How Jungian psychology transforms religious experience, thought, and symbol to yield a new form of modern spirituality suited for the modern world.
Many people have an aptitude for religious experience and spirituality but don't know how to develop this or take it further. Modern societies offer little assistance, and traditional religions are overly preoccupied with their own organizational survival. Minding the Self: Jungian meditations on contemporary spirituality offers suggestions for individual spiritual development in our modern and post-modern times. Here, Murray Stein argues that C.G. Jung and depth psychology provide guidance and the foundation for a new kind of modern spirituality.
Murray Stein explores the problem of spirituality within the cultural context of modernity and offers a way forward without relapsing into traditional or mythological modes of consciousness. Chapters work towards finding the proper vessel for contemporary spirituality and dealing with the ethical issues that crop up along the way. Stein shows how it is an individual path but not an isolationist one, often using many resources borrowed from a variety of religious traditions: it is a way of symbol, dream and experiences of the numinous with hints of transcendence as these come into personal awareness.¿
Minding the Self: Jungian meditations on contemporary spirituality uses research from a wide variety of fields, such as dream-work and the neuroscience of the sleeping brain, clinical experience in Jungian psychoanalysis, anthropology, ethics, Zen Buddhism, Jung's writings and the recently published Red Book. It will be of interest to psychoanalysts, Jungian scholars, undergraduates, graduate and post-graduate students and anyone with an interest in modern spirituality.
"Minding the Self is a brilliant account of the spiritual dilemmas of our time, using Jung's life and work as a guide for modern readers. Murray Stein has a commendable style, which is scholarly and richly informed, and yet accessible to non-specialists and a general readership. He strikes the right note in this work, and should be rewarded by widespread recognition, from within and beyond the field of analytical psychology."- David Tacey, Professor of Literature, La Trobe University, Melbourne
"No living Jungian analyst has a better understanding of what Jung meant by individuation than Murray Stein, and the fifteen modest chapters of this book, his masterpiece, make the case for Jung's project as a true "minding" of the self. Stein's luminous prose mirrors the consciousness in the midst of complexity that is its subject, making evident that a psychological attitude of self-reflection can be, just as Jung believed, a most natural way to experience the elusive but definite spirit of the divine." - John Beebe, author of Integrity in Depth
