The Soul’s Imperatives: Our Relentless (and Often Misdirected) Pursuit of the Numinous

By John Michael Hayes, Ph.D., ABPP

Experiences of the numinous appear unpredictably and open up new directions of psychological and spiritual growth.  I want to put this in the context of the terrible crucial time in which we find ourselves. Experiences of the numinous are not escapes from reality but initiations into the heart of reality.  They are intended as transformative moments to wake us up, expand and deepen our awareness, and direct and equip us to engage with what life brings with greater integrity.  They help to be more of who we were meant to be and to meet the present moment.  We need to recover a capacity for the imaginal, a mythopoetic way forward out of the deadening cul-de-sac that has become late modernity, particularly in its American idiom. 

Jung’s psychology has long lived on the periphery of mainline consideration.  In his writings, Jung was always careful to maintain his scientific credibility, but to no avail.  Contemporary psychology and psychiatry — with precious few exceptions — regard Jung as a relic and curiosity, at best.  Interestingly, every year I give three lectures on clinical applications of Jung’s psychology to the psychiatry residents at the University of Maryland.  They are quite interested and receptive —indeed, not a few are fans of the “This Jungian Life” podcast.  Perhaps the 21st century may see the contemporary view change.

Jung’s psychology is distinctive in several important respects.  I find reference to Aristotle’s categories of causes to be helpful here. Aristotle claimed that there are four types of causality: material, efficient, formal, and teleological.  Material — what’s the stuff made of?  Efficient — what caused it to happen?  Formal — what is its essence?  And teleological — what is it going toward? 

Standard psychology and psychoanalysis — indeed, all empirical science in our time — focus on material and efficient causes — essentially on what we’re made of and what happened to us.  Our genetic inheritances — gender, temperament, intelligence, height, abilities, etc. — our material stuff, are important considerations for sure, but hardly the only ones.  Indeed, most psychology and psychiatry are still locked into a materialist, reductionist take on the psyche — that mind/psyche is just an epiphenomenon of the brain and nothing more.

And then there is efficient causality, the events that shaped the present state of affairs.  How can we trace the chain of prior events back to origins, not unlike the course of billiard balls hitting each other?  What is it about our particular family, traumas, historical circumstances, etc.? What happened that has reverberations in the present?  This is the stuff of efficient causality.  And much of all psychoanalytic inquiry is rightly spent on this focus on material and efficient causalities.  As William Faulkner cogently remarked, ‘the past in never dead, it is not even past.”  But these considerations are also incomplete. 

For the last 500 years, formal and teleological causality have been excised out of modern science, including psychological science.  Formal and teleological causality consider different questions: What is the essence of this person?  Who are they meant to be?  What are they going for?  What is their felt purpose in life?  Very different questions.

For Jung, human troubles are not just a matter of what happened to us in the past.  Of course, past events are important and determinative of present conflicts, troublesome behavior, and miseries.  But — and sometimes more importantly — we should ask how are we resisting the deeper psyche’s imperatives to move into the future in a particular way, to live our unfulfilled potentials in real life?  What we call the Self’s imperatives can be resisted, but only at our peril. 

For Jung, the psyche is not just responding to life circumstances and events, but has an innate autonomy, a felt imperative to be fulfilled. Jung has this lovely, multisyllabic, Latinate word — “enantiodroma,” meaning that things can get just so bad before the psyche attempts to right them.  When we get stuck — depressed, demoralized, paralyzed — that is not just the past catching up with us.  And contrary to the catechism of Cognitive Behavior Therapies, it is not just a matter of correcting our faulty underlying assumptions, but more often it’s a matter of our consciously or unconsciously refusing the Soul’s imperatives.  When we have been riding the brake too long, images appear and constellate, often numinous images that open to a bigger picture of possibility, images that demand a response, numinous images full of power and meaning that can set the individual in the needed direction.  Numinous experiences are important catalysts and signposts on the path to individuation. 

We want to consider these matters not just in terms of individual development and fulfillment, but also collectively.  Jung claimed that our only hope collectively is for a critical number of individuals to take up the work of consciousness and individuation, a work Jung insisted is an opus contra naturam, a work against nature.  Individuation, the goal of Jungian work, is to differentiate ourselves from the group mind, from the mob, from the mass and to find our own unique voice, or own idiom, our own way of doing life and responding to its problems. 

It is also paradoxically true that, whereas numinous experiences potentiate the individuation process, group psychology casts a different seductive, numinous spell that is darkly ecstatic and evil.  That numinous pull needs to be resisted, that awesome, terrifying spell needs to be broken.

 Here’s the truth of the present moment.  We live in a dark time, a dangerous time, a terrifyingly ominous time.  Does anyone seriously doubt this? 

We may anxiously distract ourselves from seeing the all-too-obvious, ominous, wicked, and worsening realities of our world.  We distract ourselves with work and career, with family projects and conflicts, with kids’ school progress and prospects, with soccer games and lacrosse, with house projects — all worthy in themselves — and, of course, when all else fails, with our cell phones, ever ready to provide the 10,000 things that distract us from the reality facing us.  And why not distract ourselves?  Nothing is more distressful than to recognize impending catastrophe and to know that we are essentially helpless to stop it.

Nations are at war in the Ukraine, in Africa, in the Holy Land, and now conflict is brewing in the Far East.  These wars threaten to grow into much larger conflicts, not unthinkably into another world war, not unthinkably into a nuclear war.  We see alliances tightening, conflicts hardening.  Tensions and suspicions threaten to spark a much wider conflagration.  It has happened before.  We might have wished we were beyond this, but in our heart of hearts, we all know that this is a very real possibility.  We are not exempt from history’s iron determinism. 

Climate change advances exponentially.  Polar caps are melting. Ocean waters rise and threaten coastal lands and cities all over the world.  Every summer brings new record high temperatures with epic storms and tornadoes in their trail.  Drought and fires in California, and now in Canada, are routine, and their effects are felt all over our country.  Globally, in the last decade, killing heat waves threaten to impel mass migrations from lands newly made uninhabitable, lands now unable to sustain agriculture and human flourishing.  Possible global catastrophe begins to become reality: ecological, social, economic realities with great human suffering and upheaval. 

Here at home, we see a tragic crisis of our own foolish making. Predictable and predicted!  In America — the land of the free and incredibly brave — we see racial tensions again exploding, as obscene inequalities in wealth and income and life opportunities drive political strife, division, and paralysis.  Who would think that America would possibly abandon democracy and chose instead authoritarian dictatorship?  But here we are.  Frightened people will often choose the certainty and security of collective control in the face of danger.  What we thought impossible is now facing us.  No idolatrous myth of American exceptionalism will save us. 

Who of us here does not harbor grave anxieties about the world our children and grandchildren will inherit?  Who will save us from ourselves?  Where is hope to be found? 

The late, great poet, Seamus Heaney, a man from the north of Ireland and no stranger to the realities of war, the madness of group psychosis, and seemingly hopeless troubles, wrote, “Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well (that’s an American narrative I would interject), but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth fighting for.”

It is also true that the inner life, and our life with and in community, our life for others, are of a piece.  Of course, we all know that the fight for the good must also be a fight with ourselves, a fight to clean up our act, to grow up, to wake up, and to show up, a fight to face our shadows and integrate those energies, a fight to recognize, withdraw, and own our projections, a fight to accept nothing less than radical truth about ourselves and about life.  Unless those internal fights are waged, the fight for peace and justice can easily become an ego trip in phony noble disguise.  If psychoanalysis teaches us anything, it is that our motives are complicated and never pure and that human beings are enormously capable of self-delusion.  There must be a fight for the good within, in tandem with the fight for the good in the world. 

The mess that we are in is the complex culmination of many factors — historical, cultural, economic, social, and spiritual — over many centuries in what we call the West. 

Let’s talk about factors that have threatened the self-destruction of the West: the myth of the autonomous self and the desperate last throes (hopefully) of the ancient scapegoating system.  These have led to our ontological orphanhood, our alienation from the numinous. 

Increasingly, the modern individual, particularly in America, finds himself or herself rootless with diminished connection to community, to history, and to family.  In the late 1970’s, Christopher Lasch described the hollowness and alienation of contemporary self in his Culture of Narcissism.  Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone points to the diminishment of community in American life.  In A Secular Age, philosopher Charles Taylor speaks of the disenchantment that attends contemporary experience of self and reality and of how we are left with what he calls a “buffered self,” having no felt solidity and no organic connection to community, to nature, or to history.  This vacuum of meaning creates profound vulnerability and alienation. 

We will see that the psyche often responds to this impoverishment with numinous experiences that disrupt that complacent isolation and start a person’s initiation into their potential for depth and meaning.  That psychic vacuum can also ominously be filled with the numinous evil of toxic group psychology. 

The late Stanford scholar Rene Girard identified the ancient mechanism for social cohesion as mimetic envy, leading to resolution in scapegoating violence.  Girard references Freud in his work but shows no evidence of engagement with Jung.  However, Girard’s work is clearly resonant with Jung’s prophetic fear of the dangers of mass psychosis in the modern era. 

For Girard, desire is the root of much evil.  Desire is essentially mimetic — imitative — we desire what we see the other desiring.  When discontent, envy, and mimetic desiring boil over and violence threatens to break out, the ancient safety valve is to identify a scapegoat and make them “other” — subhuman — and violently destroy them.  The camaraderie in that violence is always infectious and memorable — intensely and ecstatically numinous.  The group coheres, peace is restored, and the victim gets remembered as a mythological god. 

It’s an old story, and most ancient myths carry a disguised version of that story.  And, in its way, when it worked as it had worked from time immemorial, occasional scapegoating violence kept societies stable. Our contemporary problem is that scapegoating violence doesn’t work the way it used to. 

Girard maintains that a change began with the Hebrew prophets’ message that God is with the scapegoat, with the poor and the marginalized and the powerless, not with the powerful winners.  This destabilizing message, Girard claims, came to an incarnate conclusion in Jesus’ death wherein God becomes even more fully identified with the scapegoat.  That was profoundly destabilizing to the old mechanism.  It put a spoke in those smooth-running wheels.  Girard claims that over the last 2,000 years, the scapegoating mechanism has begun to inexorably deconstruct and unravel.

Empathy for victims, and the self-awareness that creates the possibility for empathy, undermines scapegoating.  It breaks the spell.  But when scapegoating unravels, it does not just fade away.  Rather, there arises intense and increasingly desperate attempts to get it to work again.

This is where we find ourselves.  This is our critical historical moment. Either we will collectively move into a new era of empathy, solidarity, and peace, or we will self-destruct.  It is by no means clear what will happen.  It is by no means clear that the requisite collective growth in consciousness will take place. 

The 19th century philosopher Frederich Nietzsche observed that Western religion valorizes the weak, and he despised it for that reason. He rightly saw that religion can undermine the old heroic myths of power and violence: that might makes right and victims must play their fated role in the ancient order so that social order might be maintained. Not surprisingly, the Nazis appropriated Nietzsche to justify their virulent scapegoating programs.

In the 2023 film, A Zone of Interest, the central character, Rudolph Hoss, raised in an observant Catholic family, is now the commandant of Auschwitz.  After a mediocre start in life, he strives to build an idyllic Middle-Europe, upper-class dream life for himself, his wife, and their young children.  Bucolic scenes of the family swimming and fishing together in the river, hiking in the mountains, taking piano lessons in the parlor, studying with private tutors, are shown in the dark shadow of the death camp that Hoss commands with dutiful efficiency, disavowing the humanity of those who are being consumed in the flames of its darkly glowing furnaces.  Hoss must kill off any shred of empathy, any sense of identification with his victims.  He cannot tolerate any crack in his scapegoating program.  It takes great effort to maintain that disavowal of reality, that disavowal of their humanity and his own, to maintain belief in the myth of a master race. 

We very well may be living into a similar terrible time.  The same ideas are in the air.  We all can smell the recrudescence of that thinking —that so-called heroic myth — that seductive siren call to scapegoating violence.  The call is heard not just in our country, with Trump’s branding of immigrants as subhuman dangerous criminals who need to be rounded up and expelled.  All over Europe fascism is making a big comeback.  Immigrants are being targeted, as are, of course, the Jews.

Openings to the numinous are both corrective and salvific.  Those moments potentially can break the hold of the cognitive, perceptual, and spiritual limitations of modernity’s self AND the treacherous group psychology taking hold.  Exposure to the numinous can break the hold of modernity’s narrow self-sufficient self: its slavery to capital and power over others, its many addictions, its alienation from the natural world, its rigidities and concrete narrowness, its dearth of imagination, the “tyranny of the left hemisphere” as Scottish neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist puts it in The Master and His Emissary. 

In Queen Meave and Her Lovers, Jungian analyst Sylvia Perrera writes compellingly about the transformative potential for numinous experience as a way forward from our cultural dead-end: 

All such experiences have the potential to rupture our sense of ordinary reality.  While they may lead to wild, even destructive behaviors that are profoundly negative for the person and those around, they may also grant expanded mind-body consciousness and authentic ecstatic visions of the continuum between individual and whole cosmos.  Thus they hold the potential for higher wisdom, psychological transformation, spiritual development, and healing if we can suffer their grip within a safe-enough holding context and learn to align our expanded selves creatively with a source transcending reason (Perrera,1999, p. 44).

In the first of his Terry lectures at Yale in 1937, Jung described the numinous as 

. . . a dynamic agency or effect not caused by an arbitrary act of the will.  On the contrary, [it] seizes and controls the human subject, who is always rather its victim than its creator.  The numinosum — whatever its cause may be — is an experience of the subject independent of his will — the numinosum is either a quality belonging to a visible object or the influence of an invisible presence that causes a peculiar alternation of consciousness (CW 11, par. 6).

The numinous is the signature of archetypal reality breaking into consciousness.  It is the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, evoking both fear and attraction in the subject.  Jung asserts that the primary value of numinous experience is its ability to have a powerfully disjunctive impact on the consciousness that brings the conscious ego, which experiences itself as the whole psyche, into right relationship with the deeper Archetypal Psyche, the Self.  While the content of that experience, the numinous image itself, is not unimportant, greater importance is given to its actual impact on consciousness.

Its effect is to re-mind the conscious ego that it is both seeing and being seen by the deeper psyche, the Self, re-minding ego consciousness that it emerges from and is grounded in a more profound and vital psychic matrix.  The very specific content of the image and its condensed symbolic meanings complement the essence of that corrective transformative action. 

Most of us are not strangers to inner work.  After a point in life, the ego optimally comes to know instinctively the Self’s intimations, re-cognizing its presence by remembering other such encounters.  Some numinous experiences are intense moments of encounter with the Self that re-mind the ego of its relativity and its origin in Self.  Although such moments have great affective charge and are potentially transformative, they are part of an ongoing dialectic, what Jung calls a “circular opus” (CW 9II, par. 419), moments in a “step-by-step development of self from an unconscious state to a conscious state” (CW 9 II, par. 418).  The work toward individuation, toward wholeness, toward full realization of one’s Self is the aspirational work of a lifetime, always elusive and never fully realized.

The Jungian unconscious-at-depth’s agent is the Self, the Subject of Subjects, purposeful and intentional, optimally drawing the ego into creative dialectic, but more often into energic and conflicted struggle, intimating to consciousness archetypal imperatives that are meant to be lived into life.  Indeed, for Jung, psychopathology results more from resisting the Self’s imperatives than from the reverberations of past trauma. 

The encounter with the numinous is a profoundly intersubjective moment, an experience of seeing and of being seen, a moment of mutual re-cognition and communion.  Jung quotes Meister Eckhart’s aphorism: “The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me.  My eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one loving.”  That seeing and that being seen are certainly not mere passive viewing, but rather that kind of relational seeing that brings both seer and seen into a heightened sense of being and identity.  Jung equated the experience of the divine and the experience of the Self, claiming that they are experientially quite similar, if not identical.  But they are not to be equated ontologically, nor to be taken literally instead of symbolically (CW 9 II, par. 305). 

Scholar Henry Corbin writes cogently of the seeing and knowing implicit in the experience of the numinous.  This is not the way of sensory knowledge and not the way of intellectual knowledge.  In concert with Jung, Corbin claims that there is a third legitimate way to knowledge, that of the imaginal. 

Indeed, contemporary neuroscience confirms that the imaginal realm is our experienced reality and that our experience of ordinary reality is hardly a matter of our senses as passive recording devices providing input to our intellect.  Actually, what we encounter in ordinary reality is a “convincing, fully immersive virtual reality simulation” that only seems to be life as it is.  We all know that the bumblebee, the bat, the snake, and, yes, our cats and dogs, live in a different sensory experiential world — Umvelt — one created by evolutionarily specific purposes for survival.  We also live in a sensory world that is an illusory virtual-reality simulation. 

More than that, we imbue that virtual-reality simulation with emotional meaning that comes from our lived experience.  We project meaning into what are almost always socially ambiguous events automatically, giving an emotional depth and meaning to events that can be construed in equally valid alternate ways.  When I say every child in the family has a different family, you all know what I mean.

Having an implicit knowledge that our subjective realities are just that gives us an appreciation of the subjective realities of others and an implicit recognition that our thoughts and feelings are not facts but only hypotheses about how things really are.  Mentalization is the psychological term for making provisional sense of what goes on inside us and what goes on inside others.  The “We” are always making meaning and do not always explicitly realize that meaning is created subjectively.  It does not exist in pure form out there, even as we recognize that implicitly.  Failure to develop a capacity for mentalization leads to distortion, and paranoid states and psychotic delusions result.

Unlike our friends in the animal kingdom, we humans have an implicit awareness, at times, of the limitations of our virtual reality simulations, an awareness of its illusory reality, one created by our senses and emotional states, colored by our history, and distorted by our traumas.  We long to transcend ordinary reality as we experience it and to touch, feel, and know the really real, the ontologically real — what Kant called the noumenon, what Lacan called the Real, what Jung called the Archetypal Psyche, the Collective Unconscious, the Self. 

All ancient peoples understood and appreciated a parallel level of existence that interpenetrated ordinary experience and sometimes abruptly intruded itself into human affairs.  The Irish describe these as “thin times and places,” when and where the veil between ordinary reality and the archetypal realm becomes porous.

The poet W.B. Yeats wrote “The Song of Wandering Aengus”:

I went out to the hazel wood, 
Because a fire was in my head, 
And cut and peeled a hazel wand, 
And hooked a berry to a thread; 
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out, 
I dropped the berry in a stream  
And caught a little silver trout.  

 
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor, 
And someone called me by my name:  
It had become a glimmering girl  
With apple blossom in her hair  
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.  

Though I am old with wandering  
Through hollow lands and hilly lands, 
I will find out where she has gone, 
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And Walk among long dappled grass, 
And pluck till time and times are done, 
The silver apples of the moon, 
The golden apples of the sun.

Yeats captures in image and narrative the profound human hunger and longing for the numinous that is the core and heart of human experience.

Religious traditions the world over know and name that numinous reality in various ways, understanding that there is a reality beneath and within the surfaces of ordinary reality that can be sought and experienced through immersion in nature, by music and the incantations of poetry, by sensory deprivation, by ascetic and contemplative practice, by cultivating awareness of dream-life, by use of psychedelic plant medicines — entheogens — to open up alternative sensory and cognitive awareness.  Appropriating Blake’s metaphor, religious scholar Huston Smith wrote Cleansing the Doors of Perception to describe the opening of the numinous beneath the simulations of our virtual realities.  

That numinous reality has autonomy and sometimes intrudes on our ordinary experience of reality in sometimes subtle and sometimes startling ways.  We can never directly and entirely experience that really real reality, but intimations of it alter and expand and open our ordinary awareness. 

In The Self in Jungian Psychology, Leslie Stein cogently explicates the various dimensions of the archetype of the Self as central to Jung’s understanding of the psyche and the role of the numinous in the Self’s project of individuation (Stein, 2021).  Stein alludes to Jung’s Self as both the center and the totality of the psyche, but in postmodern sensibility without definitive totalizing closure.  The Self as experienced in numinous experience is highly charged with affect, awakening the ego to its presence, and intimating divinity and guidance.  The Self intends to open a process of unending dialectic with ego, intent on individuation as its imperatives are realized and lived into life in engaged living.  The purpose of the numinous incursion into conscious awareness is to waken the ego to the Self’s presence in all its dimensions.

In Aion, Jung described the first thousand years of the Christian era as a spirituality that sought the divine vertically in the transcendent realm and affirmed and celebrated the positive revelation in scripture and tradition.  The second thousand years, coming to an end in this transitional moment, have focused on the horizontal exploration in empirical science to the neglect of the spiritual dimension (CW 9 ii).

The age of faith gave way to the age of enlightenment, but faith in that enlightenment died in the ashes of Auschwitz.  Perhaps our search now must be in that luminous darkness, as the divine reveals and conceals itself in matter, from the interior depths of concrete reality, rather than from the heavens. 

The experience of the numinous is transformative.  To be in its presence is to be transported to that far country of human experience where the ego’s certainties are imploded and where language’s faltering attempts to assign meaning feel obscenely inadequate.  This is indeed nigredo territory, where ego must submit to radical deconstruction and know itself ultimately as illusion and pretense.  This affects the ego’s reorientation to the Self and its wisdom.  This opening to the numinous reveals an expansive psychic interior that both undermines and relativizes the ego’s complexes, breaking the spell of those complexes, revealing a larger context of meaning, and hence its potential to amplify empathy and to derail the power of group psychology.

We recognize in the numinous the projected image of the soul’s interior. To experience the numinous is to be held in fascination, awe, and fear in the presence of ineffable depth, a depth not so much boundaried as “mine,” but a depth and presence without boundaries, opening into immense hidden network of collective human spirit and the divine within. Numinous experience opens the individual to an expanded awareness of the depth and dignity of the human soul. The human psyche mirrors the absolute indeterminate subjectivity, the fecund creativity, the freedom and incarnate infinity that theologians ascribe to the divine, and that Jung found in the psyche. 

That numinous experience of Self can awaken profound awareness, compassion, and empathic sensitivity to the same potential of other humans. This vision and experience convey a sense of great dignity to the human person, a dignity obscured and forgotten in the dominant vanities and expediencies of modern life.  That forgetfulness is all too apparent in the impending catastrophes of our fateful time.  The task of relating to the numinous is not for the faint of heart.  Numinous experience represents a disturbing threat to the ego’s complacency and its certainty in knowing.

 A curmudgeonly, older colleague once confided an experience he had long ago when he was a student at NYU.  He said this happened down in the BMT subway in New York City.  He had been studying comparative religion and reading the Upanishads.  Suddenly and without warning his world briefly turned inside out: “I felt the unity of everything.  Everything felt connected and one, and I felt connected to it all.  I never felt anything like that before or since.  It lasted about ten minutes.”  Then I responded that it must have been beautiful and sublime, but he corrected me, “No.  It scared the crap out of me.  I never wanted to feel anything like that again.”  And I imagine, tragically, he never did and perhaps was poorer for its absence.  And tragically his attitude is all too representative of modernity’s fearful blindness.

Experiences of the numinous can be the most dense and intense transformative realization of psyche’s nature and transcendence, but more often they are subtle, easily dismissed, but pressing on the edges of ordinary consciousness, destabilizing modes of awareness and awakening desire and longing.  How these experiences are named and understood, how they are contextualized and how they are communicated and celebrated in community determines their fate and power to transform and illuminate.  To the degree the community of reception, internal and external, has a vocabulary and articulated wisdom about experiences of the divine, those experiences will be cultivated and reflected upon.  In our peculiar western culture with its greatly diminished collective religious life, the community of reception is often the analyst’s consulting room.

 The ancient Romans regarded “numen” as the “nod of the gods.”  My old Latin dictionary has it that that “nod” was an expression of the god’s will and command, meant to effect change.  Presumably those commands were to be ignored at one’s peril.  A numinous incursion into consciousness is not just a disruption to be tolerated like a storm passing through, or an entertaining psychic sound and light show, but it implicitly marks, demands, and heralds psychic change.

These experiences are not usually intentionally sought; rather, one finds oneself surprisingly caught up in a powerful, arresting disjuncture from ordinary experience.  Such experiences may be attended by vivid, compelling images, beautiful or horrific, sometimes religious in content, or may be devoid of imagery, analogous to a Zen experience of paradoxical fullness/emptiness.  Numinous experiences are almost universally described as an epiphany of reality, more real than the reality ordinarily experienced, and as ineffable, i.e., impossible to explain or adequately describe in rational language. 

These experiences have a range of voltage, from subtle moments of awareness that transcend ordinary space and time and intimate an unrealized unity, to dramatic, high-voltage, extraordinary encounters with what is experienced as greater reality. 

And numinous experience is transformative, at least potentially.  As Wm.  James has it,    

        [T]hey seldom leave things as they found them … cold spots become hot spots … all we know is that there are dead feelings, dead ideas, and cold beliefs, and there are hot and live ones; when one grows hot and alive within us, everything has to recrystallize around it (James. 1902. 218).

Because it contrasts sharply with ordinary awareness, much numinous experience is immediately dismissed, dissociated, and forgotten, just like a frightening dream.  Indeed, the transformational effect of numinous experience depends greatly on its reception, amplification, and integration. 

In his work on numinous experiences in psychoanalysis, Leslie Stein describes his patient shrugging off a luminous vision of the Virgin Mary on a street corner in Manhattan.  The patient gave it no importance and put it down to the effects of a bad hotdog (Stein, 2019, pp. 4-5).

Two decades ago, psychologists at Johns Hopkins took the lead in renewing clinical research using psilocybin and other psychoactive drugs to induce transformative numinous experience.  Interestingly, their research protocol intentionally mirrors traditional practices with these substances.  They always include preparatory therapy sessions and a series of follow-up therapy sessions to articulate, understand, and integrate the experience.  In traditional religious contexts, all numinous experiences — whether facilitated by substances or not —are the focus of careful and considered discernment with experienced elders to appropriately regard the experience, to glean and integrate its wisdom, and very importantly to avoid the dangers of ego inflation and distortion.  Very often in our spiritual but not religious times, that role of discerning elder falls to the psychotherapist (Richards.2016).

Some access to the numinous dimension of experience is available to all.  Indeed, those universal archetypal passages of childbirth, puberty, initiations of various kinds, mating and sex, aging and death, are often experienced as numinous initiations into the heart of reality, quite distinct from ordinary consciousness.  As a priest I have been privileged to officiate at baptisms, weddings, and funerals, and know that archetypal power is quite palpable at those times.  Those are indeed “thin times and thin places” when the veil between ordinary reality and numinous archetypal reality is especially porous. 

Visions and dreams are the portal of the numinous.  Experiences variously named mystical, unitive, spiritual, or numinous happen not only to saints and mystics, but also turn up in the not-so-saintly ordinary folk in the course of depth psychotherapy.  These experiences destabilize and disrupt ordinary consciousness and potentially affect a transformative expansion of awareness.  They are paradoxically frightening and attractive.  Numinous experiences are both ecstatic and relational: that is, they bring us out of our normal sense of ego identity and boundariedness, and they bring us into connection with what is felt to be a greater reality, a more real reality within the psyche.  

The ego’s defeat comes in its realization that the Self is alive, unscripted, and purposeful.  Realizing that the drive to individuation is universal opens both a depth of compassion and trust in the ultimate integrity of the individuation process. 

Jungian analyst Leslie Stein wrote a very interesting book focused on his work with self-identified mystics from both Eastern and Western religious traditions: Working with Mystical Experiences in Psychoanalysis: Opening to the Numinous (Stein, 2019).  His subjects were serious and discerning spiritual seekers — monks, yogis, Zen teachers — who found themselves surprised by unsettling and transformative experiences, marked by fear and fascination.  Numinous experience can also be low-voltage and subtle and visited upon more ordinary folk during analytic therapy, as these clinical vignettes illustrate.

In the first, a spontaneous numinous vision comes to Marie, a 30-year-old woman with two small children, married to a busy and preoccupied resident physician.  Her own promising academic career had been put on hold.  Her Ph.D. dissertation on the poet John Keats now gathered dust on a shelf behind a tangle of kids’ books and toys.  Marie found herself living a monotonous isolated life in what she sarcastically called her suburban “cul-de-sac of dreams.”  She felt trapped, defeated, angry, and depressed.  She knew her emotional predicament was more complicated than just a reaction to her external circumstances.  Her isolation was more internal.  She felt cut off from her own liveliness, from her own center.  She felt she was merely living a life that was expected of her. 

Clearly, she had all the symptoms of major depression: lack of pleasure or hope, early morning waking, chronic fatigue, and poor appetite.  She also knew the morass of nigredo as the place where her analysis had to begin.  She intuited that this depression was something that had to be suffered through to know its meaning.  Jungian therapy is indeed counter-cultural in maintaining that the symptom has meaning and potential for transformation and is not just a “disorder” to be medicated or eradicated.  Jung maintains that psyche at a critical point inevitably offers a healing numinous image that sets the analysand on an opposite trajectory.  Several months into a very painful therapy of coming to recognize the untenability of her present life and grieving the sacrifices she had made to convention and imagined psychological safety, she had a dramatic numinous experience.  

She arrived for her session one morning in a surprisingly light mood, and she brought a painting she had made.  She told me that she had been walking on a wooded path with her children in the stroller and that this compelling vision suddenly came to her: “There was this cup, kind of like I would imagine the Holy Grail.  It appeared in this strange imaginal space.”  Marie went on, “It was weird, I mean I knew it was not really out there; I’m not that crazy yet.”  She described this Grail cup pulsating with life forms, with all sorts of animals, fish, birds, humans of all sizes and ages, trees and plants, repeatedly filling and emptying in a pulsating rhythm, in a rhythm that felt sexual and joyful, again and again and again.

The unanticipated eruption of this vision jarred her ego consciousness out of its frozen constriction.  It re-minded her ego of the very real and pre-eminent reality of Self and re-opened her ego’s imaginal connection to her own depths. 

The image that came unbidden in this vision was much like the cauldron of the Dagda, the Irish father god of fire.  His cauldron can never be exhaustively emptied but replenishes itself over and over again eternally.  This image later became christened as the Holy Grail.  

In legend the Grail is the chalice Christ used at the Last Supper that was brought to Glastonbury by Joseph of Aramethea.  It is a symbol of the elusive goal of the long quest for individuation. That quest for integration and transfiguration inevitably involves detours, defeats, and dead ends, obstacles and monsters to be confronted.  This vision of the Grail is not a destination but a reminder and signpost along the way.  In several legends, right relationship with the Grail — having an appropriate attitude — brings healing to the Fisher King and restores health and fertility to the kingdom.  Marie’s right attitude toward the numinous was indeed corrective and healing, and flourishing emerged from this experience. 

The vision gave her great comfort and joy, and the painting fixed and held it.  The experience re-opened a connection to her psyche that had atrophied.  In response to the jarring incursion into ego consciousness, the transcendent function constellated.  She began to know and trust again something lively, creative, and generative within her own depths.

This was the archetypal imperative that the vision dictated: wake up to life!  It was also, of course, vital that I recognized and affirmed the importance of this brief vision, refraining from interpreting its meaning reductively and encouraging her to feel its energy and live with the mystery of its image.  Over the next months of productive psychotherapeutic work she returned to this vision, as it had become a touchstone of renewed relationship to her psyche, the numinous and sacred reality beneath her ordinary sense of self.  Again, not just a private experience, but a transformative one that moved her into a life of greater relationality. 

In the second vignette, Stan is a young single man who has a debilitating illness that locked him out of ordinary adolescent life.  He felt emasculated by a disease that sapped all his strength and energy. He spent his high school years isolated as an invalid on his mother’s couch.  In his early twenties, with intensive medical treatment, the disease finally eased up, and Stan was able to go to community college and re-enter life to some extent.  But he soon fell into addictive attachment to cannabis and alcohol to assuage his pessimism and despair.  He was behind socially and found little success in trying to date women. 

One day he had to pull himself together to go to his younger brother’s graduation from naval officer-candidate school.  During the event, Stan broke away to go to the bathroom.  He felt stinging humiliation and rage as he mercilessly compared himself to his brother.  On this day especially, his brother’s strength, achievement, and future prospects were being publicly celebrated.  And to add insult to injury, his brother was accompanied by his attractive fiancé. 

After urinating (he was indeed pissed off!), Stan started to return to the ceremony when he came upon an ordinary red maple tree on the edge of the parade field.  He stood transfixed as he saw this tree transfigured, come alive as with flaming fire, not unlike Moses’ burning bush.  Stan felt as if its “really real” reality was being unveiled in that moment.  Stan said that this was like glimpsing “the face of God.”  This blinding vision of the numinous marked a turning point.

Stan’s years on the couch had the effect of opening up an unusual introspective intuition and awareness of spiritual reality.  Before he had turned twenty, this unusually bright young man was well read in classical Western and Eastern mystical literature.  He knew that what he experienced, this “nod of the gods,” was both a compensating reminder from his own psyche of his own potential greatness and an implicit demand, alerting him to his need to stop squandering his talents and to change his life to realize his potentials.  This experience impelled him to seek analytic treatment and make a serious and sustained commitment to twelve-step work. 

The tree is a symbol of Self, rooted in and drawing nurturance from deep in the earth while reaching its boughs to the sky.  The alchemists made the tree a central symbol of the opus because a tree has its own intense inner life and inherent gradient of growth.  The red maple is a deciduous tree; it remains the same tree throughout its changing appearance in the turning of the seasons.  It is remarkably resilient and able to thrive in a wide variety of environments.  This red tree is aflame; it doesn’t burn, but it shines forth revealing its true nature and essence. 

The rubedo is the alchemical process of reddening, of living into life the changes wrought in the work.  Stan was quite prone to exercising the option of spiritual by-pass, to thinking inner work would be enough.  He was also susceptible to bouts of spiritual narcissism and to dangerously identifying with the Self.  This arresting experience had the effect of bringing him down to earth and correcting his tendency to make distorted and inflated identifications with archetypal images; this, then impelled him to work in a rather unglamorous job in a grocery store.  He sensed his need for grounding in the real world so that he could integrate his experience of the archetypal world.  He is now about to graduate from social-work school and put his developed intuitive capacities in service to other struggling folks. 

These clinical vignettes show the essential characteristics of the numinous experience.  They are all spontaneous eruptions of psyche, affectively charged with compelling imagery, that intimate an archetypal imperative: “Your life needs to change!”  These were transformative catalysts of psychic renewal and reorientation in the analytic process; they disabused the ego consciousness of its illusion of centrality.  These experiences brought these patients into appreciative relationship with the mystery of their psychic depths.  They pointed the way to an opening of a religious attitude, although not necessarily in conformity with traditional forms and dogma.  

The recently deceased Jungian analyst Lionel Corbett wrote,

An authentic numinous experience is always new and so could be anti-dogmatic. …  If one’s spiritual instinct remains unsatisfied by traditional religious forms, one has to satisfy this instinct in a personal way.  One way of doing so is to pay attention to spontaneously arising numinous experience, which awakens religious sensibility and generates true faith.  People in this position no longer look to an outside authority.  They are bearers of a new spirituality that seems to be emerging that stresses direct experience of the transpersonal psyche (Corbett, 2011, pp. 61-62).

In a letter near the end of his life Jung wrote:

It always seemed to me as if the real milestones were certain symbolic events characterized by a strong emotional tone. You are quite right the main interest of my work is not concerned with the treatment of neuroses but rather with the approach to the numinous. But the fact is that the approach to the numinous is the real therapy, and in as much as you attain to the numinous experiences you are released from the curse of pathology. Even the very disease takes on a numinous character.      

John Michael Hayes is a Jungian analyst who has had a long and varied career as a psychologist/psychoanalyst in the Baltimore-Washington area. He is currently Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and Faculty and Training and Supervising Analyst at Washington Baltimore Psychoanalytic Institute. He also serves on the faculty and is Dean of Candidates at the Jungian Psychoanalytic Association (NY). John also holds degrees in theology and is a priest of the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland. His private analytic practice is in Baltimore.