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Feb. 8
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Class Feb. 8

The Religious Mammal

Stages of Faith

Bring: Crucifix, empty cross, candle, matches, lotus, music—Buddhist chant; Burlingame quilt; DVD Hinduism/Buddhism

Community ritual and initiation: light candle, do reading, put up faces, ask for feedback, initiation, blow out candle.

Black! crow standing
in his eye all eternity
Long shadows draw

Wild winds abate
In morning's first light
A broken teahouse

Bursting open
The rose dawn fills
My empty universe

No barrier now
Lofty mountain to one
Riding the wind.

-   Sho Ka, 1991
Source: Zen Group of Western Australia Newsletter, Spring 1991, pp.7

1. Tonight we are discussing and reviewing material related to "the internal aspects of religion," including faith, which is common to all religions..
2. Why look at this?
1. Most people think of religion as something you do, e.g., sing, pray, worship, dance, study, behave in a holy manner.
2. When asked to define religion, most people use references outside the human being, e.g., our authors—Creed, Code, Cult, Community Structure>Transcendent
3. Few stop to realize that there is something within the human being that prompts religious behavior, something other than consciousness.
4. By considering that religion arises because a being is human, and develops spiritually over a lifetime, a foundation is laid for discussing many social aspects of religion, e.g., Why do certain religions react as they do? Burn churches in Alabama? Burn the Danish embassy in Beirut over a cartoon about Mohammed?

1. Proposed theory:
1. The human being is a religious mammal—religious by nature.
1. Within the human being, there arises the awareness of something more, something different than self, a higher power—a religious experience, a being "gripped" by something else. Often occurs in dreams, visions, and projections.
1. A dream containing a "numinous" object, e.g., a bowl that seems alive and glass at the same time
2. A dream with dialogue between the dreamer and one who has died
3. A dream from which one awakens well—Burlingame story
4. During prayer, a deep sense of well-being begins to form within a person at a time of powerful distress, and the person knows s/he will be all right.
5. Sarah’s vision in Sacre Coeur [ pg. 7 of Re. Mam.]
2. Outside the human being, there is something that reveals a "more," something different than ego, a higher power—religious experience.
1. Seeing another human being as super wonderful or super terrible…a strong liking or disliking of a stranger
3. The experience of "something more" is also called a "numinous" experience.
1. Jung suggests the self, the center of the psyche, as the source of the numinous
2. I posit the "source of the self"—God--as the source of the numinous and Jung’s idea of the self as the receptor for the numinous and the transmitter to the rest of the psyche producing a religious experience.

 

2. Support:
1. Anthropology
2. Jungian psychology
1. Importance of religion for human development
2. The innate "religious need" in the human

 

A. Anthropology: 100,000 different religions over time going back 100,000 years.

3. Neanderthal grave goods, altars of bear bones
4. Religion is a universal aspect of human culture
1. When not judged by Western standards, human cultures can be seen as religious.
2. Religion for a people involves "conceptions, images, and words"—non-observable phenomena
3. Religion is difficult to study due to the intense emotions surrounding it, and the need to know the culture and the language
4. Anthropology has avoided drawing conclusions based on religious experience and focuses on outward expressions, such as dances, rituals, , dreams, visions—a regalia …

1. Jungian Psychology
1. Jung: The importance of religion for human development.
2. Who was Carl G. Jung?
1. "Anyone who wants to know the human psyche will learn next to nothing from experimental psychology.  He would be better advised to abandon exact science, put away his scholar's gown, bid farewell to his study, and wander with human heart through the world.  There in the horrors of prisons, lunatic asylums and hospitals, in drab suburban pubs, in brothels and gambling-hells, in the salons of the elegant, the Stock Exchanges, socialist meetings, churches, revivalist gatherings and ecstatic sects, through love and hate, through the experience of passion in every form in his own body, he would reap richer stores of knowledge than text-books a foot thick could give him, and he will know how to doctor the sick with a real knowledge of the human soul." -- Carl Jung
2. Lived between 1875-1961 in Switzerland. Studied medicine and was a pioneer in the development of psychology relating to the full psyche.
3. As a child, he noticed that he seemed to have two ways of looking at the world: His conscious self, and an older, wiser self, he called The Old Man. In his medical residency, he worked a lot with the insane, but noticed that if you could interpret their language symbolically they made a lot of sense. He began working with them in this way and people began to get well. After a brief association with Frued, the first psychiatrist that posed the existence of the unconscious, he worked with his dreams symbolically and also with his patients. In doing so, his patients got well.
4. Jung was especially knowledgeable in the symbolism of complex mystical traditions such as Gnosticism, Alchemy, Kabala, and similar traditions in Hinduism and Buddhism. If anyone could make sense of the unconscious and its habit of revealing itself only in symbolic form, it would be Carl Jung.

Although his first career choice was archeology, he went on to study medicine at the University of Basel. While working under the famous neurologist Krafft-Ebing, he settled on psychiatry as his career.

After graduating, he took a position at the Burghoeltzli Mental Hospital in Zurich under Eugene Bleuler, an expert on (and the namer of) schizophrenia. He also taught classes at the University of Zurich, had a private practice, and invented word association at this time.

5. Jung took a lifetime studying the human psyche [all that is human but not physical—thoughts, feelings, intuitions, impressions--]and "its religious making ways." He was a specialist on "internal states"—what is happening within the psyche.

Carl G. Jung, Swiss Analyst

1. Jung had a conception of "personality" as an organized totality of human experience and psychic contents, both conscious and unconscious, and how the unconscious influences conciousness.

 

2. The unconscious is never to be considered as a closed realm with determinable boundaries, but rather as a channel through which the entire universe — past, present, and future — is potentially flowing into the human psyche. Thus, personality is open to unceasing expansion and growth.

[Drawing of Jung’s map of the psyche]

1. Religious behavior is instrumental in the striving of the personality to grow, mature, and achieve integration—requiring the ego to relate to the "more", in Jung’s words, the" self."

 

Example: In my late 20’s…is this all there is? Search. Friend suggests church. Begin to experience the numinous—sense of presence. Unable to love as Christ loves. Counselor. Resolve past traumas, deepen personal identity. Able to understand my limitedness when it comes to loving and also how to love without strings attached.

 

1. The Self is "that focal point of our psyche in which God's image shows itself most plainly and the experience of which gives us the knowledge, as nothing else does, of the significance and nature of our likeness to God. It is the early Christian ideal of the Kingdom of God that is 'within you.' It is the ultimate experience-able in and of the psyche" (not Jung’s conclusion, but mine and other "religious" Jungians, such as Don Bisson, D.Min.)
1. [Earlier example of Sarah’s vision at Sacre Coeur, pg. 7 of Rel. Mam.]

 

2. Religion provides encouragement to grow
1. Provides "a Way". Class suggest items:

 

1. Spiritual exercises, code of behaviors, ritual celebrations…
3. Religion provides symbolic models to reconcile inner conflicts
1. The crucifix: Christian symbol meaning a perfect human being took my punishment for not being perfect and reconciled me to God. It points to God’s love and forgiveness with a desire by God to develop a personal relationship with the believer. Helps one forgive others and self and receive reconciliation with God. Reveals the extent love will go for another.
2. The empty cross: Christian symbol meaning "death cannot have the last word"—Christ rose from the dead—and those who believe in him will rise also.
3. Blue-green quilt
4. Religious experience arises from the "psyche".
1. *Psyche (from Jung): The totality of all psychic processes, conscious as well as unconscious. There is an inbuilt function of the psyche to mature. This requires both "inner world" and "outer world" events.
1. Example of inner world and outer world events among tribal peoples: onset of menarche (inner, embodied experience) and initiation ceremonies—now you are a woman, can bear children, must be strong to withstand pain (outer world, cultural experience).
2. Example from contemporary times:
1. Outer world: A favorite pet dies
2. Inner world: With the death of a favorite pet, a woman’s thoughts become full of all the losses over her lifetime. Much sadness and discouragement results
3. Outer world: She goes to a counselor who helps her into a healing grief cycle.
4. Inner world: She is able to understand and integrate "death" into her living of her life; less subject to "shattering" with future deaths.
5. The "hints of patterns" that occur in religious experience. Called archetypes, they represent universal human aspects, e.g., the mother, the wise old man, the evil one, the savior, the god… sometimes interpreted as spirits, demons, gods, forces and powers.
1. Example: The Hero: The one who conquers all obstructions and reaches the goal> Jesus Christ, Buddha, Mohammed
2. At another level: Superman, Spiderman, Brad Pitt…
6. Jung as a scientist would not conclude the source is God; but says that "images and energies in the psyche can so grip us that we insist there is a power greater than ourselves whom we recognize as different from "us."
1. "I have to admit the fact that the unconscious mind is capable at times of assuming an intelligence and purposiveness which are superior to actual conscious insight. There is hardly any doubt that this fact is a basic religious phenomenon.
2. Example: Impression to go to my daughter’s school, sense of urgency.
7. The "numinosum", Jung
1. A dynamic agency or effect not caused by an act of will.
2. A quality belonging to a visible object or the influence of an invisible presence that causes a peculiar alteration of consciousness.
8. Jung: The aim of all religious practice is to relate the ego to the center of the psyche (Jung’s word is "self"), from which arises the experience of the numinosum. [Our authors would say that religious practice relates us to transcendence.]
1. Process: Ego grows strong relating to the world. When ego strong enough, the "self" makes itself known to the Ego. Ego suffers the realization it is "not alone" and must relate to this new Unknown.
9. The experience of the "self" is often referred to as experiencing God or gods.
1. Example: After hearing about the love of God in Jesus Christ, a person experiences an overwhelming feeling, impression of being totally loved, regardless of any "blemishes."
2. Out of the self proceeds a "magnet" drawing us to our fullest potential and destiny.
2. The "religious need", Jung
1. A longing for psychic wholeness
2. Our longing lays hold of the images of wholeness offered by the unconscious, say in dreams or infatuations.
1. Example: Read Karen’s story (Venice dream) Illustrates both the "numinosum" and the "religious need"

1. Question for discussion: Subjective as well as objective reaction
1. What do you find meaningful? What do you find problematic?

1. Faith, an aspect of believing and trusting what a religion teaches, is universal in all religions.

2. Faith development is a fairly new religious discipline—20^th century, a relatively unknown subject.

3. Popular religion assumes that if you believe certain "truths", you will be "saved." This can lead to stunted spiritual growth because so called truths cannot be challenged and understood at a deeper, broader level.

4. Reflective religion assumes that one begins with certain "truths", reflects on them and sifts and sorts them over time, and, that as one develops psychologically, one’s religious faith changes. Reflective religion assumes this is never ending.

5. If faith gets "stuck" and does not develop, rigidity develops that produces conflict with those who differ. Popular vs. reflective religion vs. non-believers

6. Some religious expressions are stuck and some have lost their momentum. Mainline churches need to recover the power of religion which has been rationalized away—the "old, old story" needs to be reinterpreted for modern people but with the power of the tradition. Conservative churches need to catch up with developmental theory and encourage personal growth beyond literal interpretations, embracing and integrating modern science and psychology.

6. We are in a crisis of cultures highlighted by the very conservative element in Islam crashing into modern Western expressions of culture. We need to understand how to dialogue.

7. I hope to encourage those of you interested in developing your own religious nature, to do so intentionally and consciously. You may be the ones who bring the religions together for dialogue.

1. Hindus believe in a one, all-pervasive Supreme Being who is both immanent and transcendent, both Creator and Unmanifest Reality.
2. Hindus believe in the divinity of the four Vedas, the world's most ancient scripture, and venerate the Agamas as equally revealed. These primordial hymns are God's word and the bedrock of Sanatana Dharma, the eternal religion.
3. Hindus believe that the universe undergoes endless cycles of creation, preservation and dissolution.
4. Hindus believe in karma, the law of cause and effect by which each individual creates his own destiny by his thoughts, words and deeds.
5. Hindus believe that the soul reincarnates, evolving through many births until all karmas have been resolved, and moksha, liberation from the cycle of rebirth, is attained. Not a single soul will be deprived of this destiny.
6. Hindus believe that divine beings exist in unseen worlds and that temple worship, rituals, sacraments and personal devotionals create a communion with these devas and Gods. They believe in one major God of who all the other gods are manifestations.
7. Hindus believe that an enlightened master, or satguru, is essential to know the Transcendent Absolute, as are personal discipline, good conduct, purification, pilgrimage, self-inquiry, meditation and surrender in God.
8. Hindus believe that all life is sacred, to be loved and revered, and therefore practice ahiusa, noninjury, in thought, word and deed.
9. Hindus believe that no religion teaches the only way to salvation above all others, but that all genuine paths are facets of God's Light, deserving tolerance and understanding.

Some basics of Buddhism

1. Founder: Siddartha Gautama who became The Buddha, The Enlightened One
2. No supreme Being
3. Sacred Teachings: Dharma & the 4 Noble Truths
4. Reincarnation
5. Dharma—orthodox Buddhist belief, sublime religious truth
6. Nirvana—state of ultimate freedom from reincarnation
7. 4 Noble Truths
1. Life brings suffering
2. The desire for pleasure, power and immortality are the roots of suffering
3. Suffering ceases when desiring ends
4. Desire ends via the Noble 8-fold Path of right views.

Mantra—a sound or sounds to focus

[See website Sacred Quest/Religious Studies/Buddhism Basics for further info.]

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Last modified: February 09, 2006