Good Jung’s Confrontation With The Unconscious, Healthy And Unhealthy Religion Essay Example

Many times Jung found himself seeing strange dreams and visions of another world, full of darkness and emptiness. It reminded him the world of the dead, or the trip to the moon. These psychedelic experiences helped him to discover the depth of his imagination. Through the voyage to the unconscious, Jung draws the connection between religion, psyche and human consciousness.
Under the psychic reality Jung understands the experience of human personal unconscious, that is, all its processes, in particular, instinct, imagination, as well as the energy that is present in human mind all the time, from birth to death, perhaps, even after death. Getting into a conscious relationship with the unconscious, knowing that it is present in every human and affects all human thoughts and actions change all aspects of human life. In dreams people find themselves in distant lands, in unusual situations and in different images. When erroneous words fall from human lips, as if driven by some hidden power, projections on people, places, social conditionality, when a human being feels unusually strong emotions, moments of creativity, when human senses becomes unusually fresh testify the constant presence of unconscious mental processes in human life. In this case, something happens inside the human. Unconscious in mental life is gradually concentrated in the presence. Jung called this decisive force in the unconscious the Self. This communication between two worlds, between the real world and the world of dreams, reveals the image of God, according to Jung.
Jung offers the method of interpreting religious traditions, instead of the usual historical, literary and socio-political criticism. When people study the reality of the psyche, they have to use, among other things, a method of psychological interpretation of religious subject. Jung proposes a method of studying recurring archetypal characters in peculiar religious rituals or doctrines of the Incarnation, connecting them with equivalent experience in human psyche. He applies this method to the western and eastern religious traditions. Transcendent God speaks to people through human images of God and, at the same time, crushes them, because none of the human form is able to accommodate the incomprehensible Divine. These images can cause negative feelings and positive ones as well.
Jung’s contribution to the vision of religion consists mainly in the fact that it brings unconscious psychic reality in a conscious confession of faith. He clearly states that the main role of his psychology is to establish the relationship between the true content of traditional religious symbols and human mental experience. Religious life involves human in an effective, meticulous attention to what becomes conscious in the human experiences that happen when the ego and the Self refer to each other. People do not control such moments, but rather put in their meanings hidden content of their lives. This kind of trust forms the essence of the relationship which Jung calls religious.
Jung suggests that the nature of God is complex, and it includes the shadow side as well. It needs a human being with his consciousness, focused on the physical basis to realize the contrast between spirit and life. Studying the Book of Job, Jung suggests that Yahweh suffers because of his own unconscious, forgetting to turn to his own divine omniscience. Job protest against his undeserved suffering frees Yahweh from his own shadow, associated with Satan, and in the end, Jung responds to Job, using the image of Christ, who took upon himself the sufferings of humanity, and sacrificed himself to save the human society. Christ is sinless, and his opposite evil figure is the Devil, or the Antichrist. Christianity, according to Jung, leaves no room for the evil inclination in the human personality. According to him, the doctrine of evil as a lack of good does not account for the actual existence of evil as a countervailing power. The doctrine of God as the summum bonum of God raises an incredible height. The religious relations, therefore, include a sacrifice. When it happens, it seems that the reality changes itself.
According to this analysis, Jung defines religious relations close to theologians. Briefly religion can be stated as the nature of obedience to the higher powers. However, Jung argues that religion is cautious, careful and dynamic existence or action, caused not by an arbitrary act of the will, but it captures the human being under its total control. Having defined religious experience as captured by an external force, Jung further interprets the concept of the unconscious as a religious concept. According to him, the unconscious cannot just be a part of individual consciousness, but it is out of control.
According to Jung, religious experience is characterized by a special kind of emotion, in particular, submission to a higher power, and it is called higher power of god or just unconscious. No doubt, it is really typical of a certain type of religious experience, for example, in the Christian religion, this emotion is the core of the teachings of Luther or Calvin, but for another type of religious experience, for example, Buddhism, it is not typical. Summarizing the essence of Jung views, he reduces religion to a psychological phenomenon, at the same time, raising the unconscious to the level of religious phenomenon.
Taking into account Jung study about religious experiences, the division of healthy and unhealthy religion is based on the faith and archetypes the human believes in. Healthy and unhealthy vision of God depends on the peculiarities of God image in the human psyche. Healthy view of God reveals the positive nature of God meaning that the human beings believe in God as the source of goodness. The theological practices state that fundamental peculiarities of healthy view of God depend on human understanding of what is good and what is right from the moral perspective. Actually, the image of God consists in strong belief in love and goodness. That is why healthy religion is based on love and goodness.
In contrast, the unhealthy religion presupposes unhealthy vision of God the human beings believe in. This view of God reveals dark nature of God who is harsh, aggressive, vengeful, dictatorial, cold, or even capricious. This image of God is rather devilish than divine. With this regard, many perceive God as Devil, or Antichrist. As a result, there appear various beliefs and religions that concentrate human consciousness on the devilishness of the reality, so people do not believe that God is love, they persuade themselves that God is evil. Jung suggests that people who believe in dark God suffer from psychological disorders.
Jung portrays religion as a positive psychological factor. Furthermore, he writes that religious delusions, for example, the representation of the ideal religion, which is the source of the human mind, leads man from humble faith to understanding of morality and absolute freedom. This kind of knowledge is based on the misconception that it takes for granted the religious experiences. Religion provides human beings with assurance and strength, so that they could not be silenced by the monsters of the universe. Religious experiences allow the humanity to overcome the instinctive unconscious and get to the height of the greatest moral and cultural achievements.
Jung came to the conclusion that the idea of God and the whole complex world of religious phenomena is not only a projection of mental processes, but also the images of higher power that express the mental integrity of human existence. Taking into account these main points of Jung’s study of religion, one may notice that basically any religion consists in the concepts and powers human being believe in. As a result, religious experiences are grouped into healthy and unhealthy ones that mainly depends on the image of God that the human beings put in the center of their religion.