Back in 1985, I did a final project in college required for graduation on the Gnostic period of early Christianity. These "Gnostics" as we call them today had one thing in common; though they consisted of many different unorganised sects and groups, all of them subscribed to a version of Christianity different from what we take for granted today.

Back then the mystery of who and what Jesus Christ was was greatly subject to interpretation, and many documents of his life and work were written that did not appear in the Bible. St Paul, who founded Christianity as we know it toady, was interested in making Christianity appeal to the Greeks and Romans; it is this version that we know as Christianity today. There were others, however, including some of Jesus' apostles, took a view that was somewhat more complex, suggesting that there were some important theological points that St Paul was overlooking.

I missed most of these points myself in my final project; I had in the back of my mind that there was something more that I was missing due to my lack of attention and time(I wanted to graduate that year). When I read through Peter Novak's The Division Of Consciousness, I finally found that missing piece. I wanted to go back and rewrite my project after the fact, but Novak has already said it better than I could have.

Novak's book deals with an ingenious concept he calls division theory, which postulates that the spirit and soul, which we often consider to be the same thing, are actually two different entities that usually split after the change called death. To coin a phrase from Carl Jung (who is quoted liberally by Novak), the spirit is the conscious mind, while the soul is the unconscious mind. The concept also addresses reincarnation; the spirit reincarnates, while the soul is frozen in whatever emotional state it tended towards in earthly life. The inference is that Adolf Hitler's soul is in Hell, while Mother Theresa's soul is in heaven.

My very natural question on this concept being introduced was "Well, how do we reintegrate the soul and the spirit?" This, according to Novak, is where Jesus Christ came in. In Novak's estimation, Christ appears to have been the first earthly being to successfully integrate the soul and spirit; it could be said he was sent here by God to show us how it is done. "That which I have done, ye can do also." As far as I as a sometime comparitive religion student and researcher on the subject am concerned, there were probably others, but it does explain why some religions emphasise reincarnation(Hinduism)and others emphasise the continuance of the soul only(modern Christianity). The research of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and others into afterlife experiences suggests that some have conscious memories of certain things happening(spirit), while others have intense feelings of either great bliss or pain(soul).

The book is very well-researched and written; it's clearly a labour of love on the part of the author. Some of the conclusions drawn may make casual Christians uncomfortable, but serious Christian scholars would either feel vindicated, be intrigued, or both. This is a book to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed.

The one thing that makes me uncomfortable personally is the emphasis on Jesus Christ's Second Coming in the last few chapters of the book, that would appeal greatly to any fundamentalist Christian who's fascinated with the Book Of Revelation. There's material that could be very easily misinterpreted with unfortunate results if not read very carefully. Chapters 9 and 10 were the most difficult parts of the book; they deal with what will happen to the divided souls and spirits of individuals in the event of The Second Coming. I will only say that it is more gruesome than the worst Christian apocalyptic warnings.

The Division Of Consciousness caused me to examine my own religion; it occurs to me that there is room in my religion for this concept. It appears to have been articulating it in its own way, I just may not have noticed before. It shows that there is room for improvement in all religions, that they all are missing the point in different ways.

The caste system in India, for example, could be considered a result of their own misunderstanding of Division Theory, just as Christianity has over time excised all but a few references to reincarnation in the Bible. "This is the one...there has not risen anyone greater than John The Baptist...And if you are willing to accept it, he is the Elijah who was to come. He who has ears, let him hear." Matthew 11:11-15. There are many more in the Gnostic Gospels, especially the Gospel of Thomas (the apostle best known as 'doubting Thomas,' who would only believe Jesus had returned if he saw with his own eyes. When he did, however, he said "My Lord and my God!").

The Division Of Consciousness is very readable for any casual student of religion at the college level. I would have welcomed studying it in my college classes in the early '80's.

It is, quite frankly, the most important book in its field since Elaine Pagel's The Gnostic Gospels in 1978, and takes Pagel's merely scholarly conclusions light years further. Division theory is such an ingenious concept I'm amazed nobody had been able to think of it in this way before.

There are religions that have concepts of levels of spiritual experience that touch on the concept in some way; in my religion, for example, it's explained in terms of the subtle bodies(Astral, Causal, Mental(conscious mind), Etheric(unconscious mind)), that the Pure Soul goes through and eventually drops in its progression back to God.

That, however, is another book entirely, but the connection between Novak's theory and theories of the Self postulated by Freud and Jung are significantly similar(conscious=Spirit, unconscious=Soul, subconscious=the overlapping point that occurrs between the two in a living human being). It should also be pointed out that human beings are the only species on this planet that have consciousness, which enables us to make choices and have free will.