ABSTRACT

The psychological approach to spirituality stresses that personal experience of the divine is more important than any abstractly derived or doctrinal idea of God. In fact, it is psychologically correct to say with the Sufis that there is no God except the experience of God. The depth psychologist is not concerned with the nature of divinity in some absolute sense, and cannot know to what extent ‘God’ is a human construct or whether God exists outside of ourselves. Our concern is with the meaning of the experience of God to the individual, with how the individual may best approach the spiritual search and with how such experience affects the personality. For the religiously oriented psychologist it is therefore essential to have a way of talking about the intrapsychic manifestations of the divine and a way of integrating them into the total psychology of the individual. Jung was a major proponent of this attitude,1 and for these purposes his concept of a transpersonal Self and its symbolic effects provides a useful language and framework. However, for this to be an effective method it is also essential that we discard all preconceived ideas of God that we have unconsciously imbibed from classical theism, and not unwittingly transfer or project them onto the Self concept (Asher, 1993). This is easier said than done; as we will see, Jung himself occasionally is guilty of this attribution. Instead, we must remain within our actual experience. To avoid preconceived ideas about the Self, I suggest that the therapist’s attitude has to be that of the ‘don’t know mind’ of Zen, or Lao Tzu’s ‘do not know that you know’.