mysterium fascinans et tremendum

"...We may have become too habituated to approaching things in a dualistic fash­ion, especially as regards what is “conscious” and what is “unconscious.” For there also exists what the Rudolf Otto calls the “numinous consciousness”: an experience of the holy: of grace; a participation with a sacred dimension in life. Otto took Kant’s term, noumenon, and Kant’s division between the noumenon (the thing itself) and the phenomenon (the way we perceive the thing), and coined the adjective, numinous. Later, Jung borrowed the term from Otto. Jung wrote that the difference between his psychology and Freud’s was that Freud focused on the neurotic while Jung was concerned with the numinous.2 This difference is crucial. It reflects an essential difference between a sacred and a profane experience: an experience of grace as opposed to an experience of life as a mere linear succession of meaningless events."

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Otto and the Numinous

Consciousness without an object

Tertium Organum

How to Do Things with Words