AFTERLIFE FOR THE CONSCIOUS MIND
If, in leaving its dying body, the conscious also separated from its unconscious, it would be struck with total amnesia, losing every last thread of its memory and sense of identity, because the unconscious is where all memory is stored. Without the unconscious' memory, instinct, and intuition, nothing it observed around it would seem to make any sense.
And without the unconscious' subjective perspective, it would not feel related or connected in any way to the world around it. In fact, without the unconscious, it would not experience any feeling or emotion whatsoever. Objective to the end, the conscious would then just be a bodiless, identi tyless, emotionless point of pure, living awareness (just such a state has been found, in Past-Life Regression research. When hypnotically regressed to a time between lives, subjects consistently describe themselves as bodiless, floating in nothingness, possessing no memory of any identity or past life, and seemingly free of any emotion whatsoever.).
The conscious half, then, would lose all its memory and emotion (modern Near-Death Experiencers, curiously enough, commonly report just such an absence of emotion immediately after leaving the body). Although the conscious would lose its entire memory if separated from the subconscious, it would nonetheless remain free to make new choices and move on to new experiences. In time, such an amnesic conscious spirit could be expected to drift innocently into new experiences, from which it would slowly build up a new sense of identity. Free as a lark, it would be likely to repeat this pattern indefinitely, perpetually creating new identities and leaving behind a steady stream of discarded past selves, like a plant endlessly growing shoots that are pruned as soon as they are grown.
This scenario, arrived at purely by the logical consequences of the innate characteristics of then human conscious mind, virtually duplicates the East's reincarnation scenario.
AFTERLIFE FOR THE UNCONSCIOUS MIND
The subconscious, meanwhile, would lose all ability for objective, rational, independent thought, as well as all ability to make new choices, and thus, deprived of its ability to move in any way, would just sit perfectly still, with nothing to do but fall back deeper and deeper into itself, deeper and deeper into the levels of the unconscious, deeper and deeper into its own emotions and memory (Swedenborg saw something very similar to this in his mystical experiences). And since the subconscious is responsive and emotional in nature, it could be expected to react emotionally to those memories as well, feeding off its own emotional reactions to its own life memories; it would, in effect, be emotionally judging its own past life and then creating and experiencing its own dream-world reactions to those judgments. And as it would be cut off from all external input, it would remain in this unconscious dream-state permanently (kind of reminds you of Jesus saying "He is not dead, only sleeping", doesn't it?), and 100% of its experience would derive from its memories and its reactions to them. Caught in a circular pattern of automatic behavior, it could be expected to perpetually review its memories, react to them emotionally, and react to those reactions emotionally as well, all automatically, over and over, forever, squeezing every last drop of emotional content from its life memories (which reminds me of the "treading the winepress" quotes scattered throughout the Bible). If the subconscious judged its memories of what it had done in its past life favorably, it would thereafter experience a dream-world filled with absolute, positive emotion - pure pleasure and happiness. If it judged itself unfavorably, it would experience a dream-world filled with absolute negative emotion - the pain of self-condemnation. And this virtually duplicates the West's heaven-and-hell scenario.
Trapped in a Permanent and Unchanging State
Any afterlife for a separated unconscious would necessarily be both permanent and unchanging, because an unconscious would be unable to change after having parted from the conscious mind, since that conscious holds the free-will, the power to make choices and decisions when alive. Once parted from its conscious half, it would lose all capacity for objective, rational thought; unable to think clearly, it would be doomed to remain in whatever automatic, subjective, emotionally based patterns it had forged during life. As Swedenborg suspected, if an individual died still holding onto desires which, on an unconscious level, brought only grief and pain, then his unconscious would always continue to experience that grief and pain, yet would also still continue to desire the object which brought it that pain. Having lost the capacity for intelligent decisions, the unconscious would find itself frozen in form, permanently holding whatever opin ions, psychological habits, and unresolved emotional complexes it possessed at the moment of death.
Falling Inward
And, also as Swedenborg anticipated, it does seem that the unconscious would more or less `fall in upon itself' after death, but only if, in that dying, it also became separated from the conscious. By separating, it would lose the source of all its energy, vitality, and drive, and could do nothing except sit, utterly unable to move. And being cut off from the input of both the physical body and the conscious mind, cut off, in effect, from all mental and sensory stimuli, it would find itself in ultimate darkness and ultimate silence, imprisoned by the bars of absolute isolation. Sitting alone and abandoned, cut off from all it had known outside itself, cut off from all objective reality, the unconscious would turn its attention inward. Since it is naturally subjective anyway, full self- absorption under such isolation would be inevitable, perhaps even instantaneous.
Treading the Winepress of Memory
Turning within, it would find all the memories it had stored up over the lifetime, and would quickly focus all its attention on them. Collapsing into itself, such a separated unconscious would become completely preoccupied with redigesting its own memories (which explains the unconscious and automatic behavior commonly reported about ghosts). And since as the source of humanity's moral consciousness the unconscious is also naturally sensitive to issues of `good and evil' and `right and wrong', during this digestion process it would become acutely aware of all the moral shortcomings illustrated within those life-memories; in effect, it would judge itself. And because the unconscious is also naturally reactive and responsive, it would then automatically react to those memories as well, experiencing internal emotional responses which reflected those judgments. In effect, then, not only would a separated unconscious judge itself, it would then also reward or punish itself accordingly, through its automatic emotional responses to those judg ments.
Infinite Involvement and Infinite Reaction
Due to its absolute isolation from all outside stimuli, these emotional responses would come to fill its entire field of awareness, and so would be felt on an absolute level of intensity. And since the unconscious is emotionally-oriented, it would focus intently on those responses, feeding blindly on their emotional content; like a winepress, it would press the same material over and over for the ever-increasingly-intense emotional responses this would elicit. Thus, if its judgments of its memories were self-approving, the corresponding emotional experience would be absolute, unending, ever-increasing joy; but if those judgments were self-condemning, the emotional re sponse would be absolute, unending, ever-increasing misery.
Self-Judgment
Established psychological theory, then, would seem to predict that if an unconscious separated from both its physical body and its conscious mind, yet continued to function, it could be expected to automatically make, and then feel, its own value judgment of itself; the unconscious' own fundamental nature would, in effect, force it to judge and carry out sentence upon itself! If it judged itself to have been good, it would experience absolute joy; if it judged itself to have been bad, it would experience absolute anguish.
Thus, the 20th century's scientific discovery of the natural division of the human mind seems to produce two radically different afterlife scenarios, which are, interestingly enough, virtually identical to the two major religious scenarios that have been in existence for millennia. The East's tradition of reincarnation and the West's tradition of heaven and hell are each thousands of years old; science's discovery of the natures and qualities of the conscious and unconscious, on the other hand, are less than a single century old. Nonetheless, they are somehow the same; somehow, the latter has reconstructed the former. Science, it seems, has arrived at conclusions religion embraced centuries ago - modern science has found that the conscious and unconscious each possess the very characteristics necessary for them to perfectly reproduce the millennia-old afterlife scenarios of Eastern and Western traditions, but only if they divided apart at death.
Division Theory, simply by taking what science now knows about the human mind, and asking how it might function under a different set of circumstances (the two halves of the mind continuing to exist and function after death, but divided apart from one another), arrives at answers that replicate beliefs thousands of years old. This seemingly impossible anachronism suggests the existence of a single, potentially verifiable scientific reality which underlies and substantiates both Eastern and Western religious traditions. Thus, Division Theory not only works toward unifying the divisions within humanity's religions, but also the chasm between religion and science as well.