“I am accused of mysticism. I do not, however, hold myself responsible for the fact that man has, always and everywhere, spontaneously developed a religious function, and that the human psyche from time immemorial has been shot through with religious feelings and ideas. Whoever cannot see this aspect of the human psyche is blind, and whoever chooses to explain it away. . .has no sense of reality.”
Carl Jung, Freud and Jung: Contrasts
Religion, as was explored in the previous video, can help us improve the state of our character and can turn us into a man or woman more capable of facing up to the challenges of life. Religion does this by helping re-order our inner world in a way that brings harmony and strength to where previously existed disarray and weakness. In the final video of the series we will explore the practical steps we need to take in order to use the power of the unconscious to cultivate a religious attitude to life:
“If we try to define the psychological structure of the religious experience which saves, heals, and makes whole the simplest formula we can find would seem to be the following: in religious experience man comes face-to-face with a psychically overwhelming Other.”
Carl Jung, Flying Saucers – A Myth of Things Seen in the Skies
A religious attitude to life is established when we discover a divine order, or what Jung calls a psychically overwhelming Other, and we strive to connect with it. The divine can take many forms but in this series of videos we have been focusing on the divine within, or what is called our inner god. The inner god, as we saw in the second video, is not a personal phenomenon, we do not create it, rather it is a gift of our evolutionary history and a shared feature of the entire human race. The inner god expresses itself through what Jung calls the collective realm of the unconscious.
