According to Jung, mystical or transcendent experiences consistently feature a profoundly numinous symbol representing the union of opposites. It is not uncommon to encounter symbols that signify the conjunction of one with the divine or with the universe. Two following instances of documented mystical experiences will illustrate the union of opposites.
First, consider the account of Barbara Ehrenreich (born August 26, 1941), an American author and political activist. She describes her mystical experience in the following manner:
“[S]omething happened when I was 17 that shook my safely rationalist worldview and left me with a lifelong puzzle … that morning in 1959 when I stepped out alone, [I] walked into the streets of Lone Pine, Calif., and saw the world – the mountains, the sky, the low scattered buildings – suddenly flame into life.
There were no visions, no prophetic voices or visits by totemic animals, just this blazing everywhere. Something poured into me and I poured out into it. This was not the passive beatific merger with “the All,” as promised by the Eastern mystics. It was a furious encounter with a living substance that was coming at me through all things at once, too vast and violent to hold on to, too heartbreakingly beautiful to let go of. It seemed to me that whether you start as a twig or a gorgeous tapestry, you will be recruited into the flame and made indistinguishable from the rest of the blaze. I felt ecstatic and somehow completed but also shattered.”1
The uniting symbol is always extremely numinous, and it brings joy and an ecstatic feeling. It shows the union with God or a godlike figure, the universe, the light, the cosmos.
Generally, it may be described as the encounter of the particle with the whole or as the particle becoming the whole. The second example comes from Muz Murray (born 1941) who is a spiritual teacher and author. He recalled his mystical experience of becoming the universe as follows:
“I began to feel a strange pressure in my brain. It was as if some deliciously loving hand had crept numbingly under my skull and was pressing another brain softly into mine. I felt a thrilling liquidity of being and an indescribable sensation as if the whole universe was welling-out of me from some deep center. My “soul” thrilled and swelled and I kept expanding until I found myself among and within the stars and planets. I understood that I was the whole universe! Yet suddenly I became aware of huge entities millions of miles high, maneuvering in space, through which the stars could still be seen…. wave upon wave of extraordinary revelation swept through me, too fast for my conscious mind to record other than the joy and wonder of it. In those moments of eternity, I lived and understood the truth of the esoteric saying “as above–so below.” I was shown that every cell had its own consciousness which was mine.”1
Understanding the essence of mystical experiences as a conjunction of opposites (conjunctio oppositorum) provides the key to deciphering many of Jung's complex writings.
For more on this subject see:
C. G. Jung's Theory on Mystical Experiences
1 From the Institute for Mystical Experience Research and Education Mystical Experience | IMERE.org
