Historic Quakerism and Jungian psychology are together on this, though they have not used the same words for the same reality. Some Friends, like Kenneth Boulding, whose thinking was in the context of continuing creation through evolution, might well want to extend Jung s concept of archetypes to include the don vital that fuels the further development of the species, Homo sapiens. The numinous images that can keep the individual on course to individuation must indeed be augmented by archetypal images intended to keep the whole species on course toward a mutation from Homo sapiens to the next possible step in human evolution, Homo spiritus. The child within may not only symbolize the need for nourishing some neglected talent or healing some unresolved early conflict, but could speak to us as well of undeveloped qualities for which the future of the species languishes. Jung s vision cries aloud to be expanded in an evolutionary context.
Archetypes afford the species direction toward the capacity for developing higher consciousness.
When Jung says that the archetype of the self and the archetype of the Self, God within, are ultimately indistinguishable, he is certainly affirming the Quaker position that there is that of God in everyone. This is a mystical affirmation. The distinction of Quakerism, and one of the points at which it has something to offer Jungian psychology, is that its Meeting for Worship is an experiment in group mysticism. It attests that the presence of the Self can be experienced in the collective of a Meeting for Worship. If, as Jung insists, the unconscious is the only accessible source of religious experience, the Friends Meeting for Worship offers a means for collective access to the unconscious and hence to religious experience.