The unconscious and the authority of inward experience

The conscious mind often mistakes its access for the whole territory. We assume that because we can explain an action, we know why we performed it. Then a dream, an unexpected jealousy, or a disproportionate reaction reveals motives that the explanation had politely left out.

The unconscious interrupts the fantasy of private omnipotence from within. Even our own mental life exceeds what we can consciously supervise. A person who claims that consciousness creates reality must first confront the fact that ordinary conscious intention does not govern every part of the person making the claim.

Jung’s psychology of religion gives a useful distinction between a divine reality and the images through which the psyche encounters or represents it. His psychological inquiry concerns the effects and organization of those images. It does not acquire unrestricted access to God’s metaphysical essence by finding an image of God in the psyche. A sacred image can be psychologically real without being the whole reality to which it points.⁴⁰

This distinction is especially valuable for The Godward Way. An image of the Father may carry associations with protection, authority, absence, or judgment. Some of those associations may come from a person’s history. Recognizing them need not abolish devotion. It can clarify what has been placed inside the word Father and free the direction of prayer from unconscious substitution.

Suppose someone encounters every unanswered request as rejection. The interpretation may draw strength from an old pattern of seeking approval. Calling the feeling a direct revelation about God can protect the pattern from recognition. The person can instead recognize the fear and offer it toward the Father, while allowing the account of what the silence means to remain open.

Dreams offer a similar opportunity. They can give form to conflicts, wishes, and meanings that waking self-description has neglected. Their force deserves attention. Yet a vivid dream need not become a command, and the absence of an immediately clear interpretation need not make the dream worthless. A symbol may open a question more truthfully than it supplies an instruction.

Jung’s warning about inflation concerns identification with powers or contents that exceed the ordinary ego. The person may feel enlarged while becoming less capable of discrimination. In a spiritual setting, this can appear as a conviction that personal importance has acquired divine authorization. The useful response is to recover the distinction between what has been encountered and what the person is entitled to claim.⁴¹

William James approaches inward authority through mystical states. He identifies ineffability, noetic quality, transiency, and passivity as characteristic marks. Such states can feel like knowing, not merely like having an emotion. Yet James also resists the conclusion that their inward authority obliges everyone else to accept their interpretation. The force of an experience and its universal authority are different matters.⁴²

That distinction need not make a person’s experience thin or meaningless. A moment can change a life without becoming a private constitution imposed on every other life. Its fruit may appear through patience, courage, or a renewed capacity to face reality. The person does not need to exaggerate its public authority in order to honor its personal significance.

There is also an opposite error. We may discover a psychological condition associated with a spiritual experience and conclude that its meaning has been abolished. But identifying the conditions through which an experience occurs is different from settling its significance. An account of how a sentence is heard does not, by itself, decide whether the sentence is true. James’s criticism of reductive judgments about religious experience turns on this kind of distinction.⁴²

The spiritual task therefore involves two forms of honesty. We allow inward experience to matter, and we remain willing to examine the interpretation we place upon it. An experience can be received deeply while its explanation remains revisable. This is often harder than either cynicism or unquestioning certainty.

Writing about spiritual experience reveals the difficulty. We may explain because we wish to share. We may also explain because we fear that the connection will vanish if it is not secured in language. The page becomes an attempt to keep hold of what could never be held in that way.

The fear need not disqualify the writing. It can be included in the offering. A sentence may begin in the fear of forgetting and become useful when the writer recognizes that fear without demanding that the sentence guarantee the divine relation. Words then serve remembrance without pretending to manufacture its source.

This is one reason the Bigger Eye must not become a figure of spiritual rank. The recognition of a thought is already enough for the work at hand. We do not need to imagine a superior personality above the ordinary one, protected from every human limitation. That superior personality could become another psychological possession.

An honest inner life leaves room for surprise. We can discover that a cherished motive was mixed, that a powerful interpretation was incomplete, or that a period of apparent emptiness was full of unrecognized attachment. None of these discoveries requires the abandonment of a Godward direction. Each gives the direction more of the actual person to include.

The unconscious thus belongs in a book about divine and human consciousness as a teacher of proportion. Our inward world is larger than our deliberate management of it. The divine source is not thereby reduced to unconscious process. Rather, the encounter with what exceeds our management prepares us to stop confusing management with the whole of spiritual life.