Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today, my guest is Lionel Corbett. Lionel is a professor of depth psychology at the Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, California. He’s the author of the book The Religious Function of the Psyche and many professional articles on the subjects of depth psychology, psychoanalytic self-psychology, and the work of C.G. Jung and religion. His work focuses on the integration of depth psychology and spirituality into a seamless whole. With Sounds True, Lionel Corbett has published the audio series Spirituality Beyond Religion, an audio program for discovering a vital spirituality that transcends doctrine.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Lionel and I spoke about numinous experiences and how to understand them. We talked about God as an archetype, and the psyche’s need to find meaning and generate spiritual imagery. We talked about the role of suffering on the spiritual path, and how we can understand suffering in terms of our personal destiny calling us forward. Finally, we talked about the nature of faith as a type of inner knowing, [as well as] the importance of visionary experiences. Here’s my conversation with Lionel Corbett:
Lionel, you’ve written a book called The Religious Function of the Psyche. Here, at the beginning of our conversation, I’d love to know what you mean by “the religious function of the psyche?”
Lionel Corbett: Well, it’s a phrase that I borrowed from Jung—from his writings on religion. What he’s talking about is that the psyche has a tendency to spontaneously produce experiences of the sacred or the holy. He borrows this from the work of Rudolf Otto, who in 1917 [or] 1918 wrote a book translated into English called The Idea of the Holy, in which he talks about—in which he talks about a certain type of religious experience called “numinous experiences.”
When Jung started to hear these kind of experiences in his consulting room, he decided that they were the same kind of experiences occurring in ordinary people that had occurred to the founders of our major religious traditions—Jesus, Mohammad, Moses, and so on.
Whereas Otto said that these are like the burning bush—Moses at the burning bush in the Bible; or Saul on the road to Damascus hearing the voice of Jesus, saying, “Why do you persecute me?” Those kind of experiences are what Otto meant by numinous experiences. So, for Otto, these were experiences essentially of the Judeo-Christian God. The development that Jung made was to say these are experiences of transpersonal levels of the psyche, or the non-personal levels of consciousness which the individual has access to when these kind of experiences erupt into our awareness.
So, that’s one meaning of the religious function of the psyche—the tendency to produce those kinds of numinous experiences. That’s probably the major meaning.
TS: Can you tell me a little bit about this word “numinous?” I don’t think that’s a word that is part of most people’s vocabulary.
LC: It’s not a commonly used word.
TS: Yes.
LC: No. The etymology of the word comes from the Latin noun numen—which means a god or divinity. There’s also a Latin verb, nuere, which means to nod or to beckon.
So, the sense of a numinous experience is of divine beckoning or divine approval. You can imagine Moses at the burning bush, hearing the voice of God talking to him from the burning bush [and] telling him to go down to Egypt—tell the Pharaoh to release the people, and so on. These are the kind of things that Otto and then later Jung were talking about.
But, what was important to Jung was not the content of the experience. It doesn’t have to be a specifically Judeo-Christian content. What he gets at is [that] the quality of the experience is important. Otto said these experiences are mysterious, fascinating, tremendous. They have a certain emotional gripping power.
That’s what Jung was interested in, because he discovered that when people have these kinds of experiences, the experience has a kind of a healing effect. It tends to bring us what we need. It’s always somehow directly related to our own psychological makeup or to what’s going on with us at the moment.
TS: Now, would you say in your own life there have been numinous experiences that have been tremendously important to you? If so, could you share one or two with us?
LC: Yes. Well, the most recent one occurred to me about six years ago. I haven’t had many, but I’ve had enough to convince me of the reality of these experiences. Although, we should later talk about the way these can be dismissed. But, for me—and for most Jungians—they’re particularly real.
But the one I’m thinking of now occurred to me about six years ago. It occurred just before I had a very severe illness, from which I nearly died but obviously survived. But just before the illness, I was lying in bed at night. I was wide awake. This was not a dream.
Suddenly, I realized that next to me—standing beside the bed—there was a tall, gray figure. It looked like gray stone—like something a building would be made of. That kind of gray color, except it was obviously alive. It looked down at me. It was quite big. The really terrifying thing was that the figure had three faces. It had a face looking straight forward down at me, and then a face coming from either side of its head on either side.
So, it was a rather brief visionary experience. It lasted several seconds, but it was very distinct and very frightening. It has these criteria that Otto and Jung write about—obviously very mysterious, tremendous, fascinating, awe-inspiring. A-w-e: awe-inspiring. And deeply mysterious and completely out of the ordinary. Very different than an ordinary kind of experience. That’s the sort of thing that Jung and Otto were writing about.
These experiences are quite difficult to interpret. Usually, you recognize them by the emotional quality that they produce. The difficulty is that it may be hard to know what they mean or where they come from. For Jung, they come from this transpersonal or what’s sometimes called the mytho-poetic level of the psyche—that level of consciousness where myth and dream arise.
No matter what tradition you were born into or what culture you were born into, this kind of imagery can show up from any religious pantheon or any mythological system anywhere in the world, any time in history. That’s what often makes it unrecognizable.
So, this particular experience is an experience of what’s called a trisophallic god. If you look in world mythologies, you will see there were lots of gods and goddesses that have either three heads or three faces. It’s a very common mythological motif. It’s what Jung would call “an archetypal motif.” Usually, the significance of it is that one face or one head is looking at the present, one is facing the future, and one is looking back into the past. Something like that.
So, this particular figure—there are lots of choices. I’ve decided this particular figure—in the end—was a sort of visitation from the mythological Hermes/Mercury. This was a Greco-Roman god who was a herald. He would appear often with a message when something was about to happen. Sure enough, soon after this visionary experience, I became ill. So, in retrospect, it looks as if this visitation—this numinous visitation—was a kind of warning or precursor to the illness, as if something was telling me that it was going to happen.
Now, this was helpful to me. One can wonder how on Earth this could be helpful, but the reason it’s helpful is that it gives you the sense that when a major event like a serious illness happens, that there’s a transpersonal dimension to it. The event is not some kind of random, meaningless event—but, [it’s] part of the destiny of the individual. Somehow, there’s an important transpersonal process going on.
Something—in Jung’s case, he would say it’s the transpersonal Self—the Self with a capital-S. The “Imago Dei,” as he calls it. The God Image in the psyche. That is aware of what’s going on and it’s part of the destiny of the individual to have the experience. Something like that.
So, in that sense, it’s a helpful kind of experience.
TS: Now, did it only begin to make sense to you—this visionary experience—once you became ill?
LC: Yes. It wasn’t—I didn’t know what it meant at the time. I had a sense that this was a premonition, but of course I didn’t know what was happening. Then, a couple of months later, I became ill, and then in retrospect it made sense. But it was still helpful.
TS: Are you healthy now? Is everything OK?
LC: Yes, I’m fine now. I had a bone marrow transplant. I had acute leukemia at the time, and then I had a bone marrow transplant five years ago. I’m fine now.
TS: OK now, you talked about how there are ways that we can dismiss these kinds of numinous experiences—and I can certainly imagine that. I can certainly imagine someone saying, “You know, I must have not gotten enough sleep the night before,” or something like that.
LC: Yes. Well, it’s very easy to what we call “reduce” these experiences. You can dismiss them. You can say they’re hysterical or it’s a transient psychosis. Or, “What were you smoking?” Or, “You have an overheated imagination.” There are all kinds of ways of reducing these kinds of experiences and not taking them at face value.
But, this sort of depends on your metaphysical commitments. If you believe there is a transpersonal or a spiritual dimension of reality, then it’s simply an eruption of that level into ordinary waking consciousness. If you don’t think there is a spiritual dimension of reality, then you have to come up with some kind of reductive explanation. There are many. Epilepsy, psychosis—there’s a whole list of them.
So, it very much depends on your belief system, really—how you approach these things.
TS: Now, let’s say somebody’s listening and they’re reflecting on something from their own past that they could say, “Yes, that was a numinous experience, but I never really understood it. I don’t think I ever really understood what was happening. Something was happening, but I don’t really get it.” How might you help them find the meaning?
LC: Well, what I would do is I would get a detailed description of the experience. I would try to see in what way is the experience connected to what’s going on in the person’s life. Usually, what I’ve found is it’s either connected to some developmental difficulty that the person is struggling with or a life situation [or] existential crisis of some kind that they’re struggling with. Or an illness, or a relational problem. Those kinds of difficulties.
It’s always connected to something that’s going on in the person’s mental makeup. It’s never really isolated.
If it’s a mythological image, I would try to help the person locate it in world mythology or in a religious system. The difficulty is that it may not be a mythology that the person knows about. Then, I would try to see essentially what the relevance of that figure is to the person’s life situation at the moment.
TS: Now, you mentioned something, Lionel, that I wasn’t clear about. You said “the Imago Dei,” or the God Image. Help me understand.
LC: Yes, the God Image. Imago Dei is simply a Latin term. “Imago” means “image;” “Dei” means “of God.” So, Jung had the idea—which is not unique to Jung, of course—but what he does is he psychologizes the Upanishadic notion of the atman. There’s a divine element—the atman—in the personality, which of course is a very ancient idea.
What Jung does is he talks about how that God Image manifests itself psychologically. Basically, his idea is that this is an a priori—that means an innate aspect of the human being. It’s an essence, even though the idea of essence isn’t very popular in the academie at the moment. But for Jung, there is this essence—a divine essence in the personality.
Then, what happens is that local traditions will give it a name. If you’re born in a Christian culture, you’ll call it Christ. If you were an ancient Norse individual, you might call it Odin. If you were in South America, you might call it Quetzalcoatl. You give it the local name for God, whatever it is. There are thousands of them, of course. Shiva—whatever is the local name.
But, all these—according to Jung—these are all local folkloric names for this spiritual essence in the personality—this divine essence. And it can manifest itself in very unique ways within the individual. That’s the point.
The important point is that it may not manifest itself in the way that is consonant with the religious tradition in which you were raised. In other words, suppose you were raised in a Western Christian tradition. You might experience it in a dream—it’s very common for these things to appear in dreams—as a Hindu god or goddess. Or something like that.
That’s very disconcerting for people. Sometimes, when they go to their minister of religion—for example, I’ve heard a few dreams in which Christ appears as a woman. In one dream, he appears as an old lady—a grandmother figure. In that case, the dreamer was told—and it was clearly Christ—by her minister that this was a demonic manifestation. That sort of thing is very typical, because people are distressed when they get a figure which is very numinous but not the one they were expecting.
TS: What I’m curious about is: what if what occurs for you as an image of God is not a figure per se, but a sense of infinity, or melting space, or something like that?
LC: Yes. I didn’t mean to suggest that it could only appear as a figure. You can have numinous experiences—say you’re one of the whole group of people who are nature mystics, who experience the sacred or the holy in the wilderness, for example. They have a sense of the presence of the divine in the wilderness.
So, it doesn’t have to be a figure. It can appear in a variety of different ways. Certainly, the way you describe it—experiences of unity, of cosmic consciousness, of oneness with all of reality, and so on. There’s a long list of ways.
What matters is not the content, but the quality of the experience. Mysterious, tremendous, fascinating, awesome. Something that makes the—Otto used the phrase “creature feeling.” It makes the subject feel very small, as if one realizes [that] one is faced with something that’s totally out of the ordinary, totally beyond the ego.
TS: So, is it fair to say that our sense of God—God as a presence—that that’s an archetype? That there’s an archetype inside us for God?
LC: Yes. Yes. One way of saying it is that there is an archetypal potential in the individual. But, it’s like an empty envelope. It’s simply the human potential to experience That—where “that” has a capital-T, as it were. Usually, at certain times in one’s life—when there’s a crisis or suffering of some kind—that’s when the ego—the everyday personality—is a little bit more fragile than usual because you’re suffering or distressed or in pain or depressed or something.
Then, as it were, the boundary between the everyday ego—the ordinary you-and-me personality—and the transpersonal dimension or the spiritual dimension of the psyche gets a little thin. Or, the veil gets lifted because the hegemony of the ego—the rulership of the ego—can’t be maintained when it’s suffering. That’s when you get these eruptions of numinous experience.
So, typically you see it during periods of stress.
TS: Now, thinking about God as an archetype, if you will—something that is in all of our psyches as an “empty envelope,” to use your phrase—it seems like a lot of people might find that offensive. Like, “No, there’s something outside. It’s not this potential in the psyche.” Somehow, we’re making God less than what God is . . .
LC: Yes, exactly. You’ve put your finger on what was called the “Jung-Buber disputation.” What you just said is almost exactly what Martin Buber—the famous Jewish theologian—said to Jung.
Briefly—to summarize a long argument—he accused Jung of what he called “psychologism.” He said that the divine must transcend the psyche. It must be beyond the psyche, and when Jung says these experiences are psychological experiences, he’s reducing something transcendent to something which is “only psychological”—as if that meant it wasn’t real.
What Jung could never quite get across to Buber was that the psyche is real. Consciousness is real. When an experience is a psychological experience—and all experience is essentially psychological. The psyche is the organ of experience. The psyche is real, so the experience is real. So, if you have a numinous experience, it’s an experience of something which is real—which actually exists.
That argument between them never really got resolved. I don’t think it’s ever been quite resolved. It depends on whether you think the psyche is real or not.
TS: Help me understand that. I think I understand the “psyche is real” side. Help me understand Buber’s side of the argument. Just pretend that—
LC: Well, Buber’s side was that what we call God—Buber [was] essentially a traditional Jewish theologian. So, he—and probably Christian theologians as well—would like to have a transcendent image of God. In other words, whatever the psyche is—whatever consciousness is—the God that they worship would have to be somehow be beyond that [and] transcendent of that.
Their complaint to Jung is, “You’re making the experience of the divine imminent. Too imminent.” The move that Jung makes is saying, “Instead of having a transcendent God which is out there, I want to locate it deeply within human subjectivity.”
In a famous comment, Jung said, “Every night, you have a chance of experiencing the Eucharist when you go to sleep.” In your dreams, he meant, because you can experience the sacred in a dream, in the form of a numinous encounter. When that happens, it’s a psychological experience, but you can’t dismiss it as “only a dream”—as if that meant the experience was not real or it wasn’t an experience of something actual. The imagery in the dream is an image of something real.
So, even though it’s an imminent experience, that doesn’t mean it’s somehow not the real thing. It’s still an Imago Dei. It’s still an experience of the sacred or the holy. The Buber sort of attitude is [that] it can’t be. The divine is transcendent of all that.
So, that’s one reason why Jung was not popular with the theologians. He makes it too imminent.
TS: Now, see if you can follow me here. It seems that if I were tracking with you on this religious function of the psyche, it might mean that if all of the religions of the world that are currently in existence were to go away, the psyche would still have this need to somehow have a set of questions answered or for there to be images that would—that this is something that lives inside us as a need [and] as a drive.
LC: Yes. Well, what you’ve just said is really a paraphrase of a comment of Jung—which is that, if all the world’s religions were abolished, new numinous imagery would appear and the whole thing would start again, just for the reason you said. The psyche spontaneously produces this kind of imagery.
It’s very important to understand that—from Jung’s point of view—there’s no need for conflict between the traditions, because the experience is always arising from this mytho-poetic, transpersonal level of the psyche. So, you can’t say that any one of the traditions is somehow more real or more true than any other. They’re all coming from the same place.
TS: Now, I’ve heard some people say that psychotherapy could be considered a new religion of our time that we founded just a hundred years ago. I’m curious how you see that.
LC: Well, it’s a debate. On one side, there are people who don’t like that idea, because they want psychotherapy to be a purely secular pursuit. Some of them even think it’s a scientific pursuit, which I personally think is an abhorrent idea. But, there is that point of view.
And then there are other people who say it’s possible to approach the psyche not as a religion, exactly—you see, if you say it’s a religion, you’re talking about the traditional distinction between a religion and spiritualities—a religion has a sacred text, a tradition, a long history, a hierarchy, rules and regulations, a creation myth, and all that. Certainly, psychotherapy doesn’t have much of that. It’s only a hundred years old.
But, it’s possible to approach the psyche with reverence as a spiritual practice. That’s what my last book was about. It was about psychotherapy as a spiritual practice. The psyche—as John Darley pointed out—is sacramental. If it’s true that the sacred or the holy can manifest itself in the psyche, then by definition that makes the psyche sacramental.
So, you can approach psychological material reverentially, as a spiritual practice.
TS: Now, help me understand what you mean by this word “sacramental.” The psyche is sacramental.
LC: Well, it’s simply a manifestation of the sacred—or a sign or a symbol of the sacred—pointing to the sacred. A container for it, if you like.
TS: And you’re talking about psychotherapy as a spiritual practice from the perspective of the therapist or analyst? From the perspective of the client? Both?
LC: Both, both. Yes. It doesn’t have to be psychotherapy. Just paying attention to your own dreams and those kind of experiences is a spiritual practice. It allows you to get in touch with the transpersonal dimension.
TS: Now, this whole arena of people looking at their lives and saying, “I’m spiritual, but not religious. I’m a spiritual person, but I’m not religious.” More and more people are identifying with that phrase.
And yet, it brings up certain questions for people. “If I’m spiritual but not religious, what happens when I get all confused? I can’t turn to a text. I can’t turn to a priest or a rabbi. My community is kind of diffused.” What do I do with my confusion?
LC: Well, that’s a good question. It’s one of the drawbacks of this approach—that there aren’t really organized communities with fixed texts. I do think that’s a deficiency.
What you can do is you can find someone to talk to who has a sufficient understanding of the situation you’re in—like a therapist or a friend or somebody that you can talk to. You need a reflecting consciousness.
But, really, there is no ultimate authority. We don’t have a Pope or hierarchy. So, confusion might be the order of the day. What’s wrong with being confused?
TS: I think sometimes with being confused there can be a sense that perhaps I’m not progressing, perhaps I’m wasting my time. I’m rotting. That kind of thing.
LC: I think if you really felt that, it might be a good time to go into therapy, quite honestly. Sometimes, you need a guide. The guide should be somebody who’s done his or her own journey, and who knows some of the milestones and some of the pitfalls.
But, I don’t think that’s essential. I think sometimes you can get through these kinds of things. For example, in using a dream group, or just with a knowledgeable friend.
I mean—are you suggesting that you have to have some kind of spiritual authority? I don’t really like the idea of a spiritual authority, to be honest.
TS: I think my question has to do with—given that so many people are in this place of saying, “I’m spiritual but not religious,”—how can they create the support and guidance for their lives that traditional religions used to provide? How do we get that in this time that we’re in?
LC: Well, I think you’re pointing to the fact that we don’t have adequate community for people who are in that position. I think that’s just the situation that we’re in. We’re in a transitional period. We’re at the end of the Christian Era. The Christian Era is clearly coming to an end. We don’t know what’s going to replace it.
There’s a small group of Jungians who talk about what they call “the New Dispensation.” The phrase was coined by Edward Edinger—who was a Los Angeles analyst—about 20 years ago. Briefly, he said that in the West, we first had the Hebrew Dispensation—the Mount Sinai dispensation. “Dispensation” here means the dispensing of divine grace into the world, initially carved in stone on the Ten Commandments. And then you had the Christian Dispensation, where you have a radical change of the God image from a kind of sky god on a volcano in the Sinai Desert to a God of love.
[Edinger] thinks that the New Dispensation is this sense that we’re all in touch with the transpersonal level of the psyche, and that we can have our own connection to that—what the Jungians call the “ego/self axis.” [This is] where you have the ego—the everyday consciousness—has direct connection to the transpersonal dimension in dreams, visions, synchronistic events, and things like that.
But, the nearest thing we have in terms of community would be things like the Friends of Jung group around the country. There are now lots of lay organizations in many cities in this country and around the world which get together, listen to lectures, and do dream groups based on Jungian psychology. But, that’s the nearest thing that we have.
TS: So, what I hear you saying is that—in the midst of this New Dispensation—the need for community is something we’re going to have to creatively inquire into and resolve as a group.
LC: Yes—I don’t really think we have it at the moment. You know?
TS: Now, Lionel, I’m curious—especially hearing about your recent experience of illness—how you view suffering on the spiritual path. I know that’s a big question.
LC: Yes, it’s a huge question. Essentially—well, there are several ways to approach it. First of all, unless you believe that what happens to us is random, suffering can be seen as part of the destiny of the individual—part of what Jung called the telos, of the personality. [It’s] a word he got from Aristotle, essentially meaning that the personality has a goal, end, or purpose that it’s pointing to.
Then, your suffering is trying to move you in a particular direction that perhaps you wouldn’t otherwise take. So, it’s teleologically important. It’s spiritually important because, developmentally, suffering makes you look at aspects of yourself and your relationships and your work and so on which otherwise you might be able to ignore. That’s what happened to Job, for example.
Suffering makes you alter your God Image. When people suffer, they’re often dissatisfied with the kind of image of God of the religious tradition that they grew up in. It makes them rethink their way of thinking about spirituality.
So, it can change your spirituality. It can have a very powerful effect on character structure. It can make you much more receptive, open, and empathic to other people. And so on. It has all kinds of transformative psychological effects which otherwise wouldn’t happen.
So, it’s very significant developmentally. You can look at suffering in terms of what’s called “liminality.” This is a bit of an unusual word that was coined by the anthropologist Arnold van Gennep about a hundred years ago. Liminality is the middle phase of a rite of passage.
In tribal cultures, they usually divide their rites of passage into three. [This includes] an initial period of separation where you’re taken out of your usual environment. And then the middle period is the transitional period of betwixt and between. Finally, you’re reincorporated back into the culture in the new status.
But, the dangerous period where people break down is the middle, transitional period. That’s called liminality. The Latin word, limen, means “a threshold.”
So, it’s betwixt and between. You’re not out of the old situation fully. You’re not in the new situation fully. It’s these transitional periods when people break down emotionally.
So, suffering plunges you into liminality. If the Jungians are right about this, this is an archetypal process. It’s not just a random misfortune which is happening to you. It’s important to you developmentally and spiritually. It’s intended to initiate you into a new level of consciousness. It will make you aware of things that you hadn’t been aware of before.
So, in a nutshell, those are some of the ways of looking at it. I could go on about it. It’s a huge subject.
TS: I was quite interested in what you were saying about this teleological approach to our life—that there’s some destiny in our life that suffering can help us understand. I’d be curious to know: from your own illness passage recently, was something revealed about the directionality in your own life?
LC: Well, I think the effect it had on me was to deepen my own spirituality. My own interest actually is in nondual spirituality as well. So, there were many, many experiences during the course of this whole illness that allowed me to practice a sort of attitude of radical acceptance and what’s called “resting in awareness.” Those kinds of practices.
That had a profoundly deepening effect for me. So, that—teleologically, developmentally—it gave me a kind of thrust. I think it was helpful in sort of speeding up a developmental process. You could say it that way.
TS: Lionel, in some of your writing on spirituality beyond religion, you talk about what it means—outside of belonging to a religion—to stay connected to the sacred in our lives. I’d be curious to know what you think are some of the ways that we can stay connected to the sacred without religious support.
LC: You mean without community support or without a fixed tradition? Is that what you mean?
TS: Yes, yes.
LC: Yes. Well, there are several things. I think paying attention to your dreams is very important. The difficulty there is that it’s often hard to understand the dream. But just paying attention to them and writing them down is very useful, because in this Jungian tradition, the Self—the transpersonal Self; the Self with a capital-S—is the maker of dreams.
So, paying attention to the dreams is an important way of staying in touch with that. It’s as if the Self trying to reach the everyday personality or the ego, and trying to fill in the gaps or make the ego aware of what’s missing—or compensate if it’s too one-sided. That kind of thing. So, it is intrinsically a spiritual practice.
The reason that paying attention to emotion is important is because the Self—this is conceptually a little difficult. But, the Self embodies itself or incarnates by means of emotion. The way that the Self is felt in the body is in the form of emotion. If you’re having an intense emotion—fear, depression, anger, whatever it is—you can think of that as the way Jung describes this [as], “The intent of the Self to incarnate, to embody itself.”
TS: That’s very interesting to me. You can definitely hear spiritual teachers talk about “transcending emotions” and, “Not paying too much attention. They’re just passing weather formations.” That kind of thing.
LC: Yes.
TS: You’re saying something quite different.
LC: Yes. I guess I am. The trouble is: both are true.
TS: That’s OK. You can trouble us with that kind of thing. That’s OK.
LC: Well, I’m afraid paradox is par for the course here. Suppose you have what Jung called a “complex”—in other words, some kind of an emotional difficulty that causes you anxiety or depression or something. Let’s suppose you had some difficulty with a very common kind of problem with a mother or father. So, you are prone to depression or anxiety or something like that.
When the complex takes over, the important point for Jung is [that] at the core of the complex is the archetype. It’s not simply the personal mother or father, but the archetypal Mother or Father. So, when the complex grips you—when you’re in the grip of panic or anger or sadness or whatever it is— you could say that you’re gripped by this spiritual principle. The archetype’s like a spiritual presence at the core of your emotional suffering.
The way it embodies itself is by producing emotion. Emotion is raw, autonomic nervous system activity in the body. So, the archetype—I hope this doesn’t sound too abstract—in the dream or vision, it appears as an image. In the body, it appears in the form of emotional intensity. You know—a pounding heart, sweating, goose-bumps, that kind of thing.
All those would be the effect of the archetype in the body, because mind and body are not two different things. They’re two aspects of the same reality.
It’s true to say that they are transient energetic manifestations in the body, and they will pass. If you simply watch them, they come and go. But that doesn’t rule out the fact that they have this archetypal embodiment component at the same time.
TS: You know, another way to talk about what we’ve been talking about would be to use a phrase like “personal spirituality”—that somebody could develop their own personal spirituality. I’m curious: if you had to speak in a personal way, what would you say is your personal spirituality?
LC: Strange question, because personal spirituality is not really personal in the sense that the spirit is transpersonal. So, I think one could say, “What is one’s individual way of relating to that dimension?”
So, you could adopt an existing tradition. And/or, you could go the Jungian way of looking at your dreams and synchronistic events and numinous experiences—which are highly individual, unique, and tailored.
In my case, I’m particularly interested in nondual forms of spirituality, which are very ancient [and] found in several traditions. The link to Jung there is that Jung thinks that the Self—the capital-S Self—is the totality of consciousness, which is a very nondual way of thinking. Then, on the other side of that, when we talk about the ego/self axis or the individual personality in relation to the Self and its manifestation through dreams, then it becomes unique and tailored to the individual.
So, I don’t find an inconsistency. In my own life, I bridge between those two. You have to work out something that’s individually useful for you.
Other than that, you just have to go to a tradition and see what the book says. That’s what William James calls “secondhand religion.” It’s reading a book about what happened to somebody else.
TS: So, Lionel, I think I’m following you in terms of the recommendations you’ve made about staying connected to the numinous in our life. But in terms of this whole question of personal spirituality, I’d be curious to know how you relate to the idea of faith or trust.
LC: Faith.
TS: Faith, trust, trust in reality. What is it you have faith in, you would say?
LC: Well, it depends on what you mean by “faith.” There are different approaches to faith.
But, I think faith is very important. There are writers who talk about faith as a developmental achievement based on the development of basic trust in infancy. There are some psychoanalytic writers, like Eric Erickson, who say that you develop faith when you have enough instances in early infancy of your needs being met by a mother or father who’s attentive to you. So, you learn to develop trust that the universe will bring you what you need because you’ve had many experiences of that in infancy.
There are other people who think that faith is just a kind of infused act of grace that’s given to you, where you have just an intuitive sense that there’s a larger reality—that there is something beyond the personal [and] beyond the individual.
I think both those might be true. But, otherwise it’s very difficult to know where faith comes from. Some people seem to have it and some people don’t have it. In other words, it might be an archetypal endowment, or it might be developmentally achieved. I’m not really sure which it is, to be perfectly honest.
My own faith is—certainly, what Jung would say is that faith comes if you have sufficient experiences of the transpersonal dimension. Then you have knowledge.
In the famous BBC interview with John Freeman, when [Jung] was asked if he believed in God, he said, “I don’t believe, I know.” What he meant by that is that if you have a direct experience of the transpersonal—of the spiritual dimension—you don’t need to have belief. But, belief isn’t quite the same as faith. I think faith is somehow deeper. Belief is more cognitive.
So, it’s a difficult distinction, I think. Belief is belief in a set of principles, doctrine, or dogma. Faith is a more intuitive trust that there’s a transpersonal dimension.
TS: Would you say that’s your faith—that you would summarize it by saying—
LC: For me, I think it is. Yes. Yes.
TS: —that there is a transpersonal dimension?
LC: Yes. I think there is. But it’s based on experience.
I’m hesitating, because you could say that’s knowledge. Once you’ve had the experience, you know that it’s there. It’s not something that you need to believe, or you don’t need faith. It depends on how you define faith.
TS: Well, let’s go with knowledge, because it’s not so much the word that I’m interested in. I’m interested to know—here, after all of your experiences and your study of the psyche; your work with your own suffering and the suffering of other people—what do you have confidence in? What do you know?
LC: Well, I’m with Jung in believing that the personality has a telos—that there is a kind of destiny that the individual is living out. What happens to us is not random. It’s guided by the Self.
So, I guess if you wanted to know what my faith is, I have faith in that.
TS: Thank you. That’s powerful. I’d love to know, also—because I was very moved by hearing you talk about the numinous experience that you had six years ago. I’d love if you could share with us another such experience from your life.
LC: Another experience was another visionary experience. I think visionary experiences are actually rather important, because they’re rarely talked about. People are often embarrassed about talking about “having had a vision” because it sounds little crazy. But, a lot of people have had visionary experiences.
Many years ago, I had the experience of—I happened to be looking up into the sky, and I saw a huge face in the sky looking down at me. This was a very numinous experience. It meets all the criteria of Otto—mysterious, tremendous, fascinating. It gave me the kind of confidence and faith, if you like, that there is something—as it were—seeing me, looking at me.
This is what Jung meant when he said that as you individuate—as you develop—the ego becomes aware that it is what he called “the object of a superordinate subject.” In other words, you realize with these kinds of experiences that something is aware of you. That was a direct experience of something transpersonal that was aware of me.
TS: Now, that’s interesting. Something is aware of us? That’s interesting. What do you mean? Not necessarily a being being aware of us. What do you mean?
LC: Well, the word “thing” is a mistake there. It’s tricky language here, because I don’t think of the divine as an entity or a thing or a very big person in the sky.
So, it’s not that kind of thing which is aware of us—but that there is a larger intelligence. There is an organizing principle or the intelligent order of the universe, or something is aware of the individual. Something like that. It’s hard to put into words.
I don’t think of it in theistic terms.
TS: OK, Lionel. I just have one final question for you. This program’s called Insights at the Edge. I’m always curious to know what someone’s edge is—meaning what they’re working on right now in their inner growth life. What’s their current edge?
LC: Oh. Well, you mean professionally or academically or personally?
TS: More personally.
LC: More personally. Well, I guess I’m working on how you integrate nondual spirituality with Jungian thinking. That’s in my own life. It’s a very interesting combination, because much of Jung is dualistic—the notion of the ego/self axis. But, when the Self is the totality, it’s no longer dualistic. So, I’m trying to bring those things together. It’s an interesting journey.
TS: That’s a beautiful answer. Thank you.
I’ve been talking with Lionel Corbett. With Sounds True, Lionel has created a six-session audio learning series called Spirituality Beyond Religion: The Direct Experience of the Sacred. Lionel, thank you so much for the conversation and for being with us on Insights at the Edge.
LC: It’s a pleasure. I’ve enjoyed being with you.
TS: SoundsTrue.com. Many voices, one journey. Thanks for listening.
