The Divine Mind: Exploring the Psychological History of God’s Inner Journey
Presented by Michael Gellert, MA, LCSW
link to audio file
Sunday, 4:00 PM – 6:00 PM, January 21st, 2018
Michael Gellert’s new book tells the story of the Abrahamic God from a viewpoint that is imagined to be his, if such a thing were possible. Who he originally was—a God tormented and divided against himself and humanity—and who he became is a journey from affliction to redemption, from trauma to enlightenment. Spanning from the scriptures of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam to their later mystical teachings, the book explains many of the Hebrew Bible’s darker moments yet concludes on the same joyful note as his journey, namely, on a celebration of his deep, mystical nature. It shows how his inner journey offers us a metaphor for our own. This book talk will include a brief overview of this journey and the reading of a selected chapter. Signed copies will be on sale at the talk.
Course objectives:
To understand the story of the Abrahamic God as the evolution of our human experience of him.
To explore what the core images and ideas of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam reveal about the psychological nature of religious experience.
To appreciate how the many different traditions of mysticism share the same universal dynamics.
Michael Gellert, MA, LCSW, is former Director of Training of the C.G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles, where he currently serves as research instructor. A Jungian analyst practicing in Los Angeles and Pasadena, he sees individuals and couples and offers a Jungian Writing Workshop. He was educated in rabbinic Judaism, hitchhiked from Europe to India at age 19, studied theology at Loyola College in Montreal and media theory with Marshall McLuhan at the University of Toronto, and trained with the renowned Zen master Koun Yamada in Japan for two years. The author of Modern Mysticism, The Fate of America, The Way of the Small, and The Divine Mind, he lectures widely on psychology, religion, and contemporary culture.