2nd Annual FALL FEST: The Dark Numinous: Pathologies and Transformation, a talk with John Hayes

Experiences of the numinous are not exceptional and are hardly restricted to saints, monks, and mystics. Indeed, they occur in various degrees in the experience of ordinary folks. Not unlike dreams, numinous experiences need to be received and empathically understood for their transformative potency to be realized. These experiences intimate to ego consciousness the presence and power of the Self. After a point in life, the ego comes to instinctively know the Self, recognizing its presence and 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,” or moments in a “step-by-step development of self from an unconscious state to a conscious state.” The work towards individuation, towards wholeness, towards full realization of one’s Self is the aspirational work of a lifetime, always elusive and never fully realized.

Jung also recognized the dangers of the numinous, both individually and collectively. While optimally the numinous is a catalyst for individuation, it also holds the potential for psychic possession and even psychosis. The numinous can hold group psychology in its thrall with dangerous and terrible consequences as recent collective history bears witness. Rene Girard’s writings on the scapegoat mechanism in group psychology amplify Jung’s concerns for the destructive power of the dark numinous. Both Jung and Girard indicate the fateful and critical urgency for an upgrade in consciousness as the way forward to an authentic human future.