“Children come into the world with that sense of celebration and delight in the awesomeness of life. Then we eat of that wonderful, terrible fruit depicted in the story of the Garden of Eden, and our lives become divided. In childhood we have innocent wholeness, which then is transformed into informed separateness. If one is lucky, a second transformation occurs later in life, a transformation into informed wholeness. A proverb puts it this way: in life our task is to go from unconscious perfection to conscious imperfection and then to conscious perfection.
As we grow up, most of us retain an intuition that heavenly wholeness exists somewhere, however harsh our lives may be. The boundary between the two worlds seems to be particularly thin during adolescence, a condition that does not occur again until we reach the age of forty-five or fifty. Then there is a chance to experience the Golden World again. Unfortunately, adults often dismiss such experiences as ‘only a dream’ or ‘childish talk.’ We tell our children to grow up and face the realities of life. As a result, many people give up on even finding wholeness.”
Robert A. Johnson, Jerry M. Ruhl. “Balancing Heaven and Earth: A Memoir of Visions, Dreams, and Realizations.” HarperCollins, 1998.
Adults too often become & remain stuck in anger, resentment & cynicism towards people, religions, even life in general. Past traumas cause us to build defensive walls around our mind/emotions/body. All of us, to varying degrees, have been traumatized by those claiming to represent various religions. This hardens/toughens us, but then we're less than fully alive and can't explain why our life no longer shines. This is unnecessary, needless, optional, 'discretionary' suffering that we can heal. BUT to do so, alone or with guidance, we must go through our heavy defenses, to re-discover & re-unite with our own spacious depth. We CAN soften & gradually unlock OUR OWN chains. HOWEVER, aversion & intolerance towards: self-reflection, meditation, religion, spirituality, love, intimacy, etc can keep us deadlocked for life.
Below, Rick Archer's (RA) excellent interview with Christian mystic, Cynthia Bourgeault PhD (CB):
RA “You mentioned that you were kind of turned off from Christianity originally because it seemed so rigid, doctrinaire, stifling, and so on. I would say that this has been the problem with every religion, that there’s an inner core to every religion that its founder was likely living as a daily reality, and that over time, that core, that deeper dimension is lost, and so the religion becomes like a dead body without the spirit that animates a live body. So there’s nothing necessarily wrong with the outer forms of religion, but without their foundation and inner experience, they become calcified and problematic in so many ways.”
CB “Exactly. And I think that Thomas Keating very, very correctly intuited that meditation or contemplation was the sap, was the flowing fluid that would restore the body of Christianity out of its calcification and back to life. And I think he’s a hundred percent correct in that. And that the practice just opens up capacities to comprehend the Gospel - which is a non-dual teaching - in a non-dual way. And without it, you don’t have a prayer. So his sense that somehow we had made this so high and so mighty that nobody was doing it was just absolutely locking Christianity at its lowest level of expression. And every religious tradition will have a lowest level of expression. It’s always going to happen. But when you have only your lowest level of expression, you don’t have a living religion any more.
RA “When people get onto a spiritual practice, and really begin to make some progress, they begin to realize not only the truth of their own religion if they have one, it begins to make sense to them for the first time, but they begin to look at other religions and say, ‘Oh yeah, they were saying the same thing, just stated in a slightly different way, in a different culture and so on.”
CB “Exactly, exactly. And until that happens, I think you really have to break through to the place where you see that every religious path, all the great sacred traditions are absolutely precious and necessary and irreplaceable like colors in the rainbow. If you lost one of them, the ability to understand what’s in the invisible light spectrum of God would be diminished.
And I’ve also found for a lot of people, that they will leave Christianity (for example, just because it’s still for many of us our religion of upbringing), they’ll leave with a lot of wounds, go to another path, embrace it, and become very, very adept at that path. But you find that until they can come back and heal the wounds that they’ve had in their religion of origin, it’s going to limit their progress on the path they’ve chosen. They always hit a stuck place that’s not going to be resolved within that path. It’s going to be resolved by going back to where the issue was in their Christianity, working through that so they’re genuinely forgiving of the hurt that happened. And then they’re liberated. Then they can be a Buddhist, or a Sufi again, but the rigidity always enters at the same level.”
Cynthia Bourgeault - Oct 23, 2017 Batgap interview: https://batgap.com/cynthia-bourgeault/
Below, the same topic from a slightly different perspective, using different terminology:
“Over the years I discovered that virtually everyone that comes to (Jungian) analysis is in some way facing a religious crisis, a term I prefer to neurosis, and every analysis is in some way a religious dilemma.
This is the essence of what I learned from Dr. Jung: listen to your interior intelligence, take it seriously, stay true to it, and – most important – approach it with a religious attitude. His psychological term for this is individuation – discovering the uniqueness of yourself, finding out what you are not and finding out what you are. Individuation relates to wholeness, but it is not some indiscriminate wholeness but rather your particular relationship to everything else. You get to the whole only by working with the particularity of your life, not by trying to evade or rise above the specificity of your life. This is the blending of heaven and earth. This is a truly religious life.
Of course, Jung didn’t invent this; it is as old as humankind. … but Jung presented it in a very practical way and in a language for modern times. After I learned from Dr. Jung the process of approaching daily life with a truly religious attitude, then I could begin to see how the great symbol systems of the world’s religions were saying similar things. I had grown up with Christian symbols and rituals all my life, but they had become empty; it is ironic that work with my dreams (and, later, living among Hindus in India) would teach me what those symbols and rituals were really about. Only when I could understand, for example, that the virgin birth was about a birth of new consciousness in me did that story begin to have profound meaning for me.
Dr. Jung linked religious experience to the numinosum, a word for dynamic effects not caused by an act of human will, and he distinguished between religion and creed. A creed is a codified and dogmatized form of an original religious experience of the numinosum. Dr. Jung believed that all of the prophets for all the world’s religions experienced the numinosum, what I call the Golden World, and over time creeds were developed to help channel the energy and to explain such experiences to the uninitiated. Replacing the immediate experience of the Golden World with an institutionalized set of symbols and rituals has a valuable purpose in defending people against religious experience that might be overwhelming. Direct experiences of the Golden World are glorious but also painful and dangerous, and some people shouldn’t try to contain these energies on their own. The church, synagogue, temple, or mosque mediates between the numinosum and the everyday; it is a good place to reconcile the Golden World and the earthly world.
Dr. Jung always tried to return patients to the religious systems in which they had experience, if that was possible. … I wasn’t pushing any form of religion, but I was very sensitive to the importance of the religious function in each person.”
Robert A. Johnson, Jerry M. Ruhl. “Balancing Heaven and Earth: A Memoir of Visions, Dreams, and Realizations.” HarperCollins, 1998.
Life's too short to remain stuck. With courage and guidance, we can regain our zest for life - at any age!
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