Much of traditional religion consists of protecting people from that numinous experience which would be too big for them. A person who is touched by a vision of God too soon or in a deeper sense than he has the capacity to survive it will be a severely wounded person. Really, that’s the Fisher King wounded experience: he touches God, he eats the salmon too illegitimately and suffers a terrible run from it.
I think probably half of the suffering of modern people could be cancelled out or alleviated in just one stroke by understanding the nature of that suffering. If people understand that we’re Fisher Kings and that we have bitten off the salmon and that this is a noble task and that it is going to yield a wonderful cultural product, then one doesn’t have to be guilty over it anymore. And that’s half of the suffering cancelled out right there. One needn’t be frightened or guilty any longer but half of the suffering is alleviated the moment one understands the true meaning of it. The one unforgivable or unbearable form of suffering is meaninglessness to us.
I had the feeling that under it all there must be some quite special complex, a universal one having to do with the prospective tendencies in man. If there is a “psychanalysis” [sic] there must also be a “psychosynthesis” which creates future events according to the same laws. (I see I am writing rather as if I had a flight of ideas.) The leap towards psychosynthesis proceeds via the person of my patient, whose unconscious is right now preparing, apparently with nothing to stop it, a new stereotype into which everything from outside, as it were, fits in conformity with the complex. (Hence the idea of the objective effect of the prospective tendency!)
The four cornerstones of the human organism are that we are bio, psycho, social, spiritual beings, kind of a quaternity of the aspects of the human organism. We're bodies, we're psyches, we're social animals, which has to do with work and love primarily, and we're spiritual beings, which is this deep human longing to experience the transcendent in our ordinary lives.
A healthy spirituality expects to experience the transcendent in the imminent. A healthy spirituality is personal - it’s [mine], I’ve hammered this out, I’m conscious that I’m a spiritual being and I expect to experience the transcendent in my love relationships, in my family, in my ordinary work life. So I experience myself as being in the presence of the holy or the transcendent no matter where I am or what I’m doing. The other thing it carries is no judgment, no judgment of another spirituality, no judgment of another’s tradition. The more spiritual one becomes the more inclusive she becomes. So a healthy spirituality is personal, imminent, and inclusive. (7:20)
Jesus taught over and over again: the wind blows where it will, you know not where it comes from or where its going. So there’s a kind of autonomy to the transcendent... we can’t control it in other worlds. There’s a magical thinking that “if I do this, that will happen,” well you can’t control the experience of the transcendent. Buddhists talk about enlightenment, they say it’s always accidental but spiritual practice makes you accident prone. (9:09)
The etymology of the word suffer is the word ferre to carry. Suffer means to carry from beneath. There are two view points on an effect. There’s a cause and effect, that’s called reductionism, “so I’ve had this trauma, what caused it?” Then there is the question of the teleology, which is teleos, which means complete or whole. So rather than saying what caused this, you can asked the question, “what does this want? what does this mean? what does this want from me? what is this leading to?” Now, it’s important to ask maybe both questions, but it’s the second question where we find the meaning. And so, in a quick etymological amplification, we understand by standing under. So we stand under and carry it until we can understand it. And when we understand it, we find its meaning and we can integrate it into substance and soul. I suspect the soul primarily is created in its substance through suffering rather than through success. (13:27)
One of the popular things to say today is “I’m spiritual, I’m not religious.” I get that, I even understand that and could maybe say it myself. If we do good etymology though we’re all religious, because the word religion comes from the root ligare which means Latin for “to connect.” So religare means to reconnect something that’s been broken or estranged. So the religious nature of the psyche is to become whole, take all our fraction or fragmented parts and this religious nature of the psyche is to seek wholeness. So we’re all religious, we’re not all called to the doctrinal, creedal formulation denominational religion but we’re all called to meaning, purpose, belonging, and wholeness. (42:43)
Having-in our view quite correctly-discarded the traditional framework of dogma and religious orthodoxy with its personal God and revealed law, they are left with only the human ego. After stripping away the flimsy defenses of the mind, the existentialist is thrown back on his mundane, egoic selfhood; as an ego he faces the immensity of freedom, as an ego he creates himself. In contrast with these thinkers, Jung squarely stated: "It is not I who create myself, rather I happen to myself."" There is a hidden operator behind our lives, even though it may not be in accord with the view of conventional religion. The words of the Delphic oracle, incised over the doorway of Jung's house in Kusnack, near Zurich, as well as on his family crypt, are of supreme importance here: Vocatus atque non vocatus Deus aderit (Called or uncalled the god will be present). Whether we affirm or deny, invoke or banish the numinous reality of the light indwelling, it will nevertheless be present, and moreover, its presence will be felt through its works. We cannot escape being destined. Our freedom is not a freedom that takes us away from the destiny of individuation, but rather it is a freedom that permits us to recognize this destiny consciously, with full gnosis. The choice is merely between two possibilities: one implies unconsciousness, and a consequent lack of freedom ensuing from the compulsive pressure exerted on us by the god, or collective unconscious; the other is an experience of meaning arising from the recognition of the individuational urge decreed by the same indwelling god.
- Stephen A. Hoeller, The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead, p. 117-118.
Emil A. Fischer: Is there any special relationship between this saying and your Weltanschauung or your life's work?
Carl Gustav Jung: "Called or uncalled, God is present!" It is a Delphic oracle. The translation is by Erasmus. You ask whether the oracle is my motto. In a way, you see, it contains the entire reality of the psyche. "Oh God!" is what we say, irrespective of whether we say it by way of a curse or by way of love.
What Jungians have, but it probably needs to be strengthened, is faith. We place our faith in the Self, in the psyche. In this sense when we sit down with a patient and conduct analysis, we believe that the answers to the patients' questions will emerge out of the dialogue, out of their inner world, out of their dreams. That's an act of faith. And I think that needs to be very solidly stressed in the training program. The analyst doesn't have the answers, what you have is faith that the answers will come. Otherwise you couldn't conduct analysis. You know you don't have the answers. But you have faith that they will emerge, out of the process, out of the psyche.
There's a famous letter that Jung wrote to one of his followers that sent him a dream. In that, Jung speculated that a new religion would form in about 600 years. And he said, in the meantime individuals are creating their own spiritual systems or their own belief systems out of their inner work and their dreams and their active imagination. But eventually this will come into a new world religion.
