunity to speak with him for several hours on Monday, I hung on his every word.
Here is just a portion of what he said. Hopefully it will make you want to take the time to listen to the entire interview.
“I think that Jung understood the psyche as naturally creating the experiences that lead humanity to its universal belief in God, whatever form or variation those beliefs might take. ... I think he also understands the psyche to be creating the religions in such a way that there may be a discernable pattern in their creation. In a couple of places in his Collected Works he will say religion in its evolution seems to have followed this path: that the many gods, the polytheistic religions, became one God, the monotheisms, and that that one God became man. Obviously the reference to the one God becoming man would go to Christianity. But he goes on then to imply that when the one God became man, every man – that is every individual, both genders – was called upon to activate the divine potential within themselves. This process of activation of one’s personal divinity, I think, is at the core of the maturational process [Jung] describes as individuation.” {00:07:01 – 00:09:25}
My interview with Professor Dourley can be found in Episode 4.
EXCERPT
In one of his major works on alchemy, Mysterium Coniunctionis, Jung describes the process of alchemical transformation as one of often painful asceticism moving toward a consciousness which, when fully incarnate, evinced a living awareness of its dialectical unity with the ground of all consciousness and being. This is how Jung interpreted the alchemical notion of the unus mundus. The mode of thinking which arises from this experience he related to the Western idea of the interpenetration of microcosm and macrocosm. With his concept of synchronicity (‘an acausal connecting principle’), Jung takes the position that each time- and space-bound ego has access to the macrocosmic totality through the microcosm in the individual unconscious. This theory, both in alchemy and as formulated by Jung in his writings on synchronicity (which in turn he related to modern physics), presupposes a common ground or collective unconscious from which individual centers of consciousness emerge. This common ground thus makes it possible for individual centers ultimately to be united one with another in patterns of empathic intensity.
Within the spiritual and intellectual atmosphere of his time, Jung came to see himself as a lonely advocate of such a common substratum. He further saw it as possessed of a goal: to realize itself through greater integration with individual centers of consciousness, and so to author patterns of deeper relatedness, both to oneself and to others. Historically this philosophical view disappeared after Leibnitz and Arnold Geulincx. Similarly alchemy was literalized into chemistry; the sought-for unities cherished by its practitioners dissolved into the dissolute facticity and meaninglessness of modern empiricism, while reality was reduced to the merely observable and measurable. Religion also was literalized and, lacking a symbolic understanding of its myths, discredited itself in the battle of the literal-minded that ensued in the dialogue between religion and science.
John P. Dourley, Ph.D., The Illness That We Are: A Jungian Critique of Christianity, pp. 41-42