From 1937, when he gave the Terry Lectures at Yale University, until his death in 1961, Jung was increasingly concerned with the role of religion in human psychology. He came to believe that religion played a crucial part in the process he called 'individuation'; the process by which people reach towards a fuller maturity that not only encompasses their conscious life, but which comes to integrate those deeper forces that lie not only behind but beyond the personal stream of consciousness. We could say, by analogy, that it is a process whereby the leaf floating on a stream becomes not only aware of itself as a leaf and aware of the tree from which it has fallen, but aware of the stream upon which it floats, and, perhaps, even of the valley through which the steam flows. It is to know the individual life in a much deeper and richer context, and to become aware of the forces that are operating on that life from within the deep mechanisms of the mind. It is no idle or passive process, and one which Jung saw as the primary psychological function of religion. For him religions contain the outward projections of those processes of individuation in symbolic form. Those symbols form maps of the inner pathways that need to be followed in order to enable and encourage the process of individuation. This is religion as the midwife of deeper wisdom and maturity: it involves gnosis – a deeper coming to know at an intuitive and more embracing level.
If denied or ignored, those processes will seek to attach themselves to less explicitly religious objects of devotion, such as the 'Nation', the 'People', or even a belligerent atheism or a strident materialism; or, alternatively, if repressed they may produce a overwhelming sense of anomie, leaving the sufferer in a wasteland of nihilism. Many of the patients that had come to him did so precisely because they were suffering from such a malaise.
We have no symbolic life, and we are all badly in need of the symbolic life. Only the symbolic life can express the need of the soul - the daily need of the soul, mind you! And because people have no such thing, they can never step out of this mill - this awful, banal, grinding life in which they are "nothing but.". . . Everything is banal; everything is "nothing but," and that is the reason why people are neurotic. They are simply sick of the whole thing, sick of that banal life, and therefore they want sensation. They even want a war; they all want a war; they are all glad when there is a war; they say, "Thank heaven, now something is going to happen - something bigger than ourselves!"1
He contrasted the lot of modern people with that of the Pueblo Indians he met during his tour of America. He formed a life-long friendship with Mountain Lake, a Hopi elder, spending many hours in conversation with him. They exchanged letters for many years after.
It is the role of religious symbols to give meaning to the life of man. The Pueblo Indians believe that they are the sons of Father Sun, and this belief endows their life with a perspective (and a goal) that goes far beyond their limited existence. It gives them ample space for the unfolding of personality and permits them a fuller life as complete persons. Their plight is infinitely more satisfactory than that of a man in our own civilisation who knows that he is (and will remain) nothing more than an underdog with no inner meaning to his life.2
Jung continues:
A sense of wider meaning to one’s existence is what raises man beyond mere getting and spending. If he lacks this sense, he is lost and miserable.3
Jung came to the opinion that all religions were essentially externalisations of deep psychological processes. They were projections of the deep mind:
Myths and fairytales give expression to unconscious processes and their retelling causes these processes to come alive again and be recollected.4
Jung stressed the importance of symbols within those myths. It was those symbols that reached beyond the surface of the rational, conscious mind into the deep mind, to an almost primordial layer of instincts, drives and emotions. It is only when those are engaged that people become truly energised and become impelled. That layer interacts with our conscious, rational layer through the ways in which we respond to symbols, and those symbols are most often encountered woven into the fabric of myths.
For Jung, symbols were far more powerful than mere signs: they do not simply convey information as a sign does, but engage us at a deeper more emotive level – they engage far more of our being and evoke responses in doing so. The symbolic meaning of myths are patterns for being. Relating to them changes us and can imbue our life with underlying meaning. However, therein lies a trap – that of ceasing to see them as myth, but coming to view them as factual stories which must be believed. A myth encodes truths, but is not in itself true. It is a vehicle for communicating truths in symbolic form. Jung was concerned that people should pay attention to how they were engaging with myth, and should take special note of experiences that he called numinous. Such experiences he felt could be profound.
Jung was dismissive of those who tried to substitute 'belief' for engagement with their experience:
When people say that they believe in the existence of God, it has never impressed me in the least. Either I know a thing and then I don’t need to believe it; or I believe it because I am not sure that I know it. I am well satisfied with the fact that I know experiences which I cannot avoid calling numinous or divine.5
You cannot assert something to be true simply by choosing to believe it. That does not, and never has, made it true. Religion is not about factual truth, it relates to experience, and especially to experience of the “numinous or divine”. It weaves a mythic web between and around such experiences in which its truths are encoded. The fact that you have had, or have the capacity for such experience, is something you can know, and can know conclusively. Those experiences are doorways into the mythic, into spirituality. They tell you about the reality of such relationships and open paths to a deeper maturity and wisdom.
Jung is uncomfortable for both the theist and the non-theist. For the non-theist as he stresses the importance of engaging with the mythic because of its function in vitalising the psyche, and fending off anomie and its associated malaise. He also stressed its importance in fending off what happens when the psyche is free to attach to a less explicitly mythic symbol such as “the nation” or “the cause”: a risk of which he became all too aware as the first half of twentieth century unfolded in all its bloody convolutions. For the theist he is uncomfortable because seeing the belief as a living myth points to its being a myth and thus not literally real.
By embracing the inward nature of spirituality there comes a question: is this just an ego-trip, an joyous exploration of the inscape, an escape into mythos and fantasyland; or is there the courage to face the deeper, darker questions? Confronting the darkness of one's own shadow and understanding how our ego consumes and devours the manna of self and other's esteem: we must ask, who do we serve?
Our egos love to feed on self-esteem, or, if we lack self-esteem, then egos crave the esteem of others either directly, by courting praise, or by being sycophantic, or being a people-pleaser; or indirectly by taking vicarious pleasure in the success or fame of some chosen figure. Battles with ego may lead to a chronic state of self-abasement – something that lies at the root of much of the darker religious traditions of self-flagellation, mortification of the flesh, or desire for punishment. Jung taught the need to integrate the ego, not to let it become inflated into a devouring monster, or to reject it and become self-destructive. Correctly balanced, the ego serves not just ourselves, but those we are in relationship with, our communities, and the wider good.
According to Jung it is in embracing the tension between the opposites that we evolve. That tension is at its most dynamic between the ego and the deep centre, which Jung called the Self. It is seeing the ego from the perspective of the deep-centre, or Self, that allows us to constructively control the ego and thus our deeper relationship with the world; relating to the world in the fullness of our humanity, not the superficiality of ourselves as actors in pre-allotted roles. We are far more than the consumers that some versions of political economy would reduce us to; or the stimulus and response machines that some psychological accounts would have; or expressions of our selfish-genes; or any other reductive simplification. We need myths that encompass the complexity of both ourselves and our societies. That is the function of religion. What ties us into those myths, according to Jung, is our God-archetype and the images it generates.
I cannot define for you what God is, but my work had [repeatedly] revealed that the pattern of God exists in every [mind], and that this pattern has at its disposal the highest transformative energies of which the human Spirit is capable.6
However, the forms that are generated by the God-Archetype, the content of religions, can be quite various and given to change over time:
That is why whenever we speak of religious content we move in a world of images that point to something ineffable. We do not know how clear or unclear these images, metaphors, and concepts are in respect of their transcendental object. If, for instance, we say “God” we give an expression to an image or verbal concept which has undergone many changes in the course of time. We are, however, unable to say with any degree of certainty — unless it be by faith — whether these changes affect only the images and concepts, or the Unspeakable itself. After all we can imagine God as an eternally flowing current of vital energy that endlessly changes shape just as easily as we can imagine him as an eternally unmoved unchangeable essence. Our reason is sure of one thing: that it manipulates images and ideas which are dependent on human imagination and its temporal and local conditions, and which have therefore changed innumerable times in the course of their long history.7
For many living in a Christian society, the key image generated by the God-Archetype is that of the union of God with the man Jesus as Christ.
Our discourse necessarily brings us to Christ, because he is the still living myth of our culture. He is our cultural hero, who, regardless of his historical existence, embodies the myth of the divine Primordial Man, the mystic Adam.8
However, Jung thought that the Christian myth was only the current vehicle to which the god-archetype was attaching itself in European cultures. Christianity had evolved from earlier mythologies, and its rituals were shaped to invoke the same deep parts of the psyche as those earlier incarnations:
There are absolute facts which are quite surely established. They point back into pre-history, into a continuity of tradition perhaps hundreds of years before Christianity. Now these mysteries have always been the expression of a fundamental psychological condition. Man expresses his most fundamental and most important psychological conditions in this ritual, this magic, or whatever you call it. And the ritual is the cultic performance of these basic psychological facts.9
'God' has been a symbol favoured by the Western mind. The Eastern mind has been subtler. The Eastern mind has favoured solutions couched in terms of negative images, of emptiness, of the void, of the Tao, the inexplicable, rather than the positive images of a deity preferred in the West.
Jung saw the development and strengthening of the Self – that deep centre – which balances and controls the impulsive, hedonistic ego – as the primary psychological function of religion. The realisation that you are not your ego, but that the ego is a defensive shield through which we transact our lives with the world, is a very fundamental step in the analytic process. The ego is very much our conscious, rationalising mind – what the Buddhists refer to as the monkey mind. It is incessantly busy. It is pushed by drives from deep within and reacting to an ever changing and challenging environment. It job is to keep us alive by placing us in favourable circumstances. Sometimes its job becomes impossible. Sometimes the push from the drives within take us into dangerous or damaging circumstances. That is when discovering and developing the deep-centre provides that fulcrum of balance which can lead to a wiser, more guided path through life. In functional terms it matters little what symbolic form the deep-centre is presented as: the Buddha, Brahma, God, Allah, the Earth-Mother, or a thousand other possible disguises will all suffice. What matters is that the symbol will enable the process of re-centring to happen. It is the process of providing a focal point of reference which will give meaning and purpose to life. It is to be experienced as such a centre, to be felt, not simply given logical acknowledgement – logical acknowledgement would be sterile.
What has been called the “existential instinct” is the drive to have meaning, and, ultimately, to have meaning is to find the ground state of being. Quakers have done that ever since the time of George Fox through the practice of silent-waiting. That is what seasons them. That is what leads them into communion with that ground state – the ineffable, the unnameable, the inexplicable.
That ground state can be approached via the Western symbolism of monotheism; via the polytheistic symbolism of the Hindu; or by the deconstruction of symbols practised in Buddhism; or by smacking your being against it in the manner of Zen; or it can be approached by sitting in a Quaker meeting. All should lead to the deeper wisdom than words. Opening to that wisdom is the process of individualisation described by Jung. Then your life can become guided by being rooted in the ground of being.
Understanding the content of religions as projections of the deep mind is not the most comfortable of processes but is one that Jung thought was essential, one that marked yet a further stage of our psycho-cultural evolution, perhaps the closing of the Christian aeon, and the advent of a new age that incorporates Christianity within a wider vision.
1C.G. Jung, Collected Works volume 18: The Symbolic Life, Chapter III. ""The Symbolic Life".
2p.89: Jung, Carl G: Man and his Symbols: Aldus Books, London, 1964
3ibid
4p.180: Jung, C G (trans Hull, R F): Aion . Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self: 2nd edition: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968 [of 1951]
5Jung's reply to Philip's question about whether all we are limited to is knowledge of the God-archetype: p.16: Philp, H L: Jung and the Problem of Evil: Rockliff, London, 1958
6Handwritten note on Isaac Pennington: What is God? Irene Pickard's archive item #57
7 p.xiii: Jung, C G: Answer to Job: Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1954
8p.36: Jung, C G (trans Hull, R F): Aion . Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self: 2nd edition: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968 [of 1951]
9p.9-10: ibid
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