Emerging Consciousness

This Paper arose out of my participation in a series of public lectures. Their organiser, Agnes Wilkinson, did me a service for which I am grateful. Out of what I described of my intentions, she distilled for me my title. I needed verbal expression for something not yet fully conscious, and the title ‘Emerging consciousness’ referred as much to my state of mind as to the contents of the lecture! It carried the advantage of indicating something dynamic, changing, in process of becoming—and hence with a reference to the future. This agrees with the consideration that consciousness as such is always emerging, and that whatever has emerged needs in time to make some space for and to facilitate the claims of further content, sometimes hitherto resisted, or sometimes quite new, to be considered for fresh integration into the whole.

Consciousness is very often wisdom after the event and the result of learning from painful experiences. It can emerge out of the conflict between the young and the old, the new and the established, the non-rational and reasonable order. There is nearly always need for new light in all places and at any time. I understand that it was every day that Confucius threw the sticks for the I Ching, presumably to compensate for the rather static qualities of his ethics and to make room for the emergence of something not yet conscious, though postulated to be subliminal.

To return to the lectures, it was, in fact, changes and developments in consciousness that motivated their planning, for they were concerned with describing some of the changes that have taken place in analytical psychology since Jung's 1935 lectures to the Tavistock Clinic. In these, about a fifth of his time was spent on a discussion of the nature of consciousness and I propose to open the subject by examining what he had to say (JUNG 9).

Jung, on that occasion, made a considerable use of imagery in his description of the phenomenon. Consciousness, he said,