Is injustice built into the system, and if so, why? The answers seem to be - yes, WE built injustice into the system. The system IS unjust, and WE are the ones responsible for it.
We must nott think of the unconscious as "other". It IS you, carrying a perfect record of every thought and choice and feeling you ever had. Why is the unconscious crucified? Why does it suffer? Well, in fact, when you err in life, after death BOTH halves of you suffer; both halves pay the fiddler.
The unconscious is locked into reviewing its mistakes, while the conscious reincarnates to face the karmic consequences of its past. The soul is NOT an automaton while it is making the decisions that it is left to face after death. Only after the life is over does it become an automaton.
The classic psychological terms "the conscious" and "the subconscious" do not reflect two *states* of the mind, but rather two constituent parts of it. A person's mental *state*at any given moment is produced by an ever-changing blend of these parts. Sometimes the blend may be 50%/50%, other times it is 99%/01%, other times 01%/99%. The blend is always changing, fluxing, dancing, if you will, much as Taoism describes the "eternal dance" of Yin and Yang, always interacting with one another, flowing into and out of and through one another. There are as many different mental *states* as there are different possible ratios of the mixture of the two constituent parts.
Our recognition that something "means something important to me", while it is a realization, i.e., it is something that we are "conscious" of, does not in fact originate in "the conscious", but is actually only deposited there from out of "the subconscious". In healthy minds, material that is first generated in "the subconscious" is continually being shipped over to be implanted in "the conscious", at which time we finally become aware of these subjective impressions and personal valuations. THIS is how the mind works. At the same time, material from "the conscious" is also being shipped over to "the subconscious", where it is stored, as memories. There always is, or should always be, this two-way interaction, the"eternal dance".
WE created this injustice, and it is this fracture that divides us within. And since WE are the
authors of our societies, this innate injustice is coded, reflected, copied, into every system we
create. Thus this inherent injustice finds echoes of itself in the relationship between the sexes,
between rich and poor, between black and white, and on and on and on. All of the systems we
create are flawed by this same injustice. Why do you suppose this is so? Only because the ones
who are creating these systems carry the same flaw within them. The division is the lens through
which we observe all else, or rather, the lens through which we observe all else carries this flaw,
this fracture, this crack, and so everything else we see, and everything else we make, carries this
same flaw.
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This is a good question, and the nature of how the mind works suggests a possible answer. The unconscious, which would be lacking in the above scenario, is what gives us the "context' to make sense of the world we perceive around us. The unconscious is "pattern-oriented" and "analogy-forming" according to Jung. The conscious is not. Without an awareness of patterns and analogies, the conscious would lack context, and could only perceive the world as a meaningless jumble.
A newborn baby sees well enough, but his brain does not yet know what to make of all the data it is receiving. It has no context, it has no way of perceiving patterns and relationships in all that data.
The conscious, without an unconscious, would be in precisely the same boat. It could not make sense of the world around it, and so could not make an informed choice at all about where it went next.
Thus, this explains why we do not all choose the best and happiest lives.
But it does not explain why we end up in bodies and lives that are, presumably, karmically appropriate. I suspect that this is guided not by us, not by our own conscious choices, but by God.
As so very much of all the rest of the many mysteries of death and the beyond seem to be resolved by DivisionTheory alone, without having to invoke the active Hand of God in the explanation, this is, one the one hand, a somewhat unsatisfying answer, and I am still searching for further understanding of the processes involved. It may yet be that the mechanics of DivisionTheory suggest a logical process. But if not, it's nice that God is still in the mix somewhere, and not, as some complain, an "absentee landlord".
If we have lived numerous past lives, we probably have a whole hodge-podge of different kinds of karmic debts piled up, and it doesn't seem reasonable that the pile would be either "all good" or "all bad". We could expect to have some of these debts paid back to us in one lifetime, but then have very different kinds paid back in the next. Anyway, the issue is not what we have coming to us, but what we do with what we get. No matter how bad, or good, things are, it is our own decisions in any given lifetime that will be the deciding factor as to whether we end up as a "Hitler" in any lifetime.
The new personal soul would seem to be a piece taken from the Primordial Soul. Another way to say this is that one's personal unconscious in each life is a piece taken from the great Collective Unconscious.
What IS the Collective Unconscious?
When Jung discovered a level of the unconscious that seemed to display universal characteristics, he explained this unexpected discovery by theorizing that there must exist a level of the human unconscious which was apparently shared by all people, a level in which autonomous elements from humanity's deepest past continued not only to exist, but to exist actively, continuing to register experience completely independent of any person or persons' awareness of the existence of these elements, or of the experiences those elements were having in that place, the darkest of all realms.
Although Jung did not take the next step and theorize that these elements were in fact the cast-off personal unconsciousnesses, or souls, of humanity's dead, such a hypothesis would seem to fit into his general description of that level and the contents to be found therein.
Hinduism chimes in at this point with its belief that a "Great Soul" accompanies the birth of all people, a cosmic Soul that attends the reincarnations of all spirits. I believe that this "Great Soul", is the one and the same thing as DivisonTheory's " Primordial Soul", one and the same thing as Jung's "Collective Unconscious".
And when a person is born, from out of the huge, galaxy-sized, ocean-like SOUL that Jung called the "Collective Unconscious" and Hinduism calls the "Great Soul", I suspect that a small bit of that SOUL attaches itself to this spirit when it reincarnates into a new body, a small bit of that Primordial Soul which the spirit takes for itself and calls its own (like a husband taking a wife), becoming that person's "personal soul", (in Jung's terms, the personal unconscious; in Freud's terms, the subconscious).
So let's review:
But as that reincarnated spirit's new life went on for a few years, and the spirit started, once again (as it is prone to do) to reject, refuse, and deny the ever-moralizing input of that bit of soul, that very act of rejection would become, in time, a virtual wall of mental resistence that built around that bit of soul. We don't want to hear its voice, and so that voice is pushed back farther and farther out of our conscious awareness, as we erect more and more mental walls around it to keep its sound out of our minds.
And as that wall of resistence built up, it would act not only to divide and separate that bit of Primordial Soul from the reincarnated spirit to which it first attached itself when the spirit was first reborn, but it would also act as a wall that separated and distinguished that bit of soul from the Collective Unconscious, or Primordial Soul, from which it was cut. Thus, that personal unconscious would still be sitting within that Great Collective Primordial Unconscious Soul, but doing so safe and relatively undisturbed within its own little bubble floating within that sea, a bubble which would give it some small degree of autonomy and a sense of independent selfhood apart from the whole ocean of Primordial Soul from which it was cut .
The personal soul would then be like a balloon of water floating within the ocean. Of the same substance, and with it, but nonetheless distinguished from it. Only I suspect that the wall that is erected around this "personal unconscious" is somewhat porous, and allows some degree of flows through it.
Anyway, this little bit of the Primordial Soul which has become the person's personal unconscious still has partial interaction with the spirit, and also partial interaction with the greater Primordial Soul, or Collective Unconscious. Each way, up or down, the avenues of communication have been reduced, but not entirely cut. Not yet.
So during the life, the person would continue to enjoy the advantages of possessing the personal unconscious - it acts as a memory receptor for him, recording and playing back memories as needed, and it generates feelings, which the person accepts or rejects as is his desire. All of this allows the person to experience himself as a separate and fully formed individual. But the more he rejects those feelings, the less powerful those feelings become over time, until the person is finally barely able to notice having any personal feelings at all. But until the moment of death, that personal unconscious remains stuck like glue to that spirit, and functions as best it is allowed to. But if that spirit was insistent about rejecting that soul, at death its ties to that spirit are severed, and it falls like a rock to the bottom of the Collective Unconscious from which it originally was an undifferentiated part. Falling to that miry bottom, it would, in time, decompose somewhat and fuse together, or coalesce together, with all the other old past-life abandoned personal souls sitting there as well.
This whole process, then, would allow the person to create and maintain, in his lifetime, a strong and secure sense of "self" fully independent from the universe (i.e., the collective unconscious) around him. Or in yet other words, this process allows the person to form his or her own ego. The ego is formed, Jung and Feud taught, by interaction between the conscious and unconscious. The conscious sees, and the unconscious reflects, and through their interaction the conscious sees itself, and achieves self-awareness, or ego. But the Collective Unconscious is too huge to absorb or deal with, so a little portion is separated away, making a little miniature unconscious for everyone. So while this act of "dividing", or rejecting the input of the soul, would seem to have negative consequences (allowing people to resist hearing and following the voice of their souls, which risks the dividing of soul from spirit at death), it does allow the development of ego. So perhaps one was necessary to achieve the other, and now the trick is to prevent the division without abandoning the ego? Unlike many spiritual schools, I believe that DivisionTheory, and the early Christians, believed that the whole point was the formation of ego, not the abandonment of it. In revelation a number of passages refer to the victors being rewarded with their very own "morning star" as their reward, and I think a good argument can be made that the "morning star", in these passages, is the little human ego, which can shine correctly separately from the Great Sun, or God, if one is successful.
I don't know if I've done a good job explaining this bit about the formation of the Personal Unconscious out of the Collective Unconscious. In my book I use some diagrams that I think make it more clear.
Anyway, Jung's & Freud's concept of the unconscious having two levels - a Personal Unconscious and the Collective Unconscious, not only seems to make sense under the DivisionTheory scenario, but is in fact necessary to explain how a person would acquire a new personal soul again at the start of a new incarnation.
DivisionTheory almost describes the soul as some dark thing that's probably going to languish in hell no matter how hard we try to live life in a good way. Why WOULD we want to listen to it?
The soul is *not* a "dark thing" except when it is abandoned by the spirit. When this division occurs, EACH side should be recognized as being afflicted, injured, crippled. The soul is deprived of its reason and is imprisoned in an unchanging dreamworld. But the spirit is JUST as afflicted, and this must be perceived as well. The spirit has lost what? Its memory. But what altogether is that memory? What is the full measure of the value of that memory?
Let us not even consider here the mountainous collection of talents, loves, achievements, spiritual and emotional growth that this spirit may have won the hard way, perhaps over and over again, in lives past. Let us not even consider the knowledge of self that has been hard won, only to be lost again and again.
Consider instead that this loss of memory has fatally crippled our ability to truly perceive the workings of divine justice in the world. If we did not lose our memory, then the workings of karma would be crystal clear to us. We would recall the deeds we did in the past, and see all too well the consequences of those deeds appearing in our lives today. Our sense of justice, instead of being what it is today, only a vague, seemingly vain hope, would instead be a certainty.
Consider what else. If we had not lost that memory, we would still remember all the way back to the moment of our creation - we would still remember our Creator.
We would not be possessed of dark and mysterious unconscious passions; there would be no element of ourselves that operated outside our conscious awareness. Never would someone do something patently foolish and then wonder, "now why did I do that?".
The soul is not "almost certainly going to languish in hell" regardless of what we do. It WOULD, if not for Jesus, and if Jesus were not part of this scenario, we would THEN be left possessing inner conditions that condemned us to that hell despite almost any effort we might bring to the table. But with Jesus IN the picture, the whole field of possibilities changes dramatically
Under DivisionTheory, the mechanics of psychology would suggest that Jesus' soul would have more or less "exploded" when His spirit first touched His soul after he had died. I have not spoken of this with you before, but consider - if the soul and spirit always split at death, and if this happened with Jesus as well, then how did He rise back up? His soul and spirit would have had to reunite AFTER death, and the mechanics of psychology (and physics) suggest that this would have caused what can only be likened to an "explosion" in the universe of the unconscious, as Jesus' soul exploded throughout the whole universe.
There is a passage in the Bible which even says this - that after His resurrection, Jesus went on to "fill the whole universe" or word to that effect. If, then, His soul is indeed inside our own, this radically changes the whole field of possibilities of what happens to one's soul after it is discarded by its spirit after death.
I feel that the soul of Jesus that lies within each of us is not picky, and doesn't care at all if one uses the right words. One only has to "align" one's own soul, one's own intent in life, with the intent, or direction, in that bit of Jesus soul within us. And when this "alignment" is made strong enough while one is still alive, one begins to identify with Jesus, and He begins to identify with us.
And inside, the two souls, His and ours, can merge in a very real and effective sense. Thus, after we die, the strength of His soul adds greatly to our own, and we do not fail the Judgment that comes after death. Instead, we pass, and enjoy a dreamworld of bliss until Judgment day, when our souls finally leave their unconscious imprisonment and reawaken in the realm of the conscious world.
Why should we listen to this soul ? Because it is who and what we are. The spirit is just an eye, a searchlight, a living point of consciousness. But by itself it makes no sense of anything it views. The unconscious is what gives us relative, subjective perspective - in other words, context. By itself, the conscious is like the eye of a baby - it is registering input, but has no context, so nothing it sees around it makes any sense.
The soul provides that context. It provides meaning to everything in our lives. It IS meaning. It is ourselves. It carries all our memories and sense of self. To reject it is to reject ourselves, to trashcan everything we have done, and done, and have hoped for
The soul, or more precisely the personal soul, has another extremely important value - it is the avenue to the Universal Soul, the Collective Unconscious, the Great Soul. In this respect we are a diad - spirit on top, personal soul under that, and Great soul beneath that. The Great Soul or Primordial Soul, or Collective Unconscious still remembers everything, it still contains everything, all our past memories, lives, etc. It can be considered, perhaps, God, or God's Soul.
And the only way we, our conscious selves, have to get to that Primordial Soul, is through our personal soul. It is the link without which we are truly, and finally, lost.
The ancient Hawaiian religion, Huna, contains a very similar conception of these three levels.
There are numerous hints in the Gnostic Gospels that the early Christians did this on a regular basis, but so far as I know they didn't leave any clear-cut instruction manual. Certain Hindu mystics claim to recall one or more past lives, and certain children naturally do, but I don't know if these are brief fragments of memories being reacquired, or the full reintegration of a whole pastlife soul. I'm inclined to believe that this will occur in its own good time, as a result of seeking first to fully restore healthy contact with one's present life soul. Once we've removed the log from our present life's eye, only then can we search for others. A pastlife soul would be very different from the soul of a newborn - a newborn's soul would not contain an already fully-developed ego and image of its own identity, or any personal memories.
Why would we want to recover something that has been hell bound for countless eons?
These ARE you. They are who you used to be, who you were. Imagine being trapped in limbo by a trick of fate you had no idea was waiting for you. Then imagine your spiritual descendants (your future incarnated selves) finding a way to rescue you but not bothering. Why should you save your past souls from their imprisonment? How's sympathy for an answer? How about love? How about faithfulness.
This is answered simply, and again highlights the marvelous ability of DivisionTheory to show the logic in the otherwise inscrutable details of the Bible. The unconscious soul would be a mindless automaton when it was separated from its partner, the conscious spirit. Thus, in order to make new decisions, to turn and choose to follow the path of God, thereby redeeming itself, the unconscious soul would have to be reconnected with its conscious spirit. The Judeo-Christian scriptures promise that just such an event indeed will occur, during the Judgment day scenario, when all the world's dead souls will raise back up to living conscious life. And when they are alive and conscious once more, they will once again possess the priceless opportunity to finally redeem themselves.