Journal of Religion and Health, Vol. 42, No.

2, Summer 2003 ( 2003)

Images of the Abyss

KATHRYN WOOD MADDEN
ABSTRACT: Images of the abyss in traditional Christian theology and psychology are generally
symbolic of hell, destruction, or death. Here, the notion of abyss is regarded afresh through the
experiences of Jacob Boehme, the 17th century German shoemaker and mystic, and Carl Jung,
the 20th century Swiss psychoanalyst. Boehmes pre-existent abyss, which he called the Ungrund, or un-ground, and saw as underlying all of creation, even God, relates to the unitary
reality of Jungs Self. The Self is before the beginning of the individual human psyche and also
its ultimate goal in terms of psychological life.
KEY WORDS: abyss; unitary reality; Jacob Boehme; Ungrund; Carl Jung; Self; mysticism.

The abyss
What is important here is not what is consciously presented to individuals, but
only what so extends the human consciousness that human existence with all its
light and dark sides can be affirmed and shaped, and the meaningfulness of life
can be experienced. (Wehr, 1995, p. 385)

Throughout the Christian era, images of the abyss traditionally have been
symbolic of hell, destruction, or death. Like the sea with which it is so often
linked, the abyss is an expression of our fear of annihilation. Yet, there is
something about the abyss, as there is about the sea that has a strange
attraction for us. That something has to do with origins, both physical and
spiritual.
Jacob Boehme and Carl Jung give witness to this layer of existence. It is
not so much the abyss of hell in the imagery of the Christian tradition that
they encounter as it is more the abyss as a symbol of a unitary reality. The
abyss of the objective unconscious for Jung, like the Ungrund for Boehme,
provides a window to eternity which leads through newly constellated
realities (the Self, and Christ) to the vision of something of the deep that
points beyond itself to a totally transcendent ultimacy.
For Boehme and Jung, the abyss is a realm outside of time and space that
Kathryn Wood Madden, Ph.D., Academic Dean, Blanton-Peale Institute Graduate Program in
Psychoanalysis and Pastoral Psychotherapy; Faculty and Supervisor; Associate Editor of the
Journal of Religion & Health; Diplomate of the American Association of Pastoral Counselors;
Member of the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis; co-editor of the Ann
Ulanov Festschrift. Dr. Madden is in private practice in New York City.
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2003 Blanton-Peale Institute

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is accessible and real. Jung, with his concept of the psychoid layer, helps us to
see beyond our purely psychological beginnings, telling us that he has
even hazarded the postulate that the phenomenon of archetypal configurationswhich are psychic events par excellencemay be founded upon a psychoid base, that is, upon an only partially psychic and possibly altogether different form of being. (1963, p. 351)

Boehme, too, refers to something beyond what we would call the ego, beyond what Jung would identify as the objective unconscious, to the divine,
although he tends to equate the divine with the unconscious. Nonetheless,
what he is referring to suggests a movement of the ego to something positive,
real, and transformative.
While Boehme and Jung meet in these specific ways, there are also some
differences between them that distinguish them as theologian and as depth
psychologist. There remains, for Boehme, the 17th century shoemaker and
mystic, something ineffable in religious experience. At the other end of the
spectrum, Jung, a psychoanalyst steeped in the skeptical modernism of the
20th century, focuses upon manifestations in the clinical encounter, often
skipping over the subject of another layer of existence beyond the objective
unconscious altogether. He does talk, however, about God beyond the objective psyche and thinks we do have a soul that is related to deity that we are
capable of knowing.

Images of the abyss in Boehme

Jacob Boehme experienced directly an opening up of a deep layer underlying
all surface reality. He attested that experience of the divine is beyond any of
our rational categories and can best be described as a void or an abyss.
Boehmes experience of this groundless ground is perhaps analogous to the
concept of the divine Void that gives life to the world (Neumann, 1989, p.
114). The abyss or divine Void gives life by penetrating and uniting the human being to layers of existence beyond the human psyche. More than a
stasis, something counterpoised and in-and-of-itself, spirit meets us as a dynamic reality at the abyss level. Beyond what we know, as philosopher Donald Wood tells us, we receive glimpses of conscious communion or participation in a timeless reality (Wood, 1982, p. 209). Here, the actuality of time is
not eliminated, but we feel temporarily outside it.
Rather than be repelled by these experiences of the abyss, which followed a
period of melancholia, Boehme allowed himself to be drawn in and down to
where he discovered a new image of God, fuller and more complete than before. God was there in the deep, calling unto the deep that exists as a mirrored reflection of the divine in each human psyche. These experiences

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proved to be watershed events, inspiring in Boehme the production of a lifelong opus of creative work.
Wisdoms child
Jacob Boehme was certainly not the first, nor clearly the last to have had a
vision of the abyss as something other than a hell mouth. As an example, a
vision of psychoanalyst Frances Wickes patient is stunning, even beautiful,
in its stark clarity and mythological feel:
I looked upon space and I beheld darkness. In that darkness moved mysterious
forces. Not like the gods of mans conceiving were they, but strange primeval
beings born before the gods of human form. They were hooded in darkness.
Through their fingers they drew the threads of blackness and ever wove them
back and forth. I saw the rays that they made like the rays that stream inward
from a many-pointed star or the converging of the lines of a many-sided crystal,
but these rays were not of light but of darkness, and the darkness seemed to
draw all things into it. Thus I knew that they were weaving a great void that
had no form nor boundaries. (Wickes, 1950, p. 245)

Boehme had similarly alluring visions, illuminations, and deep experiences

of God and nature, from which he produced a series of profound writings that
influenced a long lineage of persons to the present day. These visions, and the
writings that followed, though, caused Boehme to be rejected by his church
and exiled from his hometown as a pathetic and misguided heretic.
Although these experiences were of a radically other reality, one beyond
time and space, it is, nonetheless, important to appreciate something of the
time (15751624) and place (Gorlitz in eastern Germany) in which Boehme
lived and wrote, for these experiences did not occur in a vacuum. Characterized by intense political and religious upheaval, the final quarter of the
16th century in Europe was a liminal time, a hinge period when old certainties were destroyed (Waterfield, 1989, p. 17). Barely a generation had passed
since Luther had set the Reformation ball rolling down its inexorable path,
causing the Western Church to begin its eventual splitting into a myriad of
permutations. A mere twelve years before Boehmes birth, the Council of
Trent had responded by inaugurating a fierce Counter-Reformation that
would lead to the burning at the stake or the banishment throughout Europe
of thousands of heretics. Six years before Boehmes death, these tensions
would eventually flare up into the Thirty Years War that scorched the central
European countryside with the flames of religious conflict.
If the historical era into which Boehme was born was particularly significant to his formation, so was the place of his birth. Boehme entered the world
in the village of Old Seidenberg near Gorlitz in Eastern Germany, which itself served as a haven for many who sought refuge from the religious strife.

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Upon completing his apprenticeship as a cobbler, Boehme began his journeyman travels throughout Upper Lusatia, observing a land torn by dissension,
party strife, and religious unrest. In fact, the conflict was so severe that in
1592, the year Boehmes travels began, Rudolf of Saxony ordered a thoroughgoing religious purge of the area (Stoudt, 1957, p. 47). After several years of
travels throughout this conflicted region, Boehme returned home to Gorlitz
and established himself as a cobbler.
Sometime during the Spring of 1600, after an unusually long, cold winter,
Boehme was to have one of the most significant of his illuminations, a shattering mystical experience which became the vital center of his life and
thought (Stoudt, 1957, p. 56). The experience was as profound as it was
brief, lasting a mere fifteen minutes. Nonetheless, it provided Boehme with
material for thought and writing for years to come. As he, himself, described
the experience,
the gate was opened unto me, that in one quarter of an hour I saw and knew
more than if I had been many years together at a University; at which I did
exceedingly admire, and I knew not how it happened to me; and thereupon I
turned my heart to praise God for it. (Waterfield, 1989, pp. 6364)

As recounted in Aurora, his first major writing produced some twelve years
after the vision, my spirit directly saw through all things, and knew God in
and by all creatures, even in herbs and grass . . . In this light my will grew in
great desire to describe the being of God. (Boehme, 1915, xix, 13).
What was the nature of this experience that revealed to Boehme the Being
of all Beings, the Byss (the ground or original foundation), and Abyss (that
which is without ground, or bottomless and fathomless) . . . (Waterfield,
1989, p. 64)? It is described in the following passage by Hans Martensen, one
of Boehmes biographers.
Sitting one day in his room, his eye fell upon a burnished pewter dish, which
reflected the sunshine with such marvelous splendor that he fell into an inward
ecstasy, and it seemed to him as if he could now look into the principles and
deepest foundations of things. He believed that it was only a fancy, and in order
to banish it from his mind he went out into the green fields. But here he noticed
that he could gaze into the very heart of things, the very herbs and grass, and
that actual nature harmonized with what he had inwardly seen. (Martensen,
1949, p. 5)

In Wisdoms Children: A Christian Esoteric Tradition, Arthur Versluis

speaks most interestingly of the fact that Boehmes revelation was preceded
by a period of deep melancholy, during which he had been in a profound
quandary over the existence of evil and suffering in the world (Versluis,
1999, p. 4). In Boehmes own words from Aurora, written more than a decade
after the fact, we see something of the psychic struggles that consumed him
at the time of the vision. . . .

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[A]t last I fell into a very deep melancholy and heavy sadness, when I beheld and
contemplated the great deep of this world, also the sun and stars, the clouds,
rain and snow, and considered in my spirit the whole creation of this world.
Wherein then I found to be in all things, evil and good, love and anger, in the
inanimate creatures, viz. in wood, stones, earth and the elements, as also in men
and beasts . . . But finding that in all things there was evil and good, as well in
the elements as in the other creatures, and that it went as well in this world
with the wicked as with the virtuous, honest, and Godly; . . . I was thereupon
very melancholy, perplexed and exceedingly troubled, no Scripture could comfort
or satisfy me, though I was very well acquainted with it, and versed therein.
(Boehme, 1915, pp. 485487)

It was then in the context of this intense inner struggle, perhaps mirroring
the religious storms in the outside world in which Boehme lived, that he was
able to penetrate to another layer of being. He continues in Aurora.
But when in this affliction and trouble I elevated my spirit (for I then understood very little or not at all what it was), I earnestly raised it up into God, as
with a great storm or onset, wrapping up my whole heart and mind, as also all
my thoughts and whole will and resolution, incessantly to wrestle with the love
and mercy of God, and not to give over, until he blessed me, that is, until he
enlightened me with his holy spirit, whereby I might understand his will, and be
rid of my sadness. And then the spirit did break through. (Ibid., pp. 485487,
italics mine)

So overjoyed with the lightening of his melancholy (depression), he found it

difficult to express, either in speaking or in writing what he described as
the triumphing of the spirit. He even went so far as to liken the experience
to the resurrection from the dead (Ibid., p. 488).
Was it melancholy brought on by the unresolved conflict (internal or external) that catalyzed an inbreaking of the spirit in his oppressed soul? It is
hard to know precisely because Jacob Boehme did not commit to writing the
content of his experiences until more than a decade after the sunlight on the
pewter dish had opened these inner gates to him. His explanation for this
interval is that he could not at once apprehend the deepest births of God in
their being, and comprehend them in my reason. As a result, there passed
almost twelve years, before the exact understanding thereof was given me
(Ibid., p. 488).
The Ungrund
We do know that Boehme wrote and expanded upon the same themes for the
rest of his relatively short life. Of all the themes that he explored in his
voluminous writings, the most profound is that of a groundless abyss, the
Ungrund, underlying not only all of creation, but even God. The Ungrund is

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anterior to God and anterior to being. Recalling his vision of the eye in the
pewter dish, Boehme says that the Ungrund lies in the eye, the core of God
and creation (Boehme, 1969, 3:1, 16:16). The Ungrund is eternally a mystery
to God because it is what God was before God became conscious of Gods Self.
Inspired by the image of the Ungrund, he expanded upon a new creation
myth that complemented the Genesis story. It is in Aurora that he first
broaches this theme of beginnings (Ibid., pp. 500501). Perceiving both a vacuum and a need to fill it, he takes on the self-identified calling of describing
the true ground of God in the balance of his opus. In Signatura Rerum,
Boehme speaks of the Grand Mystery of All Beings.
[U]nderstand this of the divine essence; without nature God is a mystery, . . . for
without nature is the nothing, which is an eye of eternity, an abyssal eye, that
stands or sees in the nothing, for it is the abyss; and this same eye is a will,
understand a longing after manifestation, to find the nothing; but now there is
nothing before the will, where it might find something, where it might have a
place to rest, therefore it enters into itself, and finds itself in nature. (1969, p.
22)

The Ungrund is not the personal creator God but the absolute-in-itself, a
moment at the commencement of the divine life and process of self creation
and revelation of being and the divine (Boehme, 1965, 1:1). Boehme pursued
this theme over and over in work after work, including his magnum opus, the
three volume Mysterium Magnum which was written in the last years of his
life. In the following passage, however, Boehme introduces a new theme. Here
he equates the nothing with the all.
The eternal divine understanding is a free will, not arisen either from any thing
or by any thing; . . . but it is A L L, and yet as a Nothing. For there is in itself no
contemplation, sensation or perceivancy whereby it might find a likeness in itself. (1965, p. 217)

The emptiness is also the fullness. In his essay on Boehme in A. E. Waites

Three Famous Mystics, W. P. Swainson relates that
[t]his Abyss contains within Itself everything and nothingthat is, everything
potentially, but nothing manifestly; somewhat as an acorn contains, potentially,
a forest of oak trees. Hidden, as it were, within this Abyss is an eternal, bottomless, uncreated Will, or Byss. This Will, or Byss, ever desires to become manifestIt willeth to be somewhat. This is only possible in a state of duality or
differentiation, for without contrast there could only be eternal stillness, nothing
could ever be perceived. (Swainson, 1940, pp. 9394)

Even though it contains all the antinomies, all the contradictions are still
in harmony. They are only potential and not yet differentiated. At the deepest

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level the Ungrund cannot be characterized at all, except perhaps as ewiges

Kontrarium.
Boehmes creation myth goes beyond the standard God created the world
ex nihilo. It articulates a process in which God created Gods-self from the
nothingness of the abyss through an eternal will. Swainson, interpreting
Boehme, describes in further detail Boehmes notion of a creation myth by
which God differentiates himself:
This Will, or Byss, fashions what is called a Mirror, which reflects all things,
everything existing already in a latent or hidden state in the Abyss. It thereby
makes them visible or manifest. The Supreme thus, as it were, perceives all
things in Himself. The dual principle is latent in Him (italics mine). He is both
Byss and Abyss. He could not otherwise know Himself. The manifest is equally
eternal with the unmanifest, there never having been a period without manifestation. Boehme terms this Mirror the Eternal Wisdom, the Eternal Idea, or the
Virgin Sophia. It is the Infinite Mother, the Will being the Infinite Father. . . .
When the Will, or the Father, beholds Himself and his wonders reflected in the
Eternal Idea or Virgin Sophia, the Mother, He desires that they shall not merely
remain passive or hidden, but become active and manifest. The Mother also
yearns for the manifestation of the marvels latent in Her. Through the union of
the Will and the Wisdom, the Father and the Mother, the generation of all things
takes place, the unmanifest becomes manifest, the latent becomes active. (Ibid.,
pp. 9395)

Thus, the abyss, for Boehme, is a place beyond time and space from which
emanate all possibilities. In Boehmes visions, these eternal contrarieties exist and emerge together. All creation arises from an eternal speaking of
God, a breathing out of Himself. This breathing speaks through the static
ground of life and is a likeness of the divine breathing (Boehme, 1978, p.
209).
Analogous to the nothing-something, hidden-manifest dynamic of his creation myth, Boehme experiences creation arising in and through the static
ground of melancholy in the human psyche. As the soul seeks direct experience of God in the stillness of the abyss, and relinquishes its self-image, God
breathes out a likeness of Gods self into human brokenness. Boehme intimately reveals something about his early experience in The Way to Christ, a
series of treatises written toward the end of his life:
If it were possible for him to remain quiet for an hour or less in his inner selfwill and speaking, the divine will would speak into him. Through this inspeaking, Gods will forms His will in man in Himself, and speaks into the formed,
natural, essential, external life of reason and smashes the earthly formation of
the rational will, and enlightens it so that immediately the supersensual divine
life and will sprouts in the rational will and centers itself in it. (Ibid., p. 209)

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Could this interval of an hour or less be a specific reference to Boehmes

own 15-minute inbreaking of the spiritan inspeaking of Gods willtriggered by the sunlight on the pewter dish some two decades previous? If so,
further evidence of the nature of that shattering experience follows.
For if life stands quiet in its own willing, when it stands in the abyss of nature
and creature [emphasis mine], in the eternal speaking out of God, then God
speaks in it.
For whatever is without will is one thus with the nothing and is beyond all
nature, which abyss is God Himself. (Ibid., p. 209)

These statements would indicate that the concept was inspired from the
experience as opposed to being reasoned through the rational mind. Boehme
seems directly to connect his illuminative experience with the concept of the
abyss or the Ungrund. In finding the Ungrund at the very depth of God, we
might say that Boehmes vision is a kind of mystical depth theology.
Mystical visions or madness
Boehme may have been accused by his detractors of being delusional and
even a drunk, but these were only attempts at discrediting him for his original and provocative writings that put him, some said, at serious odds with
orthodox Christian theology. Despite these unfortunate and costly accusations, Boehmes writings were not the rantings of a madman. They were
rather his process of unpacking and integrating for himself and for others
what was revealed to him during his visions.
What might a psychological analysis say about Boehmes experiences of the
abyss? While these visions may have followed a disintegrating period of melancholy or psychic disturbance, the visions, in the end, led to healing rather
than disintegration. These were humbling not inflationary experiences, leaving Boehme with a feeling of awe and gratitude.
Think of Boehme in this way: He retrieved into consciousness and culture
an awareness of the chthonic spirit at the very time when post-Reformation
Christianity was becoming increasingly cut off from the feminine and the
notion of the presence of spirit in matter. His extensive exploration of the
Virgin Sophia in his writings could be seen as compensating, consciously or
unconsciously, for the Protestant reaction against the cult of the Virgin Mary
as well as the subsequent demotion from her position as mother of God altogether.
Further, the most immediate thing we notice is that his experiencesat
least as far as they have been recorded in his writings and those of others
give us no indication of a psychotic break. Beginning in 1600, Boehmes visions were noetic; they opened a gate to inner knowledge and gnosis and

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produced a significant compendium of work. Also, Boehme exhibited a diminution rather than an inflation of ego in the way he speaks of the inner-self
giving over to the divine will (Ibid., p. 209).
What is the map we are given here from the lens of analytical psychology?
Themes of oppositionof feminine and masculine, creation and destruction,
good and evil, Christ and Lucifer, Ungrund and Sophia, eros and aggression,
life and deathabound in Boehmes map. If we were to apply his insights to
that of modern depth psychology, these themes locate the original problem
which so troubled him and his work squarely in the realm of analytical psychology and the notion of Jungs Self-field, where all naturally occurring oppositions of the psyche are encountered, united, and held in harmonic tension.

The Self and the divine mirror

Is Boehmes Ungrund, the fact of spirit breaking in, and the notion of the
Eternal Mother, Infinite Father in some way analogous to Jungs creation
myth out of which evolved his theory of the collective unconscious? One is
tempted to think that, had Boehme read the works of Jung or known him, he
would have recognized in Jungs writings a similar map to his own inner
journey.
Jung likewise experienced an inbreaking image of abyssthat he called
the Pleromaduring a descent into the deeper layers of the unconscious.
Jungs experience, during what he referred to as his night sea journey or
Nekyia, was that of a paradoxical nothingness containing all opposites out of
which God differentiates himself.
Jung went on to develop his theory of the unconscious acknowledging the
psyche as the medium through which we grasp the transcendent. As a culmination of a long-term process of encounter with the deepest layer of the
collective unconscious, specifically the psychoid, archetypal layer, Jung
believed that we can experience something analogous to what for Boehme
would be a pre-existent unitary reality.
Jung refers to the psychoid layer also as the somatic unconscious (1988, pp.
441ff ). This layer of the psyche is not easily accessible to consciousness. In
contrast to the psychic unconscious, which is for Jung more about our psychological movement on a mental-spiritual level in which images, patterns, and
causality are the informing materials of individuation, the (psychoid) somatic
unconscious is more about a psycho-physical layer of reality. Jung claims that
the physical and psychic are possibly but two aspects of one and the same
underlying reality. The world of matter may be a mirror-image of the world of
spirit or of the psyche, and vice versa (Jung, 1963, pars. 766769).
Thus, Jungs notion of the archetype as psychoid alerts us to a revolutionary notion, one in which the unfolding of what he names the Self, the arche-

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type of order, as an innate and potential bridging reality links the material
and psychical, inner and outer in one reality. We may go in an out of this
reality, but once we know it is there and that it is real, it makes a difference.
Marie-Louise Von Franz (1997), Erich Neumann (1989) and others refer to
the Self as a field, or simply the Self-Field. Ann Belford Ulanov speaks of the
Self as an ordering force in the unconscious, saying,
The Self exists in us as a predisposition to be oriented around a center. It is the
archetype of the center, a primordial image similar to images that have fascinated disparate societies throughout history. It is, like all the archetypes, part of
the deepest layers of our unconscious which Jung calls collective or objective
to indicate that they exceed our personal experience. We experience the Self
existing within our subjectivity, but it is not our property, nor have we originated it; it possesses its own independent life. (Ulanov, 1997, p. 298)

The Self archetype unites oppositions and, according to Ulanov, orders our
whole psyche. When we enter into an experience of unitary reality, or when
we
cooperate with the approaches of the Self, it feels as if we are connecting with a
process of centering, not only for our deepest self but for something that extends
well beyond our psyche into the center of reality. (Ibid., p. 299)

Neumann seems to echo this when he tells us that the field of the Self is
beyond, or a regulatory field superior to, the archetypal field (1989, p. 20).
In describing the stages of ego consciousness in relation to the archetypal
field and to the Self-field, Neumann says that we find at a certain layer of
reality a unitary reality existing beyond and before the primal split (consciousness from unconsciousness) that inevitably occurs in which our conscious minds develop into a polarized reality. Except in cases of severe
trauma or developmental injury, he believes that most of us have experienced
this unitary reality in some form while we were in the mothers womb or at a
very early stage of development:
The prenatal egoless totality is associated with an unconscious experience
which can, however, be recalled in later life as a dim memoryof an acosmic
state of the world. In this totality there exists a pre-psychic nebular state in
which there is no opposition between the ego and the world, I and Thou, or the
ego and the self. This state of diffusion of the world-soul and the corresponding
emptiness of the world is a borderline experience of the beginning of all things
which corresponds to the mystics experience of the universal diffusion of the unitary reality [emphasis mine]. (Ibid., p. 74)

Neumann believes that in the case of the mystics experience too, the dissolution and overcoming of the ego results in what he is calling a borderline
experience (to be distinguished from the DSM diagnostic category, border-

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line psychosis). The experience is one of absolute knowledge of the

pleromatic phase, by which Neumann is referring to the prenatal egoless
totality, a sort of pre-existence in utero in which the ego is not yet incarnate
but has a psychic reality or awareness.
With the term absolute knowledge, Neumann (1989, pp. 7981) is drawing from Jung (1960, par. 931) on the notion of a self-subsistent unconscious
knowledge that consists of images of the archetypes.
[T]here is in the unconscious something like an a priori knowledge or an immediacy of events which lacks any causal basis. (Ibid., par. 847)

The collective unconscious, inclusive of the ordering archetype of the Self,

contains the images of all creation. Before we become an ego, we are of this
uroboric realm. Thus, the pre-ego contains the knowledge of the archetypes
but in an uroboric or undifferentiated form. The symbol of the uroborosa
serpent coiled into a circle biting its own tail represents
a primal state involving darkness and self-destruction as well as fecundity and
potential creativity. It portrays the stage which exists before delineation and
separation of the opposites. (Samuels, Shorter & Plaut, 1986, p. 158)

Absolute knowledge as Jung and Neumann explain it is felt by the pre-ego

to be a diffuse feeling of the world and an extension to the limits of the world
of an existence enclosed neither in the body nor in time and space (Jung,
1960, par. 948). Then, as the pre-ego develops and becomes an ego, what was
originally an indefinite uroboric unity of the unconscious with all the opposites contained within itselfa Pleromatic unitythis acosmic emptiness
and fullness of the psychic dimension disappears. The body scheme of the
growing infant is coordinated with the consolidation and differentiation of the
ego and the ego begins to replace the once diffuse world with a configured
world of precisely demarcated objects. When we are entirely incorporated
and identical with our egos, we come to live at a fixed place and a clearly
defined moment of time. A number of processes can disrupt what Neumann is
calling our incorporated selftrauma, intoxication, ecstasy, illness, fatigue
any of which can remove us from our spatio-temporal definiteness (1989, pp.
8081).
Neumann is helpful in understanding the experience itself although he
limits it to a purely psychological ground. At least he is open to diverse forms
of experience:
We are only just beginning to recognize that different psychic constellations are
associated with different experiences of the world, and that the world experience
associated with our ego-consciousness is only one form, and not necessarily the
one that is most comprehensive and closest to reality. (Ibid., pp. 910)

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From Neumann, Jung, and Ulanov, we learn that there is an inheritance

that is specifically ours, psychologically and spiritually. The pleromatic experience of unitary reality is the beginning, a first ground, a birthright, something that is there from our inception. Developmental injuries and specific
traumas may impair an individuals knowledge of it, but a unitary reality
underlies all experience.
This would suggest that, even though we experience something psychically,
what we experience may actually have its origin in a place beyond our psychic and psychological modes of apprehension. The Self archetype would appear to be open at both ends. There is, then, an intersection in the archetype
in general, and more specifically in the archetype of the Self, wherein is
brought together and held in tension all opposites and othernesseswholly,
holy, and radically other. This see-through place of intersection would be the
locus of our encounter with the Ungrund/abyss.
The Self mediates for the individual both poles of the archetype and bridges
between material and psychical forms of existence. What is needed from the
Self s point-of-view in the context of the ego-Self axis, the sphere where ego
and Self meet, is consciousness. Jung stresses the importance of the ego as
the necessary other in order for the Self to manifest its-Self in microcosmic
form in a created world. We see a similar emphasis in Boehmes claim that
spirit is constantly seeking a point to break in. The egos consciousness of
Self is crucial for the Self to become actualized.
The experience of the Self is one of having a center infused with intentionality, even though this center is initially experienced as radically other
and may appear in the form of pain and suffering, fear, wonder, grace, or all
of these simultaneously. Pain seems to be a particular venue for something
deeply unconscious to become conscious, just as Passion (passio to suffer)
is the venue of Gods becoming known to us.
We have known it once, and we may experience it again. One way or another, the Self grabs our attention and opens us to the experience of one allencompassing worldliness. However fleetingly, for fifteen minutes, for threeand-a-half weeks, or for a lifetime, we exist anew with the perception that
there is unity in all things. The Self continues to have its own independent
life even after the ego comes to consciousness of it. If we can hold the center,
converse with it, and translate the Self s contents into life, we may feel an
abundant flow of creativity, of new ideas, and of new forms of expression as
spirit surges into our life, directing and redirecting our activity.

Implications for depth psychology

As clinicians we need to be able to discern whether a patients inner visions
are indications of an experience of unitary reality or evidence of madness, and
we should not be so quick to collapse one into the other. If unitary reality

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underlies all psychological experience, then we ignore the spiritual realm at

the risk of the total psychic health of those in our care.
How do we know whether the experience is one of mysticism or of madness? In the end, the final determinant of visionary experience is the result.
Mystical experience leaves an individual more connected and involved with
the world (Agosin, 1992, p. 54). The person emerges from his or her journey
with greater wisdom, insight, and generativity than before and can house and
integrate the encounter with the unconscious. The psychotic cannot and is,
instead, overwhelmed and disintegrated by it.
In the clinical setting, the analogue to Boehmes abyss of contrarieties, inclusive of the Ungrund and its first event, Sophia, has to do with our experience of this radical layer of re-membering through the deepest part of the
self, the soul. The unconscious for Jung and the bridging Self function analogously to Boehmes mirrored reflection Sophia. Sophia as a mirroring reality
of the eternal couple does not cross over into the material world but remains
pre-existent in eternal conjunction, eternally reflective of the original ground.
From Boehmes perspective, soul is the reflected presence of Sophia, wedded
to Christ who does cross over to the material world. From the view of depth
psychology, we might say that the soul is the lived activity of spirit trying to
come into matter working through the Self of the unconscious, in Jungs
terms, so that it can work into us.
This mirroring reality might relate to what the symbol of the Self looks like
in the field created between the two people in the consulting room. We observe it in the psychotherapeutic dynamic of transference and countertransference. We get glimpses of it in the radical otherness of some dreams,
or in splashes here and there, as we observe clinically when a patient begins
to perceive and take in the psychological (and spiritual) content of one of the
poles that the analyst has been carrying for her.
To live in the image we need to make conscious that which is unconscious
and unintegrated. Drawing from Jung (1921, par. 424), Ann Ulanov makes
the point, that the soul
is a function of relation between the subject and the inaccessible depths of the
unconscious. The determining force (God) operating from these depths is reflected by the soul, that is, it creates symbols and images. The soul is then both
receiver and transmitter, perceives unconscious contents and conveys them to
consciousness by means of these symbols. The soul lives, as it were, midway
between the ego and the primordial unconscious, which expresses itself through
the archetypal images that the soul receives, creates and transmits. (1999, p. 21)
The soul is thus like a two-way mirror, reflecting unconscious to ego and ego to
unconscious. (Ibid., p. 31)

Soul meets spirit through the activity of the deeper self as we are penetrated by that transcendent factor that is dynamic and free. The fact of an

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inherent transcending principle is that point of intersection and conjunction

between the soul and the unconscious, in Jungs terms, and between Christ
and the Eternal Mother, Sophia, in Boehmes terms. The transcending factor
that bridges and brings these two opposites together integrates them at a
new level.
Unitary reality
In sum, unitary reality can be known. The experience of this unitary reality
occurs in the psyche and is nothing less than an encounter with the deepest
layer of the collective unconscious. We meet at this depth of experience an
otherness so radically other that all that was formerly known to us and
thought to be real from the egos perspective is surpassed.
The experience of unitary reality is relevant to clinical practice because it is
so radically transforming. A new reality is born to us, offering us a new intrapsychic core, perhaps even restructuring the entire personality in a way the
ego can better deal with its context and circumstances, one that enables us to
see through to our former origins.
Crucially, for those who suffer from a severe degree of traumatic rupture in
early development, the implications would be that ones potential for wholeness would not be entirely dependent upon a human being, ones mother or
father, for example, but instead upon unitary reality. To access the reality
that bridges us to this ground at the fairly inaccessible psychoid and somatic
layer, we would have to access not only what is unconscious in the usual
psychic sense, for example, with the images and emotions we know and are
familiar with, but also the somatic or body-matter pole that is so unconscious
that it feels to be unconscious to the unconscious itself. In other words, what
is known even at the primordial level has to be encountered and relinquished
as known to meet what is beyond it, more unconscious, unknown. In essence,
it means encountering what is totally unknown from the conscious perspective of the ego, and it involves the body specifically.
Evidence of unitary reality in the religious experience of Boehme and the
Nekyia of Jung would imply that the archetypal is a layer of being and contains an opening to a before being, a larger unitary reality in which we can
participate and about which we can know. Spirit, from this view, is an a priori
reality always in motion, moving toward us, shattering our consciousness,
summoning us if we are willing to probe beyond our psychological independence to receive that which is archetypally present and spiritually actual.
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Shea (Eds.), The Fires of Desire (pp. 4165). New York: Crossroad.

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