This book is a collection of essays in honor of psychologist, C.A. Meier, and it includes Meier’s 1983 address to the Third World Wilderness Congress in Inverness, Scotland, entitled, “Wilderness and the Search for the Soul of Modern Man.” It is a nice, diverse overview of different perspectives on inner wilderness of Jungian depth psychology and its relation to outer wilderness of nature. It includes an essay on a Taoist parable of how imposing order on chaos and nature can lead to its death (“The Arts of Mr. Hun Tun,” by Mokusen Miyuki); two wonderful essays by South African soldier and writer Laurens van der Post (“Wilderness: A Way of Truth,” and “Appointment with a Rhinoceros”); various essays examining personal nature narratives and explorations of indigenous peoples’ relationships with nature; and an interesting ending of a poetic mélange called, “Nature Aphoristic (with an excerpt from Goethe), by artist and publisher, Sam Francis.

The foreword of the book is by Robert Hinton, also a psychotherapist as well as the editor and publisher of Daimon Press in Zurich, which is the publisher of the book. Hinton sets the tone for the book, reminding us of “the potential meaning – of crisis, both within and without: it can be tragic; and at the same time, it provides us with the possibility of renewal,” (xii). He invites us, if we are “willing and able to be open to it…it is often just the un-known, the un-planned, the un-expected, the un-familiar which can best teach us,” (xii).

Meier’s essay is based on the correspondence of the inner unconscious and the outer natural world and that disturbance of one, or over-emphasis of one, causes disturbances of the other. “Man is estranged from his soul, therefore from his own inner nature, by being lost in the outer world. Excessive interference with outer nature creates of necessity disorder of the inner nature, for the two are intimately connected,” (2). He draws on the writings of the Neo-Platonists, citing Poseidonius’ statement on “sympatheia ton holon [sympathy of all things],” and Porpyrius’ comment that “the soul, when it encounters the visible, recognizes itself there as it carries everything within itself and the all of things is nothing else than soul,” (3-4). He, is critical of an over-valuation of the scientific perspective on life, stating that we “try to learn more and more about those objects [of nature] and begin to analyze and dissect them, thereby eventually killing them…In other words, as the natural sciences developed, respect for nature as a whole disappeared,” (6). Meier argues that we must attend carefully and thoughtfully to “wilderness without – wilderness within,” and that if we ignore our inner wilderness, we will project these disowned dangers into the outside world and work out our inner conflicts through our relationship with the environment.

Miyuki’s discussion of Chuang Tzu’s Mr. Hun Tun or Chaos critiques the concept of the “machine heart,” and calls for balancing the yang control function of machines with the yin harmony function of the feminine. “If we are not to destroy ourselves as a result of the inhuman operation of the technocratic machine, we must cultivate the feminine functioning of the ego so as to let the Tao, or Self, take its course,” (34).

Laurens van der Post, in his essay, “Wilderness – A Way of Truth,” recalls a conversation he had with Jung in which he said that “the truth needs scientific expression; it needs religious expression and artistic expression,” (45). He thus sets up the need for having different, complementary attitudes and perspectives on nature. Van der Post tells a marvelous tale from the South African Bushmen of “The Great White Bird of Truth.” This story recounts how the community’s best hunter one day caught a glimpse in a rippling pool of a beautiful white bird flying in the sky. “From that moment on, he wasn’t the same. He lost all interest in hunting…One day he said to his people, ‘I am sorry; I am going to find this bird whose reflection I saw. I have got to find it,’ and he said good-bye and vanished,” (53). He traveled throughout all of Africa until he was at the end of his strength, as he watched the beautiful African sunset, he thought, “I shall never see this white bird whose reflection is all I know.” And he prepared himself to lie down and die. Then at that moment, a voice inside him said, ‘Look!’ He looked up and, in the dying light of the African sunset, he saw a white feather floating down from the mountain top. He held out his hand and the feather came into it, and grasping the feather, he died,” (54). He interprets this story as the tale of a person who is spiritually aware, is open to perceiving even a reflection of the truth, and is content with just one feather of the truth. This harkens back to the second part of Jung’s comments on the truth needing scientific, religious and artistic expression, “even then…you only express part of it,” (45). Van der Post stresses the ongoing need of adaptation and re-orientation of each generation to the truth of inner and outer.

Van der Post’s second essay, “Appointment with a Rhinoceros,” is well worth the read. Briefly it is his telling of a transformative encounter with nature in his homeland of South Africa after having been away from home for 10 years, including 3 years in a Japanese concentration camp. He says that his loss of connection with his “natural self” and regaining it in a sudden communing with nature, is an “illustration of one of the many paths we can travel in order to rediscover this lost self,” (124-125). It is a really marvelous essay about the healing of war trauma through nature as well as re-establishing the harmony of inner and outer. I plan to discuss this in a book I am currently working on using Joseph Campbell’s framework of the Hero’s Journey in working with veterans.

The book ends with Sam Francis’ aphorisms about nature. I’ll end this review with a few choice quotes from him. “Every detail of life is a perpetual blessing. Artists work to show this to everyone. It is an unremembered act of kindness and love to do this,” (137). “As William Blake said, what can be imagined is true,” (139). “Space and time are relative to matter, not imagination,” (140).

This is a short (142 pages) book that is very readable and presents a nice selection of perspectives on the relationship between inner and outer wilderness. It extends Meier’s work as well as the work of Jung. It is of interest from a psychological as well as an ecological perspective, and has a lot of fascinating narratives of personal growth in it, as well.

This is a review of an edition of this book that was later re-named and reprinted in 2005: A Most Accursed Religion: When a Trauma Becomes a God.

The thesis of this book is that trauma (as an experience that overwhelms the ego) and God (an experience that overwhelms the ego through unknowability) share something in common, and may perhaps even be different aspects of the same thing/process. Mogenson writes that his aim “is not to reduce theology’s God to a secularized category of psychopathology but rather to raise the secularized term ‘trauma’ to the immensity of the religious categories which, in the form of images, are among its guiding fictions,” (1). Further that just as “God has been described as transcendent and unknowable, a trauma is an event which transcends our capacity to experience it,” (1).

Drawing on Jung, Hillman, Nietzsche, Freud, the Christian mystics and the Christian Bible, Mogenson traces out a very interesting interplay between trauma and God. The book is flawed by, what comes across as, hostility toward religion, and with that spiritual and mystical experience. I would say this is the major reason that I found this book fascinating as well as frustrating and disappointing. There is a certain arrogance in Mogenson’s knowing of religion and a reductionism, not necessarily to materialism, but to imagism. By this I mean the strain of thought and argument from Jung through Hillman which seeks to distance itself from spiritual experience. Jung’s work is bifurcated, sometimes he claims to be a scientist and speak of the “God-image” rather than of God (Mogenson adopts this stance in the first paragraph of his book, saying he is not speaking of God, but of the “God-image”). Jung’s work, particularly now that The Red Book has been published, also clearly values spirituality and religion, and attempts not to reduce those universal aspects of human experience to psychology, but to use psychology to better understand God/spirituality/religion. Hillman (whose work I can’t claim to have studied as extensively as Jung’s) elevates soul over spirit, with soul being associated with energized human experience and the spirit associated more typically with transcending human experience. In a way, this is the old argument between immanence (soul) and transcendence (spirit). In Hillman’s work there is a, usually subtle, antagonism with spirit, partially because he views himself as correcting the imbalance of traditional religion.

Freud was a confirmed atheist. Nietzsche pronounced the “death of God,” however, Nietzsche was very alive and expansive in his writing. Freud used rationalism and modernism to dissect God. Nietzsche used reason and social criticism to diagnose a problem with Christianity. While Freud seemed to bemoan the fact of non-rationality in human beings, Nietzsche glorified irrationality in the form of “the will to power,” the flow of life, particularly Dionysian life, but also Apollonian life.

I apologize for this divergence from Mogenson’s work, but I think the flaws in the work are not specifically his, so much as a problematic current within contemporary human thought and experience, and particularly within scholarly and academic writing. I cannot claim to have “solved” this dilemma, however, I think it can be dealt with in a more subtle and complex way than Mogenson has done in this book.

Mogenson writes that the “soul-destroying consequence of worshipping a God who is identical with our inability to understand Him is that we tend to propitiate, as if they too were completely transcending, events which the soul might easily comprehend and absorb,” (46).  I think Mogenson overstates the point that life events are easily comprehended and absorbed. It is this aspect of Mogenson’s work that seems arrogant and polemical, rather than subtle and exploratory.

I do see that Mogenson revised this book and that revision is published under the title, A Most Accursed Religion: When a Trauma Becomes a God (2005).  This title does fit the topic of the current edition of the book being reviewed, the out of print, 1989 edition. I happened to be reading this book at the same time I was reading C.A. Meier’s Healing Dream and Ritual: Ancient Incubation and Modern Psychotherapy. What I missed in Mogenson’s book was Meier’s conception of Asclepius, the man who transformed over centuries from a man to a god. The healing, or “right attitude was made possible by the cult, which simply consisted in leaving the entire art of healing to the divine physician. He was the sickness and the remedy,” (3). The title of the revised edition of this book more clearly emphasizes that it is about the potential sickness of God and trauma. The edition of the book, entitled God is A Trauma, is an interesting, if at times one-sided, look at the relationship between Judeo-Christian religion and trauma, as well as the common human response of turning an overwhelming trauma into a “god,” that then terrorizes the individual. The one-sidedness comes from seeing god-making as a pathological process, rather than as an ambivalent process which could be positive or negative depending upon how it was handled.

Review of Majma’ Ul Bahrain or The Mingling of Two Oceans, by Prince Muhammad Dara Shikuh, translated and edited by M. Mahfuz-Ul-Haq

I found the reference to this book while reading Henry Corbin’s book, The Voyage and the Messenger: Iran and Philosophy. Corbin describes Shikuh as “the short-lived Emperor of India. His profoundly mystical soul was completely absorbed by his desire, based on his own inner experience, to realize an exegesis which would be common to Hindu and Islamic mysticism,” (86). While Shikuh’s book, translated to English as The Mingling of Two Oceans, or sometimes as The Confluence of Two Seas, is of historical interest, perhaps, as an early attempt at illuminating the underlying unity of different religious traditions, I did not find it very interesting from the perspective of mysticism or inspiration. The book is largely lists comparing different conceptual topics, for instance, in Islam, there are considered to be five elements, which have names, similarly, in Hinduism, there are five named elements; the Sufis consider that there are four “worlds,” similarly, in Hinduism, there are considered to be four worlds. These correspondences are perhaps interesting from a historical perspective, but Corbin’s books focus not on the historicity of religion, but rather the inner essence of experienced spirituality. There are some interesting passages that are more poetic and mystical, such as “The inter-relation between water and its waves is the same as that between body and soul or as that between sarir and atma,” (45). Dara Shikuh considered the Vedas to be “revealed books,” thus establishing a hidden unity between Hinduism and Islam, at least Sufism, (28). The introduction by M. Mahfuz-Ul-Haq is of interest in the discussion of Dara Shikuh’s life, Wikipedia also has an entry on him as well that is quite readable.

The physical book, itself, is quite beautiful, with images of rocks and oceans waves, gold lettering, a nice feel to the book. It also has the original text, in I believe Persian script, at the back of the book. The book is surely of great historical value, but, personally, I had to work to get through the book, even though it is not long, 75 pages in English. I appreciate the search for unity between religions. This seems to be a characteristic of Sufism, as Fadiman and Frager state in their Essential Sufism, “According to many Sufis…the essential Truths of Sufism extend to all religions,” (2). If you are looking for more visionary and mystical writing, I also followed the reference from Corbin to Carl Ernst’s translation of Ruzbihan Baqli’s The Unveiling of Secrets: Diary of a Sufi Master. This book has many amazing visionary passages and is quite readable as short diary entries.