The Divine Mind: Exploring the Psychological History of God’s Inner Journey. (2018). By Michael Gellert. Prometheus.

T he Divine Mind, Michael Gellert’s new book, draws one into the mind of God and holds one there for a sojourn with the gods, and then becomes an excursion into what it means to be God from God’s point of view. Gellert takes a humanistic, psychological point of view of God as part of our historical world. He tells us his method in his subtitle that the book is “exploring the psychological history of God’s inner journey.” It is a hard book to put down if one is at all interested in the core questions of analytical psychology, particularly in those parts of the psyche that behavioral and reductionist psychologies (which mostly ignore this issue) might call “the God problem.” Jungian work finds the subject of these matters to be archetypal realities, and eminently psychological in their substance. Gellert engages these numinous energies by awakening the dynamism of the self in ourselves that is forever questioning the reality of the archetype, and then feeling that power in one that is held in its thrall. Working through this archetypal/human issue via history and experience demonstrates that something called “God” is developing and changing, and this change is not only in us, but in “God” himself. Gellert shows this development by going straight to the source material: the historical record of God’s interventions in the world (the Bible and similar scriptures); our interactions with these interventions (as the record of the prophets, teachers, and judges for God); and, finally, our attempts to practice, live, and understand what it means to be a god and a human (via the mystics and the products of mystical experience). His book is rich with authentic source material, beautiful quotations, and depth insights that paint a full canvas of our cultural experience as psychological individuals who are not limited to materialism or spiritualism. Without intentionally trying, Gellert brings together the transpersonal with the mundane, and the ancient, almost universal stories of God with the intensely individual experiences of those hearing and bearing those stories. He brings these into an understanding of how we have come to know God, experience what God is, and how he has evolved. Gellert’s feeling tone makes it clear he is exploring the history of the God-image in our human experience— not imposing dogma, but he makes it equally clear that he is discussing a God that is beyond the image. This may be a nothingness in our conventional language, but as the experiences of God develop, Gellert makes it clear that nothingness is one of the many facets of God