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When I read his earlier work, Jung's Map of the Soul (1998), I was most attracted to Murray Stein's chapter, ‘The psyche's transcendent center and wholeness’ where he asserts: ‘The self is the center, and it unifies the pieces. But it does so at a considerable distance, like the sun influencing the orbits of the planets’ (p. 168-69). I found it helpful in teaching Dante's Divine Comedy especially the Paradiso. His new book amplifies his earlier image as well as others in Jung's cosmology to develop a new and refined presence and power of the numinous, qualities lost today by modernity, which Stein observes ‘casts aside symbol, myth, religious objects, and meaning-generating images in favor of doubt, the agnostic shrug’ (Minding the Self, p. 2).
In the 15 chapters that follow, are titles like ‘Making room for divinity’, ‘The way of symbols’, ‘Turning on the transcendent function’, and ‘The problem of ethics’. The book ends with a provocative psycho-spiritual reading of the soul's individual journey depicted in the Ten Ox-Herding Pictures created by the twelfth century ‘Chinese Chan (Zen) master Kuo-an Shih-yuan’ (p. 111) and adopted by Shuhbun , whose works are kept in Kyoto. Stein's intention throughout his study is no small matter: to revision the spiritual quest towards wholeness by ‘minding the self’, that is, by engaging this most central archetype of the collective unconscious and the source of all God images (p. 15). To do so is to engage a wider ‘ontological ground for the self’ (p. 15) which he will emphasize and return to throughout what I found to be a dramatic reinterpretation of the self's incarnational reality to include what stands behind it: ‘the Ground of Being’ (p. 19). My own background in poetry and mythology responded to this call to explore the deeper ontic ground of the self as similar to poetry's own ontological basis of mind. Both psyche and poiesis converge on a shared participation in the symbolic. For Stein, the God image is ‘a numinous sy