By Kenneth Lloyd Anderson
Part One
Individuation and Sacred Affirmation
The question is, how does Carl Jung define the instincts and the unconscious with which he wishes to balance the conscious mind?
Jung did not have the science of sociobiology (although he did have Darwin) to work with, which has related consciousness to instincts of survival and reproduction. That is, the conscious and the unconscious, as well as human behavior in general have been largely, although not solely, controlled by mostly unconscious instincts to be successful in survival and reproduction. Perhaps these instincts are not as atrophied as Jung considered them to be.
Let me begin by saying that
Evolutionary Catholicism (EC) maintains that the central activation of the mostly unconscious instincts resides in the Spirit Within, which seeks to activate life to Godhood in evolution. It is this drive which the conscious mind needs to integrate and balance and apply to civilization. Enlightened consciousness is based in this realization of the Ideal of the Instincts, and in turn this gives unconscious instincts a sacred religious base, a base missing in both Traditional religion and psychoanalysis, which deny, block, or psychologize this ideal.
It is the Self in Jung that replaces God, even though Jung does seem to make nods in the direction of a transcendent Self. For Jung, the Self essentially remains in the human unconscious where supposedly psychoanalysis can root it out and bring it to consciousness by studying dreams, symbols, and so on.
This is a mostly worthy endeavor, but eventually the base of the activation of the unconscious needs to be understood to be the Will to Godhood of the Spirit, which helps activate both nature and nurture to evolve materially and spiritually to Godhood. This becomes far more than the balance sought of “individuation,” this becomes a Sacred Affirmation of the Ideal of the Instincts.
The Four Zeniths
In EC we say that the zenith of the body is the mind, the zenith of the mind is the soul, or self, the zenith of the soul is the spirit, and the zenith of the spirit is Godhood. Affirming the four zeniths brings psychobiological health, indeed, the need for spiritual meaning is in this way instinctive or innate.
Civilizing the Beast
The unconscious must not be reduced to being a barbarian. The instincts are not evil. Survival and reproduction are not evil, and the dynamics of evolution are not evil.
When the unconscious is understood as being activated by the Will to Godhood, or the Spirit, then the unconscious can be a source of revelation. But if the unconscious is reduced to Soul-Mind alone, the Self of Jung, then it is doubtful that this can be considered a source of the deepest revelation because this self is still human, all too human.
Too often the unconscious has been thought to be “pathological” because it can “bursts out” after being ignored and repressed. But we should not be too quick to define the actions of evolution as pathological.
The dark side (the unconscious) and the light side (consciousness) are not thought of as opposing one another in EC. The light side of Traditional Religion is represented by the
Involutionary Inward Path and the dark side, more or less represented by the
Evolutionary Outward Path. But this is a less than desired way of defining these things, because it is based in ancient antagonisms, gnostic antagonisms, between spirit and matter, with matter always being reduced to the dark side, even essentially defined as the “shadow” by Jung.
We use the term Civilizing the Beast in EC to mean bringing in from the cold the “beast” of material life, ending the exile of the beast caused by the
Great Spiritual Blockade of material evolution to Godhood. This is one of our main responses to both revealed religion and psychoanalysis.
In Jung “good” and “evil” are relative to consciousness and not fixed or absolute, because good and evil are only within our consciousness. In psychoanalysis the unconscious can introduce a view that can unsettle religion and society. For example, if religion calls “good” a life devoid of sexuality, then the unconscious objects to this repression. But since we often cannot face the “evil” within ourselves, we “project” the evil onto something or someone else. Jung even defines war this way, as a consequence of people not able to face their own shadow side, and so they make the other side evil. The more repression of the shadow, the bigger potential explosion, such as war. I will have more on the subject of war later in this essay.
Jung preferred to channel the twin forces of good and evil into a cultural form, with a less one-sided view of religion, and with a more gnostic view that could encompass the dark as well as the light, a system that could encompass opposites. For example, Jung said, “Christianity split the Germanic Barbarian into an upper and lower half, and enabled him, by repressing the dark side to domesticate the brighter half and fit it for civilization. But the lower, darker half still awaits redemption and a second spell of domestication.”
This is precisely what EC offers. In EC the Inward and Outward Path harmonize material and spiritual evolution. The “evil” of material evolution is seen as not evil, but as the path to attain Godhood---the God first seen in the “good” Inward Path of Revealed Religion. When we speak of the Great Spiritual Blockade, we think we are more realistically addressing the problem Jung saw of blocking unconscious or instinctive forces. When we speak of The Ideal of the Instincts, this is the real inclusion required to end the repression of human nature and end our exile from nature and evolution.
When W. B. Yeats speaks in his poem “The Second Coming,” of the beast being born in Bethlehem and recognized as a co-equal, this is that same need to incorporate the dark side. We think EC can act as the “civilizing force” for the whole man, engaging both the instincts and consciousness in recognizing the true repression of the instincts. The instincts seek Godhood and consciousness needs to know this and help guide evolution in this great and sacred task.
We have been describing here some of the same goals that Jung had, but we have, if I dare say, a deeper project. We are not made whole---and mankind will not be made whole---merely by absorbing or harmonizing the human unconscious into human consciousness.
The Spirit Within the unconscious seeks to activate the instincts to evolve life to Godhood, and the unconscious, and even the Spirit, will not be made whole until Godhood is attained. God exists beyond the human unconscious, yet God is first seen in the human unconscious through the Soul, the zenith of the mind, or more rarely seen through the Spirit.
To be made whole, we require the true God of the Evolutionary Outward Path, the God first seen in the Involutionary Inward Path of Revealed Religions, and the God defined much later in the unconscious by Carl Jung.
The Shadow Behind the Shadow
Civilization is out of balance with itself, as Jung discerned. But it will not be balanced alone by incorporating the unconscious into consciousness. Deeper than the unconscious is the Will to Godhood of the Spirit, which activates both the unconscious and the conscious mind. This is the shadow behind the shadow. We will always be out of balance until we attain Godhood in evolution.
“Accepting our fate” means accepting the Ideal of the Instincts, which is our destiny of Godhood. This defines a
positive theology.On War
It is a very serious mistake to think that “projection,” or transferring unacceptable “evil” from one's own unconscious onto an enemy, alone leads to war and violence, and that the “cure” is to synthesize the evil shadow of ourselves into our own conscious minds. Evolution is competitive, and alas, competition can be deadly, but this will not cease by incorporating the unconscious.
Understanding evolution and the Will to Godhood behind life can lead to finding acceptable cultural structures which allow evolution and competition to take place. For example, various forms of federalism which promote variety, localism and independent states, might be such an evolutionary cultural structure.
Jungianism may relieve the human psyche by opening wider the unconscious, more so than an exclusively involutionary religion, but Evolutionary Catholicism includes the evolutionary drive, which drives the psyche itself.
Jung may be right in saying that Involutionary Christianity did not enough engage the darker side, but Jungianism did not engage evolution nearly enough. Jung may offer more than the “pleasing patina” which Jung defined as Christianity, but Jungianism is itself a veneer of the unconscious over the evolutionary dynamic.
Jung was pessimistic about psychic health originating from governments, or even from religions. He thought psychic health had to happen with individuals first. This seems true also of the traditional teaching of virtue to individuals first in religion, but this pessimism seems also to stem from virtually ignoring the powerful universal force of evolution, where individuals help groups survive, and group selection is a central dynamic in human life, however blocked and unconscious culturally it may be today. Sociobiology has shown that individualism, as well as Jung's ideal of “individuation,” need to be related to group dynamics and evolution if they are not to be thought of as selfish.
On Gender
We have to realize that the force and direction of the Spirit is greater than ourselves. We can perhaps agree with Jung's calling the soul the logos of animas, and calling the spirit the animus of eros, but we don't see these as gender specific. Both genders possess them.
In Evolutionary Catholicism the Soul, or animas, defines the mind (logos), or more precisely, the Zenith of the Mind, and the Spirit is defined as the Zenith of the Soul, or the Will to Godhood, working through survival and reproduction (eros) and evolution, which applies to both genders.
When the Spirit is seen as more than eros, more than connectedness and love, and when the Spirit is seen as the Will to Godhood, then talk of gender seems to fade, as both genders seek the same Godhood.
Men may be inclined psychobiologically more to logos, and women more to eros, but it is the genders working together in a complementary fashion, toward integrating the Spirit into the Soul and the Will to Godhood into the Mind, which is the central psychological and biological integration needed for both genders. We would have to disagree with Jung in his suggestion that only men have animas (Souls) and only women animus (or Spirit). Both genders have soul and spirit.
Was Jung himself blocked a bit by limiting spirituality to the unconscious human mind, which might have led to his concentration on gender differences? When the Spirit is seen as the Will to Godhood in evolution, then gender, though important, is less centered upon in religion.
Sociobiology has validated many of Jung's gender differences, which had, until recently, suffered from deconstruction as being merely social constructions. The truth remains a balance between the forces of mind, body, gender, evolution and culture.
Evolutionary Therapy
The Priest's role in Evolutionary Catholicism is to understand the intentionality of the Spirit, which the person is often unable to clearly comprehend, whereas in Jungian psychology, the therapist's role is to represent the intentions of the psyche and to see or understand the “Self”. The Priest needs to take the side of the Spirit, whereas the psychoanalyst takes the side of the Unconscious.
In “Evolutionary Therapy,” the Priest would need to mediate a deal or balance between the Spirit (unconscious) and the soul (conscious mind) which the parishioner can live with. “Befriending” the spirit may be a task which could involve political incorrect insights. Egotistical human life and modern values may seem limited in the face of the long evolution of the spirit to Godhood, beyond man, beyond superman, beyond angels and gods, all the way to Godhood.
When the spirit is blocked, It turns away from its central path. The Priests “art” in EC is to help “release” the spirit into the energy of the person and society, making the energy of the spirit available for the individual and for society---like the martial arts, we can learn to use or turn the powerful force of the spirit away from hurting ourselves into helping ourselves, and helping our societies evolve.
Meanwhile the soul, which is the Zenith of the Mind and the ego, must maintain its task to intelligently help guide or “ride the tiger” of the spirit, even as the Soul needs to stop blocking the spirit. This is the desired balance. We need to befriend, not only the unconscious, but the spirit which activates the unconscious, and we need to correctly define the spirit and its direction.
We are not merely looking for the opposite of the ego, the contrary elements of our psyche, because androgynous balance is not the goal. The great goal of the Spirit is the goal, which lies beyond us, beyond the human unconscious, at the Zenith of Evolution to Godhood. Whatever parts of our psyche seem opposed to the direction of the spirit need to be synthesized and balanced.
Part TwoA Biospiritual Form of Transcendence
Jung's “transcendent function” goes at least as deep as the “Self” within the human psyche. Some argue that Jung was also defining something beyond the human being and beyond the human psyche, but this does not seem likely. David Tacey ("How To Read Jung") believes Jung does not wish to imply that this is a metaphysical process, or is a spiritual transcendence. Jung sees this as a “natural biological process.” The creation of the third or “tertium” in Jung seems like a biological process.
In EC, Godhood is a biological form of transcendence which we often call biospiritual transcendence, to indicate the highest levels of evolution, which are, in this sense, spiritual or biospiritual.
Inflation of the Human
Using Jung's concept of “inflation” somewhat differently, there can be an inflation of the human, yet alone inflation of the ego, which seems to take place in Jungian therapy when elements of the unconscious are seen as only human forces. The Spirit Within activates us to evolve far beyond the human, far beyond the human unconscious, far beyond the incorporation of the human unconscious into consciousness.
Jung said, “A psychoneurosis must be understood, ultimately, as the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning.” ("Psychotherapists or the Clergy") This is well said, but, we would use the word spirit rather than the word soul, which takes things out of the realm of the human psyche, the seed of the soul, and its potential inflation, and takes us into the realm of evolution, ultimately to Godhood.
The cause of suffering will probably not be cured by psychoanalysis because the human psyche and the human self is seeking something beyond itself, it is seeking to evolve to Godhood. There will, of course, be the suffering related to survival and reproduction in evolution, until Godhood is reached.
Knowing the goal of the spirit will certainly give meaning to a confused neurotic. Jung seems right in giving the patient their own psychic story, or myth (what Jung called a healthy fiction), especially since they seem to need it most in the second half of their lives. Jung thought no one could be healed without gaining a religious outlook. But Jung's medicine stopped at the human psyche, which is not a Kosmic enough myth, which can inflate the human being.
Material causation goes much deeper than science now knows. We may one day understand the spirit and Godhood in physical or chemical terms, but for now we do not.
The mind is virtually reducible to the brain, which is where the soul lies, at the Zenith of the Mind. It is the spirit which lies at the Zenith of the Soul, that has transcendent properties, which go beyond the imminent or involutionary brain and soul. Yet even the spirit is inevitably bonded to the body and to matter, since the body is the vehicle of the spirit's evolution, and the only way the spirit will reach Godhood is through the evolution of the body activated by the spirit.
Establishment psychology seems to be a science, a “logos” without a soul or psyche, as Jung believed, but psychoanalysis seems to be a soul without a spirit.
Yet the logos is God to the Gnostics, which makes them, paradoxically, the progenitors of science. The Word, the Great Equation, is God to the Gnostics, which derived from Plato, Zoroastrianism, and the East.
Jung believed that the spiritual was real and natural (a deeper dimension of the real) yet he did not believe the logos was enough. Jung's spirituality was not discernible, necessarily, by reason or logic, yet it was real. This is confusing. How is the spiritual real, yet not discernible by logos? The answer is that what is defined as spiritual in Jung is really the logos, as it is defined in all the involutionary religions. It is an introverted, involutionary soul defined, an idea defined, and not really a biological process. Jung did affirm Gnosticism after all.
Spiritual Logos
In EC science becomes spiritual and the spiritual becomes science. The logos, then, moves into the camp of the spiritual since definition and equations and words can be defined as spiritual and of the mind only. In EC the Object not the definition of the object is all.
The spiritual joins the material in that the material evolves to Godhood and Godhood is the Zenith of biospiritual evolution. The spiritual is therefore real and the logos is unreal in EC, which transposes the traditional structure.
Symbols and archetypes are thus of the logos and not of the spirit, since they are symbols for a thing and not a thing in themselves. Jung seems confused in denying the logos and affirming the soul in analysis, since his soul is logos.
EC affirms the Supreme Object Godhood and not merely the logos or definition of God. And furthermore the Supreme Logos exists only in the mind of God, much like reason exists in the mind of man.
Our transvaluation or transposition says that science or logos defines the world and is therefore spiritual, and religion or the spiritual becomes the world and is therefore material.
When Jung seeks the spiritual in man, he is really moving away from the spiritual, and moving toward the logos of definition and symbol, thereby denying the spiritual as he seeks the logos.
The spirit is grounded in the material because it exists within the material, activating the material to evolve to Godhood. When we try to separate the material from the spiritual we create a false duality and concentrate instead on the logos of definition. This has set up the Great Spiritual Blockade.
We need to move back to the Object, and not the symbol of the Object.
Even the logos of definition is grounded in the mind within the body, as the spirit is grounded in the body of the soul. The mind or soul doesn't exist without the body, and the spirit cannot evolve without the body. This is not the Gnostic “entrapment” of the mind or spirit, this is material reality, the reality of the Object. There is no duality in this sense, which means the Jungians, Gnostics and their forefathers in Platonism, Zoroastrianism, Brahmanism, were more or less mistaken in seeing dualities.
Martin Heidegger seems to have seen duality something like this, but good luck with studying him.
In therapy Jung was worried about the ego appropriating things coming in from the unconscious and therefore Jung called for “expansion without inflation” of the ego. We see the best way to avoid the inflation of the ego is to avoid the inflation of the unconscious as well. The spirit is not complete in the human unconscious and seeks Godhood. What better way to avoid inflation of any kind, then to understand that we need to evolve far beyond the human species.
Spiritual Neurosis
A “psychoneurosis,” according to Jung, must ultimately be understood as “the suffering of the soul which has not discovered its meaning.” But it is the suffering not of the soul but the “suffering” of the spirit which we are concerned with. The spirit seeks to evolve beyond the unconscious, beyond the soul, beyond the psyche, all the way to Godhood. The spirit needs to direct unconscious material life to evolve this way. The Soul-Mind needs to discover its meaning in the evolution of the spirit. This defines the spiritual neurosis. Therefore, wholeness is more than “psychospiritual” wholeness.
We agree with Jung when Jung says that the spiritual is eminently “natural,” that it is not supernatural and that the spiritual is a deeper dimension of the real. But the deeper dimension of the natural and the real is Godhood, the Supreme Real Object which we must materially evolve to in the Kosmos. Jung does not project the “real” to this destination.
Original Sin
We can somewhat agree with Jung's definition of original sin as alienation from the base of our nature, but we have severed more than our connections with the human unconscious. We have severed our connections with the evolving spirit, and this is the true “original sin”.
We need more than a “psychological enlightenment,” and this enlightenment is not beyond the categories of good and evil, as Jung implies. There is, in fact, an ethical code related to recovery of our alienation as defined by evolution. The basic code can tell us the “pattern” that takes evolution forward toward higher and higher consciousness, from the simple to the complex, and so on. It is the very difficult
Beyondist task in the Order of the Outward Path to discern the evolutionary direction of the Spirit Within material life.
The new religioscience of the late Raymond Cattell's
Beyondism sought to understand evolution and sociobiology so that human beings may evolve naturally out into the Kosmos. We would continue this task, but unlike Cattell, we do continue to affirm and embrace the moral codes of “Traditional Religion” (e.g. Catholicism) through the Involutionary Inward Path, which among other things, keeps the conservative order that is so important to continued evolution.
Ordered Evolution is the balance we seek in our
Revitalized Conservatism. On “Remembering the Soul”
“Remembering the Soul” in Jung's Platonic reference makes one happy or “eudaimonic,” full of happiness, but therein lies the danger of what we have defined as The Great Spiritual Blockade. We stop and swim in eudaimonic bliss and forget or overlook the evolutionary direction of the Spirit and the Body. This has been the great error of Traditionalism.
Both Plato and Jung believed that this “remembering” was a central activity of the human soul. But we have called this a Great Spiritual Blockade which needs to be unblocked. It is not only the ego that opposes this remembering, it is the eudaimonic remembering itself that is the opponent of wholeness.
The ego may be a “good servant but lousy master” (Tacey) but the unconscious can also be a diminished master since the unconscious itself must learn to take direction from the Spirit or the Will to Godhood.
Ritual in EC, as in other religions, helps us get back in touch with the Will to Godhood, the flow of the Spirit, which is the central function of the ritual. Tacey points out that the word ritual comes from the Latin ritus, relating to flow and river.
Symbolic life according to Jung is initiated by spiritual life. The symbols point toward higher reality. Later in this essay we will define the ritual of the Mass of Joy.
The Alchemy of Evolution
The “holy marriage,” “the conjunctio,” the “chymical wedding” of alchemy is seen in EC as the alchemy of evolution, leading to Godhood. Sacred Unions must be discovered in the alchemy of evolution to Godhood.
Sexuality not only symbolizes the search for the missing “other half,” it actually provides the Real conjunction of reproduction necessary to evolve to Godhood in the material world. Romance seeks the other half, the missing piece, which is why romance has often been a symbol for seeking Godhood.
The Spirit is “sick” when it does not feel connected to the Universal Spirit of the Kosmos, the “tree of life” in Hyperborean terms. The ego is often resistant to or ignorant of this connection.
The Spirit seeks more than to unite with the universal Spirit Within, the Spirit seeks to activate material life to evolve all the way to Godhood. Let us not stop the Spirit too soon, short of its goal.
It is the dams and walls set up against the Spirit, in the Great Spiritual Blockade, that we are concerned with, more so even than the walls blocking the conscious mind from the unconscious, which was the primary concern of Jung.
Nature is goal-directed toward evolution, and the unconscious is only a servant of this great goal, as the ego is the servant of the unconscious, or perhaps should be.
Biospiritual Health
It is our biospiritual health that we are concerned with, not merely our psychological health. We need to be in contact with more than unconscious human archetypes, we need to seek Godhood beyond the archetypes of the human species. Jung was concerned that religion damned up the unconscious, but we are concerned that the unconscious has damned up the Spirit, the Will to Godhood.
It is not only “psychic hygiene” we are concerned with but biospiritual hygiene. There has been no religious cosmology or cosmogony to affirm the forces of evolution which so essentially drive us. Contacting and including the unconscious is simply not enough.
Part ThreeNew Age
According to Jung, as religion and religious symbols have collapsed, we have opened the Pandora's box of the unconscious. And this process has increased since the time of Jung. New Age and neopagan organizations proliferate as the old religious symbols have declined.
The New Age has affirmed a so-called
“evolutionary spirituality” which nevertheless defines only the evolution of human consciousness, not the evolution of the human species to super species and beyond to the gods---although it makes little fearful nods toward actual biological evolution. Therefore, in our opinion the New Age will not suffice in the search for religious symbols, just as Jungian psychology seeking to make a truce with the unconscious, was not enough.
The Spirit, the Will to Godhood, does not go away because we do not think about it, or know it. It is an instinctive force at the base of life, and EC is now paying attention to this primal force.
Religion, not psychology, is the “therapeutic system” we require, but we need a religion of biospirituality, and not one that denies even the validity or importance of the material world, as traditional religions essentially tend to do.
If we ignore the sacred symbol of evolution, it will not go away, it will break out in ways that seem uncivilized to us. Imperial racism is one example of this. We seek to “Civilize The Beast” of evolution with the religion of Evolutionary Catholicism. (“Civilizing The Beast” is our blog title, from Nietzsche, or Yeats)
We do not wish to kill the 'beast' of evolution, as modern conscious life has tried to do, and thereby putting up a dam that will burst out occasionally in brutality. Evolution needs to be an ecumenical activity, and all people, all races, all states must be allowed to biospiritually evolve in what we call an
Ordered Evolution, helped along with
Revitalized Conservatism. This view finds imperial or colonial racism unacceptable.
We would not want Jungian psychology to become a therapeutic system which frees us from the necessity of dealing with the Spirit Within or the Will to Godhood and human evolution, by directing all our psychic energies into the human unconscious alone. We could tragically end the path of evolution to God if we are unable to unblock the forces that block evolution. We could even end human life itself.
Homo evolutus
The order of evolution has been unbalanced. Nietzsche wrote in “The Genealogy of Morals”: “All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly, turn inward—this is what I call the internalization of man: thus it was that man first developed what was later called his 'soul'.” It has been suggested that here might be one of the sources of Jung's psychological dynamic.
While this may be true of the Soul, which is the Zenith of the Mind, it ignores the Spirit, which activates both mind and body from within, as the vital force in life and evolution. The spirit is not merely the product of outward life internalized, even if the soul may be. Nietzsche's Will to Power is more essentially, or more precisely the Will to Godhood, the Spirit in EC. Nietzsche's Will and Jung's unconscious need to be finer tuned to the dynamic of evolution.
Jung said at one point, “the gods have become diseases,” but what he could have said was, in Jungianism the gods have become the human unconscious. We have been insisting here that the gods are real objects, biospiritual, beyond the human species, and beyond the human unconscious, and they can be evolved to.
The Cultural Slumber
We wish to awaken the Spirit, the Will to Godhood, from It's long cultural slumber, and not merely awaken the human unconscious. We are speaking of the source and activation behind the human unconscious. We understand that these are powerful forces and it should certainly be emphasized that the Spirit does not belong to one people or one state alone.
Ours is an ecumenical approach. All people, all states, need to be allowed to evolve in variety, to the gods, and ultimately to Godhood. This is the central mission of Evolutionary Catholicism.
We think that the scientific, philosophical, political, and psychological cultures can become religious cultures, as these fields synthesize in the future. Material evolution needs to be seen as religious with a material-spiritual-numinous end.
Spiritual forces were relocated in the human unconscious with Carl Jung. They need to be relocated again in the Will to Godhood of the spirit in evolution.
Prophecy and the religion dynamic have been moved from priests to philosopher, to psychologist, to the artist. Prophecy needs to be brought back to the priests, where it began. Yet the patterns seen, the intuitive beauty of the cosmic “system” does seem to require the eye and imagination of the artist.
Jung thought we could not go back to the old religion, at least he could not go back, even to the great rituals of the Catholic Mass. The symbolism no longer worked for him, it did not express what he needed psychologically, and he did not, or could not found a new religion. So, basically, he went back to dreams, to the original Shamanic guide for man, back to the great primitive darkness.
We cannot agree with this solution to the loss of the old religion and the loss of the symbolic life. Revitalization, not revolution is the solution. For example, orthodox Judaism and the Kabbalah learned a great deal from the older religion of the Zoroastrians during Jewish captivity in Babylon, and the Zoroastrians learned a great deal from their cousin in Vedism, and Vedism seems to have been founded in the Hyperborean religion of an Arctic Homeland before the “cataclysm”. We would point out to the revolutionary minded that these great religions were overlaid, one upon the other, with changes that were adjustments to the conditions and new knowledge of the time, that is, they were philosophical, political, psychological and biological adjustments to the times. The old ways were retained, but revitalized.
EC is seeking to revitalize religion by bringing the old symbols in line with the modern world, and with knowledge of evolution, finding revitalized symbols.
Can we retain the “ecstasy” of being outside the human ego in religious ritual, which Jung believed was missing from modern, non-religious life? Ritual can supply this, but it needs to be ritual that modern men can believe in.
The ego and the unconscious are “trapped” in the body in present time. We need to untrap this entrapment through the use of new ritual, by contacting the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, which lives at the Zenith of the Soul, as the Soul lives at the Zenith of the Mind, and the Mind contains the ego. It is the Spirit that seeks Godhood, not the Soul or human mind which activates us to Godhood.
Ritualization of this great goal in EC symbolically represents the actual, real, spiritual-material goal of evolving to Godhood at the Zenith of Evolution where supreme ecstasy is the reward.
The Mass of Joy
This is the liturgy of joy, The Mass of Joy, of the Evolutionary Outward Path in Evolutionary Catholicism. The Traditional Mass of the Involutionary Inward Path, the Mass of Tradition, the Mass of Sacrifice, is retained as it is in Traditional Catholicism, and in the Orthodox tradition, and the Sacred Liturgy of the Mass of Joy is added in Evolutionary Catholicism.
This symbolically revitalizes the old symbols, newly expressing the needs of the ego, the needs of the Soul, and the needs of the Spirit to attain Godhood. The Liturgy of the Mass of Joy in the Outward Path, like the sacrificial Mass of the Inward Path, must contain poetry, passion, nature, love, survival, reproduction, music, and ritual escape from the daily entrapment of the ego and the soul, and it must give expression to the goal of the Spirit.
But the Mass of Joy does not merely provide escape from the ego and the soul, it revitalizes the activation of life, and centers on the great goal of evolution, which is to attain Godhood. This can even give ancient reference to Dionysian joy, but it is an ordered joy, in ordered evolution, not the old shamanic, frenzied, berserker, revolutionary form of evolution, it is evolution guided by the morals and ethics of traditional religion, with the same virtues and vices as Traditional Catholicism, while at the same time re-invigorated the virtues with the great virtue of the Outward Path, which is Evolution.
Human beings do need to spend time in ritual. Jung spoke about the indigenous people of Australia spending more than half their time in ritual ceremony. Compare that to the non-religious life of modern men. No wonder people seek Dionysian sensation in modern life. Their egos and souls desperately need the sacred, and they do not often know it. To Jung, this defines “neurotic,” and we would agree. “The vacuum” created by the loss of ritual life is being replaced by pathology, disease and degeneration." (Tacey).
“When There Is No Vision, the People Perish” (Proverbs 29:18)
The “World Spirit” the Spiritus Mundi, the dreaming world, which Jung called the “Collective Unconscious” is not the same as the Holy Spirit seen in Evolutionary Catholicism. The World Spirit is the activation to Godhood within the Kosmos, within life. The dreaming world of the collective unconscious is human all too human. Although other animals also dream, the collective unconscious exists within the Soul or within the Zenith of the Mind, and within the biological body. The Spirit is deeper, at the Zenith of the Soul, It is the Will to Godhood, which activates the collective unconscious and the body.
Redefining War
Earlier, we brought up the subject of war being the result of pent up unconscious forces from the loss of ritual religious ways to release these forces. Yet war was common among indigenous people who spent very much time in the ritual and transcendence of religion. This seems to contradict Jung's views on war as pent up unconscious forces.
The problem here comes from not fully recognizing the kosmic forces that move through us. Evolution is sought by the Spirit Within and evolution has, unfortunately, often involved war. This is an uncomfortable fact, even though during war, survival and reproduction are often side-stepped or halted.
Rituals of transcendence will not alone stop wars, as history and evolution have shown. The Spirit needs to be civilized. As mentioned earlier, we use the term Civilizing the Beast. Ordered Evolution is also the phrase we use. Ideally, all people need to be given the space and freedom to evolve. Ritual and religion can affirm this evolution to Godhood, and provide, not only an outlet, but a direction for the realized goal of Godhood.
We are “unitary” in seeing the Traditional Religions as deriving from the Involutionary Inward Path to the Soul Within, and we can be “universalist” in seeing the Evolutionary Outward Path as the path of all people, all races, all states, seeking to evolve to Godhood. This takes us into political philosophy, and the Revitalized Conservatism we affirm, which can lead to the Ordered Evolution of man beyond man to Godhood.
The advantage of EC is that is can affirm a return to literal thinking, even resembling the “fundamentalism” of the oldest religions, while at the same time embracing evolution and science. We do literally evolve to Godhood, the Supreme Object, not a symbol, not a logos only. This is virtually a literal interpretation of Godhood, and of course, literal interpretations have been scorned by modern theologians.
This literal interpretation of evolving to Godhood does not contradict reason as much as scientific skeptics like to think it does. When the pattern of evolution is hypertrophied into end goals, it keeps one's feet on the ground. Metaphysical fact need not be metaphor or symbol here. Metaphysical fact is physical fact in the evolution to Godhood. A = A.
At the same time the Zenith of Evolution is enhanced by faith, symbols, imagination, ritual, and liturgy. The Spirit Within needs to be contacted. Its goals need to be experienced in ritual and symbol. This suggests the mystery and unknowable reality of religion and ritual that we psychologically crave, which transcends reason and affirms “intellectual intuition” or supra-rational thinking.
Has the guiding light of revelation deserted us, as Jung believed? Evolutionary Catholicism believes that revelation is still possible. Dreams may be a substitute for revelation, but they are not enough. Jung seems to have personally believed that dreams and intuition were all that we have left, since the old religions could not be believed in, and so Jung returned to the original primitive guidance of man through dreams. We think that more than this is not only necessary, but possible.
We do not think we have to settle for a return to an earlier age, for example, to primitive times of dreams, as the only method of revelation. Science has given us the marvelous tool of evolution, which we believe is ultimately a very powerful and sacred religious tool.
We can even keep the glorious churches and the great religious works, which the movement of psychology and the modern world have virtually relegated to the trash. But we need to invigorate Tradition with the sacred knowledge that the God seen from within of tradition, is the God reached through material evolution. The Soul of the Inward Path is vast, but the Spirit of the Outward Path is vaster.
The Post-Modern condition of brokenness, discord, perspectivism and relativity was the result mainly of the destruction of the religious path. We think that religion can be put back together again, but we will need a new coat and new hat, designed by evolution and science, and perhaps a new heart.
End
(This essay began as a short review of
David Tacey's "How To Read Jung," but then it expanded.)
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