Buddhist Romanticism

itself toward that goal through the archetypes of the collective unconscious.
The fact that the goal is unknowable makes Jung’s universe functionally
equivalent to the infinitude of the Romantic universe, in which the goal of
the infinite universal organism is unknowable as well. Jung also agreed
with the Romantic principle of the microcosm: that the living organism
contains within it the organic history of all consciousness:
“The true history of the mind is not preserved in learned volumes
but in the living mental organism of everyone.” 20
On the spiritual problem: Jung agreed with the Romantics on all the major
features of the basic religious illness and the way in which a religious
experience could work toward alleviating it:
• Human beings suffer when their sense of inner and outer unity is lost
—when they feel divided within themselves and separated from the
universe.
• Despite its many expressions, the religious experience is the same for
all: an intuition of the wholeness of reality that creates a feeling of unity
with the universe and a feeling of unity within.
• Although Jung did not give Eros a role in provoking a religious
experience, he, like the Romantics, felt that its needs had to be
accommodated in any true psychic unity:
“If we can reconcile ourselves with the mysterious truth that spirit
is the living body seen from within, and the body the outer
manifestation of the living spirit—the two being really one—then we
can understand why it is that the attempt to transcend the present
level of consciousness must give its due to the body. We shall also see
that belief in the body cannot tolerate an outlook that denies the body
in the name of the spirit.” 21
• This sense of internal and external wholeness is healing but totally
immanent. In other words, (a) it is temporary and (b) it does not give direct
experience of any transcendent, unconditioned dimension outside of space
and time.
• Therefore the freedom offered by the religious experience—the highest
freedom possible in an organic universe—does not transcend the laws of
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