Carl Jung: That is the reason, too, that our time is so utterly godless and profane,

If tendencies towards disassociation were not inherent in the human psyche, parts never would have been split off; in other words, neither spirits nor gods would ever have come to exist.

That is the reason, too, that our time is so utterly godless and profane, for we lack knowledge of the unconscious psyche and pursue the cult of consciousness to the exclusion of all else.

Our true religion is a monotheism of consciousness, a possession by it, coupled with a fanatical denial that there are parts of the psyche which are autonomous. But we differ from the Buddhist yoga doctrine in that we even deny that such autonomous parts are experienceable.

A great psychicdanger arises here, because the parts then behave like any other repressed contents: they necessarily induce wrong attitudes, for the repressed material appears again in consciousness in a spurious form.

This fact, which is so striking in every case of neurosis, holds true also, for collective psychic phenomena.

In this respect our time is caught in a fatal error: we believe wecan criticize religious facts intellectually; we think, for instance, like Laplace, that God is a hypothesis which can be subjected to intellectual treatment, to affirmation or denial.

It is completely forgotten that the reason mankind believes in the ‘daemon’ has nothing whatever to do with outside factors, but is due to simple perception of the powerful inner effect of the autonomous fragmentary systems.

This effect is not nullified by criticizing its name intellectually, nor by describing it as false.

The effect is collectively always present; the autonomous systems are always at work, because the fundamental structure of the unconscious is not touched by the fluctuations of a transitory consciousness. ~Carl Jung, Commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower.