The Darkening Spirit: Jung, spirituality, religion

It is important to have a secret, a premonition of things unknown. It fills life with something impersonal, a numinosum. A man who has never experienced that has missed something important. He must sense that he lives in a world which in some respects is mysterious; that things happen and can be experienced which remain inexplicable; that not every

individual. I have sat through lectures in which psychiatrists have argued that Jung was schizophrenic because he felt ‘God’ spoke to him on a regular basis.

‘We have no imagination for evil, but evil has us in its grip.’

We must all do just what Christ did. We must make our experiment, we must make mistakes, and we must live out our own vision of life. When we live like this we know Christ as a brother, and God indeed, becomes man.

The religious attitude, also referred to as the ‘symbolic attitude’ or ‘religious outlook’, is one of reverence toward, and careful consideration of, the contents of the interior domain, in particular to fantasies, visions, dreams and synchronicities.

That is what fundamentalism is, in one respect: the junk food of the spirit.

Jung's complex position is that we cannot find scientific proof for the existence of God.

In Jung's view, to feel a sacred force at the centre of one's life is an entirely normal experience.

Science and philosophy have replaced religion as mainstream ‘belief systems’ of modernity; religion, based on an outdated and untranslated mythology, cannot hope to compete with modern systems of knowing; Christian religion has been based on the authority of tradition, and modern people do not care for tradition. Religion can only mean something ag