“The religious myth is one of man’s greatest and most significant achievements, giving him the security and inner strength not to be crushed by the monstrousness of the universe.”
Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation
In the first video of this series we explored the nature and the structure of the unconscious mind. In the remainder of this series we are going to discuss how we can harness the power of the unconscious by using it as an object for the cultivation of a religious or spiritual attitude toward life. To begin we must devote some time to answering the following: ‘What is religion?’.
For most people the term religion is associated primarily with its organized forms. To be religious, it then follows, requires that we spur the truths of science in favor of a set of institutionalized and often outdated dogmas. But organized religion is only one manifestation of religion and it is not the one that concerns us in this video. The type of religion we are concerned with is perhaps best summed up by William James in his seminal work Varieties of Religious Experience in which he states the following:
“…[religion] is the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.”
William James, Varieties of Religious Experience
The divine, as we will soon see, can take many forms and so in this personal sense religion is in no way antithetical to science, or as Abraham Maslow explains in his book Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences:
“. . .what the more sophisticated scientist is now in the process of learning is that though he must disagree with most of the answers to the religious questions which have been given by organized religion, it is increasingly clear that the religious questions themselves – and the religious quests, the religious yearnings, the religious needs themselves – are perfectly respectable scientifically [and] are rooted deep in human nature. . . As a matter of fact, contemporary existential humanistic psychologists would probably consider a person sick or abnormal in an existential way if he were not concerned with these “religious” questions.”
Abraham Maslow, Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences
