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The Pleromatics Project
7. Dynamis: The Psychology of God
The Godpsyche
Physical Eschatology
Collective Consciousness
Notes
Dynamis, a feminine noun in Greek, refers to force and power. It can mean the powers of the heavens (as in Matthew 24:29), or the exercise of power, as in the mighty works of Jesus (Mt. 11:20). Our own word dynamics conveys the idea of the powerful activities of an equilibrating system, and refers to the study of its interactions with the forces. Since we are seeking to correlate the concept of deity with physics and psyche, dynamis seems a particularly good term to use to express a central idea: the psychology of God and the psychology of cosmos are one and the same.
To most of us, that will sound like an astounding idea. It challenges our belief systems at several levels simultaneously, but it presents the idea of deity which best fits this expanded view of the cosmos. In speaking of the dynamic of cosmic consciousness, I am not implying a less than omniscient God, or seeking to diminish or "explain away" the concept of God. Quite the contrary. The quality of omniscience lies in the totality of God, a totality both physical and psychical, whose Mystery is considerably more than merely "ground of being".
It helps to keep in mind Alexander's distinction between ultimate reality (that which is) and the idea of God which exists in our own consciousness. However, though the idea of God is a construct of human psyche, it is a construct based on a particular quality or characteristic indwelling the human psyche. Though there are many widely differing ideas of God in human history, the archetype named "God" is universal. Since human psyche is part of reality, the archetype-named-God is a part of God. The image of God within the human psyche is not merely metaphor, but even more real than traditional Biblical interpretation has imagined it to be.
In the previous chapters, we have considered consciousness from a human point of view: consciousness is what humans are aware of. In a dualistic interpretation, then, God's conscious must lie in the realm of that which is unconscious to us. However, from the viewpoint of a cosmic theology, the concept of God must include the all, both conscious and unconscious. Omniscience is a quality of the totality of consciousness and unconsciousness, and if that is the all, it is a constant, one. To state the idea in algebraic terms yields the formula, U + C = 1.
It is a cornerstone of empirical (Jungian) psychology that the dynamics of psyche is the dynamics of resolving inherent dualities. That is illustrated, for example, in the polarities of the personality types: introvert-extravert, thinking-evaluating, sensing-intuiting. Further, there is the dynamic of ego versus self, and that of the feminine anima and masculine animus, present in each person (but conscious in differing measure, according to gender, cultural conditioning, et cetera.) For each of those, there is a tension between its light and shadow aspects.
The varied personality characteristics, centered around archetypes, are named differently in various mythic systems, but perhaps they are most familiar in the persons of the Greek gods and goddesses who play out everyone's psychological traits in the intrigues of Olympus. The process of individuation is the lifetime process of harmonizing those dualities to bring the individual into a balanced oneness.
We commonly think of mythology as fanciful stories of the past, and the figures of our own religious traditions as somehow more real. Indeed, the holy figures of most of the living religions are "more real", in the sense that they were historical persons. However, those persons and the events which surrounded their lives are remembered because they carry mythic power. We find in their historical reality the much more important reality of the divine dynamic working within ourselves.
There is a large still-growing literature which interprets these archetypal dynamics for the various religions, in effect translating religious language into psychological language. Both Buddha and Christ are quintessential expressions of the Self, for they are figures of light and love whose "Way" (Middle Way, way of salvation) seeks to resolve the polarities of psyche into individuated personality, at one with divine will for the person and for cosmos.
In that respect, there is indeed a duality between the person and the divine. The "I" must become conscious of the divine realm which is almost completely unconscious in the person and the universe. The interesting question for traditional religion is whether the divine is conscious or unconscious. In conventional theology, God's consciousness seems to be larger than, but of the same quality as, human consciousness. In other words, God and humans share the same cosmos of consciousness. But there is another, more all-embracing possibility. Is the Godself perhaps a different consciousness, one which needs to make that which is conscious to humans become conscious to Itself, so as to complete Itself? In other words, can the divine psyche, the Source of creation, know in Itself what it is like to live as created matter? Is the experience of being matter and being confined to spacetime an aspect of experience which the divine Am-self could not know without communicating with human consciousness?
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The Godpsyche
Jung's answer is that God is unconscious, a conclusion presented in his study Answer to Job. It is important in interpreting Jung to keep in mind that he reads the book of Job empirically, not as philosophical argument or history or as religious revelation, but as evidence for the reality of psyche which is at work in the producing of that book. In such an approach, even though interesting, it is not necessarily pertinent to know exactly who the author was, or the intent of the author, or the exact context of the author's life and work. Psyche gives evidence of itself in psyche's works.
Job's faithful orientation toward the divine cannot be shaken, even by the most severe of trials: "I know that my Redeemer liveth" (19:25 KJV) and "Even though he slay me, yet will I trust him" (13:15a, KJV); but, he will persist even then to confront God, as in a court of law: "I should still argue my cause to his face." (13:15b NEB) But great and remarkable as that is, there is more to be learned from this book than that.
Psyche, in the book of Job as analyzed by Jung, says that both the Godself and mankind are bound by a necessity to harmonize the polarities within the Self. God, too, is a coincidentia oppositorum, a being in whom the opposites contend. In another context, Teilhard writes, "The essential marvel of the divine milieu is the ease with which it assembles and harmonizes within itself qualities which appear to us to be contradictory."
Psyche (the most immediate manifestation of the divine milieu) encompasses "the inward process of dialectic in God". Job has met God's challenge by contending within himself, and in his doing so we see that God must do the same. Conventional Christian teaching speaks of a God in and of whom everything is good and perfect. Yet Job is confronted by a God who falls short of perfection, and by a wide margin, for Job's God is the primal Yahweh who bargins with Satan. God is quite willing to subject Job to the most awful of tribulations, works which Satan himself would be proud to call his own. Yet for what?
Jung presents many examples to support his argument, but it seems to crystalize in the answer to one particular question: Why did God suddenly stop tormenting Job? Why did God give up? Because, according to Jung:
Job realizes God's inner antinomy, and in the light of this realization his knowledge attains a divine numinosity. ... Job, by his insistence on bringing his case before God, even without hope of a hearing, had stood his ground and thus created the very obstacle that forced God to reveal his true nature.
Then Yahweh, in the tempest of his furor, asks
Who is this whose ignorant words
cloud my design in darkness? (38:2 NEB)
Or, in a translation from the German Bible which Jung used,
Who is this who darkens counsel
by words without insight?
Who is this without insight? Jung rejects several possiblities as unacceptable for various reasons: not Satan, not Job, not Job's friends. "The answer to Yahweh's conundrum is therefore: it is Yahweh himself who darkens his own counsel and who has no insight."
Yahweh's turmoil over his own cosmogenic process spills out as from a "whirlwind" (KJV). It is perhaps more for Yahweh's own self-assurance than for Job's benefit that Job must listen to a four-chapter catalog of Yahweh's mighty powers. In the calm which followed, Job replies:
I know that thou canst do all
things
and that no purpose is beyond thee. ...
But I have spoken of great things which I have
not understood,
things too wonderful for me to know. (42:2-3 NEB)
The book ends as Yahweh restores Job's fortunes and doubles his possessions. "Furthermore, the Lord blessed the end of Job's life more than the beginning." (42:12 NEB) Both God and Job seem to have been made whole by the process.
The God of the Book of Job was unconscious, or at least unconscious in terms of human consciousness, and through Jung's analysis we see cosmogenic psyche at work. In the processes of creation, the nuocontinuum integrates all aspects of cosmos as the oneness of the all, which is both omniscient and omnipotent. It is a process in which human consciousness (Job) and the Godpsyche (Yahweh) work in tandem toward an ultimate consciousness in which there is no remaining distinction between material creation and the nuocontinuum. Deity will have reached its complete and perfected goal.
The theological discipline of eschatology, which is the study of the end of creation, is thus given a remarkable new perspective. The end is not merely the final point of the time scale (Omega Point), but is also the goal of creation itself, and the end is the reason for the initial act of creation: God creates in order to prove the potential of what God knows to be possible. Creation is God's own individuating thought experiment.
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Physical Eschatology
The anthropic principle of physics also leads to a similar and compatible conclusion, but it too is startling because of its unconventionality. Barrow and Tipler present a speculation about the possible fate of cosmos, based entirely on scientific reasoning.
Broadly speaking, the current work may be said to be concerned with investigating the validity of FAP [the Final Anthropic Principle], and attempting to draw testable conclusions from FAP. In this final section, we shall summarize what is now known in the new study of "physical eschatology". [658]
[Bracketed numbers are page references in Barrow & Tipler, Anthropic Cosmological Principle]
They define the "Final Anthropic Principle" as a generalization of the principle that the universe must have properties which permit life to develop within it at some time in its history. [22] The FAP is stated thusly: "Intelligent information-processing must come into existence in the Universe, and once it comes into existence, it will never die out." [23] For purposes of our unification, let us consider that "intelligent information-processing", at least when it reaches a certain degree of complexity, accords with human consciousness, as we have been using the term in discussing psyche. Barrow and Tipler write:
The essence of a human being is not the body, but the program which controls the body; we might even identify the program which controls the body with the religious notion of soul, for both are defined to be non-material entities which are the essence of a human personality. In fact, defining the soul to be a type of program has much in common with Aristotle and Aquinas' definition of the soul as "the form of activity of the body". [659]
(If we look at human beings in terms of "program", and the program in terms of the dynamics of psyche, and psychodynamics as another expression of the nuocontinuum which defines the physical laws, we see the outlines of a unification of human action with cosmic action. However, this is not to imply a mechanistic or deterministic view of human life, for it is the essence of the "program" to support a cosmos which is freely creating itself. That freedom is constrained only by natural law: the physical laws and the laws of the dynamics of psyche. Individual human consciousness has the freedom, at its own level of affairs, to operate in defiance of the program, but only at high cost. Even when individual humans self-destruct, the cosmic program remains intact.)
Barrow and Tipler's argument hinges largely on the question of whether the universe is "open" or "closed". They state, "it seems on anthropic grounds that the universe is more likely to be closed than open, but this is only a weak prediction". [675] Their senario for the end of the universe is thus based on this assumption of a closed universe. In that senario, life eventually engulfs the entire universe; and the end point of the universe comes when the maximum information storage is reached. At that Omega Point, no further activity is possible. [677] In a note, the last words of text in the book, they add, "A modern-day theologian might wish to say that the totality of life at the Omega Point is omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient!" [their exclamation] [682]
A problem for life at the end of the universe is the "heat death" problem, posed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics (the entropy law). In an expanding cosmos, as matter slowly changes into radiation of increasing wavelengths (heat), a state would eventually be reached which is incompatible with life. The theory of relativity and quantum cosmology have modified that, for if the universe is sufficiently large, the universe may cycle into a contraction which yields shear energy (from the curved-space properties of the universe) rather than matter energy, and at temperatures compatible with expansion of the biosphere. [676]
Of course, the intelligent life which engulfs the cosmos need not be familiar human life, or even biological in the conventional sense. Evolution continues, and we have a part to play in directing its future course. Intelligent space probes, described by von Neumann as universal constructor machines which have the capacity to reproduce and to download their program into their progeny, might well be the instruments of that expansion into the farthest reaches. [517] In that case, current research into the genome and into space robotics, artificial intelligence and artificial life, sometimes seen as running against the grain of traditional religious consciousness, is the ally of cosmic religious consciousness, and may someday be understood as evidence of cosmos playing out its program.
The Barrow and Tipler view is based on a universe modelled in "real" time. That is, it proceeds according to the mathematics of ordinary ("real") numbers, beginning with a Big Bang beyond which the physical laws and spacetime break down in a singularity which forms a boundary of the universe. Hawking has offered a no-boundary proposal by which cosmos can be conceived as existing without such a breakdown of physical laws and spacetime.
If time is measured in imaginary numbers (in which the square of a number can have a minus value) instead of real numbers (in which a square is always positive), time and space are not distinguishable. Hawking writes that by the quantum theory of gravity in that imaginary-time mode:
There would be no singularities at which the laws of science broke down and no edge of spacetime at which one would have to appeal to God or some new law to set the boundary conditions for spacetime. One could say: `The boundary condition of the universe is that it has no boundary.' The universe would be completely self-contained and not affected by anything outside itself. It would neither be created or destroyed. It would just BE.
However, Hawking's statement about an "appeal to God" would be valid only for a God conceived to be external to the universe. The no-boundary proposal meshes nicely with the concept presented here, in which the Godpsyche is not external to cosmos. By whatever number scale time is measured, the model of the All as both matter and psyche, Creation and Creator, remains intact. The meaning of cosmos is affirmed in the integration of both interpretations: From the perspective of ordinary time in which we live, life moves toward the mystical Union of the Omega Point; but in the perspective of cosmic psyche, life cycles eternally, complete in Itself.
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Collective Consciousness
In the light of all of the above, traditional Biblical eschatology takes on new meaning. In Answer to Job, Jung interpreted some of the imagery of the Book of Revelation. In "Pantheism and Christianity" and elsewhere, Teilhard gives a new interpretation of St. Paul's eschatology, to which we can add correlations to the cosmogram.
Paul writes that Christ (Word, Logos; the Order principle of the nuocontinuum) is destined to reign "until God has put all enemies [evil] under his feet; and the last enemy to be abolished is death." At that point, Christ, "the Son himself will also be made subordinate to God who made all things subject to [Christ], and thus God will be all in all." (1 Cor. 15:26-28 NEB) Teilhard considers that to be "the most clear-cut assertion we have of Christian `pantheism'." In the unfolding of the Christian story, God becomes panta en pasin, encompassing everything and everything consciously dwells in God. The ties which bind physical eschatology, evolving deity, and personal individuation become even more striking in J. B. Phillip's paraphrase from which we quoted above:
When everything created has been made obedient to God, then shall the Son acknowledge himself subject to God the Father, who gave the Son power over all things. Then, in the end, shall God be wholly and absolutely God.
We can now suggest a graph of a hypothetical evolution of consciousness, unifying these physical, psychological and theological concepts (Figure). The curves should be seen, not as mathematical functions, but as outlining cones of consciousness, within the vast unconsciousness (U) of the current cosmos. The first cone (c1) represents the primal pantheistic consciousness (Pu) which seemed to be present among humans in every group whose ancient writings we know. Teilhard and Schweitzer (following others) have described that as a consciousness which leads toward an undifferentiated absorption into a purely spiritual unity, and ultimately to an ascetic withdrawal from involvement in life, rather than active engagement with it.
In western religion, Moses' encounter with "I AM" at the burning bush expresses the emerging of the consciousness of One God from that of a tribal god, "the God of our fathers", who was one among many tribal gods of that region and time. (Exodus 3:1-14) Despite historical distortions in the message, that consciousness (c2) emphasizes the importance of the individual before God, and draws all toward ethical engagement with the world, loving God first of all, and neighbor as self. That means that we must thus love self as well, but not ego, for narcissism is a negation of the love of God. Thus, c2-consciousness seeks a balanced individuated self at harmony both with and within cosmos.
That theistic consciousness (T), however, has been dualist: God is set off from and over mankind, and mankind has "dominion" over the rest of creation. The rise in T consciousness has been accompanied by a rise in physical consciousness (science, knowledge) as well, and that has challenged the claims and power of theistic orthodoxy. Such "secular" consciousness (s) is monistic, in that it has generally not acknowledged God as part of the concept of reality. In s-consciousness, only the physical is real.
My sense is that the leading edge of consciousness in global civilization today reaches just beyond the "T" on the figure, at which pantheism, theism, and physical knowledge are blending and the curve of consciousness is just beginning to break into a steeper slope toward its ultimate goal. That goal is divinization, the individuating consciousness (Di) at the Omega Point, in which God becomes panta en pasin, all in all, wholly and absolutely God.
For global civilization as a whole, however, the "center of gravity" of consciousness lies well behind that leading point. There is still an oppressive weight of evil in human affairs. Will we be able to understand it, and withstand it sufficiently to meet our destiny? Jung has dealt with the concept of evil in Answer to Job. Jung emphasized the coincidentia oppositorum of good and evil in the Godpsyche, that we might recognize its activity within ourselves. He held that it is inappropriate to hold that God is the Summum Bonum (most-perfect Good) because of that duality within the Godpsyche.
The Summum Bonum which does reside in the Godpsyche is that perfect Good of equilibrium to which we must aspire in our everyday actions in creation. Our term "God" is the Totality, including its polarities. The Summum Bonum equates with "Meaning", the central Logos principle. That is the point of calm at the center of the vortex, around which the dualities swirl and toward which they are drawn. That centerpoint, for Christians, is Christ.
Yet we individually do not achieve that perfected balance. Teilhard writes:
Evil is not an unforeseen accident in the universe. It is an enemy, a shadow which God inevitably produces simply by the fact that he decides on creation. New being, launched into existence and not yet completely assimilated into unity, is a dangerous thing, bringing with it pain and oddity.
In terms of the cosmogram, evil is the resistance in the cosmic system, the impedance in its "electrical circuits" to making conscious the unconscious. It is the resistance residing in that transcendent function by which ego comes to know self, and which separates all matter from its field. It is the friction involved in bringing creation into consciousness at all levels. Thermodynamically it appears as entropy, the negative of the creative information principle. Satan personifies that, while Christ personifies the integrating information-ordering principle.
Jung wrote, "The fire in which the devil is tormented burns in the divine pleroma forever". In this context, we can restate that: the fire in which the devil burns is the divine fire of creation, an inspiration to a creative spirit, a noxious inferno to the narcissistic spirits of destruction. Injustice impedes the processes of individuation, for individuals and thus for cosmos. Justice lies in making that knowledge effective at the social level, so that those conditions exist which are conducive to individuation. Individuation of a person is part and parcel of the individuation of God.
Yet, we must not make the narcissistic claim, as some today are wont to do, that we are becoming gods. The quality of transcendence remains in the Godpsyche of cosmos itself, far surpassing the significance of individual achievements. A test of true spirituality is humility in the presence of the All, for humility must increase as consciousness and ethical engagement with cosmos increases.
Still, the individual and each contribution to the consciousness of the all are immensely significant. Perhaps the intensification of the nuoflux, with growing knowledge and awareness, eventually accelerates cosmic evolution toward its Omega Point. I do not know the physics of that, but a statement by Barrow and Tipler is suggestive:
Finally, the time is reached when life has encompassed the entire Universe and regulated all matter contained therein. Life begins to manipulate the dynamical evolution of the universe as a whole, forcing the horizons to disappear, first in one direction, and then another. [675]
We cannot yet manipulate the spacetime speed-of-light event horizons of which the physicists speak, but we can manipulate the horizons of our own collective spiritual consciousness, to bring personal understandings and global affairs into closer alignment with the Way of the cosmos. That is the spirituality which the cosmogram tries to depict.
But what of that Omega Point? What then? If I could be there, I would not at all be surprised to hear Sophia say of cosmos:
It then will slow,
its work complete.
The light will dim
but only for a moment
for from that
Mass
a voice Transcendent
will say again
Again,
Now Let there Be.
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Notes: The Psychology of God
God, too, is a coincidentia oppositorum -- Jung. Answer to Job. PJ 589, CW 11:664. In alchemy, the unification of opposites was seen as a "mystical marriage", hence Jung's Mysterium Conjunctionis (CW 14). For important commentary on Answer to Job, see Edward F. Edinger's The Creation of Consciousness: Jung's Myth for Modern Man (1984) and his Transformation of the God-Image (1992) (Toronto: Inner City Books)
"The essential marvel of the divine milieu" -- Teilhard. The Divine Milieu. New York: Harper & Row, 1968. p 113.
"the inward process of dialectic in God" -- Jung. Answer to Job. PJ 542, CW 11:587.
"Job realizes God's inner antinomy" -- ibid., PJ 540, CW 11:584. Antinomy -- opposition between laws, principles. Numinosity -- a sense of sacred power or presence.
"Who is this who darkens counsel" -- ibid, PJ 540, CW 11:584.
"The answer to Yahweh's conundrum" -- ibid, PJ 541, CW 11:587.
"There would be no singularities" -- Hawking, op. cit. [2:13], page 136.
"Evil is not an unforeseen" Teilhard. op. cit. p 84.
"The fire in which the devil is" -- Jung. op. cit., PJ 627, CW 11:733.
"It then will slow" -- MOD-EK (16).
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