The material below is neither monetized nor weaponized. It is solely to provide nurturing nutrition to those hungering for wise human connection.
Below is my transcript of the first 30 minutes of the superb talk, "Spirituality in Later Life" by the respected elder psychiatrist & Jungian analyst Lionel Corbett: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrwnNxK1xk8&list=PLX31T_KS3jtpu1mC82KpWzbx4MvOW8e1a&index=9
“For Jung, the innate God image in us – the Self – which is a kind of Divine essence or core of the personality – will give us a set of potentials, and these potentials have to embody themselves as we live our life. And this process comes to a final development in later life. And one of the major developments in later life is the consolidation of a relationship with the Self.
I want to begin with one of the ways that we form a relationship with the Self. The main approach is by paying attention to dreams. So I want to talk about a very numinous dream about aging, which was given to a woman in her late sixties who was very worried about the prospect of aging. This is an example of what’s called a numinous dream.
Very briefly, numinous experiences are experiences of the Self or the transpersonal level of the unconscious. They’re experiences that have a mysterious, fascinating, awesome quality. Examples are Moses at the burning bush, or Saul on the road to Damascus - those kind of experiences where one is faced with some uncanny, larger power or otherness that defies adequate understanding. Now one of the main sources of this kind of experience is in a numinous dream.
And the main point about this, from a Jungian perspective, is that we can’t Christianize the unconscious. The unconscious will produce imagery from any religious or mythological tradition, with no regard for the subject’s preferences, the subject’s personal history, and so on. It may contradict official teaching. And I want to give an example of the dream which does just that.
This dream, like many numinous experiences acted as an initiation into the aging process. Sometimes when we’re in a transitional period, the Self will produce imagery which initiates us into the new consciousness that’s required.
Now this is the dream that occurred to a woman who was quite concerned about the losses and the physical decline that we’re all very well-aware of in later life. The problem is that we have no socially-sanctioned initiation into old age. Old age tends to be devalued in our culture, and people break down emotionally during transitional periods because of the uncertainty that we experience during these liminal or transitional periods. And the transitional period into late life is no exception.
So here’s the dream that the woman had which helped her. I’m going to abbreviate it a little bit.
In the dream an authoritative voice says, ‘I’m going to teach you about the process of aging.’ By and large, voices in dreams tend to be experienced as the voice of the Self. So in the dream the woman sees (Dreamer's Drawing below) this black & white diagram, and underneath the diagram is the head of a very old man – this is her drawing. And you see there’s a connecting line drawn from the old man’s head to the diagram. And the diagram consists of an elongated sort of square shape enclosing an inner circle – the so-called squaring of the circle which is very familiar to people who know alchemy. And at the bottom of the circle is this crescent convex upward, and out of the crescent arise two heads on long necks.
And the voice says, ‘This is an abstract of the Godhead and there are two heads of God – one is the male head of God, and one is the female head of God.’ So the dreamer realizes that the heads are in harmony with each other, their faces are sort of curiously unemotional and there’s a kind of crown at the top of each head, and ‘The old man,’ she says, ‘looks ordinary and earthy, with kind of reddish skin.’ And the voice goes on to say, ‘You don’t understand the process of aging. The process of aging, the reason that we age, is to enable God to rejuvenate.’ And the voice says, ‘When we are born, God is old. When we grow old, God becomes young and when we die, God experiences rebirth.'
Particularly in old age, it’s very important that we don’t lose our connection to God because otherwise we would deprive God of our share in God’s rejuvenation and this disturbs the cosmic ecology. And the voice goes on to say that, ‘Belief in God constellates the inner child and this fosters the process of Divine rejuvenation, and as we age, we mustn’t lose touch with the inner child because if we do, we also lose touch with the Divine. '
Now this is a deeply mysterious dream. It’s the kind of dream that Jung thinks arises from the archetypal level of the psyche – the mythopoetic level – the level that’s the source of all religious experience. It’s a numinous dream, it’s mysterious, tremendous & fascinating, and it doesn’t contain Judeo-Christian imagery. In fact, if anything, the image of an androgenous Divinity with both male and female heads contradicts the tradition that has an overly masculine image of God. Now the dream says that the purpose is the rejuvenation of God and this is a completely novel idea which the dreamer of course didn’t understand, but somehow she found it very reassuring, because she got the sense that aging is not just a period of relentless decline towards death. She got the sense from the dream that this phase of her life had a purpose and in fact it’s very typical of numinous experience of this kind to have a kind of helpful or healing effect, which it was for her.
The dream is also what’s called a ‘big dream.’ In other words, it’s not just relevant to the dreamer, it’s relevant to all of us, to society as a whole. It’s also a revelation of the individual’s personal myth. She’s given a kind of personal revelation instead of just participating in a collective revelation like say the receiving of the law on Mount Sinai or something like this, we are given individual revelations when we pay attention to this kind of manifestation of the Self. This dream allows the dreamer to distinguish herself from the collective myth into which she was born, the collective myth that we’re born into is based on nationality, ethnicity, collective conditioning, but in this kind of way, by paying attention to this kind of imagery, we can discover our own spirituality, we don’t have to participate in a kind of mass consciousness. Jung said that you can only resist the influence of collective thinking if your own individuality is well organized. And again, this is one of the main tasks of later life.
This is a good example of how the God image can change as we age. The dreamer was raised in a tradition whose God image is exclusively masculine, so when the dream says that the Divine has a feminine head as well as a masculine head, this was a very important corrective. And the dream also gives her a kind of abstract image of the Self, the bigger Self as a totality, the squared circle which is neither masculine nor feminine. So it’s telling her that the Self has these kind of human levels and abstract or transpersonal levels.
Now it was very difficult for us to know what the dream meant by ‘the rejuvenation of God’ or what it could mean that ‘when we’re born God is old, but as we get older, God gets younger.’ I mean it sounded to me like a kind of Zen koan. So one way is to think about this as a comment on the image of God in the psyche or the way the Self appears to us. So when we’re born, we are immersed in the God image of a particular tradition which is old, it’s been around for a long time, so in that way, God is old. But as we age, our God image changes, sometimes radically, and I think that’s what the dream means when it says that God becomes younger. It means the God image gets younger as we work on it. The dream stresses the importance of maintaining a connection to the inner child. So this is a very important teaching. This is of course a teaching dream, and of course in many traditions the Divine appears in the form of a child. Think of the mythologies of Jesus, the Buddha, Oris, and Krishna – all these Divinities appear in the form of Divine children, usually implying renewal and regeneration.
So as we age, the dream says we have to cultivate a more childlike approach to the Divine, reminiscent of Jesus calling on people to become like little children if they want to enter the kingdom of heaven. I think this means we have to cultivate a simple faith, and trust not a dominant ego. We have to behave in a trusting way, the way that a child relates to a good parent. So this woman’s God image was radically transformed by her dream illustrating Jung’s point that as we go more and more into the unconscious, we transform our God image.
Now I find that this kind of contact with the transpersonal level of the psyche or with the Self is very helpful during a life crisis and old age is full of life crises of this kind because of the inevitable losses we experience at this time. So attention to dreams in later life is very important because it becomes a powerful stimulus to the individuation process. We get the sense as we pay attention to this kind of dream image that we are witnessed or supported by a larger presence than the ego, and this feeling helps us to develop a personal spirituality, without any commitment to a specific tradition.
Now one of the effects of a dream like this is what Jung calls the 'relativizing of the ego.' What Jung means by this is that as we age, we discover, more and more that we are, in his words, the object of a supernatant. In other words we increasingly realize that something is aware of us. The Self is aware of the ego. The ego is not the essence of who we are. We are really part of this larger Self. And this is what’s meant by the 'relativizing of the ego.' We live in relation to a larger wisdom that determines a large part of our destiny behind the scenes. We relativize the ego also by giving up our grandiosity, our feelings of omnipotence, and we work on character traits like the need to control other people, the need for status, the need for external sources of self-esteem. These are all ways in which the hegemony of the ego decreases as we become more open to the demands of the Self in later life without resistance.
And this leads to the question of surrender and letting go in later life which I’ll come back to in a few minutes. [[Please DO listen to / watch this WHOLE video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrwnNxK1xk8&list=PLX31T_KS3jtpu1mC82KpWzbx4MvOW8e1a&index=9 ]] In the meantime, just a few other aspects of development in later life that are both psychologically and spiritually very important.
One is the development of wisdom. This has several meanings. It partly means the ability to be non-judgmental when relating to others and the way that happens is that as we age, we increasingly develop our capacity for empathy for other people. The more we can be empathic with other people, the less judgmental we are of other people. And I find that empathy is one of those faculties that often develops as we age.
Wisdom also means the ability to maintain more than one perspective at the same time, to see a situation from multiple points of view. Also the capacity to live with paradox increases as we age. And also as we age, we get better at tolerating ambiguity. Wisdom also means that we can broaden our horizons beyond our own ego concerns, beyond the concerns of our own community so that we become concerned with humanity as a whole and the situation that’s going on around us at the moment is a very good example of how we need to do that.
Now this discovery of the Self is actually a monumental realization, but the evidence for it is overwhelming when we see the accuracy of our dreams and the accuracy of synchronistic events which are also stimulated by the Self. These are so closely tailored to our psychological structures that we realize that we’re being addressed by an intelligence that understands us better than we know ourselves.
Now a few words about some other aspects of spirituality in late life. You’ll remember that Jung said that after midlife, none of his patients recovered unless they developed a religious attitude. By 'religious attitude,' he didn’t mean commitment to a specific tradition or a specific creed. He meant the development of a personal spirituality. He meant an individual connection to the Self or to sacred reality. This actually is the core of Jung’s approach to spirituality at any time of life.
... religion is an organized, historical institution that’s been around for a long time, and spirituality in the broad sense, is simply the feeling that life is meaningful and in some way that we have a personal connection to subtle realities beyond the physical world, however you think about them, or you can define spirituality broadly as the capacity to experience mystery, beauty, awe, and the ability to affirm the value of life.
Belief in a set of doctrines and dogma is not enough. That’s not an adequate basis for faith. Belief in traditional ideas may fade or may be eroded by painful life events. If you believe in a loving, benevolent God and then you have a catastrophic life event, your belief in that particular God image may be shattered. In the face of intense suffering, the teachings of the established traditions about how loving and good God is, can seem like mere platitudes. They can have no emotional power. And in fact then you may need a notion like Jung’s notion that the Divine has a dark side to it. [[ Please do read Sue Morter's "BUS STOP CONVERSATION" AND watch Natalie Sudman's video: http://www.johnlovas.com/2023/01/the-nearly-unforgivables.html ]]
So belief in doctrine and dogma may not be helpful but direct personal experience of the Self, personal numinous experience is actually indelible. It leads to knowledge rather than belief, and knowledge is permanent. Once you have this kind of experience, once you’ve heard the voice of the Self, you know, you don’t have to believe.
So an authentic spirituality is greatly enhanced by personal experience of the transpersonal psyche. This is why for Jungian psychology it’s actually impossible to sharply distinguish between psychological and spiritual development in late life. They overlap, and in fact I think they’re synonymous. So I would ignore the distinction between psychology as a discipline that’s only concerned with this world and personality, while religion has attention to spiritual matters.
I think using this kind of approach you can seamlessly blend a spiritual and the psychological because the psyche is not purely personal. It has personal levels but it also has a spiritual, or a transpersonal dimension, the mythopoetic dimension that is the source of religious experience and acts as a very important background force within the life of the individual. The transpersonal unconscious is a source of wisdom greatly superior to the ego.
So whereas in early life one has to develop an early ego, the older person in particular has to realize that the ego exists in relation to the Self and that a dialog is possible between them. And when this dialog is established, the issue of meaning often comes to the fore, because these experiences are intensely meaningful. And one of the cardinal features of spiritual development actually at any age, but particularly in later life, is the discovery of meaning in one’s life.
The sense that life makes sense it’s not a tale told by an idiot. Without meaning one often despairs. And this discovery begins to be important in midlife, but becomes very important in later life, especially as we start to accumulate multiple losses & limitations. The development of meaning helps us avoid the sense that life has been nothing more than an inexorable struggle against an indifferent fate. We don’t have any control over the losses that occur in old age, but we are free to discover meaning and we are free to pursue a spiritual practice such as work with dreams which in turn allows us to be less vulnerable, less vulnerable to despair than would be the case if life seemed entirely meaningless.
One of the difficulties we have here is that our culture doesn’t ask about the meaning of old age. Society’s main interest in aging is the medical & social management of late life. But the major task for the inner world is discovering the meaning and purpose and value of aging. This falls to the individual. There are no cultural norms that the individual can use.
So meaning refers partly to the ability to discern a pattern in your life, to make connections between elements of your life that otherwise seem disconnected so that you can see that your life has formed a coherent pattern or theme. Sometimes you find a theme that’s moved through the whole course of your life. And you can discover this theme as you tell the story of your life. Storytelling is a very important spiritual practice which helps you discover who we are – the so-called life review – telling the stories about what’s happened in our life. This makes life events more meaningful than would be the case if we were to see events in isolation, with no connection to each other. Telling a story, telling what’s happened to us requires a life review and this can be very painful, so I think it is a process that has to be approached cautiously, because sometimes it means looking at the discrepancies between the fantasies that we had early in life, the way we hoped life would unfold, and the way in which life actually unfolded. And as we do this kind of work, we find that a great deal of grief emerges. We have to look at disappointments. We have to look at goals that we had that we now realize will never be met, and so on.
But at least telling the story helps us make sense of life. And telling the story to other people is an important means of connecting to other people. And it’s an important means of passing on wisdom to other people. Whatever wisdom one has acquired, one can pass on to the family. One becomes, as an elder, the repository of all the family history and all the wisdom that one has acquired can be passed on ideally to the next generation. This is what Erikson meant by generativity in later life.
Now sometimes we feel that our life has been guided to follow a particular pattern as if we have a kind of transpersonal calling. Jung calls this the ‘spiritus rector’ [[ the central, guiding wisdom of the unconscious that directs the psyche towards wholeness and health. It's the inner wisdom that provides guidance when facing difficult situations or feeling lost ]] or the guiding spirit, which is the Self within the personality, and that’s what he meant when he said that each life has its own ‘telos’ – its own goal, its own purpose, its own endpoint, and its own vocation really, that each personality has an end or a goal that’s given by the Self. And the problem is how to discern it. The work on dreams and the individuation process is one way to discern that process.”
Lionel Corbett "Spirituality in Later Life" : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrwnNxK1xk8&list=PLX31T_KS3jtpu1mC82KpWzbx4MvOW8e1a&index=9
Numinous Dream Image drawn by Lionel Corbett's patient
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