What the F**k does "Numinous" Mean? (And Why is it Stalking Me?)

The Soulpreneuer Series Free Issue No. 17

From my Learning Journal

Have you ever heard a word that’s new to you — and then in the days, weeks and months after, it repeatedly shows up?

And you think “There it is again! WTF?!”

Sort of like purchasing a new vehicle (or a ‘new’ old vehicle) and then as you’re driving around, you notice how many other of these vehicles there are. You start noticing different colours, the varying styles, and checking out the drivers of these vehicles. 

For the last several weeks, I’ve had that type of experience with the word “numinous.” It’s happened enough times to cause me to think and write more about it. 

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Numi-what?

It first showed up for me while listening to an Andrew Huberman podcast and an interview with Jungian psychoanalyst James Hollis about his new book “A Life of Meaning: Relocating Your Center of Spiritual Gravity” (2023). 

Hollis, in his 80s, is still a practicing psychoanalyst and has written almost 20 books on topics such as aging, dream analysis, personal growth, and the soul.

Not long into the new year, I began to read a lot more about “soul”. I’ve had an active Substack presence since late 2022 publishing free weekly issues here at Box Cutter Co.

In late 2023, I added a ‘stack’ to the publication called The Solopreneur Series. This has since shifted toThe Soulpreneur Series (this is Free Issue No. 17)

Reading about and researching ‘Soul’ led me to the writing of James Hollis (and others). And, so maybe I was destined to forge this new relationship with the word ‘numinosity’. 

For those who may be as familiar with the term as I was until recently (which was not) — synchronicity may be at work. 

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Fru-fru-inous

When I first heard Hollis use the word, I thought to myself “What a fru-fru word…” 

My inner sarcastic bastard thought: “Awe… it’s all cutesy, it sounds like luminous.”

I didn’t think too much of it in the days following, other than a light filament of a web sticking in my mind. 

Then… after not really hearing the term before, it started to show up regularly. 

“Numinous… numinosity… numinous” 

Decades ago I took a deeper interest in synchronicity. I started paying more attention to events one might call “coincidence”. However, the more I paid attention, the deeper and more impactful experiences of synchronicity became. 

(See the friend link at the bottom to a Medium story I wrote about one particularly powerful experience, years in the making). 

So, I wrote in my Learning Journal. I noted where I came across the term — and plan to continue writing and exploring it some more. (Pay attention to those synchronicities)

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Numinosity in Solitude?

In 2021, my mother passed away in her early 70s. She was an avid reader.

On a visit in 2022, when we were finally able to do a small service (as C-19 wound down), my stepdad invited my wife and I to take some of her books. Several now sit on our bookshelves. 

One of those was written by philosopher Dr. Philip Koch and published in 1997 “Solitude: A Philosophical Encounter”. I picked it up recently off our bookshelf, as I have been contemplating writing more about the importance of solitude. 

In the prologue, Koch writing about his growing relationship with and reflections upon solitude: 

“… thoughts began to grow in their own dark soil: maybe these silent spaces where ordinary things become numinous, where feelings become spruce boughs and scattered stars — maybe this, not relationships — is where I should find my place.” 

The last sentence connected to this quote above hit a note in me: 

“Where anyone should, if they had enough longing for the deepest reality and enough courage to pursue it.” 

I can relate to this. 

For example, I walked away from corporate employment in the spring of 2022. I was a senior administrative leader for several years — including in healthcare through the pandemic. 

It was a household decision for me to leave behind a decade-plus career and go out on my own. To become a Solopreneur with a focus on making a living from my writing and creative pursuits. Or, as I refer to it now: A Soulpreneur. 

It was also a commitment to become CEO of my time, schedules, energy, and commitments. To build businesses around the lifestyles we want to live in our household — not “make a living” designed around workplaces and standard office hours. 

Time on my own — Solitude — is a big part of this renewed commitment to living. And, in a complicated blended family with 3 teens, solitude is often reduced to small rations and quick gulps.

(It’s shifting now with 2 teens graduating this year)

Before getting married in 2009, I spent a lot of time alone. It’s a space and place I revel in. For example, from 2001 to 2003 over three seasons, I bicycled solo from Inuvik, Northwest Territories (in the Canadian western Arctic) to Los Angeles, California. 

It was a little over 10,000 km. Many days and nights I spent on my own, in my thoughts, and often, simply immersed in pedal stroke after pedal stroke. 

Dempster Highway, Northwest Territories 2001

Some nights brought pangs of loneliness as I fell asleep in my tent, not far from some remote roadway (for example, in Alaska) or along much busier Highway 1 and 101 along the coasts of Washington, Oregon and California. 

San Francisco, Golden Gate 2002

Ironically, the times I felt the most pull of loneliness were near large cities. It was an odd contradiction. 

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Numinosity in Soul’s Landscapes?

Books are a big part of our household. They are strewn across shelves around our living room, basement, and various other walls and corners. 

My wife, knowing I was reading and researching things soul-related, bought me a paperback copy of Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue’s Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom.

Anam is the Gaelic word for soul and cara means friend — therefore Anam Cara means soul friend.

The book was originally published in 1997, and then a 25th edition was published in 2022. (O’Donohue passed away in his early 50s in 2008).

Numinous popped up several times. 

“Ghad damn it,” I thought to myself. “There’s that fru-fru word again!” 

And, adding to it… O’Donohue used it alongside luminosity. 

In one context, O’Donohue is talking about landscape — in a section (there are no chapters) titled “The Body is Our Only Home”: 

“Landscape is not matter nor merely nature, rather it enjoys a luminosity. Landscape is numinous… Landscape has a secret and silent memory, a narrative of presence where nothing is ever lost or forgotten.” 

Then again later in the book: 

“For the Celtic people, nature was not matter, rather it was a luminous and numinous presence that had depth, possibility and beauty.” 

I can relate to this wholeheartedly.

For example, cycling solo across the sub-arctic tundra and alpine of the Northwest Territories and Yukon. Setting up my tent beside the 800 km gravel highway called the Dempster Highway. No trees, or none taller than an average person. 

Mosquito hell on the Dempster Highway and NWT tundra (July 2001)

Author’s image. Dempster Highway, Yukon-side (2001)

Or, in the sheer humbling mountainous landscape of Alaska 👇

The image below is a little south of Tok, Alaska, which I took on September 5, 2001 — days before the 9/11 events in New York City. I stopped the first leg of the trip on September 9, 2001. (A few days later the world became a different place). 

Author’s image. Alaska, 2001

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Cosmic Estrangement from “Numinosity”?

My wife recently bought the book “Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View” by philosopher and historian James Tarnas (published in 2007). 

I opened it to look at the Table of Contents. There are chapters on spirit and soul and creativity and otherwise. I decided to read the first few chapters. 

Tarnas points to the Copernican Revolution (mid-1500s) as a time when humans and the human mind moved from a much deeper relationship with the wider universe and cosmos — to the modern Western scientific, analytic mind. 

In a sense, Tarnas points to a primal worldview where the boundaries between Self and the surrounding world were permeable. In other words, soul and divinity and meaning were part of a much broader universal set of powers. 

This type of worldview can be traced back to ancient cultures around the globe. A worldview and universe-view full of spirit, energy and mystery — of which humans are just but a tiny part.  

In the modern worldview, however, Self is contained within each single objective human — separated from the broader cosmos. Human life is seen as an accidental coincidence and distinct from the nonhuman world. 

image taken from Tarnas’ book

Tarnas suggests: 

“For all the exalted numinosity of the Copernican birth, the new universe that eventually emerged into the light of common day was a spiritually empty vastness, impersonal, neutral, indifferent to human concerns, governed by random processes devoid of purpose or meaning.”

Tarnas takes a bit of a darker, cynical view of the modern mind, but maybe it’s not too far off the mark. 

“The drive to achieve ever greater financial profits, political power, and technological prowess becomes the dominant impulse moving individuals and societies, until these values, despite ritual claims to the contrary, supersede all other aspirations…

… the beauty and arousal of deep human emotion all become advertising tools to manipulate consumer response.”

Ouch. 

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What the heck does Numinous Mean?

I have been doing some research to understand this term further. Many suggest it came into more frequent usage after German theologian and philosopher Rudolf Otto and his 1917 book Das Heilige. It was published in English as The Idea of the Holy in 1923. 

Image from Learning Journal

After Rudolf Otto used the term, others began using it too including Carl Jung, and writers C.S. Lewis and Mircea Eliade (1920s, 30s). The modern-day usage by James Hollis is deeply influenced by Jung’s use of the term. 

The etymology (roots) of the word come from the ancient word *neue- “to nod”. This was adapted into Latin, numen meaning “divine will” and specifically “divine approval expressed by nodding the head.”

Other roots suggest links to the Greek nooúmenon meaning “influence perceptible by the mind but not the senses.”

The Merriam-Webster dictionary gives three definitions for numinous: 

1. Supernatural, Mysterious 

2. Filled with a sense of the presence of divinity: Holy

3. Appealing to the higher emotions or the aesthetic sense: Spiritual

Thus, it’s a complex and sometimes ambiguous term.

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Where to From Here?

In Hollis’ work and — the Huberman podcast I listened to — he frames “numinous” along with the questions I wrote down (in the image at the start). 

• “Who am I apart from my history, my roles, my commitments?”

I also had numinous written in my Learning Journal near a quote by historian and author Yuval Noah Harris in his 2011 book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind:

“Humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.”

As someone who climbed corporate ladders for a decade… that one stings with truth.

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Hollis suggests a daily check-in with Soul. He believes the quality and depth of our lives are “a direct function of the magnitude of the questions we ask.”

Thus, daily, we can ask things like: 

• What is going on here?

• What generated energy today?

• Where did that energy come from?

• What is still wishing to be addressed?

• What remains unfinished in me?

• What is firing my imagination?

A Learning Journal is an excellent place to do this. I write, doodle and sketch in one almost daily. By doing that, I was capturing the synchronicity in my experiences with the terms numinous and numinosity. 

Tarnas suggests that synchronicities “permit a continuing dialogue with the unconscious and larger whole of life”. (Great way to express it). 

For folks like Hollis and others, being aware of numinosity in our lives is looking for those small nods from the broader universe, from our unconscious, from our Soul. 

As Hollis suggests, and I wholeheartedly agree: 

“No amount of outer accomplishments or recognition by the world ever equals that inner conviction — the conviction that one is living one’s journey as honestly and faithfully as one can…”

“… the most haunting things in us are the unlived life.” 

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More than Fru-Fru-nimous

I’ve come to appreciate that numinous is more than a fancy $50 word. It’s a deeper more meaningful concept intertwined with some mysteries of existence, the beauty (and importance) of solitude, and the meaning we can all find in the everyday.

And, maybe it was a numinous experience that I came to have numinosity stalking me these past weeks? A numinous synchronicity… a head nod… a tip of the cap from the Soul?

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How about you?

• Have you encountered the numinous in your life? 

• How has it shown up for you, and what impact has it had? 

Please share your thoughts and experiences in the comments. 

And, watch for the next issue of Box Cutter Co. coming to an inbox near you.

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Here’s a ‘friend link’ (anyone can read it) to the story on Medium of a powerful synchronicity I experienced years ago (image is hyperlinked)

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