PART V
COLLECTIVE MEMORY
COLLECTIVE MEMORY
Think Your Conscious Brain Directs Your Actions? Think Again
The Passive Frame Theory: nearly all the decisions and thoughts that need to be made throughout the day are performed by many parts of the unconscious brain.
Think Your Conscious Brain Directs Your Actions? Think Again
“I am blind and do not see the things of this world; but when the Light comes from Above, it enlightens my heart and I can see, for the Eye of my heart sees everything. The heart is a sanctuary at the center of which there is a little space, wherein the Great Spirit dwells, and this is the Eye. This is the Eye of the Great Spirit by which He sees all things and through which we see Him. If the heart is not pure, the Great Spirit cannot be seen, and if you should die in this ignorance, your soul cannot return immediately to the Great Spirit, but it must be purified by wandering about in the world. In order to know the center of the heart where the Great Spirit dwells you must be pure and good, and live in the manner that the Great Spirit has taught us. The man who is thus pure contains the Universe in the pocket of his heart.”
--Black Elk, a Medicine Man of the Oglala Lakota (Sioux)
The Passive Frame Theory: nearly all the decisions and thoughts that need to be made throughout the day are performed by many parts of the unconscious brain.
Think Your Conscious Brain Directs Your Actions? Think Again
“I am blind and do not see the things of this world; but when the Light comes from Above, it enlightens my heart and I can see, for the Eye of my heart sees everything. The heart is a sanctuary at the center of which there is a little space, wherein the Great Spirit dwells, and this is the Eye. This is the Eye of the Great Spirit by which He sees all things and through which we see Him. If the heart is not pure, the Great Spirit cannot be seen, and if you should die in this ignorance, your soul cannot return immediately to the Great Spirit, but it must be purified by wandering about in the world. In order to know the center of the heart where the Great Spirit dwells you must be pure and good, and live in the manner that the Great Spirit has taught us. The man who is thus pure contains the Universe in the pocket of his heart.”
--Black Elk, a Medicine Man of the Oglala Lakota (Sioux)
So the Self is part of the collective unconscious, but it is not the collective unconscious; it is that unit which apparently comes from the union of the ego and the shadow. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 754
The unconscious on one side is nothing but nature, and on the other hand it is the overcoming of nature; it is yea and nay in itself, two things in one.
So we shall never understand what the unconscious is, as we shall never understand what the world is, because it is and it is not.
~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 89.
Our unconscious is surely located in the body, and you mustn't think this a contradiction to the statement I usually make, that the collective unconscious is everywhere; for if you could put yourself into your sympathetic system, you would know what sympathy is-you would understand why the nervous system is called sympathetic. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 749-751.
*
Jung maintained that no child is born a tabula rasa.
It is curious that, although this fact is well known and is now generally recognized in the innate “patterns of behavior” in animals, it still arouses strong opposition when it comes to human beings.
Both Freud and Adler, for instance, regarded the unconscious as a kind of rubbish heap onto which all that is found inconvenient is thrown, and that it therefore consists of material that once was conscious.
Jung fully recognized the existence of this layer, which he called the “personal unconscious,” but one of his greatest discoveries was the so-called “collective unconscious,” deep levels of the unconscious that are common to all mankind.
Jung once used a large colored diagram during a lecture to make the layers in the unconscious particularly clear.
The lowest level of all he called “the central fire” (life itself), and a spark from this fire ascends through all intervening levels into every living creature.
The next layer he called “animal ancestors in general,” and this is also represented in all the higher forms of life.
The next he called “primeval ancestors,” a level present in all mankind.
In the next layer the latter began to split up into large groups, such as Western or Asiatic man. ~Barbara Hannah, Jung His Life and Work, Pages, 42-46
The unconscious on one side is nothing but nature, and on the other hand it is the overcoming of nature; it is yea and nay in itself, two things in one.
So we shall never understand what the unconscious is, as we shall never understand what the world is, because it is and it is not.
~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 89.
Our unconscious is surely located in the body, and you mustn't think this a contradiction to the statement I usually make, that the collective unconscious is everywhere; for if you could put yourself into your sympathetic system, you would know what sympathy is-you would understand why the nervous system is called sympathetic. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 749-751.
*
Jung maintained that no child is born a tabula rasa.
It is curious that, although this fact is well known and is now generally recognized in the innate “patterns of behavior” in animals, it still arouses strong opposition when it comes to human beings.
Both Freud and Adler, for instance, regarded the unconscious as a kind of rubbish heap onto which all that is found inconvenient is thrown, and that it therefore consists of material that once was conscious.
Jung fully recognized the existence of this layer, which he called the “personal unconscious,” but one of his greatest discoveries was the so-called “collective unconscious,” deep levels of the unconscious that are common to all mankind.
Jung once used a large colored diagram during a lecture to make the layers in the unconscious particularly clear.
The lowest level of all he called “the central fire” (life itself), and a spark from this fire ascends through all intervening levels into every living creature.
The next layer he called “animal ancestors in general,” and this is also represented in all the higher forms of life.
The next he called “primeval ancestors,” a level present in all mankind.
In the next layer the latter began to split up into large groups, such as Western or Asiatic man. ~Barbara Hannah, Jung His Life and Work, Pages, 42-46
“… we are challenged every day to say yes to the movements of life, to see it all through, without pause, staying in relationship to the music of life and each other, adjusting as we go, not knowing what will happen next. Yet even out of tune, this messy and magnificent practice, so essentially human, will let us hear—briefly—the music of the Universe being the Universe. To hear this larger music while grinding out the small music of our lives is what sages of all traditions have called glimpsing eternity.” —Mark Nepo
When I was working on the stone tablets, I became aware of the fateful links between me and my ancestors. I feel very strongly that I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors. It often seems as if there were an impersonal karma within a family, which is passed on from parents to children. It has always seemed to me that I had to answer questions which fate had posed to my forefathers, and which had not yet been answered, or as if I had to complete, or perhaps continue, things which previous ages had left unfinished. It is difficult to determine whether these questions are more of a personal or more of a general (collective) nature. It seems to me that the latter is the case. A collective problem, if not recognized as such, always appears as a personal problem, and in individual cases may give the impression that something is out of order in the realm of the personal psyche. The personal sphere is indeed disturbed, but such disturbances need not be primary; they may well be secondary, the consequence of an insupportable change in the social atmosphere. The cause of disturbance is, therefore, not to be sought in the personal surroundings, but rather in the collective situation. Psychotherapy has hitherto taken this matter far too little into account. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams, Reflections; Pages 233-234.
"This autonomous activity of the psyche, which can be explained neither as a reflex action to sensory stimuli nor as the executive organ of eternal ideas, is, like every vital process, a continually creative act.
The psyche creates reality every day.
The only expression I can use for this activity is fantasy.
Fantasy is just as much feeling as thinking; as much intuition as sensation.
There is no psychic function that, through fantasy, is not inextricably bound up with the other psychic functions.
Sometimes it appears in primordial form, sometimes it is the ultimate and boldest product of all our faculties combined.
Fantasy, therefore, seems to me the clearest expression of the specific activity of the psyche.
It is, pre-eminently, the creative activity from which the answers to all answerable questions come; it is the mother of all possibilities,
where, like all psychological opposites, the inner and outer worlds are joined together in living union.
Fantasy it was and ever is which fashions the bridge between the irreconcilable claims of subject and object, introversion and extraversion.
In fantasy alone both mechanisms are united."
~Carl Jung, Psychological Types, Para 78.
When I was working on the stone tablets, I became aware of the fateful links between me and my ancestors. I feel very strongly that I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors. It often seems as if there were an impersonal karma within a family, which is passed on from parents to children. It has always seemed to me that I had to answer questions which fate had posed to my forefathers, and which had not yet been answered, or as if I had to complete, or perhaps continue, things which previous ages had left unfinished. It is difficult to determine whether these questions are more of a personal or more of a general (collective) nature. It seems to me that the latter is the case. A collective problem, if not recognized as such, always appears as a personal problem, and in individual cases may give the impression that something is out of order in the realm of the personal psyche. The personal sphere is indeed disturbed, but such disturbances need not be primary; they may well be secondary, the consequence of an insupportable change in the social atmosphere. The cause of disturbance is, therefore, not to be sought in the personal surroundings, but rather in the collective situation. Psychotherapy has hitherto taken this matter far too little into account. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams, Reflections; Pages 233-234.
"This autonomous activity of the psyche, which can be explained neither as a reflex action to sensory stimuli nor as the executive organ of eternal ideas, is, like every vital process, a continually creative act.
The psyche creates reality every day.
The only expression I can use for this activity is fantasy.
Fantasy is just as much feeling as thinking; as much intuition as sensation.
There is no psychic function that, through fantasy, is not inextricably bound up with the other psychic functions.
Sometimes it appears in primordial form, sometimes it is the ultimate and boldest product of all our faculties combined.
Fantasy, therefore, seems to me the clearest expression of the specific activity of the psyche.
It is, pre-eminently, the creative activity from which the answers to all answerable questions come; it is the mother of all possibilities,
where, like all psychological opposites, the inner and outer worlds are joined together in living union.
Fantasy it was and ever is which fashions the bridge between the irreconcilable claims of subject and object, introversion and extraversion.
In fantasy alone both mechanisms are united."
~Carl Jung, Psychological Types, Para 78.
Most connections in the world are not relationships, they are participation mystique [mystical connection].
One is then apparently connected, but of course it is never a real connection, it is never a relationship; but it gives the
feeling of being one sheep in a flock at least, which is something.
While if you disqualify yourself as a sheep you are necessarily out of the flock and will suffer from a certain loneliness, despite the fact that you then have a chance to reestablish a relationship, and
this time a conscious relationship, which is far more satisfactory.
Participation mystique gives one a peculiar unconsciousness, which is in a way a function of the mother; one is carried in
unconsciousness.
Sometimes it is nice and sometimes it is not nice at all, but as a rule people prefer it because the average man gets
awfully frightened when he has to do something which he cannot share with his world; he is afraid to be alone, to think something
which other people don’t think, or to feel something which other people don’t feel.
One is up against man’s gregarious instinct as soon as one tries to transcend the ordinary consciousness. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 625
In the unconscious one cannot judge because of the great darkness there, but in the conscious there is light, and so there are differences; there is a criterion in consciousness which gives one a measure by which to judge. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 898
If there were no consciousness, there would be no world; the whole world, as far as it enters into our consideration, depends upon that little flame of consciousness, that is surely the decisive factor. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 898
The Psychic System
COLLECTIVE PSYCHE is a meta-theory of mankind and the primordial field of consciousness/matter, first proposed by Jung. We have no control over the collective psyche, the dynamic totality of all conscious and unconscious psychic processes. It is a self-organizing process with its own structure and flow (archetypes and dynamics).
Global sociopolitical life mirrors this condition (including deeply ingrained conflict, the will to live and depression). Systemic global problems are mirrored in each of us. So are collective delusions. But our collective hearts are increasingly crying out for something beyond that myopia.
We must uncover and challenge the disabling myths of the collective psyche, triggering the drive to reach for the inspirational and extraordinary. Change starts with the questions we ask because they are embedded with the potential to shift our awareness to more expansive and unexpected views. Can we harness what we've learned the hard way?
When we contemplate the same images, seeds are planted that may be unseen but express themselves through metaphor. Poised at the critical edge of creative process, we can reconfigure our strategies and resources into a living system with transcultural dialogue. All we have to do is apply decentralized, wise, creative, compassionate decisions wherever we can.
If consciousness is the root of matter, as some physics models suggest, it includes everything we imagine, experience and know as well as what we cannot know. The dichotomy of psyche and matter has collapsed in the transpersonal perspective. Realizing we share the same field, the new paradigm encompasses psyche and Cosmos.
Real awareness is being present in the moment. The confluence of future and past is eternally present now, pregnant with potential. Collective psyche "remembers" the future before it arrives, runs all superimposed scenarios in the multiverse before collapsing into ordinary reality. Collective psyche can provide prescient glimpses into possible futures. Can we, therefore, change undesireable timelines and outcomes using collective psyche as applied human survival technology?
Both individual and collective psyche possess layers that lie below consciousness. We can examine the beliefs and behavior of our global society, in general, just as we can analyze and foster emergent creativity in individuals with therapeutic effect. Is collective perversion inherent in the very processes that make us human? Collective behavior often defies apparent rationality by being toxic, pathological and malignant.
None of us is uncontaminated by what goes on outside of ourselves in the world. We all feel "violated" by some form of psychosocial trauma. This is the root of alienation. Have we become strangers to ourselves by projecting collective blame and suppressing collective wisdom?
How can we kindle a cultural placebo effect for spontaneous healing? What initiations do we need to find new meaning and make a collective transition away from "collective neurosis" toward the newly emerging concept of spiritual wellnes and compassionate maturity?
Will we assume a higher level of personal and social responsibility or remain numb to our collective dysfunctional behavior? What forces are undermining our collective psyche and why do we permit them to remain in play? How can we process and transmute our collective guilt into effective transformation? Can we stop transmitting our collective dysfunctionalities to future generations?
Can we heal the traumas imprinted on our collective psyche, recognizing there will always be conflicts from organizing principles in the psyche? Archetypes are composed of autonomous dynamic tensions arising spontaneously in individuals and the collective psyche.
The Transcendent function, according to Jung, resolves the split between opposing dynamics and recognizes the spiritual dimension of the psyche. Flow describes the state of harmonious order.
Can we take a collective spiritual journey beyond competing religions and isms toward collective vision? "Recovery" has taken on new meaning in the collective psyche since the global economic crash. We have to "take stock" of the new situation. As economic foundations crumble, we can't afford to be irrationally complacent.
Psyche, Science & Society
How can we modify the processes arising in the political context without changing the social context? The collective shadow of the old paradigm still plagues us with collective memory of political events, state terrorism, covert action, control mechanisms, public visibility (transparency), collective violence, class conflict, collective security, provincial national and cultural interests.
Psychosocial trauma is repeated as violations of person and property, competition for scarce resources, discrimination, our collective involvement in torture and such Frankensteinian science as biowarfare. In the asymmetric war of repressor and repressed, these are only a few of the manifestions of such tensions and our reactions (collective action) to them.
The insult is to our entire biopsychosocial being. Our institutional approach to trauma breaks down somewhere in the process. Global trauma occurs in the context of global drama. Traditional therapeutic paradigms don't work for this kind of trauma inflicted in the macro-social context of savage plutocracy, hegemonic capitalism and brutal totalitarianism. But there are pre-existing conditions in the structure of society and we have to deal with them as best we can.
The ghosts of such large-scale structures can only be exorcised for collective welfare by the introduction of new information, new contexts, new meaning, new structures and new paradigms. Models of collective history and psychological perspectives on society effect our worldview. The collective psyche of many groups has been brutalized. We need new models of collaboration and conflict resolution at the individual and collective level.
The collective psyche itself demands resolution or at least makes us obsess on its elusive nature. To find peace in the world, we must find it within. Images arising in the collective psyche are internalized as dreams and visions. We sense autonomous forces beyond us at work. Deity resides in the collective psyche. Even in physics and life sciences, psyche and matter are no longer split.
Collective intelligence and identity are externalized online in social networking and digital alchemy. The web is a window on collective psyche that invites eruptions from its depths. This superset is a new human identity, embodying that tangibly greater than self. We are practicing higher order collective cooperation, collectively reinventing ourselves as a species. Collective conversation moves at the speed of light.Openness, inclusivity, decentralization, nonlocality and virtuality are keywords. We are not only merging with one another, we are e-merging our nervous systems with our technology. We are letting go of personal identity to collective intelligence in a new way, teaching one another as we explore that frontier beyond the doors of perception. We are each a unique center.
EDGEucation
Our collective aspirations are guided by archetypal fantasies. Our disenchantment and collective grief is arguably over loss of the world soul. The collective psyche points toward and guides us through the transition period we now face. New images are arising, reframing the future. Images have healing properties. They speak to us in our sleeping and waking dreams, forging shared stories relevant to everyone in the process as well as the Cosmos itself.
We cannot separate our psychophysical symptoms from the collective environment. There is a missing dimension in our worldview and mindscapes. We sense it, even though the market and media have attempted to drain all depth from our experience. Emergent events are not merely responses to economic and climatic conditions or social engineering, but eruptions of the collective unconscious.
Mobilized, the archetypal dynamics and creative forces of the collective psyche perturb psychosocial trends, creating new possibilities. Archetypes are the psychic skeleton fleshed out by events that matter. We can't keep our collective skeletons in the closet anymore. We can no longer charge the future to pay for our past. The marks have wised up and no longer trust the control systems.
What doesn't effect the Collective Psyche? Perhaps humanity has never faced more multi-dimensional challenges. We need to retrieve and upgrade our human survival technologies for our metamorphosis. Healing emerges from pathology. Edge artists are the shamans of the new millennium.
Maybe we are still addicted to the Hermetic myth of futurism when we need to live in the here and now. Like Hermes, the future is a perennial Trickster: this is what you want, this is what you get -- lowered expectations. Why do we hurry to live in the future? Futurism speculates about the unknown, robbing us of the present and its opportunities.
There is no quick cure for collective ills but we can find new metaphors, deeper meaning and more relevant stories. There is no therapy but moving forward creatively into the future, experimenting with solutions. Inspiration can emerge from infinite potential in any instant.
x Participatory WisdomThe only certain way to heal the personality or the world is getting to the source of wisdom. Collective consciousness is tied to the health of each individual. Healing power emerges from integration. Looking within, we arouse our tacit knowledge for participatory wisdom -- the active wisdom of the collective psyche.
The same patterns are at work in the individual and collective psyche, something ungraspable in the depths. Larger patterns are at work in the collective. Global awareness, multiculturalism and multinationalism are basic to the collective psyche. But we fear the loss of old boundaries. Is this our collective Borderline disorder, emphasizing relationship disturbances that challenge our beliefs about ourselves? Is it the source of our unremitting crisis and vulnerability?
Joy is the only antidote to anxiety. We need to create better environments, newer myths, and more compassionate beliefs so we can thrive, not just survive. Rather than conspicuous consumption, new buzzwords include ZPG, "downsizing," "aging lean," "design intelligence."
We need new models for creative art and science that move us beyond the nihilism of postmodernism into the transmodern era. The exhausted culture must die for the new to emerge from its ashes. The collective death-wish plays out in a myriad of ways. The psyche is not amenable to reduction. It cannot be contained or restricted.
Politics, Economics, War, Disease, Natural Calamities, Science and Technology, Natural Resource shortages, the Population Bomb, Pandemic, Forced Migration, Climate Shift, Energy Crisis and more have the capacity to instantly morph our worldview and lifestyles.
Destructive states need to give way to an opening of imagination as we continue to free our collective selves from oppressive mythologies. Hopefully, we can find a more sustainable means of existence. Therapeutic interventions can be performed by anyone at any level.
For example, consumers are radically revisioning their spending, saving and investment patterns. Artists are learning what it means to design new bodies and virtual environments. Art can be read as the archives of collective vision. Our collective intelligence is transforming through social networking. We can retrieve our geneologies and test our DNA to find out exactly who we are and where we come from. What we find is we are all more closely related than we formerly thought.
We can benefit by a wide-ranging holistic examination of nature and our own nature as a species. Humans, science tells us, are 99% genetically identical to primates and even closer to one another -- we are one family of man. Battles are symptoms. In psychology, symptoms are where boundaries are shifting.
Collective psyche is as multi-faceted as mankind. The meme biological "race" -- a social construction -- is an irrelevant folk belief that is culturally ingrained divisive view. The global human population is genetically homogeneous compared to other mammals. There are no subspecies in our global family.
Dysfunctional Family of Man
However, we are dysfunctional, detached, alienated. The collective demands of our culture have drained us. We have endured unbearable collective "cognitive dissonance" between the traditional and transitional paradigms. Such mental epidemics arise in the collective soul. One treatment is to reinvest in perennial collective values, such as democracy. If you hold a value, you must speak for it. Lack of passion indicates numbing.
We yearn for something deeper than consumerism in terms of mass mind. Fragmentation is the metaphysical and existential condition that leads to compulsive creation of the false self as compensation for lack of authentic identity. Omega points embody our existential despair, our apocalyptic yearning, our narcissistic desire to have everything reflect our own emptiness.
Despair can lead to suicidal thoughts. In Suicide and the Soul, James Hillman suggests the impulse to suicide is psyche's intense desire to change, and die symbolically to be reborn or renewed. We also long for renewal in our global culture and for the sake of our offspring. But do we have to be collectively self-destructive in the process?
Collectively, we are experiencing a disorder of adaptation that manifests in dissociation. Distrust, greed, apathy and burn-out are symptomatic. We have only recently crashed from a series of socially manufactured hyper-manic investment "bubbles," awakening us from a delusion of limitless growth.
We've become numb and overwhelmed. Numbness masks our collective spiritual hunger, which is the root of all addiction. Our paranoid culture is hyper-vigilant with Post-Traumatic Stress.
Holding all this tension is "weathering" or wearing us out. Economic collapse has sent many back to square one, desperately trying to reinvent themselves for survival. Old personas grow constrictive when we are role-bound into conventionality or the equally cliche eccentricities. Even your rebellions are socially engineered. Identified with the social mask, when we lose our job or 'mission' we lose our identity.
In the same way, we have to reinvent our culture, fractally, from the bottom-up and top-down. Some areas of cultural activity are more pathological and malignant. We literally and metaphorically need to 'cut it out.'
Ancient cultures have much to teach us in this regard; we need to listen deeply to one another. Psycho-spiritual forces of transformation are also in play, such as conceptual reorientation and memes that remain to play out, such as 2012 and technological singularity.
The Collective Psyche is also vulnerable to manipulation through a variety of means that modulate the order/disorder scale. Propaganda is used for organizing chaos in accord with specific agendas through memes, media, education, social values, military, medicine, politics, intelligence and business. Ideas are replicators, much like genes, and can be "cancerous" and require radical treatment.
Zeitgeist
The very Fabric of Reality is woven in our collective thoughts and embodiment. Consensus reality is formulated and ratified at the level of the human unconscious where all minds are entangled. This matrix determines the context and meaning of individual and collective being.
Currently, we are in the midst of a profound paradigm shift. For the first time in history we have sweeping knowledge of the historic panoply of our planet and humanity's place in it. We know who we are but we don't know where we are going, except into the Great Unknown, the abyss that represents the universal Mystery. Indications are that we are becoming "transhuman." The sadpart is most of have failed to becoming "fully human," living up to our human potential, before the transition.
Shared beliefs and attitudes operating as a unifying social force create Collective Consciousness which embodies the Social Cradle. This fractal and systems awareness can be raised to new heights through transformations in tacit and articulated knowledge with behavior rooted in new understanding. This is how new self-organizing order emerges from the death of outworn toxic systems.
In therapy, we hae to get to the root of the problem for more than a "bandaid" cure. Negative instinctual forces tend to keep this positive potential in check, but we are also capable of making quantum leaps in consciousness, particularly since our survival depends on it. We need to develop a system we can trust in once again.
The social drive behind transformation is the over-arching awareness that we are all in it together. New physics has revealed a deeper level of reality where we are at one with each other, the world and Cosmos. We need to begin operating from realization of that interconnected awareness.
Culture's Strange Attractors
Both individuals and cultures have internal maps of reality that condition their beliefs, thoughts, feelings and behaviors. C.G. Jung introduced the model of a Collective Unconscious and also a Collective Consciousness. Its primary structures are archetypes or patterns behind our religious, mythical, thought and social lives.
All the most powerful ideas in history arise from archetypes: religious ideas; the central concepts of science and philosophy. In their present form they are variants of archetypal ideas created by consciously applying and adapting these ideas to reality.
The Collective Psyche is complexed, subject to distortions in healthy dynamics. They revolve around the perennial problems of mankind -- the Strange Attractors of collective life. Projections territorialize the aspects of the collective psyche, but we are all part of that collective body.
Collective behavior also has a Shadow-side as we find in individuals. It causes us to project evil onto other individuals, groups and nations, disowning our complicity. Often there is an abyss between our overt and covert intentions and their real-world effects due to a myopia that prevents us seeing into our collective blind spots.
What is going on in the collective psyche? Oppositional thinking and projection mean we live in a time of accelerating polarization: us versus them, good versus evildoers, and splitting and projection based in creeds, isms, and other congealed dogmas. What we need to examine are the effects, not intentions, of those beliefs.
Cultural narcissism and oppositional thinking are deterants to peace in the world. We need to begin taking collective responsibility for our pathology to overcome our collective denial that has fouled our environment and interpersonal relations at the individual, national and global level.
Frontiers of Consciousness
We gain in meaning and value by fearlessly examining our collective psyche to find hidden dynamics at work below the surface of events that could make or break our intergenerational futures. These dynamics are conditioned by archetypes just like individuals share these common drives for good and evil.
Global Architectronics is the evolving architecture of our common culture, shaped by a variety of internal and external forces. Some of them plague mankind and some have the potential to raise us to a higher level of being in the world and with one another.
The dynamics of Chaos Theory illuminates the process of radical culture change and the challenges of our currently shifting society. We are in unprecedented flux and recognizing that changes in one area of the globe potentially effect the whole system. There are no "closed societies" in the Information Age. This is the era of Glocalization.
Order emerges from chaos, but chaos also overwhelms us when order breaks down in our bodies, minds or societies. Then we need emergent healing that comes from deep within, not introjected from outside of ourselves but welling up from our core. In this new Depression, we need deep healing, individually and collectively.
Our sick system needs to heal from corruption and mismanagement. The planet needs to heal from human impact and overpopulation. It is a complex problem which can only be addressed by a radical shift in healing paradigms and means. The transformative process takes many forms in working with chaos through nature's way.
COLLECTIVE PSYCHE is a meta-theory of mankind and the primordial field of consciousness/matter, first proposed by Jung. We have no control over the collective psyche, the dynamic totality of all conscious and unconscious psychic processes. It is a self-organizing process with its own structure and flow (archetypes and dynamics).
Global sociopolitical life mirrors this condition (including deeply ingrained conflict, the will to live and depression). Systemic global problems are mirrored in each of us. So are collective delusions. But our collective hearts are increasingly crying out for something beyond that myopia.
We must uncover and challenge the disabling myths of the collective psyche, triggering the drive to reach for the inspirational and extraordinary. Change starts with the questions we ask because they are embedded with the potential to shift our awareness to more expansive and unexpected views. Can we harness what we've learned the hard way?
When we contemplate the same images, seeds are planted that may be unseen but express themselves through metaphor. Poised at the critical edge of creative process, we can reconfigure our strategies and resources into a living system with transcultural dialogue. All we have to do is apply decentralized, wise, creative, compassionate decisions wherever we can.
If consciousness is the root of matter, as some physics models suggest, it includes everything we imagine, experience and know as well as what we cannot know. The dichotomy of psyche and matter has collapsed in the transpersonal perspective. Realizing we share the same field, the new paradigm encompasses psyche and Cosmos.
Real awareness is being present in the moment. The confluence of future and past is eternally present now, pregnant with potential. Collective psyche "remembers" the future before it arrives, runs all superimposed scenarios in the multiverse before collapsing into ordinary reality. Collective psyche can provide prescient glimpses into possible futures. Can we, therefore, change undesireable timelines and outcomes using collective psyche as applied human survival technology?
Both individual and collective psyche possess layers that lie below consciousness. We can examine the beliefs and behavior of our global society, in general, just as we can analyze and foster emergent creativity in individuals with therapeutic effect. Is collective perversion inherent in the very processes that make us human? Collective behavior often defies apparent rationality by being toxic, pathological and malignant.
None of us is uncontaminated by what goes on outside of ourselves in the world. We all feel "violated" by some form of psychosocial trauma. This is the root of alienation. Have we become strangers to ourselves by projecting collective blame and suppressing collective wisdom?
How can we kindle a cultural placebo effect for spontaneous healing? What initiations do we need to find new meaning and make a collective transition away from "collective neurosis" toward the newly emerging concept of spiritual wellnes and compassionate maturity?
Will we assume a higher level of personal and social responsibility or remain numb to our collective dysfunctional behavior? What forces are undermining our collective psyche and why do we permit them to remain in play? How can we process and transmute our collective guilt into effective transformation? Can we stop transmitting our collective dysfunctionalities to future generations?
Can we heal the traumas imprinted on our collective psyche, recognizing there will always be conflicts from organizing principles in the psyche? Archetypes are composed of autonomous dynamic tensions arising spontaneously in individuals and the collective psyche.
The Transcendent function, according to Jung, resolves the split between opposing dynamics and recognizes the spiritual dimension of the psyche. Flow describes the state of harmonious order.
Can we take a collective spiritual journey beyond competing religions and isms toward collective vision? "Recovery" has taken on new meaning in the collective psyche since the global economic crash. We have to "take stock" of the new situation. As economic foundations crumble, we can't afford to be irrationally complacent.
Psyche, Science & Society
How can we modify the processes arising in the political context without changing the social context? The collective shadow of the old paradigm still plagues us with collective memory of political events, state terrorism, covert action, control mechanisms, public visibility (transparency), collective violence, class conflict, collective security, provincial national and cultural interests.
Psychosocial trauma is repeated as violations of person and property, competition for scarce resources, discrimination, our collective involvement in torture and such Frankensteinian science as biowarfare. In the asymmetric war of repressor and repressed, these are only a few of the manifestions of such tensions and our reactions (collective action) to them.
The insult is to our entire biopsychosocial being. Our institutional approach to trauma breaks down somewhere in the process. Global trauma occurs in the context of global drama. Traditional therapeutic paradigms don't work for this kind of trauma inflicted in the macro-social context of savage plutocracy, hegemonic capitalism and brutal totalitarianism. But there are pre-existing conditions in the structure of society and we have to deal with them as best we can.
The ghosts of such large-scale structures can only be exorcised for collective welfare by the introduction of new information, new contexts, new meaning, new structures and new paradigms. Models of collective history and psychological perspectives on society effect our worldview. The collective psyche of many groups has been brutalized. We need new models of collaboration and conflict resolution at the individual and collective level.
The collective psyche itself demands resolution or at least makes us obsess on its elusive nature. To find peace in the world, we must find it within. Images arising in the collective psyche are internalized as dreams and visions. We sense autonomous forces beyond us at work. Deity resides in the collective psyche. Even in physics and life sciences, psyche and matter are no longer split.
Collective intelligence and identity are externalized online in social networking and digital alchemy. The web is a window on collective psyche that invites eruptions from its depths. This superset is a new human identity, embodying that tangibly greater than self. We are practicing higher order collective cooperation, collectively reinventing ourselves as a species. Collective conversation moves at the speed of light.Openness, inclusivity, decentralization, nonlocality and virtuality are keywords. We are not only merging with one another, we are e-merging our nervous systems with our technology. We are letting go of personal identity to collective intelligence in a new way, teaching one another as we explore that frontier beyond the doors of perception. We are each a unique center.
EDGEucation
Our collective aspirations are guided by archetypal fantasies. Our disenchantment and collective grief is arguably over loss of the world soul. The collective psyche points toward and guides us through the transition period we now face. New images are arising, reframing the future. Images have healing properties. They speak to us in our sleeping and waking dreams, forging shared stories relevant to everyone in the process as well as the Cosmos itself.
We cannot separate our psychophysical symptoms from the collective environment. There is a missing dimension in our worldview and mindscapes. We sense it, even though the market and media have attempted to drain all depth from our experience. Emergent events are not merely responses to economic and climatic conditions or social engineering, but eruptions of the collective unconscious.
Mobilized, the archetypal dynamics and creative forces of the collective psyche perturb psychosocial trends, creating new possibilities. Archetypes are the psychic skeleton fleshed out by events that matter. We can't keep our collective skeletons in the closet anymore. We can no longer charge the future to pay for our past. The marks have wised up and no longer trust the control systems.
What doesn't effect the Collective Psyche? Perhaps humanity has never faced more multi-dimensional challenges. We need to retrieve and upgrade our human survival technologies for our metamorphosis. Healing emerges from pathology. Edge artists are the shamans of the new millennium.
Maybe we are still addicted to the Hermetic myth of futurism when we need to live in the here and now. Like Hermes, the future is a perennial Trickster: this is what you want, this is what you get -- lowered expectations. Why do we hurry to live in the future? Futurism speculates about the unknown, robbing us of the present and its opportunities.
There is no quick cure for collective ills but we can find new metaphors, deeper meaning and more relevant stories. There is no therapy but moving forward creatively into the future, experimenting with solutions. Inspiration can emerge from infinite potential in any instant.
x Participatory WisdomThe only certain way to heal the personality or the world is getting to the source of wisdom. Collective consciousness is tied to the health of each individual. Healing power emerges from integration. Looking within, we arouse our tacit knowledge for participatory wisdom -- the active wisdom of the collective psyche.
The same patterns are at work in the individual and collective psyche, something ungraspable in the depths. Larger patterns are at work in the collective. Global awareness, multiculturalism and multinationalism are basic to the collective psyche. But we fear the loss of old boundaries. Is this our collective Borderline disorder, emphasizing relationship disturbances that challenge our beliefs about ourselves? Is it the source of our unremitting crisis and vulnerability?
Joy is the only antidote to anxiety. We need to create better environments, newer myths, and more compassionate beliefs so we can thrive, not just survive. Rather than conspicuous consumption, new buzzwords include ZPG, "downsizing," "aging lean," "design intelligence."
We need new models for creative art and science that move us beyond the nihilism of postmodernism into the transmodern era. The exhausted culture must die for the new to emerge from its ashes. The collective death-wish plays out in a myriad of ways. The psyche is not amenable to reduction. It cannot be contained or restricted.
Politics, Economics, War, Disease, Natural Calamities, Science and Technology, Natural Resource shortages, the Population Bomb, Pandemic, Forced Migration, Climate Shift, Energy Crisis and more have the capacity to instantly morph our worldview and lifestyles.
Destructive states need to give way to an opening of imagination as we continue to free our collective selves from oppressive mythologies. Hopefully, we can find a more sustainable means of existence. Therapeutic interventions can be performed by anyone at any level.
For example, consumers are radically revisioning their spending, saving and investment patterns. Artists are learning what it means to design new bodies and virtual environments. Art can be read as the archives of collective vision. Our collective intelligence is transforming through social networking. We can retrieve our geneologies and test our DNA to find out exactly who we are and where we come from. What we find is we are all more closely related than we formerly thought.
We can benefit by a wide-ranging holistic examination of nature and our own nature as a species. Humans, science tells us, are 99% genetically identical to primates and even closer to one another -- we are one family of man. Battles are symptoms. In psychology, symptoms are where boundaries are shifting.
Collective psyche is as multi-faceted as mankind. The meme biological "race" -- a social construction -- is an irrelevant folk belief that is culturally ingrained divisive view. The global human population is genetically homogeneous compared to other mammals. There are no subspecies in our global family.
Dysfunctional Family of Man
However, we are dysfunctional, detached, alienated. The collective demands of our culture have drained us. We have endured unbearable collective "cognitive dissonance" between the traditional and transitional paradigms. Such mental epidemics arise in the collective soul. One treatment is to reinvest in perennial collective values, such as democracy. If you hold a value, you must speak for it. Lack of passion indicates numbing.
We yearn for something deeper than consumerism in terms of mass mind. Fragmentation is the metaphysical and existential condition that leads to compulsive creation of the false self as compensation for lack of authentic identity. Omega points embody our existential despair, our apocalyptic yearning, our narcissistic desire to have everything reflect our own emptiness.
Despair can lead to suicidal thoughts. In Suicide and the Soul, James Hillman suggests the impulse to suicide is psyche's intense desire to change, and die symbolically to be reborn or renewed. We also long for renewal in our global culture and for the sake of our offspring. But do we have to be collectively self-destructive in the process?
Collectively, we are experiencing a disorder of adaptation that manifests in dissociation. Distrust, greed, apathy and burn-out are symptomatic. We have only recently crashed from a series of socially manufactured hyper-manic investment "bubbles," awakening us from a delusion of limitless growth.
We've become numb and overwhelmed. Numbness masks our collective spiritual hunger, which is the root of all addiction. Our paranoid culture is hyper-vigilant with Post-Traumatic Stress.
Holding all this tension is "weathering" or wearing us out. Economic collapse has sent many back to square one, desperately trying to reinvent themselves for survival. Old personas grow constrictive when we are role-bound into conventionality or the equally cliche eccentricities. Even your rebellions are socially engineered. Identified with the social mask, when we lose our job or 'mission' we lose our identity.
In the same way, we have to reinvent our culture, fractally, from the bottom-up and top-down. Some areas of cultural activity are more pathological and malignant. We literally and metaphorically need to 'cut it out.'
Ancient cultures have much to teach us in this regard; we need to listen deeply to one another. Psycho-spiritual forces of transformation are also in play, such as conceptual reorientation and memes that remain to play out, such as 2012 and technological singularity.
The Collective Psyche is also vulnerable to manipulation through a variety of means that modulate the order/disorder scale. Propaganda is used for organizing chaos in accord with specific agendas through memes, media, education, social values, military, medicine, politics, intelligence and business. Ideas are replicators, much like genes, and can be "cancerous" and require radical treatment.
Zeitgeist
The very Fabric of Reality is woven in our collective thoughts and embodiment. Consensus reality is formulated and ratified at the level of the human unconscious where all minds are entangled. This matrix determines the context and meaning of individual and collective being.
Currently, we are in the midst of a profound paradigm shift. For the first time in history we have sweeping knowledge of the historic panoply of our planet and humanity's place in it. We know who we are but we don't know where we are going, except into the Great Unknown, the abyss that represents the universal Mystery. Indications are that we are becoming "transhuman." The sadpart is most of have failed to becoming "fully human," living up to our human potential, before the transition.
Shared beliefs and attitudes operating as a unifying social force create Collective Consciousness which embodies the Social Cradle. This fractal and systems awareness can be raised to new heights through transformations in tacit and articulated knowledge with behavior rooted in new understanding. This is how new self-organizing order emerges from the death of outworn toxic systems.
In therapy, we hae to get to the root of the problem for more than a "bandaid" cure. Negative instinctual forces tend to keep this positive potential in check, but we are also capable of making quantum leaps in consciousness, particularly since our survival depends on it. We need to develop a system we can trust in once again.
The social drive behind transformation is the over-arching awareness that we are all in it together. New physics has revealed a deeper level of reality where we are at one with each other, the world and Cosmos. We need to begin operating from realization of that interconnected awareness.
Culture's Strange Attractors
Both individuals and cultures have internal maps of reality that condition their beliefs, thoughts, feelings and behaviors. C.G. Jung introduced the model of a Collective Unconscious and also a Collective Consciousness. Its primary structures are archetypes or patterns behind our religious, mythical, thought and social lives.
All the most powerful ideas in history arise from archetypes: religious ideas; the central concepts of science and philosophy. In their present form they are variants of archetypal ideas created by consciously applying and adapting these ideas to reality.
The Collective Psyche is complexed, subject to distortions in healthy dynamics. They revolve around the perennial problems of mankind -- the Strange Attractors of collective life. Projections territorialize the aspects of the collective psyche, but we are all part of that collective body.
Collective behavior also has a Shadow-side as we find in individuals. It causes us to project evil onto other individuals, groups and nations, disowning our complicity. Often there is an abyss between our overt and covert intentions and their real-world effects due to a myopia that prevents us seeing into our collective blind spots.
What is going on in the collective psyche? Oppositional thinking and projection mean we live in a time of accelerating polarization: us versus them, good versus evildoers, and splitting and projection based in creeds, isms, and other congealed dogmas. What we need to examine are the effects, not intentions, of those beliefs.
Cultural narcissism and oppositional thinking are deterants to peace in the world. We need to begin taking collective responsibility for our pathology to overcome our collective denial that has fouled our environment and interpersonal relations at the individual, national and global level.
Frontiers of Consciousness
We gain in meaning and value by fearlessly examining our collective psyche to find hidden dynamics at work below the surface of events that could make or break our intergenerational futures. These dynamics are conditioned by archetypes just like individuals share these common drives for good and evil.
Global Architectronics is the evolving architecture of our common culture, shaped by a variety of internal and external forces. Some of them plague mankind and some have the potential to raise us to a higher level of being in the world and with one another.
The dynamics of Chaos Theory illuminates the process of radical culture change and the challenges of our currently shifting society. We are in unprecedented flux and recognizing that changes in one area of the globe potentially effect the whole system. There are no "closed societies" in the Information Age. This is the era of Glocalization.
Order emerges from chaos, but chaos also overwhelms us when order breaks down in our bodies, minds or societies. Then we need emergent healing that comes from deep within, not introjected from outside of ourselves but welling up from our core. In this new Depression, we need deep healing, individually and collectively.
Our sick system needs to heal from corruption and mismanagement. The planet needs to heal from human impact and overpopulation. It is a complex problem which can only be addressed by a radical shift in healing paradigms and means. The transformative process takes many forms in working with chaos through nature's way.
The only certain way to heal the personality or the world is getting to the source of wisdom. Collective consciousness is tied to the health of each individual. Healing power emerges from integration. Looking within, we arouse our tacit knowledge for participatory wisdom -- the active wisdom of the collective psyche.
The same patterns are at work in the individual and collective psyche, something ungraspable in the depths. Larger patterns are at work in the collective. Global awareness, multiculturalism and multinationalism are basic to the collective psyche. But we fear the loss of old boundaries. Is this our collective Borderline disorder, emphasizing relationship disturbances that challenge our beliefs about ourselves? Is it the source of our unremitting crisis and vulnerability?
Joy is the only antidote to anxiety. We need to create better environments, newer myths, and more compassionate beliefs so we can thrive, not just survive. Rather than conspicuous consumption, new buzzwords include ZPG, "downsizing," "aging lean," "design intelligence."
We need new models for creative art and science that move us beyond the nihilism of postmodernism into the transmodern era. The exhausted culture must die for the new to emerge from its ashes. The collective death-wish plays out in a myriad of ways. The psyche is not amenable to reduction. It cannot be contained or restricted.
Politics, Economics, War, Disease, Natural Calamities, Science and Technology, Natural Resource shortages, the Population Bomb, Pandemic, Forced Migration, Climate Shift, Energy Crisis and more have the capacity to instantly morph our worldview and lifestyles.
Destructive states need to give way to an opening of imagination as we continue to free our collective selves from oppressive mythologies. Hopefully, we can find a more sustainable means of existence. Therapeutic interventions can be performed by anyone at any level.
For example, consumers are radically revisioning their spending, saving and investment patterns. Artists are learning what it means to design new bodies and virtual environments. Art can be read as the archives of collective vision. Our collective intelligence is transforming through social networking. We can retrieve our genealogies and test our DNA to find out exactly who we are and where we come from. What we find is we are all more closely related than we formerly thought.
We can benefit by a wide-ranging holistic examination of nature and our own nature as a species. Humans, science tells us, are 99% genetically identical to primates and even closer to one another -- we are one family of man. Battles are symptoms. In psychology, symptoms are where boundaries are shifting.
Collective psyche is as multi-faceted as mankind. The meme biological "race" -- a social construction -- is an irrelevant folk belief that is culturally ingrained divisive view. The global human population is genetically homogeneous compared to other mammals. There are no subspecies in our global family.
Dysfunctional Family of Man
However, we are dysfunctional, detached, alienated. The collective demands of our culture have drained us. We have endured unbearable collective "cognitive dissonance" between the traditional and transitional paradigms. Such mental epidemics arise in the collective soul. One treatment is to reinvest in perennial collective values, such as democracy. If you hold a value, you must speak for it. Lack of passion indicates numbing.
We yearn for something deeper than consumerism in terms of mass mind. Fragmentation is the metaphysical and existential condition that leads to compulsive creation of the false self as compensation for lack of authentic identity. Omega points embody our existential despair, our apocalyptic yearning, our narcissistic desire to have everything reflect our own emptiness.
Despair can lead to suicidal thoughts. In Suicide and the Soul, James Hillman suggests the impulse to suicide is psyche's intense desire to change, and die symbolically to be reborn or renewed. We also long for renewal in our global culture and for the sake of our offspring. But do we have to be collectively self-destructive in the process?
Collectively, we are experiencing a disorder of adaptation that manifests in dissociation. Distrust, greed, apathy and burn-out are symptomatic. We have only recently crashed from a series of socially manufactured hyper-manic investment "bubbles," awakening us from a delusion of limitless growth.
We've become numb and overwhelmed. Numbness masks our collective spiritual hunger, which is the root of all addiction. Our paranoid culture is hyper-vigilant with Post-Traumatic Stress.
Holding all this tension is "weathering" or wearing us out. Economic collapse has sent many back to square one, desperately trying to reinvent themselves for survival. Old personas grow constrictive when we are role-bound into conventionality or the equally cliche eccentricities. Even your rebellions are socially engineered. Identified with the social mask, when we lose our job or 'mission' we lose our identity.
In the same way, we have to reinvent our culture, fractally, from the bottom-up and top-down. Some areas of cultural activity are more pathological and malignant. We literally and metaphorically need to 'cut it out.'
Ancient cultures have much to teach us in this regard; we need to listen deeply to one another. Psycho-spiritual forces of transformation are also in play, such as conceptual reorientation and memes.
The same patterns are at work in the individual and collective psyche, something ungraspable in the depths. Larger patterns are at work in the collective. Global awareness, multiculturalism and multinationalism are basic to the collective psyche. But we fear the loss of old boundaries. Is this our collective Borderline disorder, emphasizing relationship disturbances that challenge our beliefs about ourselves? Is it the source of our unremitting crisis and vulnerability?
Joy is the only antidote to anxiety. We need to create better environments, newer myths, and more compassionate beliefs so we can thrive, not just survive. Rather than conspicuous consumption, new buzzwords include ZPG, "downsizing," "aging lean," "design intelligence."
We need new models for creative art and science that move us beyond the nihilism of postmodernism into the transmodern era. The exhausted culture must die for the new to emerge from its ashes. The collective death-wish plays out in a myriad of ways. The psyche is not amenable to reduction. It cannot be contained or restricted.
Politics, Economics, War, Disease, Natural Calamities, Science and Technology, Natural Resource shortages, the Population Bomb, Pandemic, Forced Migration, Climate Shift, Energy Crisis and more have the capacity to instantly morph our worldview and lifestyles.
Destructive states need to give way to an opening of imagination as we continue to free our collective selves from oppressive mythologies. Hopefully, we can find a more sustainable means of existence. Therapeutic interventions can be performed by anyone at any level.
For example, consumers are radically revisioning their spending, saving and investment patterns. Artists are learning what it means to design new bodies and virtual environments. Art can be read as the archives of collective vision. Our collective intelligence is transforming through social networking. We can retrieve our genealogies and test our DNA to find out exactly who we are and where we come from. What we find is we are all more closely related than we formerly thought.
We can benefit by a wide-ranging holistic examination of nature and our own nature as a species. Humans, science tells us, are 99% genetically identical to primates and even closer to one another -- we are one family of man. Battles are symptoms. In psychology, symptoms are where boundaries are shifting.
Collective psyche is as multi-faceted as mankind. The meme biological "race" -- a social construction -- is an irrelevant folk belief that is culturally ingrained divisive view. The global human population is genetically homogeneous compared to other mammals. There are no subspecies in our global family.
Dysfunctional Family of Man
However, we are dysfunctional, detached, alienated. The collective demands of our culture have drained us. We have endured unbearable collective "cognitive dissonance" between the traditional and transitional paradigms. Such mental epidemics arise in the collective soul. One treatment is to reinvest in perennial collective values, such as democracy. If you hold a value, you must speak for it. Lack of passion indicates numbing.
We yearn for something deeper than consumerism in terms of mass mind. Fragmentation is the metaphysical and existential condition that leads to compulsive creation of the false self as compensation for lack of authentic identity. Omega points embody our existential despair, our apocalyptic yearning, our narcissistic desire to have everything reflect our own emptiness.
Despair can lead to suicidal thoughts. In Suicide and the Soul, James Hillman suggests the impulse to suicide is psyche's intense desire to change, and die symbolically to be reborn or renewed. We also long for renewal in our global culture and for the sake of our offspring. But do we have to be collectively self-destructive in the process?
Collectively, we are experiencing a disorder of adaptation that manifests in dissociation. Distrust, greed, apathy and burn-out are symptomatic. We have only recently crashed from a series of socially manufactured hyper-manic investment "bubbles," awakening us from a delusion of limitless growth.
We've become numb and overwhelmed. Numbness masks our collective spiritual hunger, which is the root of all addiction. Our paranoid culture is hyper-vigilant with Post-Traumatic Stress.
Holding all this tension is "weathering" or wearing us out. Economic collapse has sent many back to square one, desperately trying to reinvent themselves for survival. Old personas grow constrictive when we are role-bound into conventionality or the equally cliche eccentricities. Even your rebellions are socially engineered. Identified with the social mask, when we lose our job or 'mission' we lose our identity.
In the same way, we have to reinvent our culture, fractally, from the bottom-up and top-down. Some areas of cultural activity are more pathological and malignant. We literally and metaphorically need to 'cut it out.'
Ancient cultures have much to teach us in this regard; we need to listen deeply to one another. Psycho-spiritual forces of transformation are also in play, such as conceptual reorientation and memes.
But for him who has seen the chaos, there is no more hiding, because he knows that the bottom sways and knows what this swaying means.
He has seen the order and the disorder of the endless, he knows the unlawful laws.
He knows the sea and can never forget it.
The chaos is terrible: days full of lead, nights full of horror. . . .
I know that chaos must come over men, and that the hands of those who unknowingly and unsuspectingly break through the thin walls that separate us from the sea are busy.
For this is our way, our truth, and our life.
~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 299.
Is it possible to inherit our ancestors’ memories? The answer is not black and white. It depends on what we mean by "memory." The story of the movie is farfetched: there is no evidence or credible scientific theory suggesting that we can inherit specific episodic memories of events that our ancestors experienced. In other words, it’s highly unlikely that you will suddenly remember your great-great-grandfather’s wedding day or your great-great-grandmother’s struggle in childbirth.But the idea of inherited, or genetic, memory of a different kind has some degree of plausibility. There are many different types of memory. Episodic memory (link is external) is memory of specific events, such as your memory of your last birthday party. Semantic memory (link is external) is memory of information that is presented as a fact, for example, the fact that Obama is the current president, that "ranarian means frog-like or that 31 is a prime number. Finally, procedural memory (link is external) is memory of how to do things, for example, your memory of how to swim or change a light bulb.
It is uncontroversial that procedural memory can be inherited (link is external). Babies know how to suck without being taught how to do it. This is a kind of procedural memory, and it is clearly genetic. The central, and much more controversial, question is whether episodic and semantic memory can be inherited.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-superhuman-mind/201302/remembering-things-you-were-born
He has seen the order and the disorder of the endless, he knows the unlawful laws.
He knows the sea and can never forget it.
The chaos is terrible: days full of lead, nights full of horror. . . .
I know that chaos must come over men, and that the hands of those who unknowingly and unsuspectingly break through the thin walls that separate us from the sea are busy.
For this is our way, our truth, and our life.
~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 299.
Is it possible to inherit our ancestors’ memories? The answer is not black and white. It depends on what we mean by "memory." The story of the movie is farfetched: there is no evidence or credible scientific theory suggesting that we can inherit specific episodic memories of events that our ancestors experienced. In other words, it’s highly unlikely that you will suddenly remember your great-great-grandfather’s wedding day or your great-great-grandmother’s struggle in childbirth.But the idea of inherited, or genetic, memory of a different kind has some degree of plausibility. There are many different types of memory. Episodic memory (link is external) is memory of specific events, such as your memory of your last birthday party. Semantic memory (link is external) is memory of information that is presented as a fact, for example, the fact that Obama is the current president, that "ranarian means frog-like or that 31 is a prime number. Finally, procedural memory (link is external) is memory of how to do things, for example, your memory of how to swim or change a light bulb.
It is uncontroversial that procedural memory can be inherited (link is external). Babies know how to suck without being taught how to do it. This is a kind of procedural memory, and it is clearly genetic. The central, and much more controversial, question is whether episodic and semantic memory can be inherited.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-superhuman-mind/201302/remembering-things-you-were-born
"Our unconscious existence is the real one, and the conscious world is a kind of illusion, an apparent reality constructed for a specific purpose like a dream which seems a reality as long as we are in it." --C. Jung
Subjective mental life is a primary metaphor of
subjective Experience
Primary Metaphor Becomes Embodied
and maps across generations.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/genetic-memory-how-we-know-things-we-never-learned1/
Genetic Memory: How We Know Things We Never Learned
"So the course of time is really very much like the course of a ship in the ocean. The ship leaves a wake behind it, and the wake fades out and tells us where the ship has been in just the same way as the past and our memory of the past tells us what we have done. But as we go back into the past, and we go back and back to prehistory and we use all kinds of instruments and scientific methods for detecting what happened, we eventually reach a point where all record of the past fades away in just the same way as the wake of a ship.
"Now the important thing to remember in this illustration is that the wake doesn’t drive the ship anymore than the tail wags the dog. The power, the source of the wake, is always in the ship itself which represents the present. You can’t insist that the wake drives the ship. You can plot the course of the ship on graph paper and calculate a trend by seeing over what number of squares the ship has been doing its wiggling, and make predictions as to where it will go next. This would give you a trend as to where the ship is going and you might say, “Because we can plot the trend from the pattern which the ship has followed, we can tell where it is going and, therefore, we are inclined to think that where it has been will determine where it will go.” But that is not actually the case. Where it has been is determined not by where it will go but where it is going. To put that more accurately, where it has been does not determine where it is going, where it is going determines where it has been." -Alan Watts...
Subjective mental life is a primary metaphor of
subjective Experience
Primary Metaphor Becomes Embodied
and maps across generations.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/genetic-memory-how-we-know-things-we-never-learned1/
Genetic Memory: How We Know Things We Never Learned
"So the course of time is really very much like the course of a ship in the ocean. The ship leaves a wake behind it, and the wake fades out and tells us where the ship has been in just the same way as the past and our memory of the past tells us what we have done. But as we go back into the past, and we go back and back to prehistory and we use all kinds of instruments and scientific methods for detecting what happened, we eventually reach a point where all record of the past fades away in just the same way as the wake of a ship.
"Now the important thing to remember in this illustration is that the wake doesn’t drive the ship anymore than the tail wags the dog. The power, the source of the wake, is always in the ship itself which represents the present. You can’t insist that the wake drives the ship. You can plot the course of the ship on graph paper and calculate a trend by seeing over what number of squares the ship has been doing its wiggling, and make predictions as to where it will go next. This would give you a trend as to where the ship is going and you might say, “Because we can plot the trend from the pattern which the ship has followed, we can tell where it is going and, therefore, we are inclined to think that where it has been will determine where it will go.” But that is not actually the case. Where it has been is determined not by where it will go but where it is going. To put that more accurately, where it has been does not determine where it is going, where it is going determines where it has been." -Alan Watts...
You will then come into a realization not only of your human pre-stages,
but of the animal also.
This feeling of the collective unconscious brings with it a sense of the renewal of life to which there is no end.
It comes down from the dim dawn of the world, and continues.
So when we obtain a complete realization of self, there comes with it the feeling of immortality.
Even in analysis such a moment may come.
It is the goal of individuation to reach the sense of the continuation of one’s life through the ages.
It gives one a feeling of eternity on this earth.
As Dr. Harding pointed out, these men are not ready for the
pillar of fire.
The whole phenomenon of “She” has not yet been assimilated, the task is still before them, and they must have a new contact with the unconscious.
~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 154.
but of the animal also.
This feeling of the collective unconscious brings with it a sense of the renewal of life to which there is no end.
It comes down from the dim dawn of the world, and continues.
So when we obtain a complete realization of self, there comes with it the feeling of immortality.
Even in analysis such a moment may come.
It is the goal of individuation to reach the sense of the continuation of one’s life through the ages.
It gives one a feeling of eternity on this earth.
As Dr. Harding pointed out, these men are not ready for the
pillar of fire.
The whole phenomenon of “She” has not yet been assimilated, the task is still before them, and they must have a new contact with the unconscious.
~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 154.
V. Collective Memory:
Ancestral Legacy; Lifespan - Wisdom Bridge; The World Tree; The Cosmic Tree; Tangled Roots; Ancestral Soul; Reciting Your Kin; Digital Ancestry; House of Our Flesh; Soul's Gold; In Their Footsteps; Who Will Remember Us?; Hearth of the Heart; Council of Ancestors; Our Nameless Ancestors; Putting It All Together;
Inherit-Ability; Drop Lines & Dreams; Soul Dust; You Speak for the Dead;
10,000 Ancestors Will Dream of Me; The Heart of the Matter; Called Home; Listening for Echoes of the Past.
Ancestral Legacy; Lifespan - Wisdom Bridge; The World Tree; The Cosmic Tree; Tangled Roots; Ancestral Soul; Reciting Your Kin; Digital Ancestry; House of Our Flesh; Soul's Gold; In Their Footsteps; Who Will Remember Us?; Hearth of the Heart; Council of Ancestors; Our Nameless Ancestors; Putting It All Together;
Inherit-Ability; Drop Lines & Dreams; Soul Dust; You Speak for the Dead;
10,000 Ancestors Will Dream of Me; The Heart of the Matter; Called Home; Listening for Echoes of the Past.
Human consciousness has developed infinitely slowly out of nature. Before we knew ourselves as human, we were animal and plant, stone and water. For countless millennia, the potential for human consciousness was hidden within nature, like a seed buried in the earth. Then, very slowly, it began to differentiate itself from nature. Deep in our memory is the whole experience of life on this planet: life that has evolved over the four and a half billion years since its formation; life as hydrogen, oxygen and carbon; life as the most minute particles of matter; life as water, fire, air and earth; life as rock, soil, plant, insect, bird, animal; life as woman and man evolved from this aeonic experience. Finally the point was reached where planetary life evolved a brain which enabled us to speak, to formulate thoughts, to communicate with each other through language, to endow sounds with meaning, and invent writing as a way of transmitting thoughts. Over these billions of years life on this planet has evolved from undifferentiated awareness to the self- awareness of our species. All this can be described as an instinctive process, each phase blending imperceptibly into the next.
This primordial experience of the Great Mother is the foundation of later cultures all over the world. She is like an immense tree, whose roots lie beyond the reach of our consciousness, whose branches are all the forms of life we know, and whose flowering is a potential within us, a potential that only a tiny handful of the human race has realized. In these earliest Paleolithic cultures of which those of the First Peoples today are the descendants, she was nature, she was the earth and she was the unseen dimension of soul or spirit. People were connected through her to nature as to a great being and to the great vault of the starry sky as part of this being, imagined as a great web of life. She was the invisible patterning or formations of energy whose intricate and interdependent system of relationships were respected even though they were not understood. She was experienced as a law, a profound patterning which the whole of life reflected and obeyed in the way it functioned, from the circumpolar movement of the stars to the tiniest insect. The image of the Great Mother reflected something deeply felt - that the creative source cares for the life it has brought into being in the way that an animal or a human mother instinctively cares for the life of her cub or her child.
- See more at: http://www.adishakti.org/_/divine_feminine_the_great_mother.htm#sthash.HcL3ZUnO.dpuf
This primordial experience of the Great Mother is the foundation of later cultures all over the world. She is like an immense tree, whose roots lie beyond the reach of our consciousness, whose branches are all the forms of life we know, and whose flowering is a potential within us, a potential that only a tiny handful of the human race has realized. In these earliest Paleolithic cultures of which those of the First Peoples today are the descendants, she was nature, she was the earth and she was the unseen dimension of soul or spirit. People were connected through her to nature as to a great being and to the great vault of the starry sky as part of this being, imagined as a great web of life. She was the invisible patterning or formations of energy whose intricate and interdependent system of relationships were respected even though they were not understood. She was experienced as a law, a profound patterning which the whole of life reflected and obeyed in the way it functioned, from the circumpolar movement of the stars to the tiniest insect. The image of the Great Mother reflected something deeply felt - that the creative source cares for the life it has brought into being in the way that an animal or a human mother instinctively cares for the life of her cub or her child.
- See more at: http://www.adishakti.org/_/divine_feminine_the_great_mother.htm#sthash.HcL3ZUnO.dpuf
Ancestral Legacy;
Lifespan -
Wisdom Bridge;
The World Tree;
The Cosmic Tree;
Tangled Roots;
Ancestral Soul;
Reciting Your Kin;
Digital Ancestry;
House of Our Flesh;
Soul's Gold;
In Their Footsteps;
Who Will Remember Us?;
Hearth of the Heart;
Council of Ancestors;
Our Nameless Ancestors;
Putting It All Together;
Inherit-Ability;
Drop Lines & Dreams;
Soul Dust;
You Speak for the Dead;
10,000 Ancestors Will Dream of Me;
The Heart of the Matter;
Called Home;
Listening for Echoes of the Past.