James Hollis' lecture and workshop will focus on interpersonal relationships. This excerpt from The Eden Project: In Search of the Magical Other, Inner City Books, September, 1998, (pp 125-129) focuses on the relationship to the Divine. Used with permission of the author.

Copyright © 1998 by James Hollis. All rights reserved.

• First, there is the principle of resonance. Since the energy of soul is invisible, we can only track its movement as it momentarily incarnates in images. [1] The image may be an affect (an emotional state, such as panic where the god Pan is suffered), a physical sensation (a bodily state which carries both the wound and the desire of soul to heal), a dream (which presents itself out of the autonomous activity of the unconscious), or some external phenomenon, be it burning bush or a rock star. Certainly the grand religious traditions have preserved myriad images, some of which still carry the energy of soul for certain individuals. Each of us must sort through the magnificent ruins and find those images that speak to us, those that are personally resonant. Activation of the psychic tuning fork within tells us that soul is present. Like calls to like. The principle of resonance tells us what is of us, about us, for us, even as it retains its mystery. No effort of ego, however, can endow an image with mystery once mystery has fled.

• The second test of our spirituality may be found in our encounter with depth. Whatever pulls us deeper into life, even painfully so opens us to the great life that courses beneath history and below the surface of everyday appearance.[2] Soul is epiphenomenal; it is omnipresent and contiguous with all experiences of the phenomenal. To be pulled into the depths through our encounter with the Beloved, to encounter the depths within ourselves, to experience the awe of Nature, is truly to have a religious experience. To glimpse the invisible world that animates the visible one is to experience the Mystery that enlarges consciousness.

• The third principle is numinosity. When Mystery winks at us, we realize that soul is not only in us, but also in the outer world. That glimmer is the autonomy of soul in the world which seeks to connect with us. Its movement may be seen in the epiphany of natural events, ranging from the course of the planets to the microscopic dance of life. It is found in the patterns of history, the frenzies of popular fevers, and in the daily encounter with others. The Hindu tradition of greeting by clasping the hands and bowing is an affirmation that one recognizes the presence of soul in the Other, and honors it.

Those fortunate enough to live in a society where resonant images connect the tribe and the individual to the precincts of Mystery -- cosmos, nature, tribal others -- experience a psychic connection to the Other, and a sense of self grounded in a transcendent order. Those images are conduits into the natural world, with its specific tribal mythos, and assist in later moving the community members into a world beyond mortality. Moreover, such images conduct them through the developmental stages of life, rendering understandable and acceptable the various deaths and rebirths which constitute the path of maturation. Most of all, they are blessed to feel a sense of spiritual home in a world full of unending grief. As an anonymous Chippewa fragment had it:

Sometimes I go about pitying myself, and all the time
I am being carried by great winds across the sky.[3]

For most of us, alas, there is no sense of being carried by those powers. Yet it was Jung, more than any other figure in our age, who taught that those same "great winds" still course through each of us. [4] He reminded us that the source of those unifying images which animated our ancestors and linked them to Mystery were generated by the symbol-making function we all possess. The same mysterious place whence come our dreams also births those mediating images which arise when we encounter the mysterious Other.

Archetypally speaking, the god-image emerges from our own depths. A god is defined then as an affectively charged image that emerges out of our encounter with Mystery. Such images are numinous; they wink at us and activate a resonant response. They are Wholly Other, for we cannot command them. They are inexplicable for they are experiential more than cognitive. They link us to largeness. And they constellate in us all sorts of metaphoric associations. Thus the death of a princess, for instance, is more than the loss of one person, more than a reminder of mortality; it activates a very wide range of associations, and occasions resonance at very deep levels across disparate human boundaries.

As we know, imagos that express the deep movement of soul can also reify, grow brittle, even die. We need to remember that the image is not the god; rather, it is the vehicle of the godly. It seems the common temptation of us all to adore the image rather than the Mystery to which it points. Such a mistaken relationship becomes the sin of idolatry, arising out of our anxious attempt to freeze, to hold on to, the Mystery. When we seek to fix it on behalf of the nervous ego's desire for security, we blaspheme, for we are seeking to limit the autonomy of Mystery. This is like trying to order up a certain kind of dream, or seeking to constrain its meaning.

I recall an analysand who came every week with a beautifully written essay that analyzed her dreams and tied up their meaning very neatly. When she was invited to consider another reading of a dream, she grew agitated and defensive. She was seeking to control the Mystery within, lest its autonomy threaten her fragile ego.

So we blaspheme when we seek to worship the image, control the god, manage the Mystery. This human tendency may be seen not only in religious institutions but in our ordinary desire to control our psychic processes rather than attend them, be charged by them and grow through the dialogue with them. That Other we seek "out there" is also the Other "in here."

The reification of an image through history, or through our own desire to fix its meaning in forms convenient to ego, leads to this peculiar oxymoron called "the death of God." How can a god, immortal by definition, die? What dies is rather the power of the image to point beyond itself toward the Mystery it once intimated. The idolatry of image occurs after the energy has already gone elsewhere. After the Crucifixion, the followers of Christ found his tomb empty. What his energy incarnated was no longer to be found in corporeal form, but in the activation of their archetypal encounter with Mystery. Fundamentalism and literalism are in the end soul denying. When the energy of soul has gone elsewhere, what is left are merely cultural artifacts, relics, graves. The image is, after all, only the husk which the Mystery once animated. To worship the husk makes no sense, yet the reification of historically charged images is why many of us can no longer connect with the Mystery.

Footnotes:

1. See Tracking of the Gods for a more complete account of this task.
2. In Swamplands of the Soul, Hollis discusses at length how the invitation to the enlargement of the soul may be found even in the darker states, such as depression, betrayal, loss and fear.
3. Robert Bly, James Hillman and Michael Meade, The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart: Poems for Men. P. 4b96.
4. One should not be surprised by this notion, given that the various words for soul and spirit, such as psychein, esprit, rauch, spiritus, anima, inspiration, respiration, all embody the idea of "breath" as their central metaphor.