psychologist C. G. Jung, whose work became a major influence in Western
psychology, studies of mythology and religion, and New Age culture in
general.
Although Jung credited The Secret of the Golden Flower with having
clarified his own work on the unconscious, he maintained serious
reservations about the practice taught in the book. What Jung did not know
was that the text he was reading was in fact a garbled translation of a
truncated version of a corrupted recension of the original work.
Unawares, a critical communication gap occurred in the process of
transmission; and yet the book made a powerful impression. It became one
of the main sources of Western knowledge of Eastern spirituality and also
one of the seminal influences in Jungian thought on the psychology of
religion. Gary E Baynes, who rendered Wilhelm's German into English,
even went so far as to hail it as "the secret of the power of growth latent in
the psyche."
Psychological and experiential approaches to religion have enriched
modern psychological thought and research,
which have in turn enriched the understanding and experience of religion.
In terms of religion as culture, one of the advantages of a psychological
approach is the facility with which emotional boundaries of church and sect
can thereby be transcended.
