Merton’s Unity of Action and Contemplation in Transpersonal Perspective

Abstract

Adopting a transdisciplinary approach, with specific emphasis on the post-Jungian transpersonal psychological theories on the ‘Spectrum of Human Consciousness’, this paper introduces a transpersonal psychological thread of understanding of ‘Mystical Consciousness’ through an interreligious field of comparative religious approaches to action, contemplation and non-action. This paper draws on Merton’s interreligious contemplative thinking in relation to three major world religious mystical traditions of Buddhism, Hinduism and mystical Islam/Sufism and elucidates comparative insights with the Christian mystical–contemplative tradition, akin to the ‘mystical contemplation’ of Evelyn Underhill. This paper introduces and applies the transpersonal perspective to the scholarly field of mysticism. The reader is invited to consider how Merton may have responded or written about interreligious contemplative depth mysticism in terms of his own writings on ‘pure consciousness’, had he had the benefit of the language of the transpersonal models of consciousness. Finally, the reader is left with a contemplative question at the ‘heart’ of mysticism—does the ancient sculpture of the Sleeping Hermaphrodite helpfully represent an art–theological symbolic analogy for the inner repose of an illumined soul, one with God’s Unity, in whose awakened consciousness through depth mystical contemplation, action occurs as an extended manifestation, a total gestalt of contemplative solitudinous action?

1. Introduction—Transpersonal ‘Unity Consciousness’

The Sleeping Hermaphrodite1 (Figure 1) serves as an opening art–theological metaphor for the depth of unity consciousness in the human psyche2 explored in the transdisciplinary3 approach to this paper on action and contemplation. I will explore a post-modern transpersonal psychological dimensional understanding of mystical unitive consciousness, wherein poles of duality, such as male/female, yin/yang and, for the purpose of this Special Issue focus, action/contemplation become ‘one’ in unity consciousness. I will be elucidating how the perspective of post-Jungian transpersonal psychology, (which is a post-modern trajectory of psychological spectral thought that integrates the spiritual dimensions of the psyche), in articulating the state of unity consciousness, is interreligiously compatible with various modern/post-modern mystical thinkers, such as Thích Nhât Hanh (1926–2022), Swami Sivananda (1887–1967), Hazrat Inayat Khan (1882–1927), Thomas Merton (1915–1968) and Richard Rohr (1943–), representing the mystical depth-dimensions of Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufi-Islamic mysticism and Christianity, respectively, to articulate variously that in the context of the perennially contested debate within mysticism of ‘action and contemplation’, it is experientially possible to, ‘Rest in “working hard” and also do and be “resting”!’ (Brandman 2022, p. 389).

As the transpersonal psychological perspective is lesser known within mainstream mysticism scholarship, the first half of this paper will focus on outlining in ‘thick description’ (Schneiders 2005, pp. 49–60) the post-Jungian transpersonal models of consciousness and the psyche which form the basis of the transpersonal perspective mooted upon the question of action and contemplation.

Thereafter, I will apply the transpersonal understanding of transpersonal ‘hermaphroditic’ unity consciousness to the interreligious perspectives of action and contemplation found in Buddhism, Hinduism and Sufism and as deeply reflected upon by Thomas Merton.

2. The Transpersonal: Trans-/Interdisciplinary Academia

The transpersonal perspective in academia has burgeoned from its early inception in schools of Jungian and post-Jungian psychology together with its applied professional disciplines of transpersonal psychotherapy. Both facilitate depth psychological processes of psycho-spiritual personal transformation in transpersonal states of non-ordinary ‘transpersonal’ (beyond the personal) levels of human consciousness, including, but not limited to, liminal, transliminal (Clarke 2001) or mystical states of union or unitive consciousness. However, the transpersonal perspective is no longer the exclusive domain of psychological or psychotherapeutic schools of thought. Indeed, such an inter-/transdisciplinary overarching perspective was explored in the 24th International EUROTAS Conference at Oxford University in September 2024, ‘Embodied Consciousness, Psyche & Soul in Research and Practice’, which was led by Les Lancaster, Professor Emeritus of Liverpool John Moores University and author of Approaches to Consciousness—The Marriage of Science and Mysticism (Lancaster 2004). The transpersonal perspective is currently being used across a plethora of academic and professional disciplines. For example, it is legitimately applicable to refer to transpersonal gerontology, in the scientific study of old age from a transpersonal perspective. Further, the transpersonal perspective is already being applied to diverse areas of study such as neuroscience, quantum physics, sociology, insomnia, grief, peacebuilding, psychiatry and ecology, in addition to psychology, psychotherapy, parapsychology coaching and counselling. By extension, therefore, the scholarly fields of mysticism, mystical theology and theologies generally can similarly augment their fields of transdisciplinarity in considering the transpersonal perspective. Certainly, post-modern scholarship would be remiss not to address the transpersonal’s burgeoning remit, especially in the context of post-modern transdisciplinarity, as the overarching word ‘transpersonal’ which is embraced across divergent disciplines is seen to be inherently and inevitably transdisciplinary in the breadth of its scholarly scope.

Therefore, it is mooted that one future transdisciplinary trajectory of mysticism scholarship will be a transpersonal mysticism, a transpersonal mystical theology and even an all-encompassing transpersonal theology, which has as its focus the understanding of transpersonal levels of consciousness in the psyche, explored further below in the post-Jungian context. Importantly, the suggestion of transpersonal mysticism is not as innovative as it may first appear. Indeed, it follows Bernard McGinn’s ‘modest proposal’ (McGinn 2008, pp. 44–63) that ‘the category of consciousness, embracing experience but also extending beyond it, may provide a more helpful way of investigating mysticism and its relation to spirituality’ (McGinn 2008, p. 59). McGinn advocates his ‘modest proposal’ by elucidating two main areas in which an understanding of consciousness as applied to mysticism may be beneficial to mysticism scholarship. Powerfully, McGinn says,

This approach seeks to avoid the danger involved in restricting the “real” mystical element of religion to the first level of consciousness, that is, the reception of the gift of God’s presence in feeling, or basic inner experience. It also critiques views of mystical consciousness that tend to emphasize the affective dimension of direct contact with God to the detriment of the intellective aspect … the conclusion emerges that a more extensive analysis of the full range of the activities of the human subject as they are transformed and reoriented through the presence of God acting directly within the subject will help us gain deeper understanding of the mystical encounter between God and human.

(ibid.)

As transpersonal psychology is the academic field established to further scientific and empirical research into human consciousness, with established MSc and PhD degrees available in Consciousness Studies, Spirituality and Transpersonal Psychology,4 the transpersonal perspective is the very inter-/transdisciplinary field of study into human consciousness that McGinn suggests may ‘help us gain deeper understanding of the mystical encounter between God and human’. Therefore, I will outline the transpersonal model of the human psyche to show specifically how post-Jungian developments reveal the psyche as a ‘Spectrum of Consciousness’ (Wilber 1993). Expanding upon Bernard McGinn’s more encompassing, interdisciplinary perspective of mysticism scholarship which recognises that it can ‘be approached philosophically, theologically, and psychologically’ (McGinn 1991, pp. 263–343, as cited in Nelstrop 2015, p. 497) and Louise Nelstrop’s inclusivity of its interreligious dimension in that mysticism scholarship ‘encompasses both many religions and none’ (Nelstrop 2015, p. 497), transpersonal psychology presents mysticism scholarship with an exciting new paradigm for further and deeper integration of understanding consciousness in mysticism scholarship. Transpersonal psychology’s perspective of mysticism scholarship, therefore, deepens a scholarly appreciation of Merton’s understanding of ‘the development of man’s deepest capacities’ (Merton 1998, p. 162) in the universal human capacity for conscious union with God/Divine in the depth of the ‘spectrum of consciousness’ in the human psyche. Merton’s interreligious leanings in contemplative depth mysticism (akin to Underhill’s combined use of ‘mystical contemplation’ (Underhill 2011, p. 29) in practical mysticism) find complementarity in the transpersonal, especially where Merton specifically writes of ‘pure consciousness’ (Merton 1968, pp. 15–32). In this article, I am applying the transpersonal perspective to Merton’s understanding of action and contemplation as an exemplar of this developing transpersonal scholarship. Therefore, Merton’s thought is used as a theoretical lens through which to view mysticism from a transpersonal perspective in transdisciplinarity. Merton’s interest in psycho-analysis and interreligious depth mystical theologies gave rise to the meditation that prompted this article: What if Merton, in writing to articulate his contemplative states of ‘pure consciousness’, had the benefit of post-modern transpersonal language that articulates precise language to describe the depth of nuanced states of human unity consciousness in a ‘spectrum of consciousness’?

3. The Transpersonal Model: Consciousness and the Psyche

Transpersonal psychology’s understanding of the human psyche is of being what Ken Wilber sums up as a ‘Spectrum of Consciousness’ (ibid.) spanning pre-personal, personal, collective, transpersonal and transcendental dimensions of the psyche. Crucially, across the spectrum of psychological and its applied psychotherapeutic models of thought and practice, the very word psyche is used in a broad-definitional way that encompasses nuanced dimensions of meaning from ‘soul’ to ‘mind’, in contradistinction to its more usual understanding of ‘soul’ within mysticism. However, the definitional context of the psyche will differ depending upon the specific orientation of a school of psychological/psychotherapeutic thought, whose spectrum broadly ranges from psycho-analytical, psycho-dynamic, humanistic, person-centred, gestalt, existential, transpersonal and integrative/integral models/schools. The specific orientation of this paper brings into focus the post-Jungian transpersonal dimension of psychological/psychotherapeutic thought, as applied to mysticism and mystical theological academic disciplines in transdisciplinarity.

Concurring with Peter Tyler’s view of the more recent meeting and dialogue between theologians and psychologists in their interpretations of the psyche,5 (whose own scholarly expertise, more unusually, like my own, includes both mystical theology and professional psychotherapeutic models of understanding), I argue that the transdisciplinarity of mystical theology (which integrally includes theological, transpersonal and other perspectival dimensions), requires a more nuanced reflection upon what is understood by the term psyche across academic disciplines in order to avoid abyssal misunderstandings. In mystical scholarship, the term psyche is generally understood in relation to its traditional meaning of ‘soul’. Therefore, scholars may profoundly misunderstand psychological models of understanding where the term psyche is predominantly used in post-modernity to refer to the ‘mind’, but which can additionally refer, confusingly, either to the ‘mind’ only, the ‘soul’ only, or the ‘mind–soul’ or ‘mind–soul–spirit’ continuum! How this trajectory of the divergence of meanings occurred is an interesting one to unpick but, further, an essential one for enhanced trans-/interdisciplinary understandings, especially in the context of navigating mystical texts that use the word psyche across both trans-/interdisciplinary fields of psychology and mysticism. Tyler elucidates that the journey of reference to the soul can be traced from Plato to Psychology: ‘Plato’s discourse is a story of the soul that will thread its way … through later Christian doctrine to … psychoanalysis and the present day retrieval of the ‘story of the soul’ in … James Hillman and Thomas Moore’ (Tyler 2016, p. 28). However, how did the word psyche come to have a more prevalent meaning of ‘mind’ over ‘soul’ in post-modern psychological/psychotherapeutic thought?

Importantly, Jung’s original German words were Seele and Geist (Stein 2010, p. 133) (meaning ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’, respectively), following Freud (Bettleheim 1983). However, of crucial significance is that Seele was initially translated into English as ‘mind’, rather than ‘soul’ (ibid.). Bruno Bettleheim laments as follows:

Of all the mistranslations of Freud’s phraseology, none has hampered our understanding of his humanistic views more than the elimination of his references to the soul (die Seele) … translations make us believe that he is talking about our mind, our intellect …; namely, geistig, which means “of the mind”, or “of the intellect”. If Freud had meant geistig, he would have written geistig.

(Bettleheim 1983, pp. 70–71)

Therefore, in mistranslating Seele as ‘mind’, rather than ‘soul’, (possibly in order to make Freud and Jung’s work more acceptable to the prevailing medical model of its day, at a time when psycho-analysis was viewed with scepticism in its relative infancy), Western psychological understanding has been viewed with a more secular hue (Bettleheim 1983, pp. 65–81). Naturally, this has had significant ramifications for the word psyche in contemporary Western theological thought, especially in the burgeoning interdisciplinary academic discipline of Christian Spirituality6 which integrates psychological understandings and other disciplines with traditional theologies. Indeed, Thomas Moore’s influential transpersonal book Care of the Soul (Moore 2003) confusingly defines the soul in terms of more mental/emotional processes, as Moore’s definition of ‘soul’ asserts that ‘“Soul” is not a thing, but a quality or a dimension of experiencing life and ourselves’ (Moore 2003, p. 5). Further, Moore asserts that he does not ‘use the word [soul] … as an object of religious belief or … with immortality’ (Moore 2003, p. 5). Therefore, any narrow translation of psyche as meaning only mind and not soul will have had a profoundly narrowing effect in shaping contemporary trans-/interdisciplinary thought on the accuracy of complete understandings of the psyche, variously as ‘mind’, ‘soul’ or a ‘mind–soul–spirit continuum’.

Although a thorough re-evaluation/re-translation of what Freud and Jung originally intended by the use of the word Seele might inject new life and debate into a contemporary post-modern re-evaluation of the psychological understandings of the word psyche, which currently refers predominantly to the human mind, the reality is that ‘the horse has already bolted the proverbial stable’! The use of the word psyche within various psychological/psychotherapeutic schools of thought that now refer predominantly to the psyche as ‘mind’ is firmly established. Therefore, the contemporary reality is that the word psyche broadly refers more often to the ‘soul’ within mysticism/mystical theology, yet as ‘mind’ in most psychologies, except for transpersonal models which include ‘soul’ in the ‘mind–soul–spirit’ continuum, upon which I will now expound in relation to unity consciousness in the depth of the psyche.

4. The Transpersonal Psyche

The word psyche, therefore, seems to hold a potential trans-/interdisciplinary abyssal impasse between understandings/interpretations of the psyche as ‘soul’ and/or ‘mind’, unless the word psyche is seen as having, not merely multiple meanings, as finely articulated by Tyler, (especially for the prevailing definitional-level academic interest within mystical scholarship), but as a word that holds full, burgeoning possibilities of understanding the psyche as a ‘spectrum of consciousness’ of the mind–soul–spirit continuum, as articulated in transpersonal psychologies. Transpersonal theories are not merely academic-only theories/models of the psyche but rather experientially informed theories/models of the psyche, which are then applied in experiential psychotherapeutic professional practice involving the interpsychic interplay in the therapy room that unearths unconscious intrapsychic complexes of the client revealed through the relational psyches. Therefore, for the purposes of this paper, post-Jungian transpersonal insights reveal new ways of discovering and understanding the psycho-spiritual depth dimensions of the individual and collective human psyche, in the sense of the mind–soul–spirit continuum or, to add a depth profundity which is beyond the scope of this paper, the body–mind–soul–spirit continuum.

Beyond the significance of the definitional, namely that the word psyche (Greek: psukhē, meaning, breath/life/soul) can mean either/both ‘mind’ or ‘soul’,7 the transpersonal dimensional understanding of the psyche is crucial to a nuanced understanding of our interiority of the psyche in terms of our identity or sense of ‘self’, which transpersonal models of understanding reveal as a profound spectrum of consciousness and corresponding dimensions of ‘self’.8 The transpersonal, therefore, adds a depth understanding to the contemplative dimension of mysticism, often articulated as the interior path/s to union with God, as in the mysticism of the ‘Divine Within’ (Davies 1988). Notably, the transpersonal dimensional understandings of the psyche shed light on how and why it is possible for human beings to reach/attain/experience various levels of mystical states, ultimately leading to that elusive and ineffable mystery of the soul’s union with God. Transpersonal psychology is mooted as an exciting, revelatory dimension of an ever-deepening and experientially informed perspectival understanding of mysticism and mystical theology in trans-/interdisciplinarity. To understand this, we must first recapitulate Jungian psychology of the Archetype of the Self, before then considering post-Jungian developments on the understanding of the ‘spectrum of consciousness’ of the human psyche and the ensuing understandings of the more subtle dimensions of ‘self’, ranging from the personal self to the collective to the transpersonal and transcendental levels of self, essentially, the profound relationship between the psychological self-reflective ‘ego’ concept and the essential ‘self’ of the transpersonal/collective/transcendental dimensions of our consciousness.

Understanding transpersonal psychology’s differentiations of the spectrum of consciousness and ‘self’ is crucial to mystical theology’s depth understandings of which dimension of ‘self’ is being talked about in terms of either being sacrificed, denied, annihilated, lost, realised, transformed, awakened, saved, deified, divinised, sanctified, atoned, united and/or resurrected!

5. The Transpersonal Self: Post-Jungian

The Jungian approach to mysticism is well known and so this paper seeks to elucidate post-Jungian developments in the transpersonal perspective within transdisciplinarity. Without dwelling on Jungian terms, it serves as a foundational reminder that Jung described the Archetype of the Self as ‘a construct that serves to express an unknowable essence which we cannot grasp as such, since by definition it transcends our powers of comprehension … the “God within us”’.9 For Jung, ‘the self is transcendendent’ (Stein 2010, p. 152) and God a ‘transcendental mystery, the mystery of all mysteries’ (Clendenen 2012). The self is the ‘transcendent ‘centre’ of the personality’ (McLean 2011, p. 41). Ulanov and Dueck suggest that such numinosity of the self is reminiscent of the Christian theological concept of the ‘imago Dei’ (Ulanov and Dueck 2008, p. 22), whose views of Jung compliment trans-/interdisciplinarity: ‘Jung is best understood in the context of the complex web of interrelationships between modernity, religion, and psychology’ (Ulanov and Dueck 2008, p. 6). However, Jung said, ‘Buddha may be just as right as Jesus’ (Jung 1973, as cited in Tyler 2015), showing, broadly speaking, early inter-spiritual leanings before such terms/concepts became popular parlance in transpersonal academia and practice. Interestingly, Tyler regards Jung’s (inter-spiritual) perspective as a point at which Jung ‘betrays his theological naïvety’ (Tyler 2015), citing in support the differences regarding human salvation in Buddhism and Christianity, respectively. However, in this paper (which brings into focus a more nuanced understanding of transpersonal post-Jungian models of the self and psyche), contemporary, transpersonal, inter-spiritual/inter-mystical10 perspectives of ‘deep ecumenism’ (Fox 2000, pp. 2–25) and post Jungian views of ‘Reality as Consciousness’ (Wilber 1993, pp. 37–69) must be distinguished from any reductionist theological-only arguments of mere interreligious syncretism (Fox 2000, pp. 2–25), precisely because transpersonal psychology is not a theology and therefore does not operate within a theological-only disciplinary framework of thinking about such as ‘syncretism’. This is a very important nuanced point within transdisciplinarity, because a heightened clarity of recognition of differences in crossdisciplinary thinking and practice is key, yet often not apparent to scholars rooted in a singular discipline. Conversely, it can be seen as more obvious to those with crossdisciplinary qualifications. Psychology is not primarily concerned with the theological considerations of whether or how the outcome of its depth understanding of the human psyche supports or otherwise the theologies of any particular world religion, spirituality or philosophy, perhaps analogous to the focus of scientific developments over centuries as to our understanding of the sun revolving around the Earth (rather than vice versa) or of the origins of Creation which challenged the established theological assumptions of the day, thus encouraging and enabling consequential theological developments. Worldwide scholarship of transpersonal psychology is concerned with illuminating, with increased accuracy, both scientifically and experientially, our understanding of the human psyche and consciousness, for people of all cultures/religions/spiritualities, regardless of any theological implications for any particular religion/spirituality/philosophy. What is revealed as a perspectival understanding of the depth psyche is universal, independent of religious beliefs, although religious/theological beliefs can and do shape the emergent ego-level development within individual psyches.

6. Transpersonal: Post Jungian Developments

Wilber’s ground-breaking model of the ‘Spectrum of Consciousness’ (Wilber 1993) represents consciousness metaphorically as a spectrum of different bands, a ‘Holarchy’, ranging from matter to body to mind to soul to spirit, as interconnected whole-parts, called ‘holons’ within ‘the perennial philosophy’s Great Chain of Being’ (Wilber 1993, p. xvii). Wilber views consciousness as both ‘Ground and Goal’ (Wilber 1993, p. xvi) of the psycho-spiritual journey of life, which has similar resonance with Rahner’s theological ‘origin and goal’ of all reality (Kilby 2007) and Myers’ Christian view that ‘God is the ground of all being’ (Myers 2010, p. 111), echoing Eckhart’s ‘Grunt’ (Woods 1986, p. 42). Therefore, transpersonal psychology and spirituality meet in the similar territory of a mysterious mystical landscape, each using their own frameworks of understanding to help further humanity’s understanding of the individual’s relation with God/Divinity from birth, through childhood to adulthood.

Jung’s ‘Romantic U-turn’11 in the second half of life has been well critiqued by post-Jungian theorists and self-psychology theorists, such as Kohut and Kernberg, who have each developed profound transpersonal and self-psychological models of the psyche to explain with conceptual clarity the relationship between the development of individual ego structures in the psyche from birth in relation to the collective unconscious of the self, the transcendent unity of Divine Consciousness. Post-Jungian Michael Washburn’s model of the psyche suggests that the infant psyche starts out in a kind of ‘unconscious union/heaven’ with the transpersonal depths of the psyche, which he termed ‘The Dynamic Ground’ (Washburn 1995), out of which paradisiacal state of ‘Unconscious Heaven’ (which state Wilber conversely argued as better termed ‘Unconscious Hell’), the infant’s psyche will develop and unconsciously long to return to during adulthood (Washburn 1995, pp. 121–31). Interestingly, this transpersonal model of the infantile stage shares theological resonance with Rahner’s ‘Infinite Openness to the Infinite’ (Bunge 2001, pp. 406–45) of the infant. Therefore, for Washburn, infantile union with ‘The Dynamic Ground’ is lost in the infantile early years and the infant’s developing sense of self in the ego development in the psyche moves into a disconnected egoic state (which Wilber and Washburn concur as ‘Conscious Hell’), before what Washburn articulates as then making a ‘U-turn’ to ‘The Dynamic Ground’ of the prior infantile consciousness in adulthood in ‘Conscious Heaven’ (Washburn 1995, pp. 121–31).

Post-Jungian Wilber considers such Jungian–Washburn depth psychology to be a ‘Romantic’12 view of the psyche that commits ‘the Pre/Trans Fallacy’.13 In short, Wilber argues that the infantile loss of ‘unconscious union’ with the Divine is impossible because to lose oneness with that Ground is to cease to exist (Wilber 1996b). Wilber, therefore, propounds a theory of linear ascent ‘Up From Eden’ (Wilber 1996b), rather than a return to Eden-like infantile consciousness which is conversely broadly articulated as a psycho-spiritual journey from ‘Unconscious Hell’ to ‘Conscious Hell’ to ‘Conscious Heaven’. However, as a nuance, given the understanding of what is generally termed in infancy as the existence of a rudimentary ‘body-ego’ together with soul-consciousness in infancy, my own integral view might consider a conjoined paradoxical use of ‘Unconscious Heaven/Hell’ to be more complete/accurate descriptor, rather than maintaining a distinct Wilber–Washburn polemic. However, Wilber’s complex model does recognise the subtleties that individuals have different ‘waves and streams’ of psycho-spiritual development towards individuation and ultimate ‘realisation’ or ‘awakening’, as a person might be very highly developed in one area of consciousness (intellectual/academic) yet unconscious/undeveloped in another (poor depth psychological insight/self-awareness) (Wilber 2000a). Washburn’s ‘spiral’ model of development views psycho-spiritual development as a process of ‘regression in the service of transcendence and regeneration in spirit’ (Washburn 1995, p. 7) to a higher, more integrated level of consciousness. Post-Jungian Stanislav Grof suggests an integrated view that progression alternates with regression (Wilber 2000b). However, post-Jungian A.H. Almaas’ model of psycho-spiritual thought articulates the infant psyche as being both in contact with Divine Ground or ‘Essence’ (Almaas 1998) but without self-conscious recognition of it and that progression on the ‘inner journey home’ (Almaas 2004) in the psyche, therefore, involves a regression for only a part of our consciousness as ‘Essence’ as the eternal nature of the soul is outside of time, such that recognising our true self, one with God/Presence, is a conscious recognition of our inherent true nature as Essence/Presence (Almaas 1998).

In a nutshell, the much-debated transpersonal question of the ‘Pre/Trans Fallacy’ essentially attempts to express theoretically the relationship between the emerging psychology of human ego development in the mind from birth in relation to the depth, essential Ground/Spirit/Divine/Source14 of the human psyche, thereby taking the interdisciplinarity inherent in the academic question of the relationship between psychology and spirituality to even deeper levels of understanding and necessary ongoing inquiry and trans-/interdisciplinary scholarship. I consider that such theological–psychological–transpersonal transdisciplinarity is crucial for an increasingly complete understanding of the human psyche and the soul’s potential union with God/Divinity in mysticism and cannot be ignored or sidelined by any singular discipline within mysticism scholarship, which would, therefore, remain an inherently partial, non-inter-/transdisciplinary view of mysticism. As all mystics have a psyche, mysticism scholarship cannot ignore the various psychological schools of thought in relation to theories/models of the psyche. In order to understand the human psyche in its complete sense of a body–mind–soul–spirit (or pre-personal/personal/transpersonal/transcendental) continuum, both the disciplines of psychology and theology are essential in order to build as accurate a model of understanding of the psyche as possible to understand with increasing clarity how the human ego develops in the mind in relation to its underlying continuum of depth soul-consciousness, which, in the mystical life, sees through the surface reality of self-reflective ego-consciousness to its underlying pre-existing/birth depths of soul-level consciousness in the psyche.

Therefore, an integrative–transpersonal view of the psyche and the ongoing ‘Pre/Trans Fallacy’ debate sheds light on the complex areas of mysticism scholarship, notably, the relationship between mystical states/phenomena experienced through ‘method’ or ‘grace’. The transpersonal perspective of the ‘Spectrum of Consciousness’ can explain how mystical states/phenomena can arise at different levels and stages of psycho-spiritual development in different people, therefore allowing for the possibility of ‘spontaneous awakenings’ or ‘visions’ (such as those seen in many female medieval mystics, such as Hildegard and Julian) as well as those that arise following years of contemplative and meditative depth training in established spiritual/mystical traditions. In reality, there can often be an interplay of ‘method’ and ‘grace’ in global mysticisms and so the transpersonal perspective of ‘Consciousness’ is a crucial additional post-modern perspective that is a valuable contribution to post-modern mysticism scholarship in trans-/interdisciplinarities.

In essence, post-Jungian transpersonal psychology models view the depths of the psyche as essentially ‘inter-spiritual’ in the sense that the experiential, ontological reality of the depths of consciousness cannot be subsumed by any one denominational theology. Wilber says, ‘Whether Reality is called Brahman, God, Tao, Dharmakaya, Void, or whatever is of no great concern, for all alike point to that state of non-dual Mind wherein the universe is not split into the seer and the seen’ (Wilber 1993, p. 67). Consciousness is inherently, experientially, non-denominational beyond all theological concepts, which we shall further examine in this paper as a thread of thought in Merton. Indeed, Alan Watts describes ‘Christ’ as ‘the realization that there is no separate “I”’ (Watts 1987, p. 131) and ‘God’ as ‘the undefinable this’ (Watts 1987, p. 130). However, the transpersonal model may pose a challenge to exclusivist Christians or medievalist scholars of mysticism who tend to label all psychological approaches with the broad brush of ‘perennialism’ without fully appreciating the significance of the transpersonal dimensions of the psyche, beyond theological conceptualising, to experiential dimensions of ontological consciousness in the mind–soul–spirit spectrum of the human psyche (Wilber 2000a). Transpersonal models of consciousness must not be conflated with perennialist–theological-level definitional labelling, but seen in their own scholarly light because consciousness studies are not limited or informed by theologies and therefore cannot be confined to any theological labelling; hence, transdisciplinarity is mooted as the most complete perspectival gestalt15 for mysticism scholarship of the future.

It is important, yet perhaps understandably hard, for theologians to realise that Jungians and post-Jungians are simply not attempting to create any religious ‘theology’ and, further, are not thinking primarily in a theological way, which conversely, theologians are used to doing. In short, theologians tend to theologise about psychological theories from their own way of thinking theologically, rather than from an informed standpoint of qualifications in psychological thinking, both professional and academic. This line of theological thinking in relation to psychologies has been the subject of much theological questioning of Jungian psychology: ‘Why should Christians read Jung? … His theory, some argue, is a rival religion that assumes an unfallen human nature, so mired in the morass of subjectivism that life, death, and resurrection of Christ have no objective meaning. Phillip Rieff concluded, “Better an outright enemy [Freud} than an untrustworthy friend [Jung]”‘ (Ulanov and Dueck 2008, pp. 3–4).

Importantly, transpersonal theories have a different intention to ‘theological thinking’, in that the focus and function of transpersonal psychologies are interested primarily in creating various models of the psyche and theories of consciousness that provide useful and ever-penetrating insight into the depth psyche to where union with God/Divine Consciousness is possible for the soul to experience and have ensuing illumined experiential knowledge about. To illustrate this point, the use of archetypal symbols (Trinity/Unity) within psychology would be used primarily with symbolic interest at an archetypal level of human consciousness in the psyche and are not used within exclusively theological contextual understandings within dogmatics: not for any theological purpose in terms of aligning psychological thought with traditional Christianity’s theologies of the Trinity and the divinity of Christ as against the Non-conformity of the theological unity of dissenting Unitarian theologies or vice versa. Transpersonal models/theories and Christian theologies all shed light on the ‘absolute mystery’ (Kilby 2007, p. xviii) of God of whom/which theologian Karl Rahner considers we cannot ultimately say anything (ibid.). Trans-/interdisciplinarity in mysticism is, therefore, mooted as preventing any one discipline from dominating the academic field of mysticism scholarship, such as subsuming psychologies under theological thinking/labelling.

An example of progressive interdisciplinary mystical–theological–psychological thinking is Richard Rohr, whose theological thinking ‘leans heavily on’ (Winner 2011, p. 39) Jung in his own exploration of the transformational journey in the first and second halves of life (Rohr 2012, 2013). Rohr sees the modern psychological word ‘ego’ (which Rohr suggests is what Jesus meant by ‘wineskin’ (Rohr 2012, p. 36) as being closer to the original intended meaning of the biblical word ‘sarx’16 which is often translated as ‘flesh’, closer to Williams’ view of the ‘flesh’ as ‘life dominated by self-directed instinct’ (Williams 1999). Rohr speaks of a return in the second half of life to a ‘second naïveté’ (which echoes John Izzo’s ‘second innocence’ (Izzo 2004)), which Rohr says that Ricoeur regarded as ‘a return to the joy of our first naïveté, but now totally new, inclusive, and mature thinking’.17 Rohrian perspective on the complex transpersonal debate on the question of the ‘Pre/Trans fallacy’ expresses transpersonal dimensional psychology in compatible Christian terms. Rohr says, ‘spirit is the whole self, the Christ self that we were born into and yet must re-discover’18 and that the journey is ‘a spiral and never a straight line’ (Rohr 2012, p. 94), which compliments Washburn’s spiral model, as distinct from Wilber’s largely linear model. Rohr’s views of ‘The Universal Christ’ (Rohr 2019b), (echoing Ilia Delio (2011), Andrew Harvey (1999), Bede Griffiths (1990, 1992, 1994)) and ‘the eternal mystery of matter and spirit as one’ (Rohr 2014, p. 210), compliment Wilber’s spectrum of consciousness (Wilber 1993), similarly referring to ‘the Great Chain of Being’ (Rohr 2019b, p. 57) of medieval theologians. Rohr says that the ‘Universal Christ’ is a word for ‘the transcendent within of everything in the universe’ (Rohr 2019b, pp. 5–21) and, further, echoes McFague in saying ‘The body of God, shaped by the Christic paradigm, is also the Cosmic Christ’ (McFague 1993, p. 179, as cited in Rohr 2019a). Rohr presents a contemporary model of Christian Spirituality which is very in tune with post-Jungian psycho-spiritual models of the psyche—of the ‘Universal Christ’ which is ‘larger than any one … religion’, such that its ‘radical inclusivity is a threat to any power structure and any form of arrogant thinking’ (Rohr 2019b, p. 35).

However, integrating/considering transpersonal psychology and its inter-spiritual universal understandings of consciousness (Kelley 2021) into Christian Spirituality and mysticism may be challenging to some because it presents a model of the depth psyche, one with Divine Consciousness, howsoever Divinity is named across different faith traditions. However, for progressive Christians like Rohr, ‘No one religion will ever encompass the depth of such faith’ (Rohr 2019b, p. 22). Rohr’s theological views are, therefore, resonant with the Wilberian transpersonal view that consciousness itself is ontologically non-denominational in the sense that it transcends-yet-includes all the conceptual divisions of faith in ontological reality. As Wilber says, consciousness just ‘is’ and, ‘to know Reality is to be Reality’ (Wilber 1993, p. 67). Indeed, Karl Rahner considers theologically that we cannot distinguish knowing from ‘infinite Being’ (Kilby 2007, p. 2). Thus, from a post-Jungian (and specifically Wilberian) view, the developing understanding of human consciousness in relation to the Divine can be enhanced both by transpersonal psychology and theology through the different perspectives of all faiths without being dominated by any one doctrinal view (Wilber 2017), which is inherently partial in its theological remit. We will see that Merton’s progressive interreligious thinking has resonance with post-modern transpersonal psychologies, shared in relation to action and contemplation.

Developments in transpersonal psychology, therefore, challenge Ulanov’s position on Jungian psychology that depth psychology’s ‘ministry has been achieved if it unshackles us, opens us to the housing of the ego … It is only religion, theology, the churches’ life that dares to … brave the unknown waters … into the unknown’ (Ulanov 2000, pp. 18–19). It is my experience as a transpersonal psychotherapist that spirituality’s transpersonal/transcendent ‘unknown’ is the very territory of transpersonal psychotherapy, in journeying alongside another experientially in plumbing the ‘unknown’, unconscious depths of the soul-mind/psyche in relation to Spirit/God/Divine, howsoever this ‘unknown’ is ‘named/conceptualized’ in world faiths: Brahman/Allah/Dharmakaya/Tao/Being/God. Indeed, psychotherapists have already been considered as ‘the secular priesthood of our time’ (Vaughan n.d.) in their function of assisting in the transformation of the soul/psyche.

Post-Jungian Almaas uses the concept of ‘Essence/Presence’ or ‘True Nature’ (Almaas 1998) to describe ‘the fundamental nature of what we are’ (Almaas 2017, p. 1), synonymous with ‘Spirit’ (Almaas 2017, pp. 1–25) which can only ever be experiential, (not conceptually only) realising the following: ‘the experiential recognition of spirit as spirit—experientially knowing that spirit is and knowing spirit in its purity’ (Almaas 2017, p. 1). For Almaas, the realisation of ‘True Nature’ is a process of ‘realization and development of … the individual consciousness, … equated with the Western notion of soul’ (Almaas 2017, p. 2). Almaas recognises that ‘all such expressions of soul, spirit and True Nature can become ‘problematic’ and involve ‘playing with words’ because recognising our True Nature experientially ‘means directly seeing that it is not constructed’ (Almaas 2017, p. 10). Almaas emphasises that true nature is not a ‘construction of the mind. It is not an emotion or reaction of the heart. It is not a sensation of the body’ (Almaas 2017, p. 22). It is a ‘direct experiential non-conceptual unmediated realisation. It is not imagination … not a construction … or theory’ (Almaas 2017, p. 24). Conceptualisation is inherent in the tools of all languages which leads to the inevitable outcome of the ‘objectification and reification’ (Almaas 2017, p. 88) of spiritual dimensions which can only be realised through direct experience (Almaas 2017, p. v). The transpersonal ‘unity consciousness’ beyond the conceptualisation and reification of opposite-concepts in the ‘spectrum of consciousness’ of the depth psyche is portrayed, in art–theological analogy, by The Sleeping Hermaphrodite, now considered in relation to ‘action and contemplation’ in mystical theologies.

7. A Transpersonal Perspective on ‘Action and Contemplation’

Almaas’ articulation of the ‘direct experiential non-conceptual unmediated realisation’ of our ‘True Nature’ or ‘Spirit’ in the depths of the human psyche, as a mind–soul–spirit continuum, in accord with the Wilberian ‘Spectrum of Consciousness’, is at the heart of this paper’s view of the perennially contested question of action and contemplation in mysticism. I have briefly summarised the profundity of the transpersonal perspective on the human psyche, in particular, elucidating transpersonal psychologies’ various articulations of the relationship between the levels of self-reflective egoic consciousness out of or in relation to the transcendental/transpersonal depths of the psyche, namely, the ‘ego’ variously in relation to Washburn’s ‘Dynamic Ground’, or Almaas’ ‘Essence’ or Wilber’s ‘Up from Eden’. I will now weave in the transpersonal psychological thread of understanding of mystical-depth ‘consciousness’ in the psyche through an interreligious field of comparative religious approaches to action, contemplation and non-action. I will draw on the mystical thinkers of three world religious mystical traditions of Buddhism, Hinduism and mystical Islam/Sufism: Thích Nhât Hanh, Swami Sivananda and Hazrat Inayat Khan, respectively, in relation to the progressive mystical thought of Thomas Merton, drawing on his lesser examined work ‘Inner Experience’, mooted as compatible with some post-modern post-Jungian transpersonal psychologies in transdisciplinarity (Merton 2003).

In presenting the Sleeping Hermaphrodite as an art–theological metaphor for the depth transpersonal perspective of ‘unity consciousness’ (Wilber 2000a) in the union of action and contemplation in mysticism, it does not seek to ‘set in stone’ the perennially contested oscillation between the apparent theological poles between contemplation and action, but rather to exemplify a depth perspective elucidated by transpersonal psychology. Transpersonal psychologies posit a view of the union of action and contemplation as a Jungian/post-Jungian ‘union of opposites’ (Jung 1953), or ‘action in inaction’,19 to coin the interreligious term of Hinduism’s Bhagavad Gita as well as Buddhism’s mindfulness and Sufism’s ‘Social Gathekas’ (Khan 2020) in transdisciplinary integral thinking: ‘At the deepest level of selfhood, what [Merton] later came to call the “transcendent Self”, there is no real distinction between contemplation and action’ (King 2001, p. 63). Therefore, The Sleeping Hermaphrodite is analogous to such ‘deepest level of selfhood’ or ‘transcendent Self’ that is revealed in both mystical theologies and transpersonal psychologies: the union of action and contemplation.

8. Buddhism, Thich Nhât Hanh and Merton

Mystical unitive consciousness is first explored within the context of ‘Engaged Buddhism’, as coined by the late Thich Nhât Hanh, for whom there was ‘no contradiction between practising mindfulness and engaging in social action. You do not cease practising mindfulness to engage in social action; you extend your contemplative practice to include it’ (King 2001, p. 151). Specifically, mindfulness entails ‘keeping one’s consciousness alive to the present reality’, facilitated by ‘conscious breathing’ such that any action or social action is best served when ‘performed with full awareness’ (King 2001, p. 88) or in full awake consciousness. With ‘language remarkably similar to what one finds in Merton’s writings at this time’, Nhât Hanh refers to feeling ‘caught between two opposing selves–the ‘false self’ imposed by society and …’true self’ (King 2001, p. 77). Similar references can be found in Merton’s study of Zen Buddhism with D. T. Suzuki, in which Suzuki explained of Zen Zazen meditation that a person’s awareness becomes centred not in the ‘small self’ but in the ‘large self’, which Buddhists call ‘Buddha Nature’: ‘the ultimate emptiness or poverty of the self’ (King 2001, p. 108). Merton speaks of the inner self as ‘our true self’ (Merton 2003, p. 11), where one discovers the secret of one’s depth spiritual identity in God, as ‘one with’ God: ‘The inner self is as secret as God and, like Him, it evades every concept that tries to seize hold of it with full possession’ (Merton 2003, p. 7). The echoes of transpersonal psychologies of the ‘true self’20 become clear, as ‘direct experiential non-conceptual unmediated realisation. It is not imagination … not a construction … or theory’ (Almaas 2017, p. 24). Transdisciplinary similarities within post-modern understandings of transpersonal psychologies on the essential nature of the ‘true self’ or ‘true nature’ (Almaas 2004, pp. 247–67) as Divine Consciousness in the transpersonal/transcendental dimensions of the source/depths of ‘the Great Chain of Being’ (Rohr 2019b, p. 57) are considered as the depth dimension of the human psyche of ‘I AM’ consciousness/being. Ultimately, for Merton, who said he would probably ‘die of spiritual asphyxiation’ if he could not ‘breathe Zen’,21 action and contemplation are ‘intrinsically related’ (King 2001, p. 62): ‘Contemplation, if it is genuine, must express itself in action on behalf of others, while social action unaccompanied by contemplation invariably grows sterile and unproductive. Contemplation and action are required for a fully integrated spirituality’ (King 2001, p. 6).

Interestingly, Merton concluded that the Trappist monastic norm of ‘active contemplation’ produced ‘very few “pure contemplatives”‘ as they ‘were much too active for that’ and so the Trappist norm was ‘not Merton’s idea of contemplation’ (King 2001, p. 13). From a transpersonal perspective, this observation is suggestive of Trappists not really being true contemplatives at the level of realisation of the true self, ‘one with God’, but introverted at the level of the ‘false self’ or ‘ego-consciousness’. Instead, the level of contemplation that Merton sought was a contemplative–solitudinous union with God, commensurate with the level of unity consciousness in transpersonal models of the psyche. Ultimately for Merton, ‘contemplation is our awakening to this mysterious and elusive self, this unknown ‘I’ beyond observation and reflection’, in which the unitive state of consciousness, action and contemplation are ‘intrinsically related’ (King 2001, p. 62): ‘Far from being essentially opposed to each other, interior contemplation and external activity are two aspects of the same love of God’ and further, ‘the activity of the contemplative … must be born of contemplation and must resemble it’ (Merton 1972, pp. 39–40, as cited in King 2001, p. 62). Merton’s views bear uncanny similarities to Buddhist mindfulness whilst engaging in activities, such that ‘For Merton, contemplation and the act of solitude is an action because it expresses love and points towards the source of love: God’ (Aguilar 2011, p. 72). We are reminded of Merton’s views that are so resonant with post-modern post-Jungian psychologies that ‘At the deepest level of selfhood, what he later came to call the “transcendent Self”, there is no real distinction between contemplation and action’ (King 2001, p. 63). Therefore, the ‘hermaphroditic union’ of The Sleeping Hermaphrodite represents this level of unity consciousness in the depth psyche at the level of the transcendent self. Engaged Buddhism, as an exemplar of this depth union of action and contemplation, has been extended to more generally accepted vernacular ideas of ‘Engaged Spirituality’ or ‘Engaged Christianity’ and ‘Engaged Contemplation’, thus making more popular and accessible the practical reality of the expressed union of action and contemplation in the activities of the self-realised contemplative mystic.

9. Hinduism’s Bhagavad Gita and Merton

The theme of mystical unitive consciousness represented by The Sleeping Hermaphrodite is explored as interwoven through Hindu thought, with elucidation from Merton’s commentaries on Hinduism’s Bhagavad Gita. In Hinduism, this depth dimensional theme is discovered to have been long present in the allegory-image of the ‘Chariot’ that represents the full spectrum of human consciousness as understood in the Hindu tradition: from the five senses of the physical body to the Superconscious soul of ‘I AM’ consciousness driving the chariot. The imagery of the chariot to represent the full spectrum of consciousness of a human being will be examined more closely to elucidate its resonance with transpersonal psychologies and therefore act as a bridge for understanding further the union of action and contemplation in contemplative depth mysticism in transdisciplinarity.

Hinduism’s Bhagavad Gita (400–200 BCE) perhaps contains some of the oldest scripture relating to the age-old dilemma of the call to action in the soul’s relation to God. As Merton wrote, the Bhagavad Gita ‘can be seen as the great treatise on the “Active Life”’. However, Merton adds that the Gita ‘is really something more, for it tends to fuse worship, action, and contemplation in a fulfilment of daily duty which transcends all three by virtue of a higher consciousness: a consciousness of acting passively, being an obedient instrument of a transcendent will’ (Merton 2021, p. 316).

In the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna is called to fight in a battle but does not want to fight. Krishna, as an incarnation of God (Vishnu), reminds Arjuna (Soul) of his duty to fight as a Warrior and encourages him to fight. Obviously, this story is not an easy or palatable one to hear in this day and age and Merton acknowledges that the Gita presents a problem in a post-modern context as it appears to justify war. Merton acknowledges that Krishna’s call for Arjuna to fight illicits comparable interreligious analogies of wars: ‘we are uneasily reminded of the fact that in Hinduism as well as in Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, there is a concept of a “holy war” which is “willed by God”’, such as medieval Christian Crusades or a literal jihad of fundamentalist Islam. However, Merton, like Mahatma Ghandhi,22 recognised that the Bhagavad Gita is ‘not a justification of war’ (Merton 2021, p. 318) and like all good mystical texts, like the Greek Iliad, has a hidden, gnostic, allegorical level of meaning of Arjuna’s union with God or ‘Krishna consciousness’—that of the duty (dharma) of the inner spiritual battle, or we might say, interreligiously and analogously, the mystical inner-pilgrimages to find the ‘holy grail’ or the ‘inner haj’ or ‘interior spiritual jihad’ to the soul’s interior ‘Kaa’ba’ of the heart.

So, the interior dimension of God-Consciousness, which unites contemplative union with ensuing action, is at the heart of the Bhagavad Gita. To elucidate the imagery of the chariot, the fully occupied chariot represents the full spectrum of possible human consciousness, which is not dissimilar to the Wilberian ‘Spectrum of Consciousness’. The outer chariot represents the container of the physical body which is pulled by the five horses representing the five senses of taste, sight, hearing, smell and touch. The reins represent the mind that the charioteer uses to drive his chariot/vehicle. The driver/charioteer represents the human intelligence of the Divine Super-Soul (Krishna) while the passenger behind Krishna symbolises a person’s soul (Arjuna). Therefore, the driving force of God-/Krishna-Consciousness represents our true identity or highest transcendental ‘I AM’ consciousness that is the real driver of the body–mind vehicle symbolised by the chariot. Put another way, Arjuna, representing the human soul, is actually a passenger in the chariot, which is ultimately driven by Krishna, representing Divine ‘I AM’ consciousness. In Hinduism, Krishna represents the ‘conditioned form’ of the Godhead, Brahman: ‘Unconditioned brahman is pure Consciousness, Pure Act—but not activity’. Therefore, in this analogy of the chariot, as consciousness, we see how the union of action and contemplation in a natural way of ‘action in inaction’ emanates from the consciousness of the divinely realised soul, the mystic who has attained union with God. It is in the famous words of the Gita, where the union of action and inaction is expressed in relation to the soul’s true Identity in God, as Krishna famously says the following: ‘One who sees inaction in action, and action in inaction, is intelligent among men, and he is in the transcendental position, although engaged in all sorts of activities’.23 Swami Sivananda gives an interpretation of this famous discourse in explaining that ‘In common parlance action means ‘movement of the body…and inaction means ‘to sit quiet’. However, Sivananda explains that the problem is ‘the idea of agency, the idea I am the doer ‘ and that ‘if you identify yourself with the actionless Self, no matter what work or how much of it is done, action is no action at all. This is inaction in action’. Sivananda further explains that ‘The Self is actionless (Akarta or non-doer, Nishkriya or without work). The body and the senses perform the action. The actions of the body and the senses are falsely and wrongly attributed by the ignorant to the actionless self. Therefore, the ignorant man thinks, ‘I act’ (Sivananda 2013, pp. 88–89). Thomas Merton similarly understood the deeper meaning of what is referred to as ‘Action in Inaction’ in saying that it is ‘in surrendering a false and illusory liberty on the superficial level that man unites himself with the inner ground of reality and freedom in himself which is the will of God, of Krishna, of Providence, of Tao’. Merton acknowledges that these ‘concepts do not all exactly coincide, but they have much in common’ (Merton 2021, p. 320). Merton concluded that ‘The Gita, like the Gospels, teaches us to live in an awareness of an inner truth that exceeds the grasp of our thought and cannot be subject to our own control’. Merton intuited that ‘There is always a possibility that what an Eastern mystic describes as Self is what the Western mystic will describe as God, because we shall see presently that the mystical union between the soul and God renders them in some sense “undivided” (though metaphysically distinct) in spiritual experience’ (Merton 2003, p. 13). Indeed, Merton speaks specifically of ‘Christian self-realization’ (Merton 2003, p. 22), in saying that ‘if we enter into ourselves, find our true self, and then pass “beyond” the inner “I”, we sail forth into the immense darkness in which we confront the “I AM” of the Almighty’ (Merton 2003, p. 11). Here, we are reminded of Merton’s ‘The New Consciousness’ (Merton 1968, pp. 15–32) in which he writes of ‘a form of ‘pure consciousness, in which the subject as such “disappears”’ (Merton 1968, p. 24). Recalling Merton’s thoughts on the union of action and contemplation, he articulated that ‘At the deepest level of selfhood, what he later came to call the “transcendent Self”, there is no real distinction between contemplation and action’ (King 2001, p. 63) and further that ‘the activity of the contemplative … must be born of contemplation and must resemble it’ (Merton 1972, pp. 39–40). As an art–theological analogy for the union of action and contemplation, I suggest that The Sleeping Hermaphrodite analogously ‘resembles’ the inaction-activity of the contemplative that is born of contemplative-depth mystical union: in the ‘transcendent Self’, where there is ‘no real distinction between contemplation and action’, as symbolised by the hermaphroditic ‘union of opposites’, such as ‘male and female’ born of God/Krishna/Unity-Consciousness or of the comparable ‘yin and yang’ of the Tao.

10. Sufi Mysticism, Hazrat Inayat Khan24 and Merton

Finally, this paper will engage with the dimension of Islamic mysticism, known as Sufism25 and its commitment to ‘social gathekas’ (Khan 2020): the harmony of outward action and the inner life of divine transformation to one’s true essential nature, one with God/Divine Consciousness. For the Sufi mystic, all action flows out of the ‘station’ (maqam) of Divine Illumination, the true psycho-spiritual transformation of the Sufi who is ‘In the World but not of it’.26 In this sense, Sufism’s ‘social gathekas’ embodies Merton’s aforesaid sentiment that ‘the activity of the contemplative … must be born of contemplation and must resemble it’ (Merton 1972, pp. 9–40). In Sufism, (which profoundly influenced Merton, who taught Sufism to a profound level to his novitiates at the Abbey of Gethsemane) (Baker and Henry 2005), we similarly discover an articulation of Merton’s depth insight that ‘At the deepest level of selfhood…the “transcendent Self”, there is no real distinction between contemplation and action’ (King 2001, p. 63) How is this insight similarly arrived at and subsequently articulated within a Sufi mystical context?

Sufism’s understanding of the soul is particularly resonant with the post-modern post-Jungian depth insights of the consciousness and/or intelligence of the human psyche and therefore, a good final exemplar for the purpose of this paper in illustrating the depth union of action and contemplation which is found in mystics who have reached a level/station/maqam of mystical unity consciousness or union of the soul with God, where the actions of the mystic are a harmonious outflowing of the soul’s conscious union with God/Divine Being. Sufism’s depth insight is often summarised by the following Hadith: ‘Man ‘arafa nafsahu faqad’ ârafa rabbahu’, meaning, ‘He who knows himself knows the Lord’ (Baker and Henry 2005, p. 22). Sufism, akin to many of the depth insights of transpersonal psychotherapeutic psycho-spiritual transformation, is an experientially based mystical wisdom that understands the human psyche to be a spectrum of consciousness/intelligence of the soul, one with God/Divine Being in its depths. As such, Islamic ma’rifah is a term which refers to this experiential mystical insight, ‘which means simply “knowledge” or “recognition”…a special, deeper knowledge of things that can only be achieved by personal transformation’ (ibid.). Specifically, ‘ma’rifah demands knowing one’s innermost self, and this self-knowledge is the prerequisite for knowing God … [yet] ma’rifah cannot be found in books’ (ibid.), but is ‘the direct knowledge of self and God that flows freely in the purified heart’ (Baker and Henry 2005, p. 23), following the transformational spiritual stages of ‘fanâ and baqâ, or “annihilation” and “subsistence”’ (Baker and Henry 2005, p. 27).

W. H. S. Gebel explains that the twelfth-century Sufi mystic Shahabuddin Suhrawardi ‘concluded that the essence of knowledge is self-revealing. There is a knowledge that is direct, immediate, and spontaneous. It is independent of analysis. The Sufis call it presential knowledge because it comes from a keen awareness of presence’ (Gebel 2018, p. 15). Similarly, for Rohr, in Christian mysticism, ‘the word “mysticism” simply means experiential knowledge of spiritual things, as opposed to book knowledge, second hand knowledge, or even church knowledge’ (Rohr 2019b, p. 1).

From the transpersonal perspective, the Sufi process of transformation through the ecstatic mysticism of fanâ and baqâ is complimentary to the transpersonal perspective of the psyche and particularly potent to the ‘Pre/Trans Fallacy’ debate, when seen as a ‘Spectrum of Consciousness’, as the self-reflective ego level of identity is ‘seen/passed through’ and transcended to what is ‘beyond the personal’ (transpersonal). Khan says,

Very often people are afraid of reading in Buddhist books where the interpretation of nirvana is annihilation. No one wants to be annihilated, and people are very much afraid when they read “annihilation”. It is only a matter of the word–the same in Sanskrit is a beautiful word. The same is the word fana’ of the Sufis. Translated in English it is “annihilation”, but when we understand, it is “going through”; it really means “to go through.” And to Pass through what? Through the false conception, which is necessary first, and to arrive at the true realization.

(Khan 2017, p. 295)

Khan speaks of the ‘annihilation’ or ‘death’ of the ego (or ego level of identity) in terms of it being better expressed in words such as a ‘passing/going through’ of the false ego self-reflective self in the psyche to realising the ‘true divine self’, one with Divinity, the subsistence of the soul with God. This, in turn, compliments Merton’s level of understanding of ‘pure consciousness’, at which level of realisation/integration, action and contemplation are united in unity consciousness, which is beyond duality. Importantly, this is not psychologically the same as preconsciousness or unconsciousness. Therefore, the transpersonal perspective offers a new perspectival lens of unity consciousness through which to view mysticism’s action and contemplation in line with Merton’s ‘pure consciousness’. This subtle shift in transpersonal perspective from duality (of ego consciousness) to ‘unity consciousness’ is not to be confused with ‘explaining’ or ‘reducing’ mystical ecstatic union to the level of the union of action and contemplation per se in the traditional ways of thinking about action and contemplation in the current mysticism scholarship. Instead, it is articulating a union of action and contemplation with respect to the realised level of ‘pure consciousness’, which is a given clarity of understanding from the transpersonal perspective, namely, the transpersonal/transcendental dimension of ‘unity consciousness’ in the ‘Spectrum of Consciousness’ in the psyche.

Sufism’s experiential path of mystical transformation can be further illumined by Inayat Khan’s understanding of the word ‘soul’ (psyche) as a ‘condition of intelligence’: ‘Intelligence, in its original aspect, is the essence of life, the spirit of God. But when this intelligence is caught in an accommodation such as the body and mind, its predisposition of knowing—it’s original nature—then knows; and that knowing soul becomes consciousness’ (Khan 2016, p. 293). God is metaphorically alikened to the Sun and souls as ‘rays of this sun’ (Khan 2016, p. 132). Inayat Khan says that Sufi ‘mystics contemplate upon the Being of God and so raise their consciousness above the limitations of time and space, so liberating their soul by lifting it to the divine spheres’ (Khan 2016, p. 134), as a ray of the Sun can raise to be reunited with its Sun-source of unity consciousness or intelligence. Sufi mystical understanding is resonant with what post-modern post-Jungian transpersonal psychology charts as the ‘Spectrum of Consciousness’ in the human psyche from pre-personal to personal to transpersonal and transcendental levels. Merton was influenced by Massignon, with whom he corresponded, and Massignon was, in turn, influenced by al-Hallâj. Massingnon writes that ‘Hallâjian psychology…allows man the guiding rule and basic unity of an immaterial principle: qalb, heart, or ruh, spirit’. He ‘declares mystical union to be real; far from being the total disappearance of the heart… it is its sanctifying resurrection’. He explains that the ‘final covering of the heart…is the sirr, the latent personality, the implicit consciousness, the deep subconscious, the secret cell walled up [and hidden] to every creature, the “inviolate virgin”’.27 For ‘al-Hallâj and for Massingnon, “the virgin” is the innermost, secret heart (as-sirr)- the deep subconscious of a person’.28 Merton sums up this transpersonal depth understanding of a person’s psyche revealed in Sufi mysticism beautifully:

Sufism looks at man as a heart and a spirit and a secret, and the secret is the deepest part. The secret of man is God’s secret; therefore, it is in God. My secret is God’s innermost knowledge of me, which He alone possesses. It is God’s secret knowledge of myself in Him … This is a very important concept in the contemplative life, both in Sufism and in the Christian tradition: To develop a heart that knows God, not just as a heart that loves God, but a heart that knows God.29

Merton ‘thirsted for the kind of structured mystical life which the Sufi path offered in which the active and passive modes of the mystical life could be balanced on the basis of a reality that transcended the accidentality of individual existence’.30 Sufism’s mystical unity, therefore, not only acknowledges the union of action and contemplation that is possible in the depths of the unitive consciousness of the mystic but embodies a path to the union that honours both the ‘active and passive modes of the mystical life’. Such a path is embodied in the wisdom teachings of the ‘social gathekas’ (Khan 2020).

In Sufi mysticism, like Hinduism’s Bhagavad Gita, the ‘greatest war, or the jihâd al-akhbâr, [is] the holy war against yourself, which is a lifelong battle’31 to self-knowledge, identity and union with God. Burton Thurston writes of Merton’s correspondence with Abdul Aziz ‘on the subject of prayer and contemplation’32 and that Merton had ‘begun to work on the similarities between the Sufis and the Oriental Christian mystics’.33 Merton saw the similarities of Sufi zikr/dhikr and Eastern Orthodox Christianity’s hesychastic prayer, the ‘Jesus Prayer’,34 in which ‘the culmination of the prayerful experience is the vision of Divine … Light which is thought to be identical with the Uncreated Light seen at Jesus’ Transfiguration’.35 Merton wrote, ‘Contemplative prayer is the recognition that we are the Sons of God, an experience of Who He is, and of His love for us, flowing from the operation of that love in us … it is He who is praying in us with a love too deep and too secret for us to comprehend’.36 Merton taught that zikr was connected with the Islamic Sufi Shahâddah, Lâ ilâha illa ‘Llâh’,37 meaning that ‘there is no God except God’.38 So, the Sufi practice of zikr serves as a continual ‘remembrance’ of God in the interior experiential knowing of God as our True Essential Self in and as and of God (Merton 2003). Indeed, Merton declared in a retreat for contemplative women, ‘I’m deeply impregnated with Sufism’ (Merton 1992, p. 266); such imagery of male impregnation is similarly compatible with hermaphroditic metaphor.

Merton writes that ‘our being somehow communicates directly with the Being of God, Who is “in us.” If we enter into ourselves, find our true self, and then pass “beyond” the inner “I”, we sail forth into the immense darkness in which we confront the “I AM” of the Almighty’ (Merton 2003, p. 11). The realisation of the ‘I AM’ level of consciousness or presence is referred to as a station/maqam of ‘solitude’. However, Sufism speaks of ‘Solitude in Company’, the station of having remembered one’s Divine Nature and awareness of one’s identity as God’s hidden treasure that was longing to be found in us. Action that flows out of that station of Divine Illumination is the true transformation, such that Sufism’s commitment to ‘social gathekas’ expresses the harmony of outward action and the inner life of transformation as a natural extension of the lived realisation of one’s true essential nature one with God/Divine Consciousness. Inayat Khan exemplifies such mystical harmony by saying, ‘My smallest work in the inner plane is worth more than all I do in the outer world’ (Khan 2005, p. 111).

11. Conclusions

In the first half of this paper, the post-Jungian transpersonal psychological understandings of the depths of the human psyche were outlined in depth, including the profound exposition of the relationship between the development in childhood of the more surface level of egoic consciousness/self-identity and the ‘Dynamic Ground’ of the psyche, which has theological resonance with Rahner’s ‘Infinite Openness to the Infinite’ (Bunge 2001, pp. 406–45) of the infant. The transpersonal perspective was then applied to interreligious mystical theology in a spirit of transdisciplinarity, as to how Merton’s own depth-contemplative, interreligious mystical theological thinking was ahead of its time in recognising similarities (if not syncretistic exactitudes) in the contemplative–mystical depths of Buddhism, Hinduism and Sufism, as represented by Nhât Hanh, Sivananda and Inayat Khan, respectively. A similar (if not identical) thread of teachings about an experiential depth contemplative union, possible in the human psyche, expressed variously as reached through the practices of mindfulness, meditation, contemplation and zikr was presented.

Such interreligious mystical teachings profoundly influenced Merton’s own thoughts about contemplation in relation to action, such that, ‘For Merton, contemplation and the act of solitude is an action because it expresses love and points towards the source of love: God’ (Aguilar 2011, p. 72). Merton’s insights are resonant with the post-Jungian insights of the depth psyche, which provide a useful model for mapping the depth layers of the human psyche, showing how ‘unitive consciousness’ is experientially possible for the mystic who can plumb those depths. Merton says, ‘Our awareness of our inner self can at least be the fruit of a purely natural and psychological purification. Our awareness of God is a supernatural participation in the light by which He reveals Himself interiorly as dwelling in our inmost self’ (Merton 2003, p. 12). In the mystical state of unitive consciousness, action and contemplation become ‘at one’ with each other, as actions flow from a mystical–contemplative unitive consciousness of the ‘I AM’ consciousness of Divine Being, in the depths of the human psyche, in the heart of everyone: the ‘action in inaction’ of the Bhagavad Gita.19

Post-Jungian Almaas calls such depth unitive consciousness, a self-realisation of ‘The Point of Existence’ (Almaas 2000), which has resonance with Massignon’s le point vierge. Griffiths reminds us that ‘for al-Hallâj and for Massignon, “the virgin” is the innermost, secret heart (as-sirr)-the deep subconscious of a person’.39 More specifically, if the innermost heart is ‘the virgin’, the other term in the phrase we are investigating, ‘the point’ puts one in mind of ‘the primordial point’ (an-nuqtah al-asliyyah) of which al-Hallâj and other Muslim mystics often speak. It is the apophatic point of the mystic’s deep knowledge of God. So the ‘virgin point’, le point vierge, in Massignon’s parlance is by analogy the last, irreducible, secret centre of the heart.40

The Sleeping Hermaphrodite represents, in art–theological analogy, the inner repose of depth unitive consciousness of the ‘virgin point’ of depth unitive ‘I AM’ consciousness: the ‘virgin’ that is ‘male-virgin’ and ‘female-virgin’, yet neither, both or only male-virgin or female-virgin in ‘virginal/pure unity’. The mystical level realisation of virginal/pure unity consciousness has plumbed the deepest depths of the psyche to unitive consciousness, beyond the duality of opposites, such as male and female. The Sleeping Hermaphrodite serves as a sculptural–mystical analogy for an illumined soul, ‘one with God’, in whose awakened consciousness through depth contemplation, action occurs as a simultaneous expression of contemplatively realised unity consciousness. The Sleeping Hermaphrodite shares ‘uncanny’ (Tiaynen-Qadir and Qadir 2023, pp. 51–77) resonance with the famous painting of the female-breasted Christ at Hospices Lessines in Belgium: ‘to unveil him as the nourisher, and thereby draw attention to ourselves as being nourished by more than literal food’ (Tiaynen-Qadir and Qadir 2023, p. 56). Similarly, Campbell’s hero’s journey denotes the ‘stage of “Apotheosis”, when the enlightened hero transgresses gender duality, admitting to the vision of God that is beyond gender, and discovering that the psychic and symbolic architecture of the self is both male and female’ (Tiaynen-Qadir and Qadir 2023, p. 33). Thus, The Sleeping Hermaphrodite as an art–theological analogy, compliments the post-modern, post-Jungian informed interdisciplinary ‘theory of “deep culture”‘ (Tiaynen-Qadir and Qadir 2023, p. 5). Further, to Hillman’s view that ‘if the usual ego-centered consciousness tends to divide and make hierarchies, the “imaginal consciousness [of the complete self] is hermaphroditic, uniting masculine and feminine [symbolic] polarities”‘ (Hillman 1975, as cited in Tiaynen-Qadir and Qadir 2023, p. 81), The Sleeping Hermaphrodite is an apt extended metaphor for the union of action and contemplation in contemplative depth mystical union in the psyche.

As the psyche is a ‘Spectrum of Consciousness’, The Sleeping Hermaphrodite sculptural image can, of course, be viewed through many different levels and lenses: either through ‘unitive consciousness’ or through an individual’s ‘ego-level’ self-reflective consciousness, which is progressing psycho-spiritually in potential. Therefore, it is natural that for most people, the union of action and contemplation (specifically in terms of Merton’s understanding of ‘pure consciousness’) is indeed ‘dormant’. However, the union of action and contemplation that Merton is articulating is a union at the level of what he calls ‘pure consciousness’ in the psyche, a level where active and contemplative potentialities are no longer ‘dormant’, but ‘actualised/realised’. In this ‘higher/integrated/realised’ sense, therefore, The Sleeping Hermaphrodite imagery sculpturally represents this level of union of actualised/realised potentialities, akin to the Jungian ‘conjunctio/marriage’ of the union of opposites (male/female, yin/yang, action/contemplation) and in a similar way that the Buddhist sculptural ‘Reclining Buddhas’ represent the pure awakened consciousness of the Buddha, which means, ‘Awakened One’. Similarly, we can see such ‘sleeping imagery’ for our awakened/transcendent consciousness in the Dionysian tradition of Neo-Platonic Christianity in that Pseudo-Dionysius says, ‘The sleep of God refers to the divine transcendence’ (Pseudo-Dionysius 1987, p. 288).

To reiterate, The Sleeping Hermaphrodite, as an art–theological analogy, in no way seeks to ‘set in stone’ a hermaphroditic solution that ends all theological oscillations in relation to the fluid dynamic between action and contemplation. Indeed, the very notion of being able to ‘set in stone’ a depth mystical understanding counters the very paradoxical nature at the apophatic heart of mysticism. However, if The Sleeping Hermaphrodite has caught the attention of any mystical scholars, for whom the transpersonal perspective of mysticism was previously an enigma, the analogy has performed a valuable service for transdisciplinarity in mysticism. Integrating the transpersonal dimensional understanding into mysticism scholarship is an exciting and burgeoning area and one which Merton would have relished had he had access to the post-modern transpersonal models of consciousness. This paper has raised a profound meditation on the question of action and contemplation in relation to the inter-/transdisciplinarity of mysticism, acknowledging the burgeoning academic studies into transpersonal levels of unity consciousness at the sleeping/unconscious virginal depth of the psyche. With some final words from Merton, which echo Suhrawardi’s ‘self-revealing’ (Gebel 2018, p. 15) knowledge: ‘This is the heart of theology: not solving the contradiction, but remaining in the midst of it, in peace, knowing that it is fully solved, but that the solution is secret, and will never be guessed until it is revealed’ (Merton 1966, p. 212).