Carl Jung, the celebrated Swiss psychologist and one of the founders of analytical psychology, has many significant things to say on the need for God. Jung (1875-1961) says, "Out of my experience with thousands of patients, I have become convinced that the psychological problem of today is a spiritual problem."

The paradox is if you need God for a specific purpose, you are apt to neglect Him when the purpose is over.

Different people need God for different reasons. Sri Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita that four kinds of people seek Him -- people in distress, the inquisitive ones, those in need of wealth and the Jnani or wise man who seeks God as an end in itself.

Among people in distress are those suffering from diseases or are in mortal fear of enemies and in similar agonising predicaments. It is but natural that when the need is fulfilled, their fervour of devotion to God wanes. The inquisitive ones are those who in their spare time wonder about the existence of God and try to understand Him through debates and discussions or reading. But when more pressing problems claim their attention, they do not pursue their quest. The case of wealth-seekers need hardly be explained.

The one who seeks God as an end in itself ultimately realises that he abides in God and God abides in him. As long as he retains the personal identity, his will is united with God's Will, and at the philosophical level he affirms "Aham Brahmasmi," which means, "I am one with Brahman."

Swami Vivekananda cautions that the assertion, "I am God," cannot be made with regard to the sense world. "If you say in the sense world that you are God, what is to prevent your doing wrong? So the affirmation of your divinity applies only to the noumenal. If I am God, I am beyond the tendencies of the senses and will not do evil."

We can thus have an idea of the heights to which a true seeker after God has to rise to become a Jnani!

Let us hear another noted psychiatrist and psychotherapist, Viktor E. Frankl, who is the founder of what is known as Logotherapy. According to logotherapy (logos in Greek denotes ‘meaning’), the striving to find a meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force in man.

He observes, "A man’s concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is a ‘spiritual distress’ but by no means a ‘mental disease.’ It may well be that interpreting the first in terms of the latter motivates a doctor to bury his patient’s existential despair under a heap of tranquillising drugs."

Cautions he, "There is a danger inherent in the teaching of man’s ‘nothingness,’ the theory that man is nothing but the result of biological and sociological conditions, or the product of heredity and environment. Such a view of man makes into a robot, not a human being… Human being has the freedom to change at any instant."

Here is a confession: " For too long a time, for half a century in fact, psychiatry tried to interpret the human mind merely as a mechanism, and consequently the therapy of mental disease merely in terms of a technique. I believe this dream has been dreamt out." ("Man’s Search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl.)

Carl Jung wrote before he died: "I cannot define for you what God is. I can only say that my work has proved empirically that the pattern of God exists in every man, and that this pattern has at its disposal the greatest of all energies for transformation and transfiguration of his natural being." ("Jung and the Story of our Times," by Laurens van der Post.)

Well, it is for each one of us to decide whether we need God or not.

God and Religion have continued to exist as a basic need for man, right from the beginning of civilisation as affirmed by Will Durant in his monumental work, "The Story of Civilisation."