The Darkening Spirit: Jung, spirituality, religion

Spirit and soul exist in a ‘poetic’ realm and can only be accessed by literary figures of speech, not by science or reason.

Jung suggests that there is need of a second ‘coming’, not of Christ as such, but of his adversary, the antagonist.

Religions are psychotherapeutic systems in the truest sense of the word, and on the grandest scale. They express the whole range of the psychic problem in mighty images; they are the avowal and recognition of the soul, and at the same time the revelation of the soul's nature. From this universal foundation no human soul is cut off.

Today we witness the rise of fundamentalism in all the major religions, especially in the three monotheisms, Christianity, Judaism and Islam, but also in Hinduism and Buddhism.

Derrida, who argued in several important writings that we need to rediscover ‘religion without the religions’.

light = spirit, and feminine = darkness = matter.

Jung said ‘when all visible lights are extinguished one finds the light of the self’.

The dark side needs acknowledgement, and it is hardly going to get it from the Christian story, now that its identification with an image of light and goodness is set in stone.

In [the Christian West] grace comes from elsewhere; at all events from outside. Every other point of view is sheer heresy. Hence it is quite understandable why the human psyche is suffering from undervaluation. Anyone who dares to establish a connection between the psyche and the idea of God is immediately accused of ‘psychologism’ or suspected of