CHAPTER 8
CONSCI OUSNESS AND SOUL
What if there was a living agency beyond our every day human
world - something even more purposeful than electrons? Do we
delude ourselves in thinking that we possess and control our own
psyches, and is what science calls the “psyche” not just a question
mark arbitrarily confined within the skull, but rather a door that
opens upon the human world from a world beyond, allowing
unknown and mysterious powers to act upon man and carry him
on the wings of the night to a more than personal destiny? (Jung,
CW 15, par. 148, emphasis added).
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Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness
To be conscious is not to be in time.- T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton, Four Quartets.
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Maior autem animae pars extra corpus est.
(The greater part of the soul is outside the body.)
Sendivogius (Hillman, 1981:89).
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8.1 Consciousness
The words of these three great thinkers reveal important characteristics of
both the soul and consciousness and in so doing hint at the nature of the
relationship between them. Jung’s words suggest a veiled but dynamic agency
affecting individual life, a mysterious agency of another dimension. Sendivogius, in
the quotation above, completely reverses the usual interiority paradigm of soul or
psyche and this, considered with the earlier statement by Eliot, suggests that we
really do exist outside of time and space as a decentred self. I ndeed, many