Rainer Maria Rilke and the Psychology of Religion

In the Upanishads, we are told a story about how, in the beginning, and in his natural state, God the creator (Self) was utterly transparent to himself and entirely known, so much so that in a short while he became bored and invented a game of hide and seek which he began to play with himself. The image is thus of an original, unitary, and divine Self distilled into many beings who are relocated to a mundane, tellurian world where a (theatre) play was devised to keep the illusion (from ludere, to play) alive and make it all very convincing (Maya). But the game was so good, the illusion so real, that the creator Self eventually forgot himself there and became lost. There are countless other stories from mythology that also attest to the original—but lost, missing, or absent—divine nature of the human soul. Accordingly, undoing the inherent agony of being lost in a world where the divinity of one’s own nature remains out of reach is the spiritual work of re-membering to which every human life is yoked by necessity and by design. C. G. Jung called this indispensable spiritual work the teleological nature of the human psyche. James Hillman called it soul-making. The alchemists named it the magnum opus. 

Rilke lived it in/through poetry. 

When the original Self is transmuted into material physicality, a forgetting occurs. In Plato’s myth of Er, for example, reincarnating souls pass through the river of Lethe (forgetting) so that all knowledge of previous affairs of the soul and of the integrating purpose of the forthcoming life are lost. But apparently, we are not alone on this journey of remembering: an emissary/daimon—the holder of our soul memory/pattern—accompanies us in this rebirth journey. Ira Progoff, in his lecture series “Waking Dream and Living Myth (2010),” offers the image of a newly born soul, calling it an “organic soul” and comparing its nature and process of development to the seed of a plant, much in the same way that Hillman speaks of the acorn theory. The idea is that each individual life contains a specific life pattern within its seed/soul, a pattern which gestates, then, slowly, evolves into a mature specimen of its species. If we think of the original divine Self as a unitary whole, then we can imagine the soul pattern of each individual life as one thread in the giant tapestry of a unitary divinity. In this way, by living out our life pattern (growing from acorn to oak), we each become creative weavers of a jointly held divine destiny. Or, as James Hollis (2010) puts it, “We are asked to become the individual in order that our small portion of the unfolding of the divine may be achieved. To flag or fail in that task is to injure God” (p. 44). In other words, failing to realize our soul pattern impoverishes not just our own, but the transpersonal anima mundi or world soul. 

Fusing body with soul and giving it voice through the imaginal language of poetry was the pattern contained in the soul of Rainer Maria Rilke. But the crucial characteristic of this fusion—namely, the part of it which requires work—is beautifully depicted in the tao of Rilke’s inseparable human and soul life. Rilke’s life itself unfolded as a process of religious magnitude precisely because his work involved making god real through art, for, ultimately, it is through art, through the creative act as work, that god (the creator) is born into the world. As Lou Andreas-Salomé explained, this is the very meaning of religion. She explained that each individual contains a piece of god—a unique and personal image of god contained in the seed/soul/psyche—and that by living out this specific, individual life/image we are, in turn, both creating god and being (re)created as god. Our images—human and divine—are thus forever entwined in a double helix of ongoing creative work, of mutual co-creation. As the poetry of soul-making, Rilke’s work is therefore deeply religious for it fuses art, religion, and psychology (the holy trinity) into one unified and inseparable whole. Andreas-Salomé thus identified a condition she named the “religious affect” which calls for both humility and pride since our lives are simultaneously alchemical vessels (bain marie) for the creation of the divine and mere (sinful?) mundanity continually devoid of a divinity who is always absent (playing hide-and-seek), continuously sought, found, and lost again. Archetypal psychology, too, is ultimately “a religious project since its primary concern is for the soul and its relationship with the Gods” (Khoie, 2019, n.p.). 

Studying the life and work of Rilke has given me a deeper comprehension of the real meaning of soul-making, a level of understanding which eluded me before. Since my vocation involves becoming a scholar of archetypal psychology I would venture to say that this more in-depth knowledge is of incalculable value not just to my vocational aspirations, but to the ultimate purpose of my life which is to realize essential truth for myself. 

Hollis, J. (2010). The archetypal imagination. College Station, TX: Texas A & M University Press. 

Khoie, G. (2019). The religious psyche. [Personal blog]. Retrieved from http://www.gelarehkhoie.com/jungian-studies/2019/9/11/the-religious-psyche

Progoff, I. (2010). Waking dream and living myth. [Audio lecture]. Retrieved from amazon.com

The Function of Images

An area of interest that has captured my attention this term has to do with the autonomy of the unconscious and the power it wields over us through its images. I had not considered before what the function of images might be, I had just accepted that images are spontaneously produced by the unconscious and that they are its language. But this term, I have learned about the function of images which, to me, seems an important point that deserves emphasis. 

As we know, in depth psychology images are emanations that spontaneously irrupt from the deep psyche. They take a variety of forms including text, creative expression, or even emotions and intuitions. They come at us in our dreams, they come at us in thought formations and fantasies, and they come at us through art, literature, poetry, and dance. The question is, why? Why do these images come at us at all and what are we to do with them? Jung says that the images hold a measure of libido or psychic energy and that they use this energy for their own specific purposes. Furthermore, since autonomous, the images prioritize their own needs above the needs of the ego complex. Our task is to, first of all, allow the images to exist and then to experience and interact with them on their own level—the imaginal level (Jung, 1928/1966, para. 346). The images wield tremendous power over consciousness. They hold this power down in the unconscious and we must interact with the images in order to gain access to that power. In other words, images are libido—they are psychic energy. Which means that our lives as we know them rely upon images for their existence since without energy there can only be psychic entropy—a catatonic state of total inertia. This explains the sometimes overbearing urgency of images and why they often harass us until we meet them on their own terms. They know something we don’t. 

Another interesting feature of images is that they hold a specific message or quality having to do with the situation of the individual who is encountering them. Jung explained that the unconscious is the feminine side of consciousness and that it insists upon a feeling function to restore psychic balance since the ego’s rational and intellectual perspective is usually too one-sided (Jung, 1928/1966, para. 216). The images are thus emissaries of this mission to restore psychological balance and they, therefore, wear outward forms which are most relevant to the individual’s specific issues. Furthermore, psychic balance is not always just a matter of correcting pathological or unwanted psychological manifestations. It is also a matter of individuation, which is to say, a matter of bringing the two spheres of consciousness into proper alignment so that the individual ends up living a life that feels richly endowed with meaning and purpose. The images thus have secret knowledge to impart and play a serious role in the psyche.

Jung further explained that we cannot simply stand back and passively watch the images and hope to understand, much less effect, their meanings, for the images are autonomous, they have a level of unconcern we must contend with. If we hope to access the knowledge they contain we must interact with them actively on the imaginal level, which is to say, inside the image itself, inside the fantasy, inside the dream (Jung, 1928/1966, para. 350). Jung said that by actively participating with the images we “gain possession of them by allowing them to possess” (Jung, 1928/1966, para. 368) us. This method, which Jung called active imagination, makes it possible for an individual to not only experience but also to interact, in a waking state, with the unconscious—to merge with it. In so doing, access is gained to the hidden and secret knowledge of the images and the deeper predilections breeding in the psychological volcanoes of our souls. Without access to this restorative imaginal knowledge, we remain divided, stunted, and incomplete, making titanic blunders as we continue to live a one-sided, egocentric life.  

Jung, C. G. (1966). The relations between the ego and the unconscious (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). In H. Read et al. (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (Vol. 7, 2nd ed., pp.  121–241). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1928)

Imaginal Foundations of Life Itself

I was writing yesterday about images, those spontaneous irruptions from the deep psyche, and what I feel I have learned about them thus far. I was concentrating on their linguistic attributes and how they convey meaning. Then, I thought about how they are symbolic—they relay hidden messages by functioning as portals between conscious and unconscious spheres. Just as I was considering this, an image from a sort of Red Book of my own that I made back in 1998 popped into my head (see attached). And that instantly caused me to write that images “know something we don’t” which is why they insist, urge, and demand. Jung explained that psychological experience cannot be separated from images. In his own words, “everything of which we are conscious is an image. Image is psyche” (Jung, 1929/1967, p. 54, CW13 para. 75). Images are thus vehicles for conscious action, as the example above demonstrates. They come on to us like flirtatious lovers or else haunt and bedevil us until we take notice. Even when we don’t take notice, they still lead the way. 

I am learning how this imaginal realm works in writing and research. I can now see that a multitude of energetic and powerful creative forces are working alongside me to produce mundane things like sentence structure and prophetic and cosmic and transcendental things like archetypal order and the union of opposites. I am starting to recognize that depth psychological inquiry involves an exquisite network of ideas, thoughts, and emotions (images) that fuse together in a collaborative dance of creation, and that this is how new knowledge is formed and birthed into the world. This sort of research and writing is creative and soulful, it honors the depths and the inevitable paradoxes and ambiguities. An imaginal approach to inquiry, research, and knowledge is, therefore, more yielding and less authoritatively reasonable or logical for the images cannot abide in logic. They are inherently erotic. It is up to the researcher to translate them into a language which brings cohesive fusion to eros and logos dynamics in writing. 

Jung believed in a teleological psyche—a soul with a goal—the goal of individuation. He called individuation an “indispensable” ideal and wrote that “the idea at the bottom of this ideal is that right action comes from right thinking, and that there is no cure and no improving of the world that does not begin with the individual himself” (Jung, 1928/1966, p. 226, CW7 para. 373). The road to individuation goes through the imaginal realm where images morph into lived experience, what Wilhelm Dilthey called Erlebnis, an experience that “is not so much a matter of content as an act of consciousness” (Palmer, quoted in Coppin, 2017, p. 70). Here, again, is the notion that the image is the enactor of consciousness itself so that lived experience is necessarily a psychological phenomenon. For me, this idea is of paramount importance because my interest lies in uncovering the truth of reality. Since there can be no felt or lived experience without images, then things outside of me have no reality, not unless I live and experience them through my images first. We can only experience life—lived experience—by imagining ourselves into it. In this way, life, research, knowledge, love, hate—all of it is mythical, it is all a story told by the imaginative, myth-making psyche. I think a tragedy is this mythical (imaginal) life lived literally, without any consciousness of the power and autonomy of the images, their role in the creation of consciousness, and our dependence upon them for meaning and comprehension. 

Writing and research are thus deeply rooted in the imaginal dimension of lived experience. I think that comprehension of research methodologies, APA formatting, sentence structure, and dissertation writing all depend upon a healthy recognition of this fact. All aspects of scholarship are enhanced by a researcher’s strong existential foundation in the imaginal realm. 

Jung, C. G. (1967). Commentary on The secret of the golden flower (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). In H. Read et al. (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (Vol. 13). Retrieved from http://www.proquest.com(Original work published 1929) 

Jung, C. G. (1966). The relations between the ego and the unconscious (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). In H. Read et al. (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (Vol. 7, 2nd ed., pp. 121–241). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1928) 

Nelson, E. & Coppin, J. (2017). The art of inquiry. A depth psychological perspective. Thompson, CT: Spring Publications.