Centuries of religious symbols, rituals, and dogmas gather psychic energy and must express themselves across civilisations in meaningful ways. For Jung, this concerns the God who escapes human definition. But in the 21^st century, these collective containers of religious symbolism no longer seem to channel psychic energy – so what’s the deal? Whether we like it or not, Jung said, God is present. If we can’t use the psychic energy channelling over the centuries into the traditional God, we’ll channel it elsewhere, whether or not it gives us joy or sustenance.  

This manifests in the growth of all sorts of nasties (i.e. irrational clinging to ‘my rights’ (to bear arms, etc.), which often come at the price of the persecution of others who disagree. Likewise, religious fundamentalism is a backlash reaction to fear and loss.  This is all to do with an inability to secure a reliable connection to the psychic reality religion (a transcendent reality) conveyed through symbolism. Jung wanted analytical psychology to help re-establish this connection to truths contained in religious symbolism – through their equivalents in our own psychic experience, which comes to us through dreams, fantasy, and symptoms. This is the mystical or spiritual experience – experiences of this transcendent realm that, for centuries, men called God.

But how do you translate them if traditional symbolism no longer works?  Start by realising it’s an experience of the opposing self – otherness – and as we observe this effect on our centre of consciousness (ego) in dreams, traditional time/space boundaries we live with every day necessarily collapse. Stuff starts coming out, and it will do so in recurrent motifs (like it did for Jung and the Red Book), and this stuff exceeds our personal experience (it is collective, and so has a life of its own we can’t control) – so what do we do with it?

We look to our cultural heritage for solutions (centuries of it) – but they may or may not suit us – or we may have already rejected them. This is the problem of mysticism as a whole if, philosophically, we don’t wish to subscribe to the existence of universal truths. There are primordial universal themes that confront us from the deepest layers of our unconscious, and we order them best we can from what is already in our conscious, and that seems necessarily to involve interpretation, which I guess expresses itself in line with free will or fate, depending on your philosophical preference.

If Jung is right that we must experience everything through our psyches, swamped in our individuality, where does that leave us with our experiences of God? Well, at least those God images are helpful because they give us a glimpse of Self (which is the manifestation of a transcendent reality and also represents the unification of our conscious and unconscious aspects) – but that still leaves us with the problem of interpreting the ineffable, which we cannot define because we don’t have the vocabulary for it. This brings us back to religious tradition and the symbol and ritual that comes with it, for according to Jung, we are always conscious of our relationship to the deity, and if we need a relatively safe way to deal with personal experiences of that relationship, we can do no better than to stick with time-honoured religions creed and dogma – collective teachings that ‘protect’ us from the ‘blast’ of the Almighty.

Note – the above are my personal reactions to material presented in “Jung and religion: the opposing self” by Ann Belford Ulanov – in The Cambridge Companion to Jung (2nd ed. pp. 315-330),