The Ideas of Carl Jung — Psychology and Religion, Introduction
This is merely a brief article to announce the beginning of a new, hopefully long, series. My motivation is that I’ve had a deep interest in the ideas of Carl Jung for many years. This stems from my own spiritual awakening, which appeared to be an education in Jungian psychology. It consisted of: analysis of the personal unconscious, big dreams and their interpretation, an ESP course, powerful synchronicities, and a mind-blowing encounter with the I Ching. These are all staple elements of his thinking. The figure of Carl Jung has even appeared to me subsequently in a dream, as a wise old man figure, the goal of my journey.
The series can be considered to be a parallel to another I started some time ago, Christianity’s Next Reformation. I haven’t added to that for some time (apologies if anyone has noticed, or is disappointed). For the time being I’ve decided to move on to where that series was eventually heading, the ideas of Jung, which I perceive to be the essential ingredient in this needed Reformation.
The themes I’ll be addressing, as far as I can foresee at the moment, are:
- Jung’s public persona and the true Jung.
- Are his ideas psychology or religion?
- If a religion, is this a new religion, or at the very least, the renaissance of an old religion? Thus his relationship to Gnosticism.
- How his ideas conflict with conventional Christianity, thus what is wrong with Christianity in his view?
- How his ideas relate to other spiritual traditions: Sufism, Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Shamanism
Please note that, even though this is a new series, I have already written extensively about Jung on Medium. There is a series on his ‘confrontation with the unconscious’, otherwise known as journey into the underworld, see this list. There are also assorted articles on Jungian themes, see this list.
Click here for the next article in this series.
I hope you have enjoyed this article. I have written in the past about other topics, including spirituality, metaphysics, psychology, science, Christianity, politics and astrology. All of those articles are on Medium, but the simplest way to see a guide to them is to visit my website (click here and here). My most recent articles, however, are only on Medium; for those please check out my lists.
