Page 18 - March-April 2026
P. 18
The Courage to Hold Paradox
Without Losing Oneself
We are living at a moment when many something that seizes the psyche rather
people feel unmoored from familiar than remaining an idea we observe from a
structures of meaning. Old authorities no distance. It is not just a descriptive
longer hold unquestioned power, inherited adjective (“numinous”), but a
beliefs no longer organize our lives the psychological fact that acts upon the ego.
way they once did, and yet the hunger for It is the difference between being moved
purpose, coherence, and moral orientation by an idea and being seized by an
has not diminished. If anything, it has experience.
intensified. From a Jungian psychological
perspective, this kind of historical Answer to Job is psychological, not
moment is not random. It signals a shift in metaphysical — and that distinction is
what Jung called the God-image — not a crucial.In this book, Jung wrote something
theological change, but a psychological I’ve never forgotten: “The psychological
one. approach to religious imagery is not
available at any depth to one who is
A Jungian lens that feels especially contained in a particular religious myth.”
relevant right now is Carl Jung’s book, Not because faith is wrong, but because
Answer to Job, where he introduced one unconscious identification prevents
of his most radical ideas: that the God- reflection. When we’re too identified with
image evolves alongside human a belief or image, we lose perspective —
consciousness. This idea of the and whatever doesn’t fit gets projected
transformation of the God-image — speaks outward onto other people, who end up
not only to how we experience meaning, carrying our doubt, anger, shadow, or
authority, and the numinosum across time, “wrongness” for us.
but also to Jung’s conviction thatthe
psyche is real. It was through his direct Edward F. Edinger devoted much of his life
encounter with the activated unconscious to clarifying this aspect of Jung’s work. In
that he came to understand the The Creation of Consciousness and The
unconscious as a piece of Nature Transformation of the God-Image, Edinger
containing the paradoxical opposites. As makes Jung’s argument more accessible:
consciousness develops, the God-image the development of consciousness
must also change — or it becomes brittle, requires the capacity to hold opposites. A
moralistic, and dangerous. one-sided God-image — whether all-good,
all-powerful, all-male, or all-rational —
Jung took numinosum from Rudolf Otto’s inevitably splits off what does not fit. That
book, The Idea of the Holy, to name the rejected material does not disappear. It
overwhelming, lived quality of an goes underground, where it emerges as
archetypal experience — shadow, projection, and scapegoating.
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