“Our drinking problem, our food addiction, our reliance on drugs to meet our dependencies, our lusting after power…our unrealized hopes, our cruelty to others—whatever looms as our basest fear or despair or hopelessness—now turns out to be just the occasion and place where God comes to us. We are found on our own cross. We cannot get out of that gap to get to God. We do not leave behind our problems to get to God. God comes to find us where we are weakest, in the secret hiding places of our compulsions, in the segregated district of self that we despise and oppress…God comes to us”
— A.B. Ulanov
“Disease is a disorder and yet it does not obliterate everything since if this were to happen the disease itself could not exist…For that which totally lacks a share in the Good has neither being nor a place in existence, whereas that which has a composite nature owes to the Good whatever place it has among beings, and its place among them and the extent of its being are directly proportionate to the share it has of this Good. ”
— Pseudo-Dionysus
Jung on Religious Experience
“No one can know what the ultimate things are. We must therefore take them as we experience them. And if such experience helps to make life healthier, more beautiful, more complete and more satisfactory to yourself and to those you love, you may safely say: “This was the grace of God.”
No transcendental truth is thereby demonstrated, and we must confess in all humility that religious experience is extra ecclesiam, subjective, and liable to boundless error. Yet, if the spiritual adventure of our time is the exposure of human consciousness to the undefined and indefinable, there would seem to be good reasons for thinking that the Boundless is pervaded by psychic laws, which no man invented, but of which he has ‘gnosis’ in the symbolism of Christian dogma. Only heedless fools will wish to destroy this: the lover of the soul, never.”
