1. Are the perspectives on religious experience presented in William James' Varieties and Jung compatible? Explain them briefly and compare them. For William James, his view of religious experience was skeptical. It divides religion between institutional religion and personal religion. For institutional religion, he referred to the religious group or organization that plays an essential role in the culture of a society. He defined personal religion as when an individual has a mystical experience that can occur regardless of culture. James focused more on personal religious experience, "the feelings, actions, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, as they perceive themselves to be in relation to all that they can regard as divine" ( Varieties, 31), and had a sort of contempt for organized and institutional religion. James' emphasis on the mystical experiences involved in religion was characterized by four circumstances. These four circumstances were ineffability, a noetic quality, mystical states are transient, and people cannot control when experiences come and go. For ineffability, the experience must be had by one person and cannot be transferred to another. By noetic quality, he affirmed that the mystical state appeared as a state of knowledge for the individual. James goes on to ask whether these states are “windows through which the mind looks toward a larger and more inclusive world” (Varieties, 428). For Carl Jung, his view of religious experience was based on the fact that all experiences were a psychological phenomenon. He differed from James in his view that a personal or individual experience with God was indistinguishable from communication with the unconscious. It ...... middle of paper ......e inner personality in women, while the anima expresses itself as a feminine inner personality in men. The shadow archetype is made up of flaws, weaknesses, and repressed instincts. These archetypes belong to the collective unconscious and are not based on people in their daily lives. Discovering the meaning and significance of the archetypes in one's dreams and in the dreams themselves was a kind of process that helped lead the individual towards a God. Suffering and the process of analyzing dreams and manifestations of archetypes were crucial to resolving all of one's unconscious and thus being at peace with oneself. When this peace was achieved, it allowed the individual to deepen their religious experience. Jung believed that all humans had a natural religious function and that expressing their unconscious through archetypes and dreams was crucial..