ABSTRACT
The zeitgeist, or the spirit of the times in which we live, shapes our worldviews. To understand our own time, we need to step back and observe it within a larger historical context. This chapter considers how different worldviews, engendered by traditional, modern, and postmodern periods of history, condition the ways in which humans find meaning and purpose in their lives. It explains the paradox of secularization and the persistence of religion, a social context in which new forms of spirituality are emerging as alternatives to conventional religious beliefs and secular disavowals of religion. The author discusses how C. G. Jung’s response to the soulless condition of modernity supports the recovery of the spiritual—the spirit of the depths—that is the source for cultivating the inner life, and he argues that an integral form of consciousness is needed to overcome the divisions and conflicts that pervade the contemporary world, a vision of reality that includes traditional/religious, modern/secular, and postmodern/pluralistic modes of being and knowing.
