“From the child of five to myself is but a step. But from the new-born baby to the child of five is an appalling distance.”
An infant goes through many changes in the span of their first five years of life. It transforms from a helpless, dependent being, its existed measured by hunger, thirst, and attention alone, into a sentient body who, for the most part, can maintain sophisticated relationships, obligations, and structure. The memories of our late childhood and early adolescence can be brought to mind rather easily, yet no one seems capable of remembering more than one or two hazy recollections from the most formative years of their life.
What happens to the past we no longer remember? Does it get tossed away together with yesterday’s trash? It seems unlikely. We like to imagine ourselves as the master of our body, our words, our thoughts. Yet it is precisely of our own being that we know the least. There are all kinds of mechanisms that work within us that function without our direct will.
When we say mind we certainly mean more than is present to consciousness at any given moment. Not only past cognition, but also love and attention influence our present actions and thoughts. Of course, in order to function in our daily life there is no need to be aware of the effects of our unconscious. Yet to understand ourselves, why we do the things we do, create our everyday habitual patterns and respond emotionally in the manner we do, it is important to know of the existence of our unconscious.
The unconscious has been subjected to over two-thousand years of scrutiny. All the way from Plotinus, to St. Augustine, to today. So, what is this strange phenomenon? For the sake of today’s argument, we will keep the scope to the contemporary. Today the unconscious is defined as the total sum of all our mental and physical experiences of whose presence and prevalence we have no immediate awareness. Or in Jungian terms: the unconscious is the unknown “psychic”.
The conscious and unconscious function in the same realm and should therefore not be looked upon as two separate spheres. There exists but one sphere of mental process, mainly unconscious, of which only certain features become accessible to the immediate conscious. Psychic life, as Jung said, “is for the greater part an unconscious life that surrounds consciousness on all sides . . .”.
Though each of our unconsciouses are personal and catered to you, and your experiences / perception, there exist transpersonal elements that are shared throughout the human species. Elements that are not products of our individualized experience. That can be determined through the way in which you give order to the world around you. According to Jung, our unconscious accommodates what he called the archetypes. According to his theory, which to me seems the most reasonable, man does not come into the world as a blank-slate as John Locke had once determined, but equipped with a structure that pre-existed us. Which predisposes us to certain patterns of thought and behavior. Or, to paraphrase the man himself, archetypes are: “collective, universal, and impersonal in nature” and “are the forms or river-beds along which the current of psychic life has always flowed”. The archetypes can be envisioned as a storehouse of silent, implicit knowledge that is hundreds of years old. That which reflects the evolutionary development of mankind entirely.
It doesn’t come as such a surprise then that when one looks deeply into the darkness of one’s mind, one comes away with the ingrained impression that a small god resides within. Or, in Seneca’s words: “God is near you, he is with you, he is within you.”
What does it mean to have access to, to own and breed, an inner god? How do we go about such a notion in our secular age, built around scientific knowledge? And, perhaps more importantly, how did the belief in God once guided both our conscious and unconscious life? This is a topic entirely its own, and one we will delve into in my next post.
Instead, let’s end with a quote by William James, from one of my favorite books Varieties of Religious Experience: “Religious feeling is an absolute addition to the subject’s range of life, It gives him a new sphere of power. When the outward battle is lost, and the outward world disowns him, it redeems and vivifies an interior world which otherwise would be an empty waste.”