Unconscious. The psychological doctrine that the human psyche comprises an important part or "region" whose activities operate below the level of consciousness is *****iated with Freud and Jung but has a long history and much relevance to religious thought. The principle is recognized and expounded in the teaching of the ancient Wisdom (notably in India) concerning the operation of the law of karma and its reincarnational implicates. In light of the karmic principle we recognize that as individuals we each have a history that goes beyond our recall, although through certain techniques some of it may be recaptured. Plato, who recognized a form of reincarnationism very similar to that of the upanishadic writers of India, taught indeed that all knowing is recollection and that although the biological processes of death and birth block that recollection, they do not entirely succeed. Knowledge consists (at least to a great extent) of a gradual drawing forth (from the storehouse of a seemingly forgotten past) that which we have already learned. In the Meno he reports on an intelligent slave boy who, on being given a few data is able to understand the proof of a geometrical theorem as though learning nothing new but, rather, recollecting what was in the recesses of his mind. Leibniz, nearly two thousand years later, saw the individual as receiving a continual flow of perceptions, most of them little ones so dim that we are scarcely aware of them. That too is a recognition of an unconscious level of activity in the psyche. Schelling saw artistic creativity as issuing from an unconscious level, and Schopenhauer's doctrine of "blind will" also recognizes something akin to what we now call the unconscious. Eduard von Hartmann developed a philosophy of the unconscious out of the notion of a series of levels of awareness ranging from the unconscious to the conscious, and various modern structuralists and others have developed theories of the unconscious, Various writers before Freud anticipated the importance of the notion. Franz Delitzsch, for instance, writing in 1855, the year before Freud birth, remarked in his book, A System of Biblical Theology (p. 330), that most psychologists hitherto had made the error of supposing that the soul consists only of a conscious element when it has "a far greater abundance of powers and relations than can possibly appear in its consciousness Jung recognized a "collective" or "race" unconscious providing archetypes that pervade our experience. To the obvious question, "How can I know that. which by definition I do riot know?" the answer must be that I do not; I must probe for it and draw it up from the dark cellar of my psyche to the light of day; but much of what I am aware hovers at the threshold of consciousness being therefore most easily within my grasp.
unconscious : (adj.) visañña; mucchita.
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