ABSTRACT
To this point the work has argued that Jung's psychology is a major contributor to an emerging religious consciousness resting on a radical interiority not to be found in the mainstreams of the major monotheistic Western traditions. This consciousness and attendant spirituality would effectively understand the experience of and dialogue with the divine to describe the reciprocity between the wholly intrapsychic agencies of the archetypal unconscious and the ego. Within the total containment of this reciprocity, the unconscious serves to create consciousness in order to become progressively conscious in it in processes of incarnation or penetration that can never be completed nor abandoned individually or collectively. This paradox is due to the fact that the fecundity of the unconscious seeking incarnation in consciousness will always transcend its speci®c concretions. At the conclusion of Chapter 9, it was suggested that Jung's attraction to certain particular mystics was based on an experience in which the ego was wholly absorbed by the unconscious in a state of rest which for the moment demanded no activity. These mystics took the experience of such total absorption as an experience of their identity with God in which all distinction between creature and creator was negated. This chapter examines such experience and its possible social consequences.
