From the Editor

Abdul Wahid Radhu, from a family of Muslim traders based in Ladakh and Tibet, wrote a powerful memoir of his experiences as a young man during the tumultuous period before, during and after World War II, entitled "Tibetan Caravans." (In Abdul Wahid Radhu. Islam in Tibet. Foreword by the Dalai Lama, preface by Marco Pallis, Jane Casewit, tr. Louisville, KY, Eons Vitae, 1997) He describes his grandfather:

In the course of his long life, my grandfather, Hadji Mohammad Siddiq, had undoubtedly attained a remarkable degree of wisdom. He had understood that any human existence not centred on the remembrance (dhzkr) of God was in vain and he himself practiced this remembrance in the form of invocations and daily litanies. His home was thus a sort of sanctuary where the presence of the sacred was felt. (p. 120)

Evidently, Mohammed Sid, a Moslem, was a kind of ordinary yet remarkable man, living in a world not vet completely disrupted by the encounter with Western modernity, for whom an awareness of the presence of the sacred was still integrated into his daily experience. (cf. G.I. Gurdjieff. Meetings with Remarkable Men. New York, E.P. Dutton, 1974)

Thomas Merton was a Christian contemplative rooted in the modernity of the West. He described "the essence" of the monastic practice that he followed as a "practice of the presence of God ... prayer of the heart as a way of keeping oneself in the presence of God and of reality, rooted in one’s own inner truth." (Contemplative Prayer. Garden City, New York, Image Books, 1971)

Marc-Alain Ouaknin is a contemporary, postmodern Jewish kabbalist, deeply influenced by Edmund Jabes, Emmanuel Levinas, Andre Neher and Martin Heidegger, among others. In his recent book, Mysteries of the Kabbalah (Josephine Bacon, tr. New York, Abbeville Press, 2000, p. 12), Ouaknin describes the Kabbalah as "not an exclusively ‘religious’ phenomenon [but as] a way of being, characterized by an excess of vitality and vivacity, by another way of existing in the world, one that is more open to and aware of the miracle of life." He indicates that for the Kabbalah "the essence of the world is poetic" (p. 97), that reality "is not static and does not consist of eternal essences that can be understood by means of fixed concepts; it is the constantly unfolding future of life which bursts forth and renews itself." (p. 98)

These representatives of the three Western Abrahamic religions respond to the disruptive impingements of modern values and culture in three very different ways, corresponding to their own traditions and to their particular cultural and temporal situations. Their responses to modernity may be instructive for us Jungians, at this moment when secular Western culture—seen by many in the world as solely imperialistic and exploitative and as devoid of any real value—is under terrifying attack (I write this twelve days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon).

Jung often indicated that his psychology was of greatest value for those of his contemporaries who, like himself, were no longer able to find within traditional religions a meaningful path to the sacred, to an awareness of the presence of the divine, to an openness to and awareness of the miracle and mystery of life. He proposed a way of consciousness, through careful attention to neglected and resisted aspects of psyche, to the deep promptings of image and affect emerging from the unconscious. He named this path individuation, a way of becoming more wholly who and what one actually is, a way of integrity and honesty about the Self.

Jungian analytical psychology is as much a product of the modern (and postmodern) West as is global capitalism. Yet it offers something profoundly different in value—a point of view and a practice that I believe can make a healing contribution to our profoundly dangerous present moment. The Jungian insight into the innate religious function of the psyche sees through and beyond both the reductive approach of conventional secularism, and the literalism and absolutism of religious fundamentalism. The viewpoint of analytical psychology endeavors to hold the opposites of secular and religious in a way that respects the genuine value and integrity of both. The practice of analytical psychology endeavors to embody this viewpoint in the mundane and sacred work of healing individuals who are suffering psychically. In this manner, we who follow this practice strive to open pathways to the sacred within ordinary life to enhance the reality of the divine/numinous within the mundane, to enlarge our awareness of the unfolding wonder and mystery of our lives.

Abdul Wahid Radhu closes his account of the Tibetan caravans with this paragraph:

Our lives as caravaneers, usually lived at high altitudes far from the futility of the "civilised" world, remained in its simplicity, its purity, its slowness, a trace of the sacred and totally foreign to the profane modernity of our time. This life was therefore condemned to disappear and to mourn it would be futile. The only possibility that remains for us is to symbolically relive it by accomplishing an inward journey that, with divine grace, can lead us to other heights . . . (p. 308)

My prayer is that we psychotherapists and patients, along with all others, be blessed with this grace at our time of great need and distress.