Tuesday, June 24, 2008

The transpersonal is still prepersonal, yet is biologically beyond as well

Carl Jung has been charged, by Ken Wilber and others, with confusing the personal subconscious mind with the “superconscious” mind. The “collective unconscious,” where Jung discovered archetypes existing, contains what we might call the God-archetype, and here is where the Wilber types are fearful of admitting that God remains there in the personal subconscious. They want God to be more than this, (indeed God is more than this, biologically) so they expand the God archetype to exist outside and beyond the personal subconscious, but outside biology itself. Yet the transpersonal God they define is still the prepersonal God of Jung.

The Evolutionary Christian Church (ECC) takes a different perspective. The God archetype is not exactly free from the body even though it appears similar in different life forms, much as the father's genes are similar in his offspring; God is implicit in all explicit life forms. We can discover the God-archetype within, which is prepersonal, but we must evolve biologically to that Godhood we can see (with effort) inwardly.

Traditional religion involves seeing more or less the same God Jung imagined in the subconscious, using various methods of prayer and meditation, but we cannot reduce God to this experience of the God within. However, unlike Wilber's view, reaching the God within is defined in ECC as the Involutionary Inward Path, which we do pursue. But to reach the Real God, Who is only partially (though blissfully) seen as the God within, we must apply the Evolutionary Outward Path, to evolve biologically and bio-spiritually to Godhood.

This fear of biological evolution in new age religion seems to stem from fear of the idea of future biological evolution, which has been politically incorrect at least since evolutionary theory was made evil by the political study of eugenics. Fear of biology in old age religion was not so much fear as the lack of knowledge of evolution. But truth requires courage.

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