The Darkening Spirit: Jung, spirituality, religion

‘All the true things must change and only that which changes remains true’.

‘religious statements without exception have to do with the reality of the psyche and not with the reality of physis’.

the experience of conscious involvement in the project of life integration through self-transcendence toward the ultimate value one perceives. It is an effort to bring all of life together in an integrated synthesis of ongoing growth and development.

I am not addressing myself to the happy possessors of faith, but to those many people for whom the light has gone out, the mystery has faded, and God is dead. For most of them there is no going back.

Among all my patients in the second half of life – that is to say, over thirty-five – there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost what the living religions of every age have given to their followers, and none of the

So much evil has accumulated in the Western psyche because we have been identified with the good and the light for too long.

In summary: several developments needed to take place within Christianity if it were to survive: 1) evil and darkness needed to be incorporated in a new way; 2) the feminine needed to be given more credence by Christianity, which in its historical form is patriarchal and masculinist; 3) the scriptures needed to be delit-eralised and read as metapho

quest for perfection – is out of date and no longer appropriate. The myth for today is wholeness rather than perfection; our new challenge is about the integration of warring elements, and not about one archetype defeating another. Jung believed that we either need a new religion to celebrate the wholeness of life, or Christianity had to be reinven

Man's greatest instrument, his psyche, is little thought of, if not actually mistrusted and despised. ‘It's only psychological’ too often means: it is nothing. Where, exactly, does this immense prejudice come from?