Psychology and Religion: West and East (The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 11)
A more differentiated consciousness must, sooner or later, find it difficult to love, as a kind father, a God whom on account of his unpredictable fits of wrath, his unreliability, injustice, and cruelty, it has every reason to fear.
The decay of the gods of antiquity has proved to our satisfaction that man does not relish any all-too-human inconsistencies and weaknesses in his gods.
Likewise, it is probable that Yahweh’s moral defeat in his dealings with Job had its hidden effects: man’s unintended elevation on the one hand, and on the other hand a disturbance of the unconscious.
For a while the first-mentioned effect remains a mere fact, not consciously realized though registered by the unconscious.
This contributes to the disturbance in the unconscious, which thereby acquires a higher potential than exists in consciousness.
Man then counts for more in the unconscious than he does consciously.
In these circumstances the potential starts flowing from the unconscious towards consciousness, and the unconscious breaks through in the form of dreams, visions, and revelations.
Unfortunately the Book of Job cannot be dated with any certainty.
As mentioned above, it was written somewhere between 600 and 300 B.C.
During the first half of the sixth century, Ezekiel, 90 the prophet with the so-called “pathological” features, appears on the scene.
Although laymen are inclined to apply this epithet to his visions, I must, as a psychiatrist, emphatically state that visions and their accompanying phenomena cannot be uncritically evaluated as morbid.
Visions, like dreams, are unusual but quite natural occurrences which can be designated as “pathological” only when their morbid nature has been proved.
From a strictly clinical standpoint Ezekiel’s visions are of an archetypal nature and are not morbidly distorted in any way.
There is no reason to regard them as pathological.
They are a symptom of the split which already existed at that time between conscious and unconscious.
The first great vision is made up of two well-ordered compound quaternities, that is, conceptions of totality, such as we frequently observe today as spontaneous phenomena.
Their quinta essentia is represented by a figure which has “the likeness of a human form”
Here Ezekiel has seen the essential content of the unconscious, namely in the higher man by whom Yahweh was morally defeated and who he was later to become.
In India, a more or less simultaneous symptom of the same tendency was Gautama the Buddha (b. 562 b.c.), who gave the maximum differentiation of consciousness supremacy even over the highest Brahman gods.
This development was a logical consequence of the purusha-ätman doctrine and derived from the inner experience of yoga practice. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Paras 665-666.