If you’ve ever had a numinous spiritual experience, fallen in love, experienced joy at your sports team winning, or even become trapped in an abusive relationship or cult, then you will have experienced ‘Participation Mystique.’
Jung described Participation Mystique in many places, building on ideas by Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. It is is a powerful concept for helping us to make sense of the drivers behind cult dynamics and narcissistic abuse.
However there isn’t much agreement on how ‘Participation Mystique’ is defined. Here I will offer my own concise definition, as a useful concept for navigating our spiritual growth.
Participation Mystique: “The temporary experience of ‘wholeness,’ produced through the engagement with worldly objects, people and symbols onto which numinous, personal unconscious content has been projected.”
During Participation Mystique, we may feel that who or what we are enamoured with is ‘the real thing,’ but really we are experiencing a projection of something within ourselves.
The trap is not in Participation Mystique itself, but in mistaking what we are engaging with, whether it be a cult leader, our partner or our favourite sports team, for the realness within us which they represent
In the absence of this understanding, Participation Mystique can be a deadly process of giving up our self-sovereignty, opening ourselves up to manipulation, and suffering when the object fails to gratify the real need within us. This is where cults and cult leaders can do serious harm. Fall in love with the symbol and you’ll cheat on the real thing.
But in the presence of this understanding, Participation Mystique can be a profound and valuable process of engaging with deeper aspects of ourselves through the world, and appreciating the depth of our life experience without becoming attached to it or it leading to our suffering. When approached with this understanding, Participation Mystique leads to the withdrawal of projections into ourselves and the reclamation of our spiritual self-sovereignty.
Here we see how genuine spiritual growth is found neither in deadening our motivations and willingness to engage with all aspects of life, nor in pursuing any of it for its own sake (as though *it* was the point) but in a middle way that transcends both.
