Is God inside out, or outside in?

I grew up being introduced to Christianity through the Danish State Lutheran Church. I went to Sunday school with my sister and I sang in the children's choir. I learned that God was a man and I prayed to this all male father god in the Lord’s Prayer over and over again. I was like most other children my age. I wanted to know everything. The answers I got were sometimes puzzling but I accepted them since my parents told me “it was so.” As I started school the teachers told me “it was so,” and when I was put into a private Catholic school because my parents did not believe in the public school system, our Jesuit teachers told me “it was so”. 

God was a father and the prayer went : Our father who art in heaven…Clearly, God was pretty far away and the first creation to reach heaven was a dog named Laika. As a child, I believed that the stars were angels and I would sit with my mom and wave to them. Later in my teens, I projected my longing for God unto the statue of the holy virgin in my parish  church and lit candles. In my twenties, I spent a lot of time in a small Cistercian monastery and experienced for the first time the voice of the holy, which did not come from outside, but from a combination of both the outside and the inside. I experienced a glimpse of the numinous sitting in silence, and by listening to that silence in quiet meditation.

The traditional projection unto a God “out there” creates a real psychological problem which wasn’t solved until the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung came up with a new paradigm, a new way of incorporating God into our individual reality through what he called the Collective Unconscious. He figured out that this great spirit which we called God was actually not somewhere out in space separated from us, but inside our minds creating our innermost Self. Jung even concluded that God was not gendered as a man but was completely unimaginable working through our deep psyche. Christ in Jung’s universe became more than love, he became the human holy, suspended between good and evil in the center of the cross.  Jung’s message was that if we in our consciousness communicated with, or tried to understand this greater Self of ours, we could actually achieve a higher consciousness and understanding of, what the Christian church called God! Up until the revolution of modern psychology brought into life by Freud and Jung, God remained what Jung called : a projection of our imaginations. This projection was brought on by religion and had kept the Christian faithful in complete separation from the inner understanding of the holy. In fact, it is my belief that the church most often has taught people obedience instead of teaching them how to explore. Understanding how Jung unfolds and opens up Christianity, makes it again possible for me to access the mysterious, because it is no longer “out there” but it is in myself, in the dreams I have and in the being that I am, walking on the surface of this planet. It is up to me to discover the universe inside of me which does not need to be held prisoner by a projection. This is where the real story not ends but begins. Carl Jung is a universe in himself to be explored over and over again. He was no saint and did not claim to be one. His ideas were not meant to start a new religion. Religion to Jung meant dealing with the archetypal forces and processes of the psyche. Jung was purely out to explore the numinous and our relationship to the great mystery of our souls. I believe that he got as close to an answer about this as anyone has so far. His writings clearly tells the story about a God who is not separated from us, but who is everywhere, outside as well as inside our own personal universes. This is why, when Carl Jung was once asked if he believed in God his short answer was “I don’t believe, I know.” His own understanding and gnosis, his Anima-Sofia was enough for him to exist in harmony with the Numinous. 

The archetype of miniature making.

Did you know that the famous rock star Rod Stewart spend a lot of his time building miniature railroad landscapes? He does, and he is just one of millions of people on this planet who looks at the world through miniatures. There are clubs for miniature Fairy Gardens, and people like, Matthew Albanese who create fantastic sceneries, all in model scale to make stunning life like photos as if it was all real. 

From antiquity Cyprus goddess clay figures to First Nation Kachina dolls, human beings simply have a fascination for the small scale. There seem  to be an archetypal need for us to scale things down in order to understand them. I remember my own fondness of the medieval miniature model city in front of the Copenhagen City Museum as a child.

 The display which was outside the building ( see picture ) was on my way to and from school. I would stop and gaze at it almost every day and imagine myself living in or walking the streets of the old city just by looking at the model display. The Copenhagen display however was tiny, compared to the later big model cities of Rome or Shanghai.

 Is it because the tiny worlds makes us feel like Gods? Is it a matter of feeling in control or just a matter of understanding a larger context by minimizing it? I believe it is a little bit of both. When the early people of my country Denmark created a model of a horse pulling the sun, they understood the concept of the “Sun-wagon”. The sun clearly moved because it was pulled by a horse named Hrimfaxi. 

I, like many other people have my own miniature displays at my home in form of Ikons, crucifixes and Buddha statuettes. Little reminders of much larger concepts. They are the small scale items which leads my thoughts to something much bigger such as the Numinous which so huge and is beyond my understanding. By looking at them though, I get a glimpse, an idea of the real thing.