Modern mysticism : Jung, Zen, and the still good hand of God

Gellert takes us on a moving journey to explain modern mysticism and the highest religious experience.As a psychotherapist, I am often privileged to hear people's most intimate secrets. And often, I am impressed by how many of these secrets are of a religious nature. Surely, the very process of psychotherapy has a religious or spiritual character, for the courage to risk the changes demanded by psychotherapy raises issues which strike at the heart of our conception of life and the universe. Whether the world is perceived as friendly or antagonistic, and whether we can trust in some hidden “current” or force in life that helps things to work out positively, are issues which may be critical to the decision to risk change. Personal suffering such as trauma, illness, or the loss of a loved one also has a way of compelling us to examine our religious assumptions, particularly whether God exists and why he allows such suffering.1 As a number of thinkers have shown, everybody has a personal religion or “mythology” insofar as they have a worldview that affects how they see the world and their place or destiny in it. How to find happiness or deal with suffering is as much a religious or spiritual question as a psychological one.However, the emergence of religious or spiritual questions in the course of psychotherapy is very confusing for people, and, as I have observed, even for therapists themselves. When these questions come on the tail of an experience which we would describe as “religious,” matters become especially confusing. People do not know what such experiences mean—why and how they happened and what they imply about the nature of things—and therapists are often not equipped to help. This confusion may be compounded by the fear people sometimes have that such experiences are signs that they are losing their grip on reality. Because these experiences seem out-of-the-ordinary, people wonder if there may be something abnormal about having them.