Welcoming Our Gods Back Home: The Wisdom of Psychological Mysticism

    Welcoming Our Gods Back Home brings the wisdom of Psychological Mysticism to the religious, political, and cultural divides that threaten our species and planet. This book validates the universality of numinous experiences and challenges all forms of religious and political nationalism that claim divine election, validation, power, and authority. Authoritarian claims in the United States and around the world are fueled by long-standing religious delusions of external, supernatural, interventionist beings variously named gods, goddesses, and, more recently, God. Such claims promote unconscious cult behavior by leaders and their followers. Carl Jung spoke often about the dynamics and dangers of mob psychology.

    From the perspective of Psychological Mysticism, our gods are internal, intrapsychic experiences, images, and resources to support our organic connection to the mysterious Sacred Source of the universe and to support our at-one-ment with all else. Psychologically, healthy individuals, religions, and institutions view the universe as an inter-connected, inter-related, and inter-dependent web of being.    

    Jungian psychoanalyst Dr. Jerry R. Wright considers welcoming our gods back home to the human psyche, where they were birthed and where they belong, to be our most urgent psychospiritual task. Until that happens, our species will likely continue to do great harm to ourselves, to each other, and to our Earth home.

    Welcoming Our Gods Back Home completes the trilogy “Jungian Psychology and the Future of Our Species.” The two previous volumes are Reimagining God and Religion (Chiron, 2018) and A Mystical Path Less Travelled (Chiron, 2021).      The trilogy challenges individuals to invest in the power of individual consciousness in general, and religious consciousness in particular, in order to heal our collective religious and political pathology. To that end, recognizing, withdrawing, and owning our personal and collective shadow becomes the best gift we can offer the future of our species.