ABSTRACT

The opening chapters suggest that a Jungian spirituality engages the archetypal unconscious in an unmediated conversation with the spirits that rise from it to address the consciousness of the conversant. More, this dialogue on an individual plane is at the same time a dialogue with the power that creates the religious and political forms of communal bonding around societal absolutes. These foundational Jungian positions imply that the deepest movement of history is that of the progressive concretion in human consciousness of its archetypal ground. Throughout his work Jung referred to this process as one of ``incarnation''. In some of his later statements in the same paragraph he will describe the process of incarnation as one of ``penetration'' and mean by it the same ongoing ingression of the archetypal unconscious into human consciousness (Jung 1976d: 734). Because of the peculiar meaning he gives to it and to its centrality in his psychology, Jung's revisioning of incarnation and its close relation to his thought on the ``relativity of God'' warrant closer examination.