(The Huffington Post) – In 1949, Max Zeller, a disciple of the visionary psychotherapist, Dr. Carl Jung, came to Jung with a dream he could not understand. In the dream, he saw a “temple of vast dimensions” under construction. As far as he could see, in every direction, there were multitudes of people participating in the building of the temple. Though the temple was only in its beginning stages, the foundation had already been laid, and he was himself working on a pillar. Hearing this, Jung simply nodded and said, “this is the temple we are all building today.” It is “the new religion.” We don’t know all the builders, of course, because they are “in India and China and in Russia, and all over the world.” But “this new religion will come together.”[1]
This is what Jung believed. The problem for us is that the process has only just begun, and we do not yet know what shape it will take or how it can help us. Looking at the rubble of the past and the chaotic building-site of the present, many people today — both spiritually-inclined and secular — are understandably declaring “the end of religion.” But what neither seems to understand is that religion cannot die unless we, as human beings, somehow cease to feel and long for that indefinable, ineffable awareness of the sacred to which religion is merely a response. Until that happens, we will continue to reach out to the sacred, and we will use religion to get it. The real question is, what kind of religion will we use to access the sacred? Will we continue to use the old religions of the past, whether in their conventional or mystical forms? Will we evolve and participate in new hyphenated fusions of traditions like Christian Zen or Sufi-Hasidism? Or will we embrace a greater religion of spirituality, as some are already suggesting? I think the simple answer is yes.