I know that I am a finite, fallible, seeking human being, and I know that I long for wholeness, both for myself and for others. In moments when I experience even a little of that wholeness, I feel that I am coming home to my true self, even as I am moving forward into someone I have not yet become. I want this homecoming for my children, too, and, truth be told, for everyone. I think everyone is longing for wholeness. I think the call to come home is God. This is how I understand the process theology of Sheri Kling.

Sheri Kling on the God-Self
​as the Historical Route of Initial Aims

​Excerpt from Sheri D. Kling, A Process Spirituality: Christian and Transreligious Resources for Transformation (Lexington Books, 2020).

We can now view the God-Self as a relational process, but what about this theory makes that God-Self imaginal? Here we draw from Slusser * who suggests that—at least for humans—the initial subjective aim is “an imaginal process.” Echoing the way Jung understands archetypal patterns as the basis of all matter and energy, current views in quantum physics describe the base of things as “organic, dancing patterns of energy.” Slusser sees no reason not to make the leap from “pattern to image” wherein consciousness may be perception of patterns as images. Whitehead and Jung imbue such aims or images with intentionality and connect them to the divine. In both systems, the aim or image may be refused, ignored, or modified.

What is being theorized here is that we can understand initial aims as also following a “historic route” and as aggregated for each individual through memory. Both our understanding of initial aims and of personal unity within a Whiteheadian frame are enriched by incorporating an archetypal understanding because we can now understand the unifying piece as a complex, lattice, or framework around which the images of one’s life experience or initial aims are collected. We also gain by applying Whiteheadian thought to Jung’s concept of the archetypal Self because we can now ontologically describe its fluid quality while still retaining its unity and power.

​A relational-imaginal God-Self then is the historic route of one’s initial aims, collected as images around a unifying center that exists as a connecting point where the transpersonal energies of God flow into personal life with the capacity to structure and order our experience of novel aims in such a way as to spur creative transformation through the transcendent function. This presence of God in the individual evokes our intensities, harmonizes our contrasts, and, when we live in proper relationship to it, we can more fully actualize God’s aims for greater flourishing. 

[ Gerald H. Slusser wrote “Jung and Whitehead on Self and Divine: The Necessity for Symbol and Myth” in David Ray Griffin’s edited volume The Archetypal Process: Self and Divine in Whitehead, Jung, and Hillman.]

Coming Home to the God-Self:
Sheri Kling and the True Self in Process
​

 Sheri Kling is one of the most promising process theologians of our time, known especially for bringing Whiteheadian process thought into conversation with Jungian psychology. In the passage on this page, excerpted from her A Process Spirituality: Christian and Transreligious Resources for Transformation (Lexington Books, 2020), we find the phrase “God-Self.” For many, it may be unfamiliar, especially if they are accustomed to thinking of God as one reality and the self as another. Her phrase sparks several possibilities. These reflections are prompted by her work, rather than claims about precisely what she intends.

1. Within the depths of our ongoing experience, there is a dimension of ourselves that is, in a certain sense, both human and divine. 
2. This God-Self is our true self, distinct from the false selves we sometimes inhabit to the detriment of ourselves and others.
3. We feel this God-Self in both memory and anticipation.
4. In anticipation, we feel it as a beckoning presence, inviting us to become who we can be.
5. In moments when we come closest to our God-Self in our actual lives, we have a distinctive sense of coming home to who we most truly are, even as we are moving forward into who we can become.

The True Self to which we come home is neither a physical object, nor a particular psychological state, nor a pure potentiality entertained in abstraction. It dwells in a realm of experience best called the imaginal. But imaginal does not mean imaginary or fictive. It names a way that possibilities become present to us through images, feelings, dreams, and intuitions. What appears there can affect how we understand our lives and what we do next. The God-Self belongs to this realm: it is felt in memories of who we have been and in intimations of who we might become, without being reducible to either one.

Initial Aims and the True Self in Process

I do not know if Sheri Kling will appreciate my response to her ideas. What I do know is that she connects the God-Self with what Whitehead calls initial aims, or the initial phases of subjective aims. That certainly makes sense to me. These ideal aims guide our lives at a prereflective and often preconscious level. They are fresh possibilities for who we might become in the circumstances of our lives. They are sychically charged with energy. as we feel or intuit them.. In feeling prehending) them, we are feeling both God’s desires for us and our own deepest desires for ourselves. Amid the feeling, the two need not be separate. The initial aims are, as it were, our God-Self.

Kling also suggests that the God-Self is present through the course of a life, not only in momentary aims but in their historic route: a river of aims shaped by the decisions we have made and open to possibilities still before us. In this sense, it may be called an archetypal self. It might also be called our true self in process—a self we sometimes live into and sometimes fall short of when fear, habit, or old wounds close us to the possibilities beckoning in the present.

Even then, the river continues. A new aim can take account of what has happened and invite a new response. Perhaps this is why coming home to the God-Self can also feel like moving forward. The home to which we return is itself in process. It carries the history of who we have been, while its future—and ours—has not yet been decided.
And what is the aim of this journey? Perhaps it is, as Kling so often says, wholeness: not a static or fixed end to the journey, but a quality of life that is experientially rich, deep, and true.

Personal Implications

This understanding of the God-Self invites self-acceptance without resignation. A wound, a failure, or an old habit is part of a person’s history, but it need not settle the question of who that person can become. A fresh aim can arise within the circumstances that actually exist, including circumstances shaped by past choices.

It also calls for discernment. Not every powerful feeling is a divine invitation. Some feelings repeat patterns of fear or injury. We can ask whether a possibility draws us toward greater honesty, compassion, courage, and attentiveness to others. Memory helps in this work: looking back, we may recognize invitations we answered, missed, or were not yet able to receive.

In this sense, coming home does not mean recovering a finished self hidden somewhere in the past. It means becoming more fully ourselves through new responses to life.

Social Implications

We do not make this journey alone. Other people can help us notice possibilities we could not see by ourselves; they can offer the acceptance and encouragement that make change possible. Communities can also impose roles and expectations that keep us confined to false selves. Helping one another flourish includes making room for one another to grow. And, of course, we can help them, too.

The social conditions of life matter, too. Poverty, exclusion, violence, and isolation can narrow the possibilities people are able to feel and pursue. If wholeness is a worthy aim for persons, then creating more just and caring communities is part of the work of wholeness.

Communities also have historic routes. They inherit both gifts and injuries, and their futures remain open. Like persons, they can acknowledge what has happened and respond to fresh possibilities for becoming.

We come home to ourselves partly by helping make a home in which others can flourish.

See also:

1. Clapping from my Balcony: Sharing our Humanity with help from Sheri Kling
2. Sheri D. Kling: Whitehead, Jung, and Psycho-Spiritual Wholeness
3. ​Healing Reactive Behavior: A Process and Jungian Approach: Sheri Kling