ABSTRACT
The religious literature recognizes that spiritual experience may occur in at least two ways. It may be acquired by human effort, or an experience of the divine may be directly instilled into the soul passively, without human effort, as an act of grace. The hard work of everyday attention to, and amplification of, intrapsychic material belongs to the former category, while sudden, unforeseen eruption of the numinosum defines the second form. In both cases we ground our definition of religious experience on the idea that the core, or the archetypal basis, of the personal self is the transpersonal Self. This fact is both the central tenet of analytical psychology and is also the foundational axiom of a religious approach to the psyche. This psychological tenet is identical to the Upanishadic insight: ‘thou art that’, where ‘that’ refers to the divine. The idea of self-Self identity or overlap is amenable to a degree of psychological understanding, although it is a mystical statement whose truth can only be grasped experientially. It cannot be taken literally without confusing different levels of the psyche, because the Self is essentially identical with the whole of the objective psyche. However, there is a level of identity or at least overlap between Self and self which can be described conceptually. This identity occurs because the self is a humanized, incarnate aspect of some strands of the Self. It has been suggested that the process of the humanizing of the divine occurs when the Self, which in itself is beyond form or categories of any kind, enters the human psyche and body as fields or filaments of intrapsychic and somatic organization, corresponding to natural laws which we call archetypes. Around these cluster images, affects and memories of related quality. The latter three elements are provided by our human environment, which provides the contents of a transpersonal container. In this way aspects of the Self are able to gradually take on human features which coalesce to become the sense of a personal self.
