This paper purports to investigate from the viewpoint of analytical psychology what religious experience is, how religious experience is expressed in the Bible, and what functions religious experience has.
Jung insists that what human beings think as...
This paper purports to investigate from the viewpoint of analytical psychology what religious experience is, how religious experience is expressed in the Bible, and what functions religious experience has.
Jung insists that what human beings think as God in their minds is an objective being and it is the image of God that human beings have in their minds, not God as the absolute other thing. Jung calls the image of the God self.
Self is the whole of the mind that covers consciousness and unconsciousness, and it is the true character hidden in human beings and the divine true character residing in the deepest of human beings. According to Jung' s insistence, it is the very self that human beings experience a religion.
Jung says that human beings experience the image of God, which is the being that human beings think as God, not God itself when they experience a religion. Religious experience occurs through the symbol of self, and Christ and Buddha are the symbols of self. The image of God, which we can't help calling God, that is, God in our mind, lets human beings have numen experience.
Jung accepts religious experience very positive and says that each individual's mind could make a proper relation with this significant embodiment, and that researchers, through that way, can make the meaning of life and balance, and further, they can feel the sense of unification and of wholeness. Jung thinks that all the religions intend to cure any cracks appearing on the human minds.
On the basis of Jung's psychology, religious experience, which is to meet God, is that ego meets self in itself and experiences self. This self-experience is unity experience of the opposites that integrate disunion of human beings and it is religious experience. Self, which has perfect and concentrated properties, integrates human beings' imperfect and divided phenomena.
However, Jung insists that God, which is met in the religious experience of Christianity, and ego's experiencing self in analytical psychology, are not same. From the viewpoint of analytical psychology, Christians' meeting God is to experience self as the image of God.
Jung calls the world religions great symbolic systems for mental treatment. The symbolic systems that are in the world religions teach how to reintegrate all the available parts into significant unity, so it is mental treatment.
The process of individuation, which is Jung's mental treatment process, is in the same context as the religious experience that people meet God so when those who have mental problems meet God in the process of mental treatment, their problems can be solved.