The Darkening Spirit: Jung, spirituality, religion

For Jung, salvation means that the personality becomes involved in the reconciliation of the opposites and the recognition of the Self as the master of life.

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.

and religions are systems of healing for psychic illness. This is especially true of the two greatest religions of humanity, Christianity and Buddhism.

Science and philosophy have replaced religion as mainstream ‘belief systems’ of modernity; religion, based on an outdated and untranslated mythology, cannot hope to compete with modern systems of knowing; Christian religion has been based on the authority of tradition, and modern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

light = spirit, and feminine = darkness = matter.

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

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.

‘Integration of the shadow is an emigration. Not him to us; we to him. His incursion is barbarism, our descent is culture.’

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