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Divine Mind: Exploring the Psychological History of God's Inner Journey
A Jungian psychoanalyst with a background in Judaism and Zen Buddhism explores the history of God concepts in the Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions.This book is about the Abrahamic God's inner journey, an epic that begins in the Hebrew Bible-the common source of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. This God emerges as a living, textured personality as tormented as a Shakespearean character and as divided against humanity as the devil who personifies his dark side. Yet in heroic fashion, he embarks on a journey to greater consciousness, stretching into himself in the Talmud, New Testament, Qur'an, and Gnostic writings. Then finally, with and through the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic mystics, he discovers his true self as the absolute Godhead. He takes up residence in their psyches as their own Divine Mind or true self. The book suggests that what God learned from his journey might be something that we in turn could learn from and that could help us at the dawn of the twenty-first century. In this way, God's inner journey becomes a metaphor for our own.Michael Gellert, a Jungian psychoanalyst, treats this story and the sacred writings that convey it as psychological facts-as expressions of the human psyche-regardless of whether or not God actually exists. He shows how the Hebrew Bible presents God as a primitive, barbaric tribal war god while centuries later the mystics portray him as their innermost essence and emptied of all projected, external, anthropomorphic images. Thus, God's inner journey and the evolution of human consciousness-his story and ours-parallel each other and are integrally related.Rich in historical detail and psychological insights, this is a book that will be welcomed by seekers of every background and orientation.
- GenresReligion
290 pages, Kindle Edition
Published January 2, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 22, 2024
This is strange and implausible psycho-theology, fraught with unreason and downright absurdity. Although the book is educational for people who don’t know much about the history of religion, Gellert puts forward a grave misinterpretation of the divine plan and the nature of God. Readers are misled about important matters concerning divine and human nature. The author holds that the historical experience of God was really a “primitive, personified form of our higher, innermost self” (p. 202). The collective image of God is a “projection” of the human soul, which has slowly retreated from history in order for the mystical God of “nothingness” to emerge.
Gellert psychoanalyzes Yahweh as an unconscious being at a child’s emotional level. He suffers from PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), obsessive-compulsive disorder, and narcissistic personality disorder (which carries symptoms of self-aggrandizement, a need for admiration, and a lack of empathy) (ch. 7). Yahweh was, deep down, wounded in the feminine. The author continues to psychoanalyze Yahweh. He went from being an irrational, amoral, erratic, and thundering force of nature, lacking self-reflection, to becoming a civilized God, now endowed with a super-ego.
The evidence for this, says the author, is that God appeared to fall silent after his encounter with Job. He entered a period of introversion and melancholy, during which he questioned his former conduct. But these legendary events took place in a remote past, and were not prior to the Second Temple period, when the view of God changed. So the chronology doesn’t fit. However, on Gellert’s view, what people say about God is also the coincidental truth about God. What the psychoanalyst can glean from the authors’ narrative, reflects squarely on the psychology of Yahveh in those days. I think this is whimsical, uninhibited psychologization.
In fact, what precipitated the changes, was that people had begun to view the world differently. The age of Greek philosophy had commenced, and people no longer believed that Poseidon was responsible for the earthquakes. They learnt what caused solar and lunar eclipses, and nature came to resemble more and more a great machinery. People also knew that machines sometimes break; so God needn’t be involved in every calamitous event. A change in collective consciousness was responsible for the gradual disappearance of the thunderous God. It had nothing to do with the latter going into self-analysis. It doesn’t make sense in the first place to pathologize Yahweh, but Gellert finds no other explanation:
The joint process of maturation of God and mankind means, says Gellert, that all images and ideas of God are cast off, and what remains is Divine Nothingness — the God of mysticism (ch. 13). Contemplative mysticism aims to attain a union with God by the emptying of ourselves. It is all about getting the ego out of the way by focusing entirely on the empty mind. But Gellert cannot get this to square with Jungian psychology, to which the extinction of the ego is insupportable. Instead, the ego must enlarge its domains by the integration of the unconscious archetypes. Gellert tries anyway. Citing Meister Eckhart, he makes a spurious argument:
Anyway, how can such a way of salvation work for the average working man? Mystics and Zen monks, who have devoted themselves entirely to the discipline of ego-abandonment, say that it’s excruciatingly difficult and extremely demanding. According to Fr. Thomas Keating, many contemplatives have made an enormous effort, yet have seldom attained the ‘night of spirit’ (cf. Keating, Open Mind Open Heart, ch. 1). Zen master Bankei (1622-1693) dissuaded his pupils from following the austere Zen practices: “The Unborn, he told them, is not something to be reached for or attained by discipline; it is not a condition of mind or religious ecstasy; it is right where you stand, perfect just as it is” (Besserman & Steger, Crazy Clouds, p. 100).
Gellert says that, “[e]ven with the mystical Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus in the third century CE, [nothingness] would remain an intellectual abstraction and not an experience” (p. 202). This is a major error. In his biography of Plotinus, Porphyry recounts that in his contemplation, Plotinus reached a union with God (“the One”) four times in his life. Central to Neoplatonism was the soul’s movement back towards its source, towards the One, through virtue, contemplation and/or prayer. Since the union with God is found in solitary contemplation, ultimately it does not lend itself to description (vid. Remes, Neoplatonism).
It get the impression that many post-Jungians suffer from delirium. I think the lack of scientific stringency depends on their belief that they have recourse to the source of archetypal truth residing in the collective unconscious. I wish they could return to the relative sanity of the first generation Jungians.
Gellert psychoanalyzes Yahweh as an unconscious being at a child’s emotional level. He suffers from PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), obsessive-compulsive disorder, and narcissistic personality disorder (which carries symptoms of self-aggrandizement, a need for admiration, and a lack of empathy) (ch. 7). Yahweh was, deep down, wounded in the feminine. The author continues to psychoanalyze Yahweh. He went from being an irrational, amoral, erratic, and thundering force of nature, lacking self-reflection, to becoming a civilized God, now endowed with a super-ego.
The evidence for this, says the author, is that God appeared to fall silent after his encounter with Job. He entered a period of introversion and melancholy, during which he questioned his former conduct. But these legendary events took place in a remote past, and were not prior to the Second Temple period, when the view of God changed. So the chronology doesn’t fit. However, on Gellert’s view, what people say about God is also the coincidental truth about God. What the psychoanalyst can glean from the authors’ narrative, reflects squarely on the psychology of Yahveh in those days. I think this is whimsical, uninhibited psychologization.
In fact, what precipitated the changes, was that people had begun to view the world differently. The age of Greek philosophy had commenced, and people no longer believed that Poseidon was responsible for the earthquakes. They learnt what caused solar and lunar eclipses, and nature came to resemble more and more a great machinery. People also knew that machines sometimes break; so God needn’t be involved in every calamitous event. A change in collective consciousness was responsible for the gradual disappearance of the thunderous God. It had nothing to do with the latter going into self-analysis. It doesn’t make sense in the first place to pathologize Yahweh, but Gellert finds no other explanation:
Instead, let’s think along Darwinian lines. The societal authorities wanted people to procreate, as this was the only chance for the little Israeli tribe to survive. They needed many soldiers to do battle and peasants to farm the land. They required stern adherence to religious law, custom, and ritual; otherwise they would have been swallowed up by neighbouring peoples. In that case, we wouldn’t know them as Jews, today. We would call them Arabs, Egyptians, or whatever. If a little tribe wants to survive, they must keep together. Moses and Aaron knew this. So these oppressive religious and cultural patterns have a simple explanation relating to tribal Darwinism. It has nothing to do with divine pathology. Imagine if Yahweh hadn’t been so stern. Then Jewish culture and religion would have dissipated, precluding the birth of Christianity. History would have taken another course and things would be far, far worse.
The divine urge for mirroring explains a host of phenomena in the Hebrew Bible that otherwise cannot be easily understood. Most obviously, Yahweh’s fierce insistence on being worshipped and on ritual detail and perfection revolved around his need to be validated; this mirroring had to be unblemished. Less saliently, he was quite preoccupied with human fertility and procreation. This was really a preoccupation with his own immortality or continuity in the world. (p. 82)
The joint process of maturation of God and mankind means, says Gellert, that all images and ideas of God are cast off, and what remains is Divine Nothingness — the God of mysticism (ch. 13). Contemplative mysticism aims to attain a union with God by the emptying of ourselves. It is all about getting the ego out of the way by focusing entirely on the empty mind. But Gellert cannot get this to square with Jungian psychology, to which the extinction of the ego is insupportable. Instead, the ego must enlarge its domains by the integration of the unconscious archetypes. Gellert tries anyway. Citing Meister Eckhart, he makes a spurious argument:
What Jung means is that a period of introversion leads to the activation of the unconscious archetypes. On this foundation the patient may acquire a new foothold. It has nothing to do with kenosis (self-emptying) on lines of Eckhart. It is for this reason that Jung repudiates the mystic path and says that it has nothing to do with individuation (cf. Jung & Adler, Letters, Vol. 2, p. 159).
“The soul must stand alone in absolute nothingness” again brings to mind Jung’s comment, “The patient must be alone if he is to find out what it is that supports him when he can no longer support himself. Only this experience can give him an indestructible foundation.” (p. 171)
Anyway, how can such a way of salvation work for the average working man? Mystics and Zen monks, who have devoted themselves entirely to the discipline of ego-abandonment, say that it’s excruciatingly difficult and extremely demanding. According to Fr. Thomas Keating, many contemplatives have made an enormous effort, yet have seldom attained the ‘night of spirit’ (cf. Keating, Open Mind Open Heart, ch. 1). Zen master Bankei (1622-1693) dissuaded his pupils from following the austere Zen practices: “The Unborn, he told them, is not something to be reached for or attained by discipline; it is not a condition of mind or religious ecstasy; it is right where you stand, perfect just as it is” (Besserman & Steger, Crazy Clouds, p. 100).
Gellert says that, “[e]ven with the mystical Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus in the third century CE, [nothingness] would remain an intellectual abstraction and not an experience” (p. 202). This is a major error. In his biography of Plotinus, Porphyry recounts that in his contemplation, Plotinus reached a union with God (“the One”) four times in his life. Central to Neoplatonism was the soul’s movement back towards its source, towards the One, through virtue, contemplation and/or prayer. Since the union with God is found in solitary contemplation, ultimately it does not lend itself to description (vid. Remes, Neoplatonism).
It get the impression that many post-Jungians suffer from delirium. I think the lack of scientific stringency depends on their belief that they have recourse to the source of archetypal truth residing in the collective unconscious. I wish they could return to the relative sanity of the first generation Jungians.
April 8, 2018
The truths Gellert traces and expounds upon, if taken to heart, contain the seeds of psychic (spiritual) transformation and healing individuals and our world so desperately need. Read this book if you care about your own wholeness (what Jung called individuation) and what’s happening in the U.S. and the world today.
January 9, 2022
it's a waste of time. There is nothing about about the word Divine or exploration of the beautiful Divine Mind. I read about two chapters, and then decided not to read further, reading it was like insulting my creator, my Divine Lord!!!...who is the creator of all... Forgive your child dear Lord!....
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews