THe most beautiful reflection on religion and consciouness I've ever come across.
...A new side of Buddhism was revealed to me there. I grasped the life of the Buddha as the reality of the self which has broken through and laid claim to a personal life. For Buddha, the self stands above all gods, a unus mundus which represents the essence of human existence and of the world as a whole. The self emobdies both the aspect of intrinsic being and the aspect of its being known, without which no world exists. Buddha saw and grasped the cosmogonic dignity of human consciousness; for that reason he saw clearly that if suceeded in extinguishing this light, the world would sink into nothingness....
Christ--like Buddha--is an embodiment of the self, but in an altogether different sense. Both stood for an overcoming of the world: Buddha out of rational insight; Christ as a foredoomed sacrifice. In Christianity more is suffered, in Buddhism more is seen and done. Both paths are right, but in the Indian sense Buddha is the more complete human being. He is a historical personality, and therefore easier for men to understand. Christ is at once a historical man and God, and threfore much more difficult to comprehend. At bottom he was not comprehensible even to himself; he knew only that he had to sacrifice himself, that this course was imposed upon him from within. His sacrifice happned to him like an act of destiny. Buddha lived out his life and died at advance age, whereas Christ's activity as Christ probably lasted no more than a year.
--C.G Jung ", Memories, Dreams, Reflections" pg 279.
The most moving words on not the 'truth' behind the religions but the place it has in our consciousness, less on the dogma and lessons than on the act. that psychology is not just a science--there is an aspect of spirituality about being human. This necessarily escapes theorizing. One of the first I've ever come across to suggest that the actions of both Buddha and Christ were meaningful on a very personal level and that does not make it any less great. Something I have never considered.
There