Beltane                                                                         Early Growth Moon

One of the problems with the Self model I proposed yesterday is that it is sticky.  When the ego has its way, which it wants to do all the time, feelings and thoughts gum up the mental works, a problem that zen and other meditative disciplines can correct, or, at least, diminish.  Example.  Waking up at 4:50 am this morning, then running through the evening at Tom’s 35th anniversary gig.  Nothing in particular, just this thought then that thought, which might lead to an emotion which can careen off in another direction.

This not unusual for me, neither is it usual.  It happens.  Rather than eliminate the self to control the ego I choose to say, it happens.  And not worry the matter beyond that.  Then I can move on, albeit with less sleep than I might desire, but I can always–and always do–take a nap.

At 10:30 I see John Desteian, my analyst (Jungian), of long standing and we will discuss the numinous.  At least that’s the question for the day:  what is the essence of the numinous?  I’ve had some time to reflect on that since John and I last met.

Rudolf Otto invented the term numinous in his book, The Idea of the Holy.  In this book he wanted to get at the non-rational aspects of religion, the holy and the sacred being the usual terminology for it.  He felt these words had a lot of baggage and had gotten confused in the up take of rationalists who wrote theology, did historical criticism of biblical texts and generally tried to shoehorn the  whole of the religious experience into the reason paradigm forcefully advanced by Enlightenment thinkers and the newly regnant science.  Otto wrote in 1909.

The numinous is his word for the dimension of the holy and the sacred not touchable by reason, yet crucially important to their lived reality.  Jung, born in 1903, came to Otto’s work with a deep respect for the small r religious life and adopted the numinous as critical to his understanding of psychology.

Thus, the question, what is the essence of the numinous?  As I see it right now, the numinous is an affective response to an experience of the other, an example of which would be the ego experiencing the Self.  The ego, as the command and control center of the psyche, believes it has full authority for advancement of its priorities, but not so.  The ego works best and accomplishes the most when subservient to the overall needs of the Self.

That is, the ego wants to arrange matters to optimize the survival and flourishing of what it perceives to be me, the sense of I that has the most developmental history, and also the sense of I most invaded by cultural or personal expectations that may not advance the interest of the Self, but may try (too often successfully) to bend the Self toward the goal of career, ambition, money, fame, power.  This bending or truncating of the Self in service of needs defined by externals–the culture or persons influential in the individual’s history–leads to deep unhappiness, a sense (and the reality) of betraying one’s Self.

The power of the numinous comes in its ability to challenge the mundane priorities of the ego.  Note, the ego’s priorities are not bad or wrong.  To the contrary, they are in line with the need to survive and, within limits, to thrive.  Those limits are, interestingly, the places where the needs of the Self conflict with received expectations, either cultural or from your personal history.  In other words, the unexamined ego will take me down the path of whatever expectation hollers loudest.

When the numinous, the whole Self, (or God, or Brahma, or shunyata) intervenes, it enlists the ego’s powers of organization, protection and survival and marshals them in a more holistic direction, that is, fulfillment of dreams and hopes that connect the individual to the collective, not in the sense of overpowering it or coming to dominate it, but in a manner that synchronizes the gifts of the individual with the needs of the many.

This change of direction can be terrifying, can seem like abandonment of everything mom and dad taught, of those very things the culture says are most desirable, and such a direction threatens the individual with isolation and failure.  The most familiar direction seems safest and an experience of the numinous challenges it.