HEP Spirituality

Spirituality is as fundamental to HEP as psychology is. In this integration, HEP draws on spiritual themes in the humanistic, existential and transpersonal traditions, as well as Jungian and archetypal psychology, and mythology as given by figures such as Campbell, Jung, Hillman, Eliade, Scholem, Corbin and the Eranos Conferences. HEP draws on the Romantic tradition and post modernism (including romantic irony and the nouveau roman tradition), relating it to divine-human union and apophatic mysticism, seeing the world in the Hegelian sense as a place of spiritual evolution, based in a model of the 'eternal return'. This also integrates the esoteric theme in surrealism and the mystical theme in existential absurdism. The crossfertilizing interrelationship between the Hermetic, Gnostic, Kabbalistic and Rosicrucian traditions is reflected in the syncretic nature of HEP spirituality. This particularly draws on the theme of the presence of the divine in the experience of individual humanness, and in the natural world. The shamanistic aspect of HEP is correlated with the deity work of Vajrayana Buddhism, the 'body of light' tradition in Sufism and related themes in other Western theurgic mysticisms. Caroline Mardon, Jim McNamara