Books
Welcoming Our Gods Back Home: The Wisdom of Psychological Mysticism
Welcoming Our Gods Back Home brings the wisdom of Psychological Mysticism to the religious, political, and cultural divides that threaten our species and planet. This book validates the universality of numinous experiences and challenges all forms of religious and political nationalism that claim divine election, validation, power, and authority.
Authoritarian claims in the United States and around the world are fueled by long-standing religious delusions of external, supernatural, interventionist beings variously named gods, goddesses, and, more recently, God. Such claims promote unconscious cult behavior by leaders and their followers. Carl Jung spoke often about the dynamics and dangers of mob psychology.
From the perspective of Psychological Mysticism, our gods are internal, intrapsychic experiences, images, and resources to support our organic connection to the mysterious Sacred Source of the universe and to support our at-one-ment with all else. Psychologically, healthy individuals, religions, and institutions view the universe as an inter-connected, inter-related, and inter-dependent web of being.
Jungian psychoanalyst Dr. Jerry R. Wright considers welcoming our gods back home to the human psyche, where they were birthed and where they belong, to be our most urgent psychospiritual task. Until that happens, our species will likely continue to do great harm to ourselves, to each other, and to our Earth home.
Welcoming Our Gods Back Home completes the trilogy “Jungian Psychology and the Future of Our Species.” The two previous volumes are Reimagining God and Religion (Chiron, 2018) and A Mystical Path Less Travelled (Chiron, 2021). The trilogy challenges individuals to invest in the power of individual consciousness in general, and religious consciousness in particular, in order to heal our collective religious and political pathology. To that end, recognizing, withdrawing, and owning our personal and collective shadow becomes the best gift we can offer the future of our species.
From Dr. Wright: These three volumes provide the reader with an introduction to the Analytical Psychology of Carl Gustav Jung, especially his concern for the recovery of soul in all aspects of life, including religion. The trilogy also provides an introduction to Psychological Mysticism, an interim psychospiritual paradigm as we await a new collective myth. The three volumes are part of my personal and professional testament, a kind of memoir. They bear witness to my lifelong search for meaning that combines religion and depth psychology.
A Mystical Path Less Traveled:
A Jungian Psychological Perspective
Drawing on his personal journals, the Analytical Psychology of Carl Gustav Jung, on the discoveries of modern science, and on mystical traditions from numerous world religions, this book proposes a psychological mysticism that preceded, and now replaces, the historical theological mysticism that has been dependent on theistic images of god. Such images are no longer meaningful for many people - or necessary.
These pages explore an alternative spiritual path that has the character of a grounded, embodied mysticism and replaces the heavenly, disembodied escapism that has dominated the religious collective for more than 4,000 years.
Psychological mysticism expands the meanings of god, religion, mystic, and mystical and validates the universality of human experiences of the numinous. The mystical perspective is one of radical immanence.
The whole of the human enterprise is this: it is an experiment to accept both our inner angels and monsters, individually and collectively, and to live responsibly our social contract assigned by Nature.
When the divine is located within matter, within the natural world, and within the human psyche—rather than outside or beyond—the whole of life becomes a mystical sanctuary. This perspective promotes a practical or pragmatic mysticism that embraces what is and how to live what is responsibly.
Reimagining God and Religion:
Essays for the Psychologically Minded
With the necessary demise and death of antique cosmologies and traditional religious paradigms dependent on external deities and devils, the modern religious challenge involves two simultaneous sacred endeavors: to eulogize, bury, and grieve the theistic and monotheistic god-images and the religions dependent on them; and, secondly, to bring fresh imagination to the meanings of god and religion, which will satisfy both the modern mind and ancient soul.
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Drawing on the insights of Jungian or analytical psychology, Dr. Wright offers depth psychological analysis of our contemporary religious and political dilemmas, as well as invites readers to be midwives for the emerging religious myth that many believe to be on our collective horizon—a myth that will be more inclusive, intellectually and scientifically honest, and soul satisfying.
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The invitation is made urgent by his psychological conclusion: as long as our deities and devils are perceived to be beyond the physical domain and outside the human psyche, our species will continue to do great harm to each other and to our global nest.
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Combining personal testament and psychological commentary, the author explores heretofore taboo topics and reframes many traditional theological and Christological dogmas, making them more relevant to religious and non-religious alike.
“As finite beings in an infinite cosmos, perhaps the greatest puzzle of all is the mystery of the human psyche, the mystery we are to ourselves. That puzzle demands our primary attention since it governs all that we think, feel, know, and choose. The health of our world, including our religions, depends on the health of the human psyche or soul.”