Now the earth was formless void, and darkness was upon the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving upon the surface of the waters. God divided the waters.... God divided the light from the darkness.... God took one side of the human and...made a female from the side he had taken....
Once, DivisionTheory suggests, the conscious mind/spirit decided that the unconscious mind/soul was being too intrusive, too demanding, too costly. "Dealing with its input is not something I desire to do, so I will push it away", it thought to itself. "I will ignore it. I will deny its messages when they appear. I will tell myself when I see them, ‘They are nothing. Meaningless. They are not even really there at all.'"
The idea that mankind possesses a two-part, 2-sex design, now, in this scientific age, seems even more relevant than had previously been understood; besides the entire species being differentiated into members of two different sexes, it is now also known that each individual member is mentally androgenous as well, each possessing two parts to his or her whole mental self. The masculine, conscious `spirit' forms our objective awareness, while the feminine, unconscious `soul' forms our subjective awareness. These two, modern science has taught us, interact in a dynamic partnership, together forming a whole far greater than the sum of their parts.
The spirit, we know, operates on a fully conscious level, and makes its own decisions. The soul, on the other hand, functions almost exclusively on an unconscious level, from which it automatically generates feelings and stores memories. The conscious mind chooses for itself what it will think and do. The unconscious soul, however, does not choose for itself how to feel or react; everything it does is triggered by automatic reflexes dictated by its own inner programming. To some degree, as modern science has discovered, the unconscious can be re-programmed; to a large degree, however, it cannot.
This is the way the human psyche currently functions; it may not be, however, the way it has always functioned.
Certain changes may have occurred. Even that celebrated dis- coverer of the human unconscious, Freud himself, believed that the existence of a secondary, sub-level of consciousness must, somehow, be unnatural. Division Theory is founded on the same premise, that the current partial separation between the conscious and unconscious sides of the human psyche, although common, is not natural; Division Theory, however, takes this premise one step further with its suggestion that this unnatural partial separation, if not repaired during life, inevitably becomes an even more unnatural, total and permanent division at the onset of physical death.
"Every kingdom divided against itself will be ruined, and every city or household divided against itself will not stand."
Humanity would still remember its Maker.
If the unconscious soul was once a more equally conscious element of the human psyche than it is today, it may have originally functioned as a teaching and guidance mechanism. Fully conscious souls could have easily been capable, for example, of making people feel badly whenever they behaved badly. Since people's souls, during such an era, would have still contained their original programming, designed and installed, presumably, by their Creator, whenever people of that era made choices disagreeable to that Creator, their souls might have automatically responded by flooding their entire psyches with painfully strong doses of negative input. Just as governments have long found it necessary to install checks and balances into their nations' constitutions, perhaps the Creator also felt it necessary to install His own check and balance system into the human constitution.
Making choices that conflicted with design specifications imprinted directly into humanity's souls would have brought immediate repercussions; while individuals would have been free to consciously choose how to think and behave, they would not have had any control over the vivid feelings that could follow. While our conscious spirits would have still remained free to ignore right and wrong, we would not have been able to change our souls, which may at that time have been specifically designed to always recognize right from wrong. If so, then whenever people made choices conflicting with that inner programming, their souls would have automatically reacted by inducing severe discomfort. Immediately following unapproved behavior, people might have vividly felt shame, pain, or any number of other unpleasant, non-negotiable feelings emanating from their own souls.
Such `disobedience', then, would have carried a price; but it would not seem to have been capable, by itself, of bringing about humanity's exile from God.
After making choices prohibited by their own inner makeup, and then immediately feeling the agony those choices automatically evoked within their souls, would people's first inclination have been to try to avoid this new input, this pain which instantly filled their inner beings?
He poured out on them his burning anger.... It enveloped them in flames, yet they did not understand; it consumed them, but they did not take it to heart.
With one accord they ... had broken off the yoke and torn off the bonds.
In attempting to push their own souls away, the human race would have been denying its own design; in rejecting the inner feelings which the Creator had intended to be felt, feelings which had been expressly designed as appropriate and balanced counterpoints to their own conscious choices, humanity would have been attempting to hide from its own Maker. The Judeo-Christian scriptures agree; humanity was not ejected from paradise immediately after they disobeyed God, but only when they then tried to hide from Him as well.
Making such a choice to suppress and disassociate from people's own souls would have had consequences no one could have foreseen. It would have, for example, cost people their memories, including the memory of their Maker, thus alienating them from God, and, ironically, even the memory of having made this choice in the first place, since it was in those souls that all their memories would have been located. And because the memory of that choice to suppress unpleasant feelings would have fallen into the unmonitored, unconscious depths of the still very fertile soul, from there it would have then been free to produce an unconscious behavioral chain-reaction, making people always somewhat prone from that point on to suppress and disassociate from their more unpleasant `guilty' feelings. People would more and more frequently disassociate from all uncomfortable feelings rising from within their souls, eventually becoming so adept at this that they would only permit themselves to suffer the tiniest twinge of inner discomfort before initiating the disassociation process. Upon considering some immoral act, for instance, a person might briefly experience a moment of shame or sadness, but then instantly push this out of his mind, consciously rationalizing that he could not afford to have a `bleeding heart', thereby cutting himself off from the input coming from his own soul:
They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts. Having lost all sensitivity [to their own souls], they have given themselves over to ... indulge in every kind of impurity, with a continual lust for more.
And so a secondary, "sub"-level of consciousness was created - a place we today call the "unconscious". Here the soul sat, able to see most everything that was going on, but nonetheless alone and ignored. And so the soul began talking, often just rambling, speaking mostly to itself about anything or nothing, since the conscious mind was ignoring all its comments anyway.
RESULTS OF THE DIVISION
This decision, this choice by the conscious mind, fractured the unity of the psyche in two, dividing the spirit from the soul. Since the soul is the recorder and archivist of memory in the psyche, the spirit immediately forgot it made this decision. It was separated from the recorded memory of having made this decision. It became amnesiac.
The unconscious mind is a perfect recorder of data, and all thoughts deposited there continue to exist and function and exert their influence. Jung wrote that the nature of the subconscious was such that it always locks in beliefs and behavior patterns:
"... complexes in the subconscious do not change in the same way that they do in consciousness ... they are not corrected, but are conserved in their original form ... they take on the uninfluencable and compulsive characteristics of an automatism, of which they can be divested only if they are made conscious."
So the unconscious would contain, permanently engraved within itself, this command, this decision made by the conscious, forever.
The unconscious also has another classic characteristic - it runs like a computer, automatically "running" the programs, the "commands" given to it by the conscious mind. Commands entering the unconscious proceed to be carried out automatically.
So this command, made and then immediately forgotten by the conscious mind, would continue to run like a background computer program in the mind, forever.
And by doing so, it would perpetuate the division, keeping it alive:
Like an object in motion in the vastness of outer space, this command made by the conscious mind, this decision to always reject the input of the unconscious, would just keep going on and on, and on, in the same direction, at the same speed, forever, or until something else came along to change its trajectory. This decision, this belief, would be reflected in every thought coming from the unconscious, infiltrating and coloring and polluting every feeling the unconscious emitted, like a constant barrage of subliminal suggestions being aimed right at the conscious mind.
DivisionTheory suggests that nothing ever did "come along to change its trajectory" until Christ. But even with Christ in the picture, the conscious mind must yet be the mover, the decider, the innovator, that which makes a new decision that overturns the old one. Only new decisions can override old ones, and only the conscious mind holds the free will.
The Western tradition has always focused on the central importance of "making a decision" and "committing to that decision". Salvation is always discussed in such terms; committing to making this all-important "new decision" is the single most essential element in Christianity's concept of salvation.
Placing the ancient "Fall of Man" into the context of being an ongoing psychological program running in the psyche is fully consistent with Christianity's insistence that the solution to the problem at hand is for a "new decision", for a "new psychological program" to be introduced to override the erroneous "old psychological program".
THE COST OF REPAIRS
But it is not as easy as simply making a decision, for one must also pay the price of the original error, to deal with the damage it did. In this case that price, it seems, might be great. DivisionTheory suggests that we have been reincarnating for many millennia at least, and have been perpetually rejecting and ignoring and denying the input of our unconscious souls pretty much the whole time.
The unconscious mind/soul behaves like an automatically operating mechanism in many ways. It automatically reacts and responds (to various degrees) to all the input it receives, and as it is emotional in nature, these reactions and responses it generates are also emotional in nature. Thus the unconscious may have been, for millennia, generating emotional responses and reactions meant for the conscious mind to experience, but the conscious mind has been refusing to allow itself to experience these emotional reactions. If so, the unconscious would have been constantly creating input but not releasing hardly any of it, instead just storing it up, and has been doing this for millennia. If so, down in the unconscious of each of us, there lies a virtual lake of repressed emotion, silently churning, perhaps even fermenting and cooking in its own juices, condensing ever deeper into its own emotional essence over the millennia.
If DivisionTheory is correct that
(1) a division has occurred, but also that
(2) the division is ultimately an illusion, then
(3) what has been apparently been separated must one day apparently reunite back together.
When it does, all that lake of unreleased emotional experience will come flying at us like a virtual (psychological) ocean of boiling water hitting us at 200 miles per hour.
That's where, I suspect, Christ comes in.
Humanity's various cultural methods do provide favorable conditions for reintegration, but many of the current practices do not satisfactorily bring one as close to the door as might be possible.
Full integration and reconciliation of conscious mind/spirit and unconscious mind/soul would require a balanced blending in BOTH directions. Most traditions only concentrate on one path, and do not balance it with its opposite. Some traditions seek to allow the conscious to illuminate and recognize and thereby recover the past, repressed self-created contents of the unconscious, allowing the "eye" of the conscious to enter into the unconscious and peer around, to, in short, "make the conscious unconscious". And other traditions help the contents of the unconscious to "enter into the conscious", to "make the unconscious conscious", allowing a person to more fully and more simultaneously experience and embody the ongoing conversation from both the conscious and unconscious, to more fully embrace and express their dance within during the normal waking state .
But few seek both, and without both, the goal of full integration of soul and spirit is unattained. Full reintegration would require full acceptance and experience of all the repressed soul pain, soul emotion, that had been stored up since the dawn of time.
This, I suspect, was what Jung described as integrating the contents of the COLLECTIVE unconscious, rather than the personal unconscious. Jung warned against doing this, but I am convinced that it will happen to all of us at Judgment Day, when the floodgates of the human psyche are opened fully.
Few if any have yet achieved this accomplishment besides Christ, I fear, but all will, at Judgment Day. I believe Jesus' primary mission was to help humanity cross over that threshold when it finally occurs.