Buddhist Romanticism

organic causation. Jung shared with the Romantics the inability to conceive
of human nature in a way that could transcend the limitations of becoming.
In fact, for him, the healthy becoming of the soul was what religion was all
about.
• Because the religious experience can give only a temporary feeling of
unity, the religious life is one of pursuing repeated religious experiences—
in Jung’s case, this meant staying in touch with the messages from the
collective unconscious—in hopes of gaining an improved feeling for that
unity, but never fully achieving it.
• Unlike the Romantics, Jung did not insist that a numinous dream
would carry with it an ability to see the commonplace events of the
immanent world as sublime and miraculous. Still, he did regard the dream
as something to be given the highest respect, and that the meaning it gave
to life should be respected in the same light.
On the cultivation of religious experiences through numinous dreams: Jung
agreed with the Romantics that an attitude of open acceptance was
necessary for this sort of transformative experience. Here he cited Schiller:
“As Schiller says, man is completely human only when he is
playing. My aim is to bring about a psychic state in which my patient
begins to experiment with his own nature—a state of fluidity, change
and growth, in which there is no longer anything eternally fixed and
hopelessly petrified.” 22
Jung believed that dreams and consciously induced fantasies were the
primary modes in which such a state of receptivity, free from the
constraints of the ego, could be accessed. In fact, The Red Book, a diary of his
consciously induced fantasies, shows the extreme extent to which Jung tried
to access the contents of his own unconscious in this way.
He also agreed with the Romantics that religious texts of all sorts should
be respected as possible sources of inspiration, but that none of them
should be granted full authority, for that would prevent the patient from
having an immediate experience of the psychic forces trying to do their
compensatory work from within.
On the results of religious experiences: Like the Romantics, Jung believed
that the creative nature of the mind wants to express these experiences—he
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