– a community of Jungian thought and a forum for discovery where people come alive together through active membership and support for individual growth –
How strange my journey was! What words shall I use to tell you on what twisted paths a good star has guided me to you? Give me your hand, my almost forgotten soul. How warm the joy at seeing you again, you long disavowed soul. Life has led me back to you. Let us thank the life I have lived for all the happy and all the sad hours, for every joy, for every sadness. My soul, my journey should continue with you.
C. G. Jung, The Red Book (1915/2009), p. 232.
[T]he paradox is one of our most valuable spiritual possessions, while uniformity of meaning is a sign of weakness. Hence a religion becomes inwardly impoverished when it loses or waters down its paradoxes; but their multiplication enriches because only the paradox comes anywhere near to comprehending the fullness of life. Non-ambiguity and non contradiction are one-sided and thus unsuited to express the incomprehensible.
C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (1944), CW 12, § 18.
Religious but Not Religious
Religious but Not Religious with Jason Smith Members: $20, Non-Members $30 Held via Zoom | Friday, March 24 from 7 to 9 pm
We live at a time when traditional religious structures are in decline. Today an increasing number of people identify themselves as “Spiritual but not Religious.” Though this movement reflects a felt need for greater interiority in the domain of religious experience, it has often been criticized as reflecting a secular consumer culture’s approach to the spirit and lacking the important dimension of rigor and discipline. For his part, Carl Jung felt that the modern individual was badly in need of “the symbolic life” which had always found expression in traditional religion.
Drawing on his book, Religious but Not Religious: Living a Symbolic Life, Jungian analyst Jason E. Smith explores Jung’s understanding of the psychological importance of religious experience through the lens of three questions: What is the symbolic life? Why do we need a symbolic life? How can we cultivate a symbolic life?
