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.”
