The Noumenon is Beyond Phenomena

About this poem

As a scientist and a psychiatrist, Carl Gustav Jung’s academic research and findings were governed by the investigation of things as phenomena that could be measured. Yet, as a psychiatrist and a psychologist, and like all other scientists before him and after him, he remained perplexed in his efforts to measure the source or origin of man’s consciousness, which he attributed to originate ontologically from the unconscious which, ontologically and ironically, cannot be measured, since, as noumenon, or intrinsically connected to noumenon, the unconscious is considered to be the very pre-existing source of man’s consciousness. In his Collected Works (CW 11, Paragraph 935), Jung puts it this way: “Our consciousness does not create itself. It wells up from unknown depths. In childhood it awakens gradually, and all through life it wakes each morning out of the depths of sleep from unconscious condition.” Similarly, in Collected Works 1, Paragraph 172 (CW 1, 172), Jung states: “It is to this unconscious that all those who do creative work must turn. All new ideas and combinations of ideas are premeditated by the unconscious.” In both passages cited, Car Jung is informing us that the noumenon (what Jung refers to as the unconscious, or in a larger and more expansive sense in his Collected Works, as the Collective Unconscious) precedes and is beyond mankind and mankind’s consciousness as phenomena. Finally, to emphasize and amplify Carl Jung’s scientific observations, we can reaffirm with him that all that we experience, all that we know, all that we become aware of, all that we create, are all images that originate from the Divine Source of “The Great I Am.” All our creative efforts provide tangible evidence of God’s creative majesty ever present and ever being made manifest. more »