Christian Mysticism (2014) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Mysticism and the Psychology of Christian Religious Experience
Journal of Psychology Research, 2012
The understanding and use of the term mysticism pose a growing challenge in world religions in general, and in Christina in particular. While some Christian denominations easily identify with the concept and practices of mysticism, others approach it at best with skepticism, as they relate it more to eastern religions than Christian traditions. Most especially, traditional Catholicism with its allies easily reckons with a long-lasting mystical tradition, while radical evangelicalism shuns mysticism both conceptually and practically. However, a closer look at the popular definitions and understandings of the term reveals that mysticism is more widely practiced than generally known. This paper compares and contrasts the basic understandings and interpretations of mysticism within the Christendom and weighs them against related biblical principle in order to find out whether mysticism provides safe Christian religious experiences or not. The paper ends with a brief focus on a specific Christian religious group that rejects all forms of mysticism but some religious thinkers ironically brand it, sometimes, as a cult and mystical group. The paper aims at winning the Christians' attention to the kind of spiritual damage the concept and practices of mysticism are causing to believers through either mere propositional truth exposition or syncretic innovations in the Christian church.
Christian Spirituality and Religious Mysticism: Adjunct, Parallel or Embedded Concepts
Reflections on Christian spirituality today are profoundly shaped by the fact that there has been a move away from perceiving a dualistic split between the inner and outer journey, the natural and supernatural, matter and spirit, self and other, humanity and nature. At the heart of contemporary Christian spirituality, then, is an awareness and experience of relationality. This is not to deny the fact that writers who have recorded their personal spiritual experience throughout the ages consistently do so in relational terms. Instead this statement of the current situation simply seeks to draw attention to the fact that the awareness and interpretation of relational experiences will differ substantially when one lives within a worldview of oppositional dualism rather than one informed by a vision of interdependence. Philip Newell, in his book, The Rebirthing of God: Christianity's Struggle for New Beginnings eloquently presents the emerging relational consciousness that characterises Christian spirituality today1.
Toward a Psychological Theory of Spiritual Transformation
Proquest (2008), 2005
Purpose: Psychology traditionally has had great breadth and depth of therapeutic understandings of many dimensions of the person, including the personality, the mind, and most recently, the emotions, but it has lacked both acknowledgement and understanding of the spiritual dimension of the person. The first step toward understanding how to approach spiritual process therapeutically is to understand spiritual process itself. This dissertation seeks to understand this process of spiritual transformation in the individual person, and to formulate a psychological theory to facilitate this process. The ultimate purpose of this work is to contribute to the development of therapeutic approaches to the spiritual well being of the person. Methodology: The primary methodology to achieve the purpose of this dissertation is comparative study, which selects the phenomenology of spiritual transformation as described by Carl Gustav Jung in his theory of individuation and St. John of the Cross in his spiritual dark night to be the point of comparison. The texts are critically analyzed, compared, and integrated, to yield a psychological theory of spiritual transformation. Operational definitions are formulated for: “spirituality”, “spiritual”, “transformation”, “spiritual transformation”, “psychological theory”, and “psychological model”. Survey: Part One describes the two thinkers. Chapter One describes Jung and his theory of individuation. Chapter Two describes St. John and the nature and experience of theological and spiritual process in his Dark Night. Part Two compares the two thinkers. In Chapter Three Jungian individuation is viewed as life cycle depth psychological framework in which spiritual transformation occurs. In Chapter Four St. John’s dark night is seen as the episodic and evolutionary place in the life cycle where spiritual transformation occurs. Part Three integrates the two thinkers. Chapter Five proposes an integrated psychological theory of Jungian psychological individuation as framework for St. John's spiritual theological processes. The Afterword includes implications, conclusions, and speculations, as well as possibilities for future work that can yield findings significant to development of the fields of psychology, theology, and religion, for the individual person, and for collective humanity.
backgrounds, this paper looks at the human will through the lens of Christian spirituality and psychoanalytic theory. From spirituality, I offer a summary and analysis of the gnomic will (the human will as damaged by sin), in the work of the church fathers, especially Gregory of Nyssa and Maximos the Confessor. Each of these theologians argues, in their own way, that because of sin we are no longer attached simply to God, but also to created beings. As a result we have become "hesitant, wandering, suffering" beings. Both Gregory and Maximos, I think, could make his own Horney's observation that we have "lost the capacity to wish for anything wholeheartedly" because the will has become divided against itself. But because the human person is attached not simply to God, but to created reality, life is inevitably a competition for the limited goods which are also desired. I conclude by applying the anthropological analysis that makes up the substance of the article to the relationship between psychology and the Christian life. Situated within this analysis, I argue that we ought to seek not the integration of psychology and Christianity, but their reconciliation. In such reconciliation, modeled on the Christian understanding of the human person's reconciliation with Christ, both psychology and Christian spirituality maintain their own integrity. Further reconciliation allows us to see the relationship between psychology and Christian spirituality less in terms of methodology (which I argue is grounded in the gnomic will) and more in terms of vocation (that is, in response to a call from outside the person).
Canberra Jung Society, 2022
A core question in the psychology of Carl Jung is the relationship between the ego and the self. The ego is who we think we are, while the self is who we really are. The ego can live effectively in a secular materialist world, but the self occupies a psychic reality that has as much validity and reality as the scientific world of matter. We experience the world through our minds, combining our conscious perceptions with unconscious intuitions and influences that shape our personality and culture. The totality of the self can also be referred to as the soul. Jung interpreted Jesus Christ as the archetype of the self, the ideal of human personality integrating the conscious and unconscious realms. In this talk I will study these questions by drawing on a book by Wallace B. Clift titled Jung and Christianity-The Challenge of Reconciliation, and then share some of my own reflections arising from this rich material, looking at how the collective unconscious can be grounded in astronomy, and concluding with some suggestions about climate change.
The Religious Approach to Psyche
Review of: Jason E. Smith, Religious but not Religious, Living a Symbolic Life, Asheville, NC: Chiron Publications, 2020. , 2021
What is religion? Most of us encounter this question at some point during our lives. Sooner or later, we are exposed to influence from institutions and the people around us, nudging us to worship and to belong. Or perhaps we have an experience of the extraordinary—an experience of “being,” of something so profound that it does not fit to the paradigm we have acquired thus far. The mundane is transcended by a confrontation with the supernatural. Such experiences can change our minds and open our consciousness to a quest for meaning, for the right way to live, so our lives are not wasted any longer in the face of “it.” Since the first spark of consciousness shone in the darkness hundreds of thousands of years ago humans began to teach each other and practice rituals designed to get closer to, to reconnect with the mystery of the transcendent. We call this endeavor religion. Only in the past few hundred years has the very idea of religion become a subject of exploration. Psychologists dared to shine a light on the question of religion, perhaps to keep it alive after they reckoned that mystery is not to be reached, but paths to it could be explored. Can we understand religion without understanding the object of religion? Can we practice religion and receive its vital message without adhering to dogma? Can religion be a source of freedom rather than becoming a trap like the tower of Babel where religion, like language, divides us and ultimately leads us away from the common goals of humanity? Is there a way of being “religious” without becoming “religious?” C. G. Jung devoted his whole life to showing us that it is possible to analyze the question of religion in a nontheological way by using the lens of psychology instead. Jung surveyed a broad landscape of religious traditions, especially the teachings of alchemy, Gnosticism, and others that were not concerned with creed but sought to mediate deeper knowledge of the psyche. Jung’s work is a well of knowledge that yields unique insights and tools when it comes to religious seeking. However, his work is elaborate, complex, and not so intellectually accessible to everyone. There have been innumerable books written by Jung’s followers attempting to “translate” his teachings into a language that not only better suits the needs of modern society but also aspires to bring new elements to bridge the gaps and connect the dots between his ideas.
International Journal of Psychiatry Research
Here, we present a new paradigm explaining essence and origin of psyche. It integrates and unifies different approaches in psychology, biology, and ancient philosophy. It further introduces spirituality to psychology. Concepts of spirit and soul are analyzed as wave function, information potential, and quantum state in accordance with quantum mechanics. The brain is considered as a wave analyzer that processes information received from cloud of soul. The interaction between information present in the soul and brain produces the conscious mind. Information that does not interact with brain and is not immediately retrievable is called the unconscious and accessible information that does not interact with the brain is the preconscious. The soul is divided into three parts: Animal soul, human soul, and guiding spirit. The animal soul is the energy of magnetic field that has emerged from all electromagnetic fields of all cells and organs. According to Freud, interaction between animal soul and the brain produces the id. The human soul and guiding spirit are two quantum informational states; when they interact with the brain, they produce the ego and superego, respectively. This new approach affords a new interpretation of life and death. It considers life to be a workshop for intellectual growth and spiritual evolution and views physical disease as an indicator of unresolved conflicts and traumas. Psychological difficulties are an indicator of spiritual deviation from one's personal path. Therapeutic intervention's purpose is restoring the wellbeing that allows individuals to continue their journey of life with love, happiness, and freedom.
Journal of Mind and Behavior, 2012
The existential-phenomenological approach of the early Heidegger and Max Scheler to religion as an amplified empirical phenomenology of the human condition, combined with Heidegger's specific derivation of his Daseins-analysis from the Christianity of Eckart, Paul, and Kierkegaard, is shown to be broadly congruent with the contemporary transpersonal psychology of higher states of consciousness, largely based on Eastern meditative traditions. This descriptive transpersonal psychology of a mystical core to all religions based on the direct experience of presence or Being, as developed by Rudolf Otto and elaborated by Laski, Almaas, and others, is then applied to selected gospel narratives as a further step, past its beginnings in the early Heidegger and Rudolf Bultmann, toward a reconstruction of specific numinous states in early Christianity. This derivation of facets of the numinous from their presumed doctrinal schematizations and/or amplifications places Christianity closer to the goals of the meditative traditions, and allows a more directly experiential understanding of doctrines of Christian redemption, loving compassion, and eternal life-as amplifications of the phenomenology of the inner forms of ordinary here and now consciousness, within which they are already foreshadowed.
Integration between Psychology and Spirituality: A New Paradigm for The Essence and The Nature of The Psyche, 2019
Here, we present a new paradigm explaining essence and origin of psyche. It integrates and unifies different approaches in psychology, biology, and ancient philosophy. It further introduces spirituality to psychology. Concepts of spirit and soul are analyzed as wave function, information potential, and quantum state in accordance with quantum mechanics. The brain is considered as a wave analyzer that processes information received from cloud of soul. The interaction between information present in the soul and brain produces the conscious mind. Information that does not interact with brain and is not immediately retrievable is called the unconscious and accessible information that does not interact with the brain is the preconscious. The soul is divided into three parts: Animal soul, human soul, and guiding spirit. The animal soul is the energy of magnetic field that has emerged from all electromagnetic fields of all cells and organs. According to Freud, interaction between animal soul and the brain produces the id. The human soul and guiding spirit are two quantum informational states; when they interact with the brain, they produce the ego and superego, respectively. This new approach affords a new interpretation of life and death. It considers life to be a workshop for intellectual growth and spiritual evolution and views physical disease as an indicator of unresolved conflicts and traumas. Psychological difficulties are an indicator of spiritual deviation from one's personal path. Therapeutic intervention's purpose is restoring the wellbeing that allows individuals to continue their journey of life with love, happiness, and freedom.