Portal to the Numinous

Where is the portal to the numinous?  It used to be that animism (primitive cultures’ method) and later institutional, traditional religions provided this portal to the experience of God in our midst.  Many still find the latter capable of providing that portal.  But many throughout Western culture as a whole have lost the portal to contact the numinous and are floundering (or have just given up the quest) to find another “way out” of their soul’s discomfiture and a “way in” to that larger experience that is contact with the divine.   We have ‘lost the portal’ to our deepest reality as human beings and need to find another.  It occurs to me that the currently running television series “Once Upon a Time” (on ABC) is a modern myth of our ‘portal’ problem.  There are many false portals, with addictions (of all types) heading the list.  But the portal to the numinous experience is also clouded by the persistent, habituated negative patterns of behavior and thought processes of the ego that go ‘round and ‘round endlessly and un-fruitfully within each and every one of us. 

 

Traditional religious festivals (like Christmas and Easter for the Christian) have become incapable of competing with the shiny, ineluctable draw of consumerism and materialism which, for all their vapidity and illusion, provide a false, inadequate, empty facsimile of the dazzle and shimmering quality of a real encounter with the Holy at the center of the soul.  The soul longing for a true experience of God is not fooled by the encrustations, but sadly many do not even suspect that a genuine contact with the numinous is possible.  They have decided that it does not exist, so they no longer search for it, or they search for it in the wrong places.

Genuine contact with the numinous produces two totally opposite (i.e., paradoxical) reactions:

1. A “low”:  prostration, fear and trembling, a sense of un-cleaness and alienation from the divine, vulnerability and total inadequacy, and, if one can stay with the experience,
2. A “high”:  ecstasy, transport, connectedness with the divine, worship, adoration, love and enlargement of soul, inner knowledge and acceptance.

However, the individual faced with a numinous experience may never get beyond step 1 to step 2, because the experience is prematurely hijacked/truncated at the point where the individual feels condemned by their own conscience.  They cannot stay with the discomfort long enough to experience step 2.  At the point of feeling themselves condemned — or fearing that they will be condemned even more than they already secretly condemn themselves — many will simply stop the engagement with the numinous all together, flee in terror to the drug or the bottle or to some other distraction — anything not to have to encounter the ‘difficult’, ‘strange’, ‘unwieldy’, ‘uncontrollable’ numinous thing within their soul that has confronted them and “called them out” — anything, not to have to dreg up “all that stuff” within.  We want the “high” of inner transformation without having to experience the “low” of unbearable humiliation and inner crucifixion.  It cannot happen.

But if the individual can acknowledge both the truth and the discomfort of step 1, the conflict within the soul will “be seen” by the Numinous Presence and produce step 2:  grace, acceptance.  The individual simultaneously knows herself to be “KNOWN” by someTHING or someONE that confronts them and holds them ‘in thrall’.  They know that they have been “seen into” (“found out”) and “heard” (and being listened to deeply is tremendously healing in and of itself).  All subterfuge and hiding is ended.  One is completely and totally exposed and stripped to the bone.  It amounts to an inner crucifixion.  Impalement on the horns of the dilemma within the soul produces, if one can stay with the process of ‘dismemberment’, a mediating third thing: one’s unique individuality, prostrate-and-redeemed (to use ‘religious’ language), before the Divine Within, overcome by a love and acceptance such as one has never experienced before.

How to safely approach the numinous has been the goal of every ritual, every codex, and every form of religion known to humankind.  Words and rituals have always and will always accumulate around the numen and the numinous experience because we humans are impelled to try to come to grips with our experience.  But the verbal accretions that begin to surround the experience soon (in fact instantly) begin to separate the individual from the experience itself.  We are caught in a “catch-22”:  we must wrestle with ways of describing and coming to terms with such a fundamental experience, and yet our reflection on that experience instantly separates us from the immediacy of the experience itself. 

 

The numinous refuses and resists all conceptualizations and human efforts to “fence it in” and congeal it into dogma, because it is a unique experience, unique to each individual.  Neither science nor mental concepts deal very well with unique individual experience.  One of the functions of our carefully constructed mental concepts and dogmas is that they provide a “protective fence” from the direct experience and “attack” by the absolutely overwhelming nature of the numen, the Holy Other.  Without concepts and dogma, one feels “at sea”, “alone”, and completely vulnerable to confrontation with the Divine Within.  I repeat:  how to safely approach the numinous has been the goal of every ritual, every codex, and every form of religion known to humankind.  But here is the quandary:  Once the numinous experience is codified into religious dogma, into specific statements about the reality, it begins a process of alienation from the Source itself.  Furthermore, any re-conceptualization, any drastic re-statement of dogma threatens the imminent loss of the Immanent Numinous Presence, without which we founder and flounder back into despair and meaninglessness and truncated lives.

Rituals are far more resistant to change than concepts and dogma.  They hold and contain the mystery of the Holy Presence far longer.  That can be both a good thing and a bad thing, depending on the ritual.  As any counselor will tell you, the ritual of the addict is of longer duration and obstinacy than the concepts devised to help the addict escape their self-destructive behaviors.  For many individuals, the rituals of the Church still retain their numinosity (their capacity to contain the numinous presence) and surprisingly, even for the lapsed apostate, those rituals may still retain the residue of an emotional “hold” even as the lapsed struggles with the archaic conceptualizations of the experience of The Holy.  One is faced with an experience that no longer “fits” the protocol of an institution, but that experience is nevertheless a fundamental experience of one’s reality.

What are we to do?  We must not run and hide.  We must not run headlong into busy-ness, addiction, consumerism, materialism, and the plethora of distractions that beckon and consume us.  We can be Quiet; we can be Attentive; we can be Aware of the suffering and need around us; we can be engaged in the process of Unfolding happening both within and without.