Omniscience

Omniscience occupies a charged and contested position across the depth-psychology corpus. In the Indic philosophical traditions, as mediated through Bryant’s commentary on the Yoga Sutras, omniscience is neither a pious superlative nor a mere theological attribute but a logical consequence of Sāṅkhyan metaphysics: once the kleśas are dissolved and individual buddhi merges with universal buddhi, total knowledge of all material and psychic phenomena follows necessarily. Aurobindo, drawing on Vedāntic frameworks, treats omniscience as the intrinsic nature of the spirit concealed behind mind — a self-aware infinite that illumines the ignorant mentality ‘whether by rare or constant flashes or by a steady instreaming light.’ The divine Supermind, for Aurobindo, is omniscient by constitution, not acquisition. Jung’s engagement with omniscience is more psychologically diagnostic. In Answer to Job and Psychology and Religion, he repeatedly marks the gap between Yahweh’s theoretical omniscience and his behavioural unconsciousness — an omniscience that is ‘consulted’ only intermittently, forgotten in the intoxication of creative power, and whose latency carries enormous moral weight. This Jungian irony — the omniscient God who does not know himself — generates the central tension of the God-image’s transformation. Hillman touches the term only indexically, locating fantasies of omniscience as pathological grandiosity. Vernant’s treatment is historical, tracing the secularization of divine omniscience through mnemotechnics. The corpus thus holds omniscience in productive tension: as metaphysical reality, as spiritual attainment, and as psychologically unrealized potential.

In the library 15 passages

if one can access and exert mastery over the universality of buddhi, one has full knowledge of and control over all its evolutes, namely, the entirety of material and psychic phenomena. The claim to omniscience is thus internally consistent with the metaphysics of the Sāṅkhyan system.

Bryant argues that within Sāṅkhya-Yoga metaphysics omniscience is a rigorously logical outcome of transcending the kleśas and accessing universal buddhi, not a mystical fantasy.

Bryant, Edwin F., The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary, 2009thesis

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It is only the careful and farsighted preparations for Christ’s birth which show us that omniscience has begun to have a noticeable effect on Yahweh’s actions… Time and again we miss reflection and regard for absolute knowledge.

Jung identifies omniscience as a divine attribute whose practical influence on Yahweh’s behaviour is chronically deferred, revealing an inferior consciousness beneath the theoretical totality of divine knowledge.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958thesis

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the spirit concealed behind mind and conscious of all in itself and in all its selves, omniscient and capable of illumining the ignorant or the self-forgetful mind whether by rare or constant flashes or by a steady instreaming light, out of its omniscience.

Aurobindo posits omniscience as the intrinsic nature of the self-aware spirit, from which intuitive knowledge flows into the mind as illumination proportioned to the mind’s receptivity.

Aurobindo, Sri, The Synthesis of Yoga, 1948thesis

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Naturally this development was foreseen in omniscience, and it may be that the word ‘counsel’ refers to this eternal and absolute knowledge. If so, Yahweh’s attitude seems the more illogical and incomprehensible.

Jung exposes the moral paradox that divine omniscience, far from excusing Yahweh’s treatment of Job, renders it more culpable since the outcome was foreknown.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Answer to Job, 1952thesis

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Yahweh makes the mistake of not consulting his omniscience… he forgot about his omniscience altogether. It is quite understandable that the magical bodying forth of the most diverse objects should have caused God infinite delight.

Edinger, glossing Jung, frames the non-consultation of omniscience as a structural feature of the God-image’s unconsciousness — a forgetting that mirrors the ego’s own inattention to deeper knowledge.

Edinger, Edward F., Transformation of the God-Image: An Elucidation of Jung’s Answer to Job, 1992thesis

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quite apart from the fact of divine omniscience… Only after the giants had long been begotten and had already started to slaughter and devour mankind did four archangels, apparently by accident, hear the weeping and wailing of men.

Jung ironically invokes omniscience to highlight the cosmological scandal of heavenly ignorance, treating divine omniscience as a formal attribute conspicuously absent in the governance of events.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958supporting

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Yahweh has consulted his own omniscience, for in his omniscience there is a clear knowledge of the perverse intentions which lurk in the dark son of God.

Jung frames the elaborate precautions surrounding Mary’s conception as evidence that Yahweh has, in this instance, actually drawn upon his omniscience — marking this as an exceptional rather than routine act.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958supporting

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Īśvara’s body is pure sattva and thus free of the limitations of the senses of conventional bodies; therefore, Īśvara’s awareness can be in simultaneous contact with everything, that is, omniscient.

Śaṅkara’s commentary, as reported by Bryant, grounds Īśvara’s omniscience in the sattvic constitution of his ‘body,’ contrasting it with the tāmasic limitations that restrict embodied consciousness.

Bryant, Edwin F., The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary, 2009supporting

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We may say then that this action of the ignorance or nescience is no real ignorance, but a power, a sign, a proof of an omniscient self-knowledge and all-knowledge.

Aurobindo reframes apparent ignorance in Nature as a concealed expression of omniscient self-knowledge, arguing that the ordered workings of inconscient life testify to an all-knowing divine intelligence operating behind the veil.

Aurobindo, Sri, The Life Divine, 1939supporting

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What is this but the God in man, the infinite Identity, the multitudinous Unity, the Omniscient, the Omnipotent, who having made man in His own image, with the ego as a centre of working.

Aurobindo identifies the divine Omniscient as the superconscious source that uses the individual as its instrument and the collective as its field, driving human evolution toward an image of divine totality.

Aurobindo, Sri, The Life Divine, 1939supporting

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what divine Omniscience and Omnipotence has allowed to arise and act in Its omnipresence, Its all-existence, we must consider It to have originated and decreed, since without the fiat of the Being they could not have been.

Aurobindo argues that divine omniscience entails ontological responsibility for all that arises within existence, since nothing can persist without the implicit sanction of the omniscient Being.

Aurobindo, Sri, The Life Divine, 1939supporting

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it might be tempting to see in Hippias’s mnemotechnics the transposition and secularization of the power of omniscience traditionally connected with Mnemosyne. Hippias boasts that he possesses and can procure for his pupils the omniscience that the deity used to bring to the bard in the form of an inspired vision.

Vernant traces the historical secularization of divine omniscience as the sophist Hippias translates what was a gift of Mnemosyne into a teachable mnemonic technique.

Vernant, Jean-Pierre, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting

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SRI KRISHNA: I know everything about the past, the present, and the future, Arjuna; but there is no one who knows me completely.

Easwaran presents Krishna’s claim to total temporal knowledge as the scriptural ground for divine omniscience in the Bhagavad Gita tradition, paired with the asymmetry that the divine remains ultimately unknowable to human consciousness.

Easwaran, Eknath, The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living: A Verse-by-Verse Commentary, 1975supporting

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When I say that he could not help doing this, I do not imply any limitation of his omnipotence; on the contrary, it is an acknowledgment that all possibilities are contained in him.

Jung clarifies that the necessity of God expressing himself in creation does not diminish omnipotence or omniscience but reflects the self-contained totality of divine being.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958aside

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