perience, otherwise there would never have been any talk of God. The fact is valid in itself, requiring no non-psychological proof and inaccessible to any form of non-psychological criticism. It can be the most immediate and hence the most real of experiences, which can be neither ridiculed nor disproved (CW 8 1926, 328). For better understanding of his theory, Jung introduces new terms, listed in a lexicon at the end of the book titled Psychological Types (1921). And so for man to be actually able to create symbols, one needs a mediator between the ego-consciousness and unconscious. The mediator, according to Jung, is an innate transcendent function (Jung 1921, 115). Another important term introduced by Jung is individuation – a process of differentiation of human being from unconscious with the purpose of understanding the unconscious contents (Jung 1921, 448–450). The aim of individuation is a birth of the Self and in Jung’s work we can find many comparisons of the image of Self and the symbol of Jesus. He represents a goal to which every man is summoned in one’s own way: Self-realization. The beginnings of such comparison can be found in Liber Novus, as indicated in Introduction. What in Christian theology is called “imitatio Christi”, is for Jung a religious equivalent to a journey of psyche in the process of individualization. “The deification of Jesus, as also of the Buddha, is not surprising, for it affords a striking example of the enormous valuation that humanity places upon these hero figures and hence upon the ideal of personality.“ (Jung 1932, 181). However, Jung points out that individuation does not mean placing a burden on Jesus, but to undergo the same experiment with one’s life as done by Jesus: realization of oneself. “The Christian subordinates himself to the superior divine person in expectation of his grace; but the Oriental knows that redemption depends on the work he does on himself. The Tao grows out of the individual. The ‘imitatio Christi’ has this disadvantage: in the long run we worship as a divine example a man who embodied the deepest meaning of life, and then, out of sheer imitation, we forget to make real our own deepest meaning: self-realization. As a matter of fact, it is not altogether inconvenient to renounce one’s own meaning. Had Jesus done so, he would probably have become a respectable carpenter and not a religious rebel to whom the same thing would naturally happen today as happened then.” (CW 13 1929, 52–54, Psychotherapists or the Clergy 1932, 340). For Jung, the figure of Christ is, similarly to Buddha, the most highly developed and differentiated symbol of the Self (CW 12 1943). The basic symbol the Self is mandala, which means a “circle“ [9]. Based on hundreds of mandalas drawn by patients Jung later notes that in the centre of them there is not only God but always a variety of symbols of abstract and concrete nature (a golden flower, or a serpent, a dish, a man, the Sun, a star, a cross, etc.). According to Jung, patients with psychological problems do not primarily yearn for deity, but they search wholeness of themselves. This wholeness is fulfilled in the Self and so the image of the Self “is not a substitute but a symbol for the deity” (CW Spirituality Studies 2 (1) Spring 2016 55
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