The Varieties of Religious Experience

[Shivani Devi]

Originally Posted by Still_Waters

Once again, our paths show commonality that is no longer surprising.

William James' classic and the logic behind it is quite awesome. Since meditative experiences cvan be considered subjective to a large extent, it is often difficult to validate their occurrences. However, as William James duly noted the collective experiences that have very obvious similarities do support the validity of the mystical experience across multiple traditions. James' classic is indeed a masterpiece.

If you're familiar with Carl Jung (which I am confident that you are), his theory of the collective unconscious was approached in a similar manner. The great Sufi Mystic, Hazrat Inayat Khan, considered Jung to be the foremost of the psychologists in his time since Jung empirically bordered on the spiritual (the unity in diversity).

This is a good topic.

Thank you my friend and yes, there are some of us who are not satisfied with the superficial "spiritual offerings" and thus seek to trace everything back to its literary source and read that instead, to form our own concepts and ideas...so in that regard, the fact we have similar backgrounds and have read similar material is not surprising.

There are some of us who like to dig hard for the truth and will follow a lead....A philosophical thread or sutra right back to the well from which it was drawn and in doing such, it can take us to Hermes Trismegistus or to the last of the Neo Platonists like Dionysus The Areopagite.

Then, the trail of breadcrumbs seems to vanish and one has to dig harder to find it.

I have read a few of Jung's works, but for some reason, I wasn't really impressed by Jung much..and I don't know why that is.

[Still_Waters]

Originally Posted by Shivani Devi

Thank you my friend and yes, there are some of us who are not satisfied with the superficial "spiritual offerings" and thus seek to trace everything back to its literary source and read that instead, to form our own concepts and ideas...so in that regard, the fact we have similar backgrounds and have read similar material is not surprising.

There are some of us who like to dig hard for the truth and will follow a lead....A philosophical thread or sutra right back to the well from which it was drawn and in doing such, it can take us to Hermes Trismegistus or to the last of the Neo Platonists like Dionysus The Areopagite.

Then, the trail of breadcrumbs seems to vanish and one has to dig harder to find it.

I have read a few of Jung's works, but for some reason, I wasn't really impressed by Jung much..and I don't know why that is.

I'm surprised that you wrote "I wasn't really impressed by Jung much" because I personally found Jung quite thorough in his questioning. Are you aware that he wrote the introduction to one of the Ramana Maharshi books and portrayed Ramana as "the whitest spot in the white space of India"? He recognized the depth of the Indian sages as going beyond anything Freud or western psychologists could even fathom.

Jung's Autobiography, "Memories, Dreams, Recollections", is awesome but unlike any other autobiography I have ever read. His autobiography focuses on his psychological development and starts with his earliest recollections of his own life. It is not the normal stuff about when some one was born, where, etc. The entire autobiography is from a completely psychological development perspective.

As you duly noted, it's important to keep digging and (my own personal driving force) to keep VALIDATING what resonates without taking things on blind faith alone.