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The purpose of this article is to evaluate Rudolf Otto's account of the relationship between numinous experience and religious language in The Idea of the Holy, and this will inevitably also involve some more general discussion of the relationship between all religious experience and discursive reason. In The Idea of the Holy Otto makes a number of controversial claims about the nature of numinous experience and the problems which it creates for anyone wishing to speak about it. Numinous experience, Otto asserts, is qualitatively quite unlike any other experience. It is a religious feeling providing a unique form of religious knowledge inaccessible to our ordinary rational understanding. It is frequently spoken of as ineffable. Moreover because it resists literal description, it must be approached, if at all, then indirectly through analogy. At the heart of this collection of claims about numinous experience is an epistemological assumption about the distance separating religious language and experience. Otto believes that the parameters of numinous experience extend beyond the parameters of religious language, and consequently that it is possible to compare religious experience with language about it in a straightforward way. Indeed, much of The Idea of the Holy is devoted to the struggle of religious experience to cast off what Otto sees as its imprisonment by inadequate religious language.

In spite of the considerable body of scholarly literature on Jung's ambivalent relationship to Indian mystical traditions and his misreading of their canonical materials during the last three decades, Jung's persistent warnings against the practice of yoga by Europeans deserve more systematic examination by Jung scholars than they have so far received. At a time of increasing globalization inconsistent with Jung's East/West psychological relativism, Jung scholarship needs to engage with the considerable body of literature of transpersonal psychology addressing issues central to Jung's dialogue with yoga in the 1930s and 1940s. In this article, drawing upon the materials of transpersonal psychology, I examine two such issues: (1) Jung's claim that the European practice of yoga leads either to repression of unconscious contents by consciousness or to psychotic states in which consciousness is overwhelmed by the unconscious; (2) Jung's objection to the claim of Indian non-dualist traditions that the ego can be completely dissolved in, or absorbed by, the transcendental self. The purpose of this article is twofold: first, to catalogue challenges by transpersonal psychologists to Jung's model of psychological and spiritual development; second, to consider whether, because of Jung's defensive distancing from Indian spirituality, he exaggerated differences between the individuation process and the Indian mystical traditions he engaged with.

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