Have you ever noticed that the word "transcendence" can have very different meanings, depending on who is defining it?
While they look similar at first, the way Carl Jung and Roman Catholicism define transcendence function as complete opposites under the hood. The two are as different from each other as fast food is from health food. And to rationalize the former is like believing a sugar addiction must mean God designed us to hate vegetables in order to shorten our life so we would get our greatest craving of all finally satisfied: an eternity with the God of sugar.
In religious experience, transcendence is a state of being that has overcome the limitations of physical existence, and by some definitions, has also become independent of it. Such a state can only be reached by studying the Bible, and only with the guidance of those God has given authority to interpret its cryptic prose and poetry. For Jung, transcendence is something very different. While religion insists transcendence is about overcoming one's sinful human nature to reconcile with a God, for Jung transcendence was about reconciling us to our selves.
Both forms of transcendence claim to enable a person to find and achieve their true authentic selves, but the selves they offer as your "true authentic self" are very different. One claims you can only know your "true self" by striving to know God, while the other follows the ancient Greek philosophers and Native American religions by requiring us to "know thyself."
Science and religion appear to offer two paths to transcendence, one by escaping the limits of our physical nature and ascending like Moses to Mt Siana and the other by descending into it the hades of of our own mind like Jesus, and we are left to decide which one to follow. Like Robert Frost, one man who stood at that fork in the road was an enlightenment philosopher who some scholars claim considered himself a Christian, while others think he was more of an atheist. His name was Immanuel Kant. The question is whether these two paths he was confronted with are really the same path, but one being described in two different ways.
Two books that describe this path to transcendence are The Bible and The Red Book by Carl Jung. The former portrays the human soul as being opposed to a divine will, while the latter portrays that same soul as existing in conflict with itself. For one, we must strive "in fear and trembling" to "die to self" so we can become one with God, while for the other, it is only through the descent into the hell of self knowledge, as Kant explained, that we can achieve godliness. Both perspectives require healing a split, but religion claims we must ask for forgiveness for splitting ourselves from God, while for science, at least from the perspective of Jung and Kant, the split that needs to be healed is with ourselves. The former requires fear and obedience, the other courage and curiosity.
In "The Red Book," Carl Jung discusses his idea of transcendence. By this he means healing the splitting of the human soul. He does not mean “transcendent” in a mystical sense (though it has spiritual resonance), but in the sense of "transcending opposition"—resolving psychic conflict by creating a new synthesis. In other words, in Jungian psychology, transcendence has a function of healing while we live life here on earth, while in Catholicism, such transcendence is about overcoming, or overpowering, a sinful nature displeasing to God, in order to become one with God in heaven after we die. The former requires the courage to descend into the hell of self-knowledge, while the latter requires us to have "the wisdom," as it says in Proverbs 9:10. to live in fear of being cast into hell for failing to obey.
For Catholicism, transcendence requires dependence upon the Catholic Church as the spiritual stairway to heaven and God. But for Jung, the transcendent function refers to the psychological mechanism by which a person uses their mind to integrate conscious and unconscious elements of their psyche, a Greek word that means "soul." As Jung explained, “The transcendent function arises from the union of conscious and unconscious contents.” From the Christian perspective, we are born so broken we cannot be fixed, but only forgiven and kept on a weekly regimen of sacramental medicines. We are, in other words, like a car that needs to be gassed up every week. From Jung's perspective, however, we are, like everything else in nature, "intelligently designed" to heal ourselves.
But how should we "heal ourselves"? To do that, we first have to ask what makes more sense: That we were "intelligently designed" to be spiritually dependent upon a religion or Church to interpret the cryptic words of the Bible for God, or to follow the words of Jesus who, like Jung, Kant, and even the ancient Greek philosophers, all said in one way or another that the "kingdom of God is within you"?
While Catholicism requires us to "believe" that the "kingdom" exists outside and above physical reality, from the scientific lens, that "kingdom" reflects the realm of the relationship between what Jung calls the conscious and unconscious parts of our mind. That relationship is split in two - what I call "splitting the Adam" - through the stories we tell ourselves about who and what we are.
So which story should we necessarily believe to be "infallibly true" and which one inflicts a moral injury upon the soul of an innocent child? That we are born and "intelligently designed" to be steeped in sin, which insists we are designed to be incapable of healing ourself so we will live our whole life spiritually dependent upon a church or religion or a Bible to save us from ourselves, or that we are born and maybe even "intelligently designed" with a special intelligence that is capable of healing itself, and by so doing, also learning how to save itself, and thereby show others the way to do the same thing? The former commands us to follow the letter of dogma, while the latter invites us to play like children with our spiritual freedom.
Psychiatrist Jonathan Shay and colleagues coined the term moral injury. Emphasizing the psychological, social, cultural, and spiritual aspects of trauma, moral injury describes experiences where someone who holds legitimate authority has betrayed what is morally right in a high-stakes situation. It produces profound feelings of guilt or shame. As Brene Brown has pointed out, the difference between guilt and shame is that the former is something we feel for something we have done wrong, while the latter is the result of feeling there is something inherently wrong with us. The latter occurs when a parent teaches a child to believe they are a born sinner who is not only incapable of healing themself, but because they are, must therefore prove they are worthy of salvation by seeking forgiveness.
In effect, teaching a child to "believe" they are born with a sin stained soul that needs forgiveness is to teach the child to think they are an ugly devilish duckling who must prove themself worthy of being turned into a beautiful angelic swan. Instilling such a "belief" in the innocent mind of a child has the effect of "splitting the Adam," that is, of splitting the conscious and unconscious sides of our soul. This first wound, or "original sin" inflicted upon an innocent soul by religion, then leads to a dependence upon religion, not to heal the child, but as a way for that child to cope with the lifelong effects that religious trauma causes by the inflicting of such a moral wound.
As Gabor Mate has pointed out, the sanctuary, the Eden in which the fullness of a child is able to develop emotionally and spiritually, is the ability of the child to rest in the relationship with the parent. This ability to rest in the parental relationship means the child, on an emotional level much as it does within the womb on a physical level, need do nothing to earn or maintain such a relationship.
Teaching the child to believe they are a born sinner changes this. To do so is to inflict a moral injury upon such a child. In effect, it throws a serpent into the innocent emotional garden of Eden the child depends on for healthy emotional development. As a result, the child whose healthy development requires ability to rest in the relationship with their parent like it did in the womb, learns the need to seek approval to maintain attachment to those parents just to survive. This creates an "attachment disorder." Pouring such a story into the innocent mind of a child affects their emotional development the same way the drinking of alcohol by a pregnant woman affects the physical development of a fetus in her womb.
When the child reared in such an environment grows up to become parents themselves, that attachment disorder becomes the basis of seeking approval to maintain attachment to a tribe, our "hive" or herd, especially of the tribe or herd their parents sought approval of. In other words, the child who is raised to seek the approval of the parent, grows into a parent who seeks approval of the herd their own parent sought approval of to maintain the approval of their own parents before them.
All such parents end up requiring their own children to approve of them while also requiring their children prove they are worthy of the approval of the parent, because the parent is stuck in repeating the pattern of learned behavior associated with its survival needs. The need for the approval of their own children serves as the surrogate approval they used to get from their parents when they were children. The attachment disorder, in this way, becomes inter-generational, as the disorder is relearned as "love" from parent to child. In such an environment, a life lived for approval and attachment becomes the only thing the person every knows as "love."
But approval is not love, it is what Buddhism calls the "near enemy" of love. It looks like love, but is in fact its mirrored opposite, like our right hand is the mirror opposite of our left hand. This difference seems small, but can have a monstrous butterfly effect over the course of the child's life.
To understand the emotional effects of such a difference, consider the physical effects of mirrored opposites seen in the sedative taken in the 1960s during early pregnancy to treat morning sickness. Called thalidomide, the primary chemical isomer used for the drug came in mirrored opposite forms:
one left handed, the other right handed. The right handed isomer was affective and safe. The left handed isomer, however, caused death or congenital malformation, especially of the limbs, of children.
By comparison, the person's "soul" (their emotional intelligence and health, which are so central to our nervous system) responds to love versus attachment (i.e., "the near enemy of love") the same way those infants bodies responded to the right versus the left handed versions of the isomers in Thalidomide.
Like the left-handed isomer of love, an over dependence on attachment similarly malforms or even kills the person's sense of authenticity, replacing it with a template for conformity. To such people, the need for approval of parents produces a need for approval of our parents herd after the parent is gone. And the more dependent the person becomes to that approval, the more they impair their ability to form healthy boundaries or emotional intelligence.
Often, approval in pursuit of attachment becomes a person's sole experience of "love." As a result, rejection feels like burning in hell while "the love of God" feels like approval which is as infinite as it is eternal. Such attachment stems from a rejection of those desires or parts of oneself that fail to conform to the dogma required by the herd we feel compelled to maintain attachment to. For Jung, those forbidden desires become suppressed into our unconscious "shadow self," from which our conscious self is increasing estranged and dissociated from.
What then disgusts us in those who have failed to conform in the same way, as such, is always triggered by the recognition of those very same desires being repressed as "sinful" and shameful in ourselves. When this occurs, the feeling of disgust we experience is merely a projection of what we harbor in our unconscious. For Christians, this sense of disgust is necessarily the result of a moral compass that God has given them to ensure that those who's sexual habits are felt to be disgusting to Christians are destined for hell, and the Christian, by maintaining and even nurturing their feelings of disgust for such people, are proving to God they deserve to be rewarded with eternal bliss in heaven.
Real authenticity, on the other hand, can only grow in the soil of security when watered with unconditional acceptance in the sunlight of unconditional love. When that happens, the only thing within a person's unconscious is unconditional acceptance, which such a person also projects onto others as well. For the Christian, the projection of such unconditional acceptance is the greatest cause for fear of God, for it fails to reject a proper level of opposition to, and distaste for, whatever our religious "brand" assures us angers God so much He requires no less than eternal suffering to compensate for it.
In the absence of a healthy authenticity, a person can become trapped in a veritable addiction to approval of others, as that approval becomes the only means by which they overcome the nagging sense of self-doubt that is the scar of the moral wound inflicted by teaching such a child to believe they are a born sinner that needs to be saved.
Hence, the transcendent function that Jung refers to is the unifying of the conscious and the unconscious minds. A relationship between the conscious and unconscious mind based on the insecurity of approval and attachment is oppositional, while a relationship based on authenticity is collaborative. For Jung, it is the engine of individuation, the process of becoming a psychologically whole and integrated person. These reconciliations lead to the birth of the Self—Jung’s term for the psychic totality that unites all opposites.
Jung's individuation that unites our conscious and unconscious likewise has a "near enemy" as well, one that uses the self-division of attachment as a virtue. Called individualism, it refers to a cultural value that emphasizes the individual's independence, autonomy, and self-reliance, prioritizing personal goals and achievements over those of the group. It is a perspective where individuals see themselves, or more specifically their egos, as distinct and separate from others, and their actions are driven by personal desires and needs. This contrasts with collectivism, which emphasizes group harmony and interdependence.
The word "individual" comes from the Latin, persoa, which means "mask." Mask comes from Etruscan work "phersu" meaning dramatic mask.
The difference between attachment and love, as such, is that the former projects a protective forcefield onto others that reflects the level to which the person dissociates from their "shadow self" so they can fit into the herd to which they feel a need to remain attached. That forcefield clothes itself in virtue signaling favored by the herd, which enables others within that herd to recognize who is a member of "us" and who is an enemy of "them." Otherwise known as an ego, such a forcefield is always incapable of ever knowing with any degree of infallibility who is a true member of the "us" herd and who is not. The pedophiles within the Catholic church is simply one example that illustrate how such virtue signaling becomes the perfect sheepskin for wolves to prey upon children.
By reconciling us to ourselves, Jungian individuation allows us to accept and appreciate our own uniqueness, which is the only thing that enables us to accept and appreciate the uniqueness of others. Such self-acceptance is alone what allows us to exercise any "free will" to be whoever we freely choose to be, rather than try to win reward through shame and obedience to dogmas. Only through such freedom and acceptance can any lasting form of group harmony and healthy interdependence be cultivated, because it removes the most toxic aspects of competition between the individual and the group.
In contrast, by prizing itself over collectivism, individualism cultivates the most unhealthy aspects of competition toward collectivism.
Hence, in contrast to how individuation overcomes the toxic aspects of competition that have been cultivated to exist between the conscious with the unconscious psychologically, individualism cultivates those same toxic aspects of competition between the individual from the collective on a social level. The former allows for authenticity that can only flow from the security of unconditional love, while the latter is the result of an attachment-disorder that flows from conditional forms of approval-seeking masquerading as "love" divides us internally, between who we are or may want to be and who we think others require us to be. This division happens on both an emotional and psychological level. One unites us by empowering us to use "Free will," while the other divides us and disempowers the exercise of any such "free will."
This is why Jung said that "until we make the unconscious conscious, it will control your life and we will call it fate." The tricky part is figuring out what constitutes the true 'unconscious' in any given individual?
I was raised in a devoutly Roman Catholic family, but eventually concluded Catholicism was not telling the whole truth. My brother, on the other hand, became a Catholic priest, and now claims "my faith and I are one and the same."
Both of us could be said to have engaged in Jung's function of"transcending opposition"— of creating a new synthesis by integrating conscious and unconscious elements of our psyche or "soul." Yet we also were both raised by the same parents who were almost obsessively Roman Catholic on the one hand, and purely human and imperfect on the other. The question is: did both of us equally grow into the adults who could "save us" from the trauma or unhappiness of our childhoods?
Clearly, my brother is convinced that his decision to become a Catholic priest is, and must be, the result of receiving the right-handed "love" isomer that helped him to become his true authentic self, by helping to heal the malformed soul his religion requires him to believe he was born with, a soul that seeks approval of the world. He used his conscious desire to please and obey God, as such, to wrestle into submission his unconscious desires to sin and disobey God. What's more, for him, the effects of our parents imperfections in their attempts to do the same thing were not only necessarily better than they would have been without their Catholicism, but wholly separable from Catholicism as well. Whatever they got wrong was the fault of their human flaws, as he sees it, and whatever they did right was apparently purely because they were Catholic, and nothing else.
But what does that mean for me? According to his perspective, I must then have received the left-handed love isomer that malformed my soul's ability to integrate my conscious and unconscious correctly, so I could then see what my brother sees, to correctly see that what led my brother to become a Catholic priest was nothing short of "the infallible truth," about my real "authentic" self, about what constitutes true "authentic" human nature, about the infallible truth of Catholicism, and about the truth of even our parents.
He looks at our parents and somehow feels he is capable of clearly separating our parents imperfections from Catholicism, and so chose to become a priest to help others see the difference as well, and by seeing that difference, come to understand how his own journey led him to God and salvation from hell (which his God created and keeps in optimal operation for eternity).
Unable to see clearly the distinction my brother claims to have led him to be a priest for Catholicism, and desirous to learn of it from him to avoid the eternity of torture our Catholicism tells me to expect for failing to operate under the "belief" such a distinction is "infallibly" real, I have repeatedly asked my brother to explain it to me, since that is what he decided he felt called to do with his life. Yet, he is unable to do so. Instead, he insists the problem is me, I lack the faith to see what he sees so unmistakably, and then claims his ability to see with such infallibility is his "faith" - a "faith" which is a gift from God.
I inform him that's like telling me his "faith" is like a spiritual microscope that God gave him as a gift that enables him see things about the soul the naked eye alone was "intelligently designed" to be incapable of seeing, and then telling me he cannot tell me what he sees through that microscope unless and until God feels I deserve to be given such a spiritual microscope too. Only with such a spiritual microscope, he assures me, can one clearly see the difference between Catholicism as pure goodness and virtue, and our parents imperfections, which were only improved but not fully cured, by Catholicism.
From this perspective, he has only felt called to explain to those who are willing to "believe" he possess such insight to begin with. Only by accepting this perspective does my brother then feel empowered to share the "good news" of what my brother claims he has been given from God. When I ask him how is such a "truth" any different from a lie, since both are only empower to the same degree we are required to believe them to be true, he merely insists "it is a gift of faith." A gift he seems quite happy I, and so many who doubt his powers of divine discernment, do not have, so he can relish in the heavenly thought of our eternal torments in hell.
I also pointed out that this means my salvation is based on a different standard than his salvation. His salvation is based on an ability to see something even if he is unable to fully explain it in a way that is convincing to me, not just to him. Obviously, I could claim the same was true of a faith I held in, say, Zeus, that he would reject for the same reasons I reject his claims. But while his salvation is the result of being given such a gift, which has enabled him to see the difference, my salvation is based on not being given such a gift, and having instead to simply trust that his claims are infallibly true, even if his own fallible human nature prevents him from being able to fully explain that distinction to those who God has decided NOT to give such a spiritual microscope.
Which of us - my brother or I? - is being controlled by our unconscious and calling it fate? Both? Neither? Which of us is remembering who were were before the world told us who we should be?
For my brother, "the world" appears to be everything outside of our family and what our parents taught us to be: good Catholics. For me, "the world" is everything inside our family and what our parents taught us to be. Catholicism likewise focuses on the outside or conscious aspects of the psyche or soul, such as the rational parts of our brain, to overcome the inside or unconscious aspects of our psyche or soul, such as parts of our deeper emotional brain. For Catholicism, the inner soul is flawed and houses our shameful sinful nature that needs to be subdued and domesticated like a wild animal, while for Jung our inner soul is comprised of our "shadow self," those parts of ourselves we hide away as shameful. The former teaches us to see ourselves as suffering from an inner demon that we must subdue and domesticate so we can be as obedient as dogs for God, while the latter teaches us to see ourselves more like gods who acts like rapid dogs because our conscious and unconscious are divided.
As a result, Catholicism leads us to try and unify ourselves from the outside in, with the former finally dominating the latter, much as Greek philosophers like Plato and Aristotle conceived of the virtues of philosophy, while Jungian transcendence seeks to unify from the inside out, seeking to harmonize one with the other. Again, Catholicism views the two as existing in a competition where one must win out over the other, and life is the lived experience on the battlefield between the two, while Jungian transcendence sees the battlefield itself as being the result of failing to understand how and why the conscious and the unconscious are battling in the first place.
Jung drew much of his thinking from understanding native American religions. One such idea came from a Cherokee parable about the internal struggle between good and bad impulses within each person. Known as "the two wolves" story, it tells of the ongoing battle between positive and negative aspects of ourselves, and that the aspects you feed most - the thoughts you nurture with feelings and action - is the one that wins.
Catholicism adopts this view, labeling the two wolves as God or goodness vs the devil or evil, and "transcendence" is where the former finally defeats the latter, as we see in the Book of Revelations. Jungian transcendence, however, sees the battle between the two as being the result of failing to see why this is a false dichotomy. And it is, because the battle is the result of seeing the two sides of ourselves as being in competition with each other, as if our left hand is at war with our right hand, until the one we favor the most eventually wins. But, other than writing, two hands are better than one for doing most things, especially for doing difficult things like walking on your hands. To do that requires coordination and cooperation between our two hands.
The Catholic view of such transcendence, reflected in Matthew 5:30, is "If your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away from you. For it is more profitable for you that one of your members should perish, than for your whole body to be cast into hell". Ouch! While the Jungian transcendence is what enables us to use our "free will" to do even the most unnatural of things like walking on our hands. And while a Catholic seeing someone walking on their hands for the first time may conclude the person is only able to do so because God has empowered them to do so (or, if not performed in a Church, then the person is clearly possessed by the devil like Regan McNeil in "The Exorcist"), a Jungian would see such an act as being the result of person developing the same balancing and coordination skills we are all born with.
TO BE CLEAR - this is not to insist that my brother should, or even must, renounce his Catholic perspective about himself, even if to me that perspective looks like a conflict between his conscious and unconscious. What it may look like to me is not how it may be experienced by him, after all. In fact, given his own experiences, wanting that would be effectively the same as my brother requiring me to simply trust his "beliefs," regardless of how I have only ever experienced those same "beliefs," and despite his explanations failing to overcome the same natural degree of skepticism I have for his Catholicism that prevents him from switching from his own Catholicism to another religion, or even another version of Catholicism.
This is the difference between his Catholic transcendence and my Jungian transcendence. He claims that the fear of hell has little to no effect on his willingness to obey and conform his whole life to the dogmas of Catholicism. Even when I asked him if he would be willing to live his life the very same way if he knew that there was no hell to worry about or heaven to hope for, or if there was only a heaven that was unavoidable by all and no hell whatsoever, he had no reply. Clearly, he wanted to believe he would live his life no differently than he has chosen to, and tried to suggest he would. But it was clear his answer was on shaky ground, and he had not considered such a question before. When I pressed him as to why he would, he merely repeated himself to say "it is my faith." And this is what he gets paid to parrot to anyone who asks him anything he cannot answer - which is most anything you ask him.
INSTEAD, it is to argue that, IF it feels perfectly right and "authentic" for my brother to be a Catholic and even a Catholic priest, then he should be both, and be allowed to be both. But when he then claims his Catholic beliefs enable him, or even require him, because of what he claims such a spiritual microscope enable him to see that others cannot, to then override the ability of others to exercise their own "free will" to do the same thing because they lack such a "gift of faith," then what may be "beliefs" for him personally becomes pure delusions of power to those who he feels the need or desire to "save" from themselves, just so his "beliefs" can feel real, and true, by feeling empowered.
Simply put, Jungian Christianity provides a lens of understanding that requires us to question everything, including the lens itself, in the humble desire only to understand, while Roman Catholicism provides a lens that requires us to never question whether the lens itself does anything other than reveal to those to whom it has been gifted the sole "infallible" truth about everything, which is that the answers to all of the toughest questions is always "it's a mystery of God." And anyone who questions this deserves to be tortured for all eternity, and my brother can't wait to get there so he can act like Jack the Ripper for Jesus.
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