Intuition, dreams, the unconscious, soul, God

Larry Dossey in Recovering the Soul notes that: “Arthur Koestler stated in his monumental treatise on creativity, The Act of Creation, ‘Language can become a screen which stands between the thinker and reality. This is the reason why true creativity often starts where language ends.'” 

Is there any evidence to support this claim? The mathematician Jacques Hadamard in 1945 surveyed the most eminent mathematicians in America about their working methods. He concluded that most of the mathematicians “born or resident in America avoid not only the use of ‘mental words’ but even ‘the mental use of algebraic or other precise signs.” Instead, “The mental pictures [that they employ] are most frequently visual.”

Dossey says: “Perhaps the most astounding case is that of English physicist Michael Faraday, whom Einstein placed on a par with Newton. Faraday’s thinking was almost entirely visual, and strikingly devoid of mathematics. Indeed, he had neither a mathematical gift nor any formal training in mathematics, and he was ignorant of all but the simplest elements of arithmetic. Yet Faraday could see the stresses surrounding magnets and electric currents as curves in space, and he coined the phrase lines of force to describe them.”

Mozart described his composing as follows:

All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodized and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it, like a fine picture or a beautiful statue, at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is I cannot tell! All this inventing, this producing, takes place in a pleasing, lively dream.

Dossey writes: “As a result of analyzing his own psychic life across decades, as well as treating thousands of patients and analyzing their dreams,” Jung concluded that humanity possesses “a definite psychic heredity. This consists of phenomena essential to life and which express themselves physically, just as other inherited characteristics express themselves physically. Among these are ‘psychic factors’ that are not confined to single persons, families, or races. These ‘universal dispositions of the mind’ are analogous to Plato’s forms or to logical categories that are everywhere present as basic postulates of reason—the difference being that they are categories of the imagination, not categories of reason. Following St. Augustine, Jung called them archetypes. They abound in the lives of everyone and take the form of familiar motifs—religious stories, myths, dreams, spontaneous fantasies, and visions. The unconscious layer of the psyche that is made up of these universal dynamic forms Jung called the collective unconscious.

“Jung found that the collective unconscious demonstrates the traits of nonlocal mind we have seen so far. It would not be pinned down in space and time, and it transcended the single self to envelop all minds.” Jung asserted that the unconscious “has its own time inasmuch as past, present, and future are blended together in it. Since all distinctions vanish in the unconscious,” Jung explained, “it is only logical that the distinction between separate minds should disappear too. Wherever there is a lowering of the conscious level we come across instances of unconscious identity.”

Jung wrote: “The two elements of time and space, indispensable for change, are relatively without importance for the psyche.” Yet, to know immortality we must realize that we are mortal. “This feeling for the infinite,” Jung maintained, “can be attained only if we are bounded to the utmost. In knowing ourselves to be unique [and therefore limited] we possess also the capacity for becoming conscious of the infinite. But only then!”

Our task in life, Jung asserted, is “to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious.” Only in this way can we realize “the sole purpose of human existence,” which Jung says is “to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.”

Jung described human consciousness as “the invisible, intangible manifestation of the soul.” Therefore, Dossey argues, by increasing our consciousness we recover the soul and regain “contact with the inner Divinity.” Today, however, this task is difficult for two reasons. First, science describes our lives as though souls don’t exist and asserts that the brain produces all our conscious experience. Second, religious teachings in the West generally reject the idea that the soul is “the radiant Godhead itself.”