* This fits an existing larger pattern. Similar binary soul doctrines exist in many other cultures.MORE

Behold the mystery : like man and woman, the conscious spirit and the unconscious soul are equal opposites, but do not necessarily have to be "opposed" to one another. On the contrary, these two can integrate, fitting together as perfectly and as intertwined as the Yin and the Yang in the Tao symbol, each helping to support and define the other, each consisting, in its deepest center, of the other, each providing its partner with precisely what it needs most.

This is the mystery of the sexes.
The mystery of the psyche.
The mystery of life.
The mystery of death.

The natures and characteristics of the conscious and unconscious ARE opposite to one another in many obvious ways. The conscious is aggressively active, the unconscious passively reactive. The conscious deals with facts and figures and details, the unconscious deal with relationships and systems. The conscious is objective, masculine, and has control over the intellect and free will, while the unconscious is subjective, feminine, the unconscious does NOT have free will , instead being preprogrammed with material universally present in all minds (archetypes), but the unconscious DOES has control over the feelings and memories. (While knowledge of good and evil is but one of the archetypes that exist preprogrammed in the unconscious, it is certainly the most troublesome one of them all).

Study of the mind has revealed that the conscious and unconscious are, despite what their names suggest, not merely two different forms of the same substance; the unconscious is not just a lesser or lower form of consciousness. They are fundamentally different types of mind, with completely different modes of operation. The fact that the unconscious is not more immediately present to our normal waking awareness seems almost beside the point; if the unconscious was somehow lifted up so it could be perceived more directly, it would still be a fundamentally different kind of mind, functioning differently in the psyche than the conscious does:

Consciousness proceeds in terms of analysis and differentiation, in terms of special attention to "the most minute details". The unconscious, on the other hand, has an opposite way of thinking. Non-analytical, undifferentiated, it takes its symbols as they are, and does not break them down as consciousness does. ... the basic categories and ways of procedure are different in consciousness from those that prevail in the unconscious ... Its mode of thinking is altogether different from what we understand by `thinking.
- Ira Progoff, Jung's Psychology and Its Social Meaning, Grove Press, New York, 1953, p. 75

Each side of the psyche possesses characteristics and capacities unique to itself. However, neither part is sufficient alone; each needs the input of the other. The two sides of the mind thus comple ment one another, together forming a whole far greater than the sum of their parts:

...the unconscious processes stand in a compensatory relation to the conscious mind ... conscious and unconscious are not necessarily in opposition to one another, but complement one another to form a totality, which is the self.
- Jung

The conscious mind's objectivity allows it to distinguish and differentiate between forms, providing humanity with its logic and analytic reasoning, the foundation of all science, technology, and civilization. And more importantly still, the conscious mind has free will, the power to make choices and decisions. The basic design of the human mind grants all the free-will to the conscious and none to the unconscious, which risks letting the mind become one-sided. The conscious is able, under this design, to repress and inhibit its other half, the unconscious; and since it is essen tially masculine, or self-assertive, in nature, it tends to use this ability regularly.

The unconscious has equally essential qualities. Although much of its activity does occur outside our awareness, the unconscious is constantly releasing material into the conscious mind; this secret participation of the unconscious is vital, providing the balance necessary for a healthy psyche.

Whereas the conscious is logical, the unconscious is emotional; and since it does lie below the threshold of awareness, we tend to experience the emotion it releases into the conscious not as something we have chosen, but something which happens to us. And whereas the conscious is active, enterprising, and takes the initiative, the unconscious is almost purely reactive in nature; much of what it does is in response to outside stimuli. It is also receptive, which allows it function as the mind's memory center, receiving and storing all information, experiences, and other memory data. The unconscious contains a complete, perfectly preserved, unedited record of all the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of a person's past. However, since the memory-bearing unconscious is also emotionally-based, memory recall tends to be an emotional experience; memories are generally found to be imbued with an aura of emotion. People often find that past memories which lack an emotional charge, having little personal meaning or importance, tend to be more difficult to recall than memories which do contain strong emotional ingredients. Storing all memory, the unconscious is necessarily both vast and deep, and has often been likened to a limitless dark ocean within the psyche.

Essentially female in character, the unconscious is also the source of value-awareness in the human psyche. While the conscious will coolly note an object's outer characteristics, it takes the unconscious' more intuitive perspective to recognize if those characteristics hold any personal value or meaning; the conscious quantifies, the unconscious qualifies.

Although the unconscious is subjective, allowing feeling, rather than law, to form the ultimate basis of its value system, it also possesses an innate understanding of good and evil, making it the source also of humanity's moral consciousness. And, as the inner creator of images and patterns, the "matrix-mind" that gives birth to thought-forms in the psyche, it is also the source of all instinct, intuition, and dreams.

While the conscious mind tends to recognize specific details and differences between things, the unconscious focuses instead on issues of connectedness and unity; thus, the unconscious often reflects a certain timeless quality, a feeling of oneness and universality.

These two halves of the mind are fully dependent upon one other; each lacks and needs what the other possesses. While the conscious is the seat of free will, able to make new and creative decisions, by itself it has no ability for recall, and must rely on the unconscious to provide it with memory-data when it needs it. The unconscious, the equal but opposite partner of the conscious, lacks free will; like an automatic computer, it is incapable of making any independent decisions whatsoever. But the unconscious instinctively recognizes all subjective value content, automati cally processes all command messages, and, as the seat of all memory, precisely records all input from the conscious.

Although psychology first discovered this binary mind in the days of Freud and Jung in the early 1900's, it took biology nearly a full century longer to make the same discovery for itself. In recent years, however, medical research on the hemispheres of the human brain has reached essentially the same conclusions as those arrived at by Freud and Jung - that a fundamental division exists within the psyche. Each hemisphere seems to have a mind of its own, or rather, each hemisphere seems to be related to a different half of the whole mind. The two hemispheres seem to have, again, completely different styles of processing information: the left hemisphere seems language- and analysis- oriented, while the right seems to process information holistically. The left brain, like the conscious, is critical and detail-oriented, while the right brain, like the unconscious, seems emotional, creative, comprehensive, pattern-matching, and analogy-forming, and is even suspected of being the source of dreams.

These characteristics of the human psyche are completely consistent with the Bible's presentation of the characteristics of the human soul and the human spirit. MORE

More importantly, these characteristics are uniquely suited to fulfill the promises of the ancient binary soul doctrine. BSD cultures around the globe once taught that if the two halves of the self divided at death, one half would end up losing its memory and reincarnating while the other half would become trapped in a fixed and unchanging, emotionally intense dreamworld. And that is exactly what does seem likely to happen if the conscious and unconscious survived death divided from one another. MORE