Claiming Our Divine Potential

American psychotherapist, Ira Progoff, was fascinated by the relationship between depth psychology and spirituality. As a neo-Jungian, he took seriously the presence and power of the collective unconscious and the need to “individuate” the self—to search for the principle of cosmic potential at the depths of the person and free it to reach its fullest actualization. 

According to Progoff, the psyche is such a principle of wholeness. It is like a seed that contains within itself potentially all that the plant can become as it develops toward maturity across its lifespan.^[1] Deep within us, he argues, there is also a seed, a psychic dimension that contains in sheer, unfathomable potentiality all that the self is and can become. The steady emergence of this profound psychic potential reflects the evolutionary emergence of the whole cosmos—the whole process of creation. As human consciousness rises from the potentiality of the cosmos, the psyche is our inner source of cosmic potential, directing both the conscious and unconscious.

The psyche is likewise a unifying principle. The pattern of development in our personal existence, in other words, reflects not only the development of individual life but also, and perhaps even more, our connection to a larger meaningful course of life unfolding transpersonally in the cosmos. Progoff explains:

By its very nature, therefore, the functioning of the psyche tends to have a connective effect. As it brings about an experience of meaning and greater union within the person, it awakens in the finite being a sensitivity to the infinite. It leads to the realization that since this sensitivity is possible it must be that somewhere in the depths of the finite person there lies a capacity to perceive some of the meaning in the infinite.^[2]

Progoff’s insights certainly offer some noteworthy theological implications. For instance, we can say that while there may not be an external designer and a micro-managing providence from the outside, neither is the world devoid of divinity. Rather, God is constantly showing Godself as the world’s future—its endless potential. We have only to be sensitive to the experience of the infinite within us. 

Far before the birth of modern depth psychology, many mystics and prophets in fact spoke of God as an energetic power within the depths of oneself. In his brilliant book God in Search of Man, Hebrew Bible scholar Abraham Heschel states that the prophets participated so intensely in the dimension of depth within themselves that the psyche expressed itself for them as a subject-to-subject, person-to-person encounter with the divine. They entered into the experience with a firm awareness that this dimension of reality is one in which they actually belonged.^[3] Progoff expounds on this point:

A [prophetic] experience … indicates the deep psychological atmosphere that underlies ancient Israelite experience of the divine. With it in the background, it became possible for certain individuals to know that there was present within them and accessible to them immediately and personally a dimension of reality that is valid in ultimate terms.^[4]

Indeed, the ancient prophets were bold and courageous visionaries who became capable of reflecting their in-depth experience of divine presence often over and against the domain and strictures of formal religious teaching and practice. They were vehicles by which the God-world relationship took on new meaning and purpose precisely because they consciously realized and claimed divinity as the deepest part of themselves. They did not tell people revelations of God; rather, they awakened to the revelatory character of their own lives. 

May we, too, learn from the experiences of the prophets and persist in reaching toward a larger and more intimate contact with the mystery of reality. May we open a path by which fresh and continuing experiences of Spirit can break through and ultimately awaken the whole community of creation to its deepest divine potential. May we remember that God’s presence to us is always a presence within. 

^[1] Ira Progoff, The Symbolic and the Real (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973).

^[2] Progoff, The Symbolic and the Real, 81.

^[3] Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1955).

^[4] Progoff, The Symbolic and the Real, 218-219.