Ann Casement\'s (1998) \"The Qualitative

¶ … Ann Casement's (1998) "The qualitative leap of faith," the author discusses Kierkegaard's three stages of life -- the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious. The three stages appear to be simply as thus: Stage 1) pleasing oneself; Stage 2) pleasing society; and, Stage 3) putting faith in understanding something that is beyond all comprehension. None of the stages appear to be particularly satisfying to the person, however. Kierkegaard's stages of life are confounding, because none of the stages allows the individual to ever be completely free. Pleasing oneself is about passion and pleasing society is about being moral, but stage three, putting one's faith in God seems to be a way for human existence to be somewhat tolerable. Ironically, people are forced to face and accept the meaningless if they are to extract any meaning from life. However, the fact that we have faith in finding meaning in God is exactly what gives us meaning. Kierkegaard struck something in his complex patterns of thought. The fact that we cannot receive any bodily satisfaction from having faith or any moral satisfaction is precisely what allows us to have faith in God. Jung (1965) stated in his book Memories, dreams, reflections that when he was a boy he liked to pray to God precisely because there was nothing for him to imagine; that is, "it was impossible to form a correct conception" (1965) because he [God] was such an exceptional being.

In Jung's dream about God destroying the Cathedral and his final acceptance of what had happened, it allowed Jung to rid himself of his anxiety, particularly pertaining to his father and his father's view of Christianity. Jung's perspective toward Christianity became "akin to a patient who needed 'treatment'" (Casement 1998). Jung thought that his father simply went along with the traditional Christian attitude about God (i.e., God is perfect) and thus he never had the courage to see that there is an "immediate living dark side of God" (1998).

Both Jung and Kierkegaard share the same kind of thought that an individual reaches his or her highest potential in life when he or she has set out on a religious path -- or, as Jung called it -- individuation. Individuation is what makes a person whole in his or her being. "It is at this point that we come into our own [individuation], our natural state of living equilibrium as earth-rooted and spiritually centered people who recognize the Source of our lives, the Ground of all Being" (Dunne 2002). Thus, individuation means that when a person becomes an adult, he knows that he does not only depend on God, but that God also depends on man (2002). The ego, to become whole, must see that it must confront something bigger that itself, something that it must yield to and serve. This goes along with Kierkegaard's third stage of life: individuation or going into the religious stage of life means that man is becoming partially divine as well.

In the prologue to Jung's (1965) book, Memories, dreams, reflections, he states that life, to him, is like a plant that lives on its rhizome. The real life of the plant is not seen but hidden, rather, in the rhizome.

The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away -- an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.

Jung (1965) goes on to explain that his book about his life has been based on the rhizome of his life -- the interior happenings as opposed to the exciting events of his life -- like traveling -- because it is the rhizome of his life that has inspired all of his work. These interior happenings, it could be posited, is where man and God meet:

…the point where transpersonal energies flow into personal life, eternity as opposed to the temporal flux, incorruptibility, the inorganic united paradoxically with the organic, protective structures capable of bringing order out of chaos, the transformation of energy, the elixir of life -- all refer to the Self, the central source of life energy, the fountain of our being which is most simply described as God (Edinger 1992).

Jung believed that certain events in an individual's life, events that could be called mystical, are often of transformative significance to the person. The event with Narcissus when he sees his own image is just one of these types of transformative events (Schwartz-Salant 1986). The meaning it projects cannot be exhausted, according to Schwartz-Salant (1986) because it asks probably the greatest questions of identity of all time: "Who and what am I?" (1986). The dream Jung has where God smashes the cathedral also seems to be a transformative event in the life of Jung as it mentally challenges him to go against everything he was taught to believe and find his own meaning about God and himself in God as well as God in himself.