A Process Spirituality:

Whitehead

& Jung

SHERI D. KLING, PH.D.

What is Spirituality?

According to David B. Perrin, spirituality integrates all aspects of life into a unified whole, allowing life to be marked by the “overall spirit of goodwill” inherent in authentic living.

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• Such authentic spirituality opens us to healthy self-critique, self-knowledge, and self-giving.
• It can be understood as something intrinsic to human nature.
• It includes a capacity for both transcendence and self-transcendence.
• It is a “lived reality that is shaped into a way of life.”

What is Spirituality?

Drawing from Whitehead and process theologian John B. Cobb, we might also say that spirituality is how we are inwardly animated and enlivened, often by the “felt beauty” we experience in the natural world and in our relationships. It is the seeking and sustaining of rich experience in community with others and also in the solitariness of the heart.

What is Spirituality?

Blocks to Healthy Spirituality

• A solely transcendent view of the divine that leaves the world incapable of communicating divine presence
• A dualistic view that separates mind, body, and nature
• The idea that the earth and its beings are basically machines that can be reduced to parts and therefore have no wholeness

• The dismissal of the nonrational aspects of life – emotion, religious experience, deep unconscious forces of the psyche
• The collapse of the transpersonal or religious; humans without targets for projection of their inner religious energies will then project those energies onto other people and social movements, infusing them with religious zeal that they cannot contain in a healthy way

Blocks to Healthy Spirituality

The Spiritual Wholeness We Need

• To understand all aspects of our lives as one coherent whole
• To see life and ourselves as meaningful
• To see ourselves in relationship to the whole, interconnected with it
• To know ourselves as able to experience positive change
• To understand Reality at both the level of cosmos and of psyche as being integrated and able to facilitate our own wholeness

Wholeness is also a feeling of “at homeness”

or “at-onement” – it is feeling undivided.

The Spiritual Wholeness We Need

A Wounding and Healing Reality

• Reality is marked by change, flux, and perishing – it is inherently wounding
• There is also what we might call a “primordial mystery” at the base of life – a rushing river of being that is our source of dynamism, vitality, and creativity

Resources for Wholeness: Whitehead

• Reality is dynamic and creative, made up of events or “drops of experience”
• All things are interrelated and interconnected
• All things are subjects with an inner life and some degree of experience

• At the beginnings of experience, every moment of becoming encounters the “Other” of the objective world of past fact and is formed by that world
• All things have both mental and physical aspects that are intimately intertwined - body and mind, and body and world are unified

Resources for Wholeness: Whitehead

• The divine is immanent in the world and offers it wholeness, order, and novelty, luring all things forward toward integration and enjoyment
• Every thing has inherent value, actualizes value, and seeks its own enjoyment

Resources for Wholeness: Whitehead

Resources for Wholeness: Jung

• The human psyche is dynamic and made up of ego consciousness, a personal unconscious, and a collective unconscious
• Conscious and unconscious psyche are in a balancing relationship where what is unconscious for us can expand our awareness when brought to consciousness

• At the depths of experience, we encounter an objective “Other,” the “objective psyche” that confronts and changes us
• Body and mind, soma and psyche, cannot be separated but are joined through symbol and image – psyche, body, and world are connected through meaning and patterns of value

Resources for Wholeness: Jung

• The sacred is present and active in the human psyche as the archetypal Self, the God-image in the psyche that facilitates individuation and wholeness
• The purpose of individuation is to actualize value and “one’s own being” in the world

Resources for Wholeness: Jung

Wholeness and Flourishing

By drawing from Whitehead and Jung, we might say that when we align with the sacred flow of life, we may:

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• Discern the highest possibilities that we might actualize in every moment
• Heal the wounds and unconscious aspects of our psyche that keep us stuck in the past and in reactive mode, becoming more capable of engaging the world as it is in the present moment

• Integrate the polarizing forces at work in our psyche – the ways we are divided against ourselves – by being open to novel and expanded perspectives that transcend but include those opposing energies
• Allow these expanded perspectives to bring us to new ways of living that are more compassionate, more loving, more beautiful, and more harmonious

Wholeness and Flourishing

A Spiritual Practice of Dream Work

While there are many kinds of spiritual practices, a Jungian-style practice of working with our dreams in a spiritual way helps us to:

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• Discern our deeper callings and soul stirrings
• Bring unconscious material to consciousness which allows us to heal our wounds and move toward greater wholeness

• Improve our relationships with others because when we become conscious of our complexes and projections onto others, we can withdraw those projections and experience less emotional reactivity.
• Respond to the dynamic flow of life by engaging it as it is in the present moment.
• Feel ourselves to be connected to all of life because we are having sacred encounters within our embodied lives

A Spiritual Practice of Dream Work

What Does this Mean?

Thinking with Whitehead and Jung, we might say that Reality at both the level of the cosmos and of the psyche is marked by:

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• Value
• Relationality
• Transformation
• The immanent presence of the sacred or divine within the human and the whole world

When we experience that Reality for ourselves through spiritual practices that foster embodied experiences of wholeness, we learn:

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• We matter
• We belong
• We can experience positive change
• And this is true universally

What Does this Mean?

cobb.institute