the full numinosity of the god-energy stays inside human relationships, Armageddon is upon us.

19. Those who have no empathy for other people currently misinterpreting their own traditions are likely to be unconscious of their own grandiose claims to exclusive entitlement.

Once we face the dragon of our spiritual grandiosity and open ourselves up to awareness of the spiritual presence, miracles begin to happen in us and around us (Tillich 1957). The fruits of the presence of the true spirit begin to manifest with amazing forcefulness and clarity. Love suddenly arrives with more power, and the romance of hate and rage

From a Jungian point of view, I would argue, I should not try to tell you which myth to use to contain your archetypal projections, but only that you need conscious mythic and ritual containers. If you come to me for analysis and therapy, and you absolutely refuse to have any spirituality, I will still work with you, but I will have to tell you hon

If a therapist has trouble letting people terminate their therapy, it is because it is not therapy, but unconscious religion.

The dragon guards the treasures of life. Those who avoid it find their lives drained of energy and creativity. Those who encounter it without conscious intention and good will must know its terrible, horrific face. As Jung suggested, the unconscious meets us in the same spirit that we bring to it.

You can be just as arrogant in the Mother Theresa mode as in the Madonna mode. Spiritual practice, then, can often be a clever disguise for someone possessed by infantile grandiosity and related delusional humility. It is the genius and challenge of contemporary psychoanalytic theory to have given a comprehensive explanation of these things for the

Although Freud did not conceptualize these two systems together as comprising a “Great Self Within,” he did describe phenomena reflecting something within the self that makes grandiose, godlike claims on the individual, often leading to illness and worse if

When you start feeling contact with your wonderfulness again, you are always in danger of this kind of toxic shame response taking over. Then you fear the ridicule, because of what happened to you in your childhood when you were really in touch with your radiance and it was squashed.