ABSTRACT
The phrase “religious experience” in my title needs a preliminary comment, because the term is used in so many contexts. Religious experience may refer to ritual practices, religious services, revivalist meetings, or to the sense that one is in contact with the divine described in hundreds of different ways-everything from a burning bush to pure light to a nut in the hand of the Savior. Religious experience may also refer to meditation of many different kinds, to prayer, dreams, visions, to contact or merger with the non-theistic Void, to the experience of emptiness or nothingness, or to the experience of levels of reality that cannot be put into words, levels that are incommunicable because they are beyond the categories of ordinary language and perception. In this essay, I restrict my sense of the term to what Otto (1958) believed to be an important factor common to all religious experience, a factor that he described as the numinosum. Jung (1934b:104) began to use this term in about 1934, and he used it with increasing frequency thereafter, developing it especially in his Terry lectures (Jung 1937). (Schlamm [1994] has compared in detail Jung’s use of the term with Otto’s own concept, and elsewhere I [1996] have discussed the psychotherapeutic implications of this idea.) Ellenberger (1970) believes that Otto’s book was important enough to start a new direction in the development of Jung’s ideas. I believe that this happened because Jung realized that he could use the term to make sense of many of the phenomena he was experiencing in his own life and in his consulting room. Thus it is that, as Chapman (1988) notes, Otto tended to stress the transcendent quality of the numinosum while Jung stressed its immanence. The frequency of numinous events led Jung (1937:6) to suggest that the psyche has an “authentic religious function.”
