Jung,mysticism and a myth in the making

Abstract

A Jungian hermeneutic is helpful in the interpretation of shifts in contemporary religion and spirituality. Jung's thought on the psychogenesis of religious experience locates its origin in the unconscious and understands the history of revelation as that of compensation proffered to collective consciousness in the interests of its balance and totality. Jung perceives the unconscious to be currently engaged in the creation of a new myth or revelation containing the divine/human relation within the boundaries of the extended psyche. Such containment implies the relativization of God, and urges a quaternitarian cosmology which would extend the status of the sacred beyond Christian limits. Jung appeals to aspects of the Western mystical tradition itself as anticipating this shift. His appreciation and appropriation of Eckhart and Boehme ground the contemporary myth on an ongoing cycle of identity with the divine preceding divinity's fuller incarnation in consequent human consciousness. The process is natural, at once psychic and religious, and redemptive of both the human and divine.