Different individuals, of course, may have any number of different personal perspectives and definitions of various terms, especially in obscure areas such as these. Given this innate flexibility of the terms, the only reasonable course of action would be to examine the writings of the most respected experts in these two areas, and see how, if at all, they compared.

For this I chose, on the one hand, was has been, and still remains today the single most respected spiritual treatise in history - the Bible (far more than half the world's population still follows Judaism or one of its descendants - Christianity or Islam), and on the other hand, the writings of one of the founding pioneers of psychology, who today is still considered to be perhaps the greatest mind in the integration of psychological and spiritual thought - C.G. Jung

Of course, it wasn't always realized that the human psyche possesses a binary structure; it was only recently in human history that science even conceded the existence of the unconscious. Before Freud, fully half of all human consciousness went essentially unrecognized by science; but today, the scientific world widely acknowledges that the human psyche is indeed formed of two separate and distinct components.

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:

...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.

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.( Ibid., p. 283-85)

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 (Ibid., "Aion: Phenomenology of the Self", p. 145). 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 (Ibid., "The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche", p. 52). 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 (Frances G. Wickes, The Inner World of Choice, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, 1963, p. 165). 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 (Wickes, pp. 220, 204). 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 ( Jung, "Psychology and Religion: East and West," pp. 493, 207-210), making it the source also of humanity's moral consciousness (Ibid, "Two Essays on Analytical Psychology", p. 81). And, as the inner creator of images and patterns, the "matrix-mind" that gives birth to thought-forms in the psyche ( Ibid., "Psychology and Religion: East and West", p. 497), it is also the source of all instinct, intuition, and dreams (Ibid., "The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche", pp.44-51, 283).

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 (Ibid., "Psychology and Religion: East and West," p. 499).

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 (Sally P. Springer and Georg Deutsch, Left Brain, Right Brain, W.H.Freeman and Company, New York, p. 55). 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 (Ibid., pp. 301, 367, 328).

In the New Testament, the Greek scriptures continued this practice; again, there was one word for soul and a different one for spirit. Each was spoken of in different ways and as having different attributes, and occasionally both were even mentioned separately in the same sentence.

It was only relatively recently that modern science distinguished the existence of two different parts to a person's inner self, labeling them the `conscious' and the `unconscious'; but long before, religion had also distinguished two different parts to a person's inner self, calling them the `spirit' and the `soul'. Are these the same?

It may be that Jesus Christ believed they were, identifying the unconscious with that same soul thought to survive death - in a number of passages, he referred to a dead person as "not dead, only sleeping" (Matthew 9:24, John 11:11-14. See also Psalm 13:3, Acts 7:60, 13:36, I Corinthians 15:6). It does seem, from his terminology, that Jesus perceived some very real, existential similarity between the state of death and the state of unconsciousness.

And if it seems the soul might be identified with that same psycho-spiritual unit modern science knows as the unconscious mind, as both Jesus and Swedenborg (and Freud) seem to suggest, then might not that other mysterious unit, the spirit, actually be what is known today as the conscious mind? (Isaiah 26:9)

Considerable evidence suggests that the soul and spirit of ancient Jewish culture have reappeared in today's world as these subconscious and conscious elements. The Hebrew prophets consistently used terminology appropriate to the right-brain unconscious when referring to the soul. More than 110 times in the Old Testament, the soul was reported as possessing attributes which today we know belong exclusively to the subjectively-oriented, emotionally-based unconscious, such as loving, hating, abhorring, loathing, lusting, grieving, longing, and mourning, and as feeling bitter ness, joy, humility, thirst, desire, anguish, weariness, enjoyment, satisfaction, comfort, contempt, and delight.

The distinction is both clear and striking - nowhere in either the Old or New Testaments was it stated that the spirit experienced such feelings.

Thirty-two times in the Old Testament, the soul was referred to as being able to die, twenty times as being in danger of being `cut off', seven times as being in `the pit', three times as being in `hell', three times as being rent `in pieces', four times as being destroyed, twice as being `taken away', and once each as being thrust into `total darkness', `total silence', being `dried up', being `in prison', and being `gathered with sinners'.

Not even once is the spirit referred to in any of these contexts. While the soul was simultaneously thought able to die, to be `cut off', thrown into a pit, taken away, destroyed, and all the rest by the ancient Hebrews, the spirit was spoken of in only one way in reference to death:

Just as Israel's prophets spoke of the soul using terminology modern science reserves exclusively for the unconscious, so too they credited the spirit with the very traits science recognizes as belonging to the conscious, such as intelligence and comprehension:

Over and again in both the Old and New Testaments, the spirit was held up as the exclusive source and repository of knowledge, understanding, wisdom, and logic, the same characteristics modern science attributes to the conscious half of the human psyche:

And just as with the conscious mind of today, the spirit of old was also associated with the characteristics of perception and awareness, being thought of as the `lamp of consciousness':

And, further mirroring the human conscious, the spirit was also thought to possess the key characteristics of free will and conscious intent:

Spirit, however, was only a temporary gift; it was given at people's births only to be taken away again at their deaths:

The ancient prophets believed that the same spirit which animated human beings also resided in and animated all other living creatures:

While they fully expected the spirit to separate from the body at physical death, returning to God, there was thought to be yet another separation which also threatened one's passage from physical life, a second death far worse than the first:

The soul, they thought, could also be separated, `cut off' from its spirit as well as its body; this would, of course, prevent the soul from accompanying its spirit on that return journey: