ISAP religion exam preparation

Exam Preparation

It’s been a while since I last posted, but as you can imagine, I’ve been quite busy preparing for the remaining exams, which are due next month. Yet I felt compelled to make a post about some of my exam experiences—in this particular case, the religion exam.

When I went to discuss the religion exam with one of the examiners, I had only a brief idea of what I wished to cover. My topic centred around the Decalogue—the Ten Commandments. I wanted to look at them from a psychological angle. However, the examiner suggested going deeper and looking at the duality of prophecy and priesthood within the context of Judaism. Little did I know that this topic would take me down the rabbit hole for the next five months of daily exploration of Ancient Israel and Judaism.

Initially, my focus was quite literally on Judaic prophets and the other pole represented by Law, priests, scribes, sages, and rabbis. I used Erich Neumann’s The Roots of Jewish Consciousness as my main reference point. After a month of exploration, I realised that the topic of prophecy and priesthood was only a small part of what I wished to cover.

Slowly but surely, I moved towards the tension of opposites within my paper. I moved away from simple priesthood and prophecy towards a more symbolic expression—the numinous source and the vessel. The numinous source naturally fitted well with the prophets, who became mediators of this source, while Law, Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible), and rituals became a vessel through which the numinous source was channelled.

If the balance between the source and the vessel is well mediated, we end up with what I would call a productive tension. The numinous is given a form that nourishes the collective. The form itself ensures generational continuation that preserves the numinous over time, while the numinous renews the form. A reciprocal relationship is created—think of yin and yang in Taoism.

As I was writing the paper, I came to see my own biases and complexes. As someone who grew up being told to go to church every Sunday, I did not have the warmest relationship with religious institutions. In fact, over time, my resistance to them grew as I perceived them as increasingly authoritarian and dogmatic. Naturally, when I was comparing priesthood and prophecy, or the numinous and the form, I was very much siding with the numinous, privileging it and wishing for it to prevail over the rigid, closed-off form that the institution represented.

This was an aha moment! I know I have my own biases against institutional religion, but at the same time, if form had not been given to the numinous, numinous experiences, visions, and prophecies might never have reached the collective, let alone nourished it. Only because form was given to the numinous experience can I now read about it and make up my own ideas. I can gather insights into that zeitgeist, explore the symbolism, and dwell in my own interpretations simply because the numinous was captured, preserved, and passed through generations in written form.

As a result, I can no longer simply blame the institution. The vessel is intrinsically neither good nor bad; it is simply a form. However, the people who mediate it, with their projections, darkness, and light, may influence how the vessel is used or abused. Which takes me to the question: when did we lose the balance?

In the Babylonian Talmud, Rabbi Yirmeya explains: “Since the Torah was already given at Mount Sinai, we do not regard a Divine Voice...” (Bava Metzia 59b). What does that mean? It seems that there was a shift from divine judgement (numinous source) towards rabbinic judgement through interpretation of the Torah (vessel). This is further illustrated in Bava Metzia 59b, where “The Holy One, Blessed be He, smiled and said: My children have triumphed over Me...” This may be read as divine approval of human interpretation and judgement.

What may be the challenge with this? When the people who mediate the vessel become convinced that they already possess all the answers to any possible situation or crisis, there is a risk of inflation. This may create a rigid and closed-off form that is no longer receptive to the compensatory functions of the numinous (unconscious).

Why is the connection to the numinous so important, you may ask? From my perspective, it may provide us with an ethical and moral stance via compensatory functions. It may challenges us when we deviate from balance. Conversely, it may also overwhelm and inflate individuals, hence necessity of a stable ego which can be imagined as a vessel too.

The image I used for my paper was that of the prophets bringing prophecies to balance out the one-sidedness of the collective. Similarly, on the individual level, dreams bring compensatory or complementary contents from the unconscious that may aid our movement towards a more ethical, balanced, and morally sound stance.

After writing the paper, perhaps for the first time, I recognised the importance of the vessel—a.k.a. the institution, textual form, or whatever physical embodiment through which the numinous can flow and be preserved. Without the numinous, we lose vitality, creativity, and ethical stance; yet without form, we end up with what might be considered the destructive, irruptive, chaotic, and unstable power of the numinous. In my opinion this is one of the reasons why only select individuals received prophecies, as only they were able to withstand the voltage of the numinous irruption that perhaps would have led others to chaos, inflation and in worst case psychosis and death.

Form provides the collective with a stable, reliable, and mediated form of the numinous, but without the numinous renewal of that form, we are left with a barren, rigid, and closed-off vessel that may become destructive. The tension between the two is necessary. And if one becomes dominant over the other, we get a one-sided attitude that has never brought much positive change into the world.

Now I can’t help but look at the world today, at our institutional vessels. If you have read my blog thus far, you may have observed my own bias towards Mystery and the numinous, alongside a demonising outlook on institutions. I have started to recognise this myself, with an ever-growing capacity to hold the opposites without labelling them good or bad. The importance of institutions has become evident to me, equally alongside the importance of the numinous, which I see less and less within our institutions.

Why? Perhaps because of the convenience and comfort of form, and the inconvenience of relating to the numinous. Perhaps we have forgotten the ways of relating to the numinous and desperately need a reminder.

I believe that Dreams are that reminder, and I wish for people to remember them. Maybe then, our institutions will find more balance, leading to creative tensions that benefit not only us, but the generations to follow and the more-than-human world.

From David Whyte's Poem - What to Remember When Waking
"...What you can plan is too small for you to live.
What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough
for the vitality hidden in your sleep.

To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.
To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance..."

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