top of page
Search

Carl Jung Knew God

Updated: Jan 27

Carl Gustav Jung, the psychiatrist, psychotherapist, founder of analytical psychology, spiritual Master, and all round dude, understood God differently. Which is why when Jung in his 1959 BBC interview with John Freedman made the statement “I don’t need to believe [in God]; I know”, he was met with a vitriol not previously seen in psychological circles, despite his wisdom and brilliance.


Jung later explained “My statement was not meant to deny the existence of a transcendent reality. I merely wished to emphasise that my understanding of psychological phenomena is based on empirical evidence and observation rather than mere belief.”


What did Carl Jung mean by this? What is the empirical evidence he refers to? And how does he ‘know’ God? Let’s explore how he, the most mysterious, convincing, spiritual, and mystical of thinkers in the 20th century, approached the topic of the numinous (having a strong religious or spiritual quality; indicating or suggesting the presence of a divinity).


Over the door at his house in Zurich, Jung had inscribed: ‘Whether summoned or not, God will be present’ (‘Vocatus atque non vocatus, Deus aderit’ ). This sums up Jung’s attitude to religion and spirituality, in his life and in his work. They are an ever present and hugely powerful, even if unacknowledged, factor.



Jung said that “God is a mystery, and everything we say about him is symbolic.” The Bible is a metaphor, and so is the discipline of positive psychology. These are all ways of describing an indescribable Truth. Jung is telling us “God” cannot be fully understood or explained in literal terms because he is a transcendent mystery beyond human comprehension. Any words, concepts, or symbols that we could use to explain God, the divine, or the infinite nature of the Universe will never even scratch the surface to capture its Truth. Instead, we can only use symbols and metaphors as an attempt to express our experiences with the divine. This quote reminds us to approach discussions of God and the Universe with humility and openness, recognising that our language and concepts are limited in their ability to capture the fullness of the infinite.


Embarking on a spiritual journey entails stepping into the fire and the labyrinth of Self-discovery, Self-realisation, and expanded consciousness. On this path, the wisdom of the much revered Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung can serve as a beacon of light (or at least, it did for me). Jung inspires introspection and incites transformation. From understanding your psyche, the unconscious, embracing your authentic Self, acknowledging your relationship with the infinite to managing addictions, his words of wisdom will provide invaluable insights to guide your spiritual journey. Jung wrote about man's journey inwards that “His retreat into himself is not a final renunciation of the world, but a search for quietude, where alone it is possible for him to make his contribution to the life of the community.”

Jung wrote that there is change afoot “God has fallen out of containment in religion and into human hearts - God is incarnating. Our whole unconscious is in an uproar from the God Who wants to know and to be known.” He continues “Somewhere, right at the bottom of one’s own BEing, one generally does know where one should go and what one should do. But there are times when the clown we call “I” behaves in such a distracting fashion that the inner voice cannot make its presence felt.”


Jung came increasingly to think that the healthiest spiritual aim, that is, the one of most benefit to the individual, is that of individuation – of trying to become more and more fully and truly who we essentially are. This becoming conscious of more and more of our unconscious motivations, fears, and longings, is a lifelong process and can be followed along many different paths, two of which are, Jung thought, analytic psychology and religion.


‘Individuation means becoming an “in-dividual,” and, in so far as “individuality” embraces our innermost, last, and incomparable uniqueness, it also implies becoming one’s own Self. We could therefore translate individuation as “coming to Self-hood” or “Self-realisation.”’ We could also translate individuation as becoming un-divided – becoming more and more of our own full Self, having less of it projected or repressed or split off and denied: Integrated and authentic.


To some extent, we all follow the spiritual path of individuation, usually unconsciously, when, as Jung wrote "It means no more than that the acorn becomes an oak, the calf a cow, and the child an adult." But it is the conscious, chosen following of this path which Jung saw as the true spiritual achievement.


Jung experienced many years of doubt and struggle during his early family life, and the loneliness of such total repudiation by his family and cultural tradition, to his knowing that he lived, not ‘in the Christian myth’ but by ‘[his] personal myth "I understood that the Self is the principle and archetype of orientation and meaning." Jung had the realisation that since God and the Self are both unknowable, they could be the same, and one a projection of the other – more often, he refers to God as being a projection of the Self. Hence as Jesus said in Luke 17:21 "The Kingdom of God is within you."


Jung understood the relevance of the Christian story in its ever-living symbolic power and Truth. He thought of the life and death of Jesus Christ as happening now, always, in a dimension to our ordinary life which we might think of as ‘eternal life’ or ‘the objective psyche’ – a dimension in which time, and the split between our conscious and our unconscious awareness of events, do not exist, "As if a window or a door had been opened upon that which lies beyond space and time". So the self-sacrifice of Jesus in his death (Jesus chose to die) is eternally present in this timeless dimension of our lives, and so is always powerfully available as a symbol with immediate and current relevance – the death of the ego and the resurrection of a new ‘I’ (which no-one recognises at first, as none of the disciples immediately recognised the risen Christ), the death in seeming failure and the resurrection in new hope and a new way of life, the ending of all familiar security and then the coming, after a descent into 'Hell' and despair, of something recognisably the same yet amazingly new and different: Something divine and 'Heavenly'.


We have all had such experiences on a smaller or a larger scale, and Jung saw the story of Christ’s death and resurrection as symbolising this common, yet often traumatic, experience. Similarly, every phase of Jesus’ life, and each of the parables, can be understood as symbols of development for our psyche. For Jung, it was the internal life of the psyche, not external events, which are of paramount importance. For Jung, the external forms of religion were one means to follow our true spiritual path, which he saw as individuation, and in this quest all external events can be understood symbolically. Religion, according to Jung, therefore was merely one form of symbolism to shine light on our spiritual path. It is no wonder then, that spirituality, the Hero's Journey, and Higher Power are consistently in my top 10 most read articles.


The following BBC video is an insight into Carl Jung in his own words. If any avowed atheists are reading this right now, you might want to sit down. Because Jung doesn’t just state whether or not he believes, he goes much further than that. If you go to the video to the 8:01 mark you will see where Jung is asked the big question:


BBC Interviewer: "Did you believe in God?

Jung: “Oh yes."

BBC Interviewer:"Do you now believe in God?"

Jung: "Now... Difficult to answer: I know. I don’t need to believe…I know.”


Carl Gustav Jung 'Face to face' in his own words (BBC 1959). John Freeman and his team filmed the interview at Jung's house at Küsnacht (near Zurich, Switzerland) in march 1959, it was broadcast in Great Britain on October 22, 1959. This film has undoubtedly brought Jung to more people than any other piece of journalism and any of Jung's own writings. Freeman was deputy editor at the "New Statesman" at the time of the interview. They formed a friendship, that continued until Jung's death.


Did you see the gleam in Jung’s eye as he answered the question "Do you now believe in God?" If you watch closely, you might have detected just the slightest hint of a grin on his face as he held his pipe aloft in his left hand and delivered the monumental response. The viewer gets the impression that Jung was enjoying himself as he dropped that metaphysical bomb reply on the unsuspecting BBC interviewer. But what’s clear from the video is that Jung didn’t just claim to believe. He didn’t just espouse some blurry notion of the existence of a Higher Power. He also didn’t take the safe way out by placing his chips on the agnostic side of the ledger. He barely skips a beat and then flat out says "I know". Of course, we all wonder - that’s a universal aspect of being human - but knowing is next level. Knowing is another thing altogether. You have to admire not only Jung’s willingness to answer the question, but the lack of equivocation he brings to the question, a directness that seems in short supply among the intellectual luminaries of today or of any age. 


The conviction of “I am what I AM” was a sudden coming to consciousness for him which felt like coming out of a mist.

"I don't need to believe, I know" When Carl Jung made this claim about God there was a lot of obvious controversy over what he meant. This video explains what he truly meant by such a claim with a letter he sent to help clarify his view on God to the public

Jung wrote “Our time certainly demands some new thought [regarding religion], as we cannot continue to think in a medieval way when we enter the sphere of religious experience.”


So how can someone know God? Jung in his career analysed over 80,000 dreams from this patients. Through this material, he noticed similar motifs, symbols, and patterns as seen in world religions, mythology, folklore, and literature. Symbols such as God, Christ, the soul, the divine, the sun, the moon, the ocean, the stars, the hero, etc. It was from these similarities that Jung posited that within each human mind, there must be a single source of all ideas, symbols, and patterns of behaviour. He called this psychic system the ‘collective unconscious’.


From this system, Jung thought he could explain many phenomena such as the experience of the numinous, the captivation of certain religious and mythological texts, and what the goal and meaning of our lives should be. Jung believed, for instance, that many religious ideas, such as the ‘soul’, ‘evil’, ‘transcendence’, ‘Heaven and Hell’, and ‘God’, could be understand from this psychological framework. For instance, 'Heaven' would be a psychological state of harmony, wholeness and fulfilment (the domain of the Higher Self and love); whereas 'Hell' would be a fracture of our psyches, a spiritual alienation and existential crisis (the domain of the ego and fear).


The transcendent would be moving beyond the narrow confines of the ego to the realm of the unconscious, a connection with the deeper parts of our own minds. Evil would be a projection of the Jungian Shadow, an unwillingness to understand our own dark impulses and instead lash out at others. These concepts, insomuch as they refer to religious ideas, viewed in this way are symbols for a psychological reality. A way for us to gain access to deeper parts of ourselves. This is the Jungian process of ‘individuation’, a bridging together of conscious and unconscious elements of the psyche.


Jung struggled with organised religion growing up. He had a deep sense of the holy from an early age, but felt that the Christianity of his time was not allowing him to truly connect with the divine.


In attending his first communion, he was left deeply unsatisfied that there was no great breakthrough or insight.


Through his exploration of psychology, Jung came to understand God as the central archetype of the collective unconscious.


God was not a literal deity that provided a set of moral codes and laws, but was a psychological reality, a symbol of the transcendent aspects of the human experience.


The God archetype is the ultimate source of meaning and purpose in one’s life. Jung referred to this central symbol as the ‘Self’, a representation of the totality of the psyche.


By reconnecting with the ‘Self’, an individual transcends the ego boundaries and creates an inner connection to the deepest and most timeless part of themselves. In short, by connecting with the ‘Self’ the individual can have a direct experience of God and the numinous. For Jung, this was the final stage of individuation, or the maturating of the personality.


Jung used these ideas to account for the widespread interest in religious phenomena. He was not so taken with Freud’s ‘wish fulfilment’, and believed that Marx’s ‘opioid of the masses’ was only part of the story.


Jung didn’t focus on the metaphysics, that is, attempting to explain the nature and origin of the supernatural.


Instead he focused on people’s experiences, that which we can account for. He took the approach of phenomenology.


Jung saw organised religions such as Christianity Judaism, Buddhism as representations of the same phenomena – a reconnection with the inner world of the psyche.


Religion stems from the Latin root ‘religare’, which means to re-bind or re-connect with some transcendental reality.


Viewed through the Jungian lens, religion is a way of reconnecting with the ‘transcendental reality’ that exists beyond the ego, namely, the unconscious. For Jung then, religion is a method through which one can access the unconscious, the realm of the archetypes, or land of the Gods.


And central to all of it is the archetype of the ‘Self’, the God image, the ultimate achievement of a mind turned inward.


Indeed, even religious experience and encounters with the numinous could be accounted for through this lens.


When someone claims to have seen a spirit, or felt the presence of God, the Jungians would consider this a manifestation of the archetype breaking into consciousness.


It is a symbol of the numinous, of an encounter with something greater than oneself. This naturally produces the feeling of ‘awe’, a simultaneous terror and rapture.


Archetypal (religious) experiences can feel earth-shattering in their significance. They can represent a monumental transformation in the individual’s mind.


Religious and spiritual practices can allow for a greater connection with the unconscious forces, and as such regulate this mechanism.



Jung went as far to say that the reason no one paid attention to the psyche prior to the 20th century was because religious practices held the psyche in a stable, sheathed, metaphysical framework.

“Oh, how different did the world appear to medieval man! For him the Earth was eternally fixed and at rest in the centre of the Universe, encircled by the course of a sun that solicitously bestowed its warmth. Men were the children of God under the loving care of the Most High, who prepared them for eternal blessedness; and all knew exactly what they should do and how they should conduct themselves in order to rise from a corruptible world to an incorruptible and joyous existence. Such a life no longer seems real to us, even in our dreams.” – C.G Jung

With the rise of enlightenment thinking, rationality, and greater consciousness, we became awakened from this sleep of religion, into the nightmare of the unchained, untethered psyche.


And with it, the birth of psychology.


Jung even questioned whether the psyche intended this to happen. Were we supposed to forego our religious garms and grow into something new? In this way religion (or the re-binding) can no longer provide modern people of such refined consciousness with the tools to combat the forces of the unconscious. And as it stands in the 21st century, we are plagued with a meaning crisis, mental health issues, and a total lack of spiritual and moral direction. We don't know who we are or how to live our lives. Dysfunction has become the norm as a coping mechanism for living in this Dystopian world that we call, somewhat ironically, 'civilisation.'.

“No culture or civilisation before our own was ever forced to take these psychic undercurrents in deadly earnest. Psychic life always found expression in a metaphysical framework of some sort. But the conscious, modern man, can no longer refrain from acknowledging the might of psychic forces.” – C.G Jung

The main takeaway here is that Jung viewed religious phenomena, symbols, and experience as a psychological reality.


Through religion, one can have a relationship with the unconscious, which is synonymous with the divine, or God.


But organised religion can be outdated for many modern people, who are taken by rationality, enlightenment, and scientific revolution.


And as such, many find they are spiritually and morally deprived, which can manifest as psychological pain and existential suffering.


Jung, however, said he knew God. This means he knows of a force beyond the understanding and limitations of his ego (conscious mind), and that this force would eternally steer the course of his life, for better or worse.

“I did not say in the broadcast, ‘There is a God’, I said ‘I do not need to believe in God; I know’. Which does not mean: I do know a certain God (Zeus, Jahwe, Allah, the Trinitarian God, etc.) but rather: I do know that I am obviously confronted with a factor unknown in itself, which I call ‘God’.” – C.G Jung

And through this unknown factor, we can have a direct experience of God within the collective unconscious.


But in a way that is entirely different to how God and religion have traditionally been understood.


Through a connection to the ‘Self’, and its manifestation in myth and world religion, we can move closer to the numinous, and its true source of meaning.


Whilst Jung largely avoided the metaphysical question of a supernatural creator, he believed we should be open-minded towards issues of spirituality. What was more important was the primary experience of himself, his patients, and the collective experience of humanity with timeless symbols, rituals and religions.

Symbols that appear over and over again cross-culturally and through all human epochs.


So what does God mean for Jung? Well, he can answer that question himself…

“I remember Him, I evoke Him, whenever I use His name overcome by anger or by fear, whenever I involuntarily say: ‘Oh God’. That happens when I meet somebody or something stronger than myself. It is an apt name given to all overpowering emotions in my own psychical system subduing my conscious will and usurping control over myself. This is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans, and intentions and change the course of my life for better or worse.” – C.G Jung

Can humanity have a more evolved relationship with God? I believe so, if you pardon the pun...


Namaste.


Sending you love, light, and blessings brothers.


Olly



Email me: 





Hello,

I am delighted and enchanted to meet you. I coach men with 'Deep Coaching', 'Supercoaching', and Transformative Life Coaching (TLC). Thank you for reading this far. I very much look forward to connecting with the highest version of you, to seeing your highest possibility, and to our conversations. Please do contact me via my email for a free connection call and a free experience of coaching on Zoom or in person. 


“Transformative life coaching uniquely creates and holds the space for you to see your self afresh, with clarity, and step into new ways of BEing, which will transform how you perceive and intuitively create your world. My work is to guide you to raise your own conscious awareness to the level that you want to achieve.”







Click here for the books that I know will help you along your journey of recovering your Self:









I have a Bachelor's degree in Natural Sciences from Trinity College, Cambridge; a Master's Degree in Philosophy from Trinity College, Cambridge; a PhD Doctorate in Scientific Research from University College London (UCL); a Medical Degree (MD/MBBS) from The Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine, London and have been a doctor and reconstructive trauma and cancer surgeon in London for 20 years. I have a number of other higher qualifications in science and surgery. I have published over 50 peer reviewed PubMed cited scientific journal articles, have been an associate editor and frequent scientific faculty member, and am the author of several scientific books. I have been awarded my Diploma in Transformative Life Coaching in London, which has International Coaching Federation (ICF) Accreditation, as well as the UK Association for Coaching (AC), and the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC). I have been on my own transformative journey full time for over five years and I am ready to be your guide to you finding out who you really are and how the world works.




Please let me know if you would like to join our 'VOICE for men' VIP community: 'Vulnerability & Openness Is a Choice Ensemble', 'Visibility Is Power', where men can find their strength, courage, and authenticity, by dropping their egocentric fears and instead communicate openly with vulnerability. We are co-creating this space. It will change your life. It will empower you. This community is a safe space for men to connect and discuss philosophy, spirituality, positive psychology, awakening to Self-realisation, wisdom and timeless Truths, to share our experience, strength and hope, and to find solutions to our pain and fears. Our meeting is free to join. There is no script, just sharing.


 
 
 

Comentarios

bottom of page