CHAPTER FOURTEEN

FROM TRANSCENDENCE TO INTROCENDENCE:

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF POLITICAL
REALITY AND PSYCHO-ESOTERIC
CONSTRUCTIONS OF SALVATION

Andreas Dordel and Andrea Ullrich

The following contribution deals with a widespread modern notion of

self-conception and its problems concerning the consciousness of politi-
cal reality. The main thesis is, that the so-called secular modernity gen-
erates as a reflex secular-religious phenomena like ‘New Age’-Movement,
Esotericism and a psychological boom of conceptions and methods of
self-discovery. These notions became more and more widely spread and
diffused in society and act as religious substitutes in the existential search
of order. The common focus of these modes of self-assurance is the
restitution of a ‘divine self’ as the way of salvation for the individual, as
well as for mankind. The examples of modern esoterical systems like
Aleister Crowley’s ‘Thelematism’, Rudolf Steiner’s ‘Anthroposophy’
and L. Ron Hubbard’s ‘Scientology’ on the one hand, and modern
‘Psychologies of Self’, represented by Carl Gustav Jung’s ‘analytical’,
Abraham Maslow’s and Carl Rogers’ ‘humanistic’ and Ken Wilber’s
‘transpersonal Psychology’ on the other hand, demonstrate in compari-
son not only a continuity within the history of religion by showing a
transformation of itself within the process of secularization. Furthermore
they show some elementary parallels in the axiomatic interpretation of
existence, which describes the constitution of a ‘self-referential’ respec-
tively ‘identical consciousness’. This mode of introspective self-
awareness, where the transcendent ground of existence (nous, noetikon) is
relocated or ‘immanentized’ in the introcendent world of the psyche,
will be confronted and criticised in respect to its ethical and political
consequences with the classical philosophical paradigm of noetic con-
sciousness, which was exposed in its analytical political relevance by the
political philosopher Eric Voegelin.
416 ANDREAS DORDEL AND ANDREA ULLRICH

1. THE PSYCHO-ESOTERIC MARKET OF SALVATION IN SECULAR

MODERNITY AND ITS POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS

Contrary to the theory of secularization and its prognosis of an inevita-

ble decline of religion in the modern world, it is becoming more and
more obvious that modernization more often strengthens religion.1 One
must admit that the techno-instrumental rationality of the modern
world is quite not able to catch the existential human questions, which
have been the main subjects of philosophy and religion since antiquity.
Whereas religion ever had a broader influence and popularity of endow-
ing life with meaning than philosophy, we nowadays can observe a more
divers range of religious and pseudo-religious phenomena, e.g. New
Religious Movements and world-views, Christian heretic and the mod-
ern western adaptation of eastern religiosity. Beside the resurgence of
traditional monotheistic religions in the modern western world and its
reference to a transcendent reality, we can encounter an increase of new
manifestations of religiosity with a focus on salvation in the immanent
world. As the latter are mainly recognized as dangers for western democ-
racies and culture in form of Political Religions, like e.g. National
Socialism and radical Islamism, we can also perceive an increasing realm
of superficial private religiosity and spirituality, as we can find them in
modern esotericism and in a vast expanding market of psychological life
counselling, self-awareness and personality development culminating in
the ideas of an ‘enlargement of consciousness’ and ‘spiritual growth’.
In this so-called ‘psycho-market’, which had been established since
the ‘psycho-boom’ of the ’60s and ’70s of the 20th century, we can find
a compound of psychological and spiritual-religious aspects respectively
a syncretism of occult-esoteric world-views, together with elements of
western depth-psychology as well with consciousness-changing tech-
niques of Asian origin, e.g. Buddhist meditation and shamanistic tech-
niques of ecstasy. Just to illustrate the relevance of this psycho-market,
the approximated sales of popular-psychological and esoteric books,
magazines, self-awareness courses, alternative therapies and treatments
in Germany is among 10 to 18 Billion Euros a year. In the German
book-trade the market share of esoteric books in the group of fact- and
counsellor books was in 2005 by 13,4%, with an increase of 8,7% to

1
Cf. Peter Berger (ed.), The Desecularization of the World. Resurgent Religion and World
Politics, Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. 1999.