The collective unconscious

"No matter what the world thinks about religious experience, the one who has it possesses the great treasure of a thing that has provided him with a source of life, meaning and beauty and that has given a new splendour to the world and to mankind." C.G. JUNG

Through lack of scientific proof our culture does not recognize a dimension of reality beyond the physical universe and labels any reference to one as “taboo.” Nor does our culture acknowledge any form of consciousness transcendant to our own. This leaves us with nothing to connect us to something beyond ourselves. There is a growing need within the human psyche to bridge the gap between the physical reality we know and the unseen reality referred to as Soul or Spirit or God.

Carl Jung’s contribution to our understanding of the human psyche is that he found it to be accessible through what he referred to as the “collective unconscious.”

Carl Jung realized that man knew of and understood very little of this “other side”, man’s deeper ground. He diagnosed neurosis as a state of incompleteness and realized that real health represented a state of wholeness. This wholeness was brought about through reconnection of the left hemispheric mind, the logical rational side, with the unrecognized and essential counterpart of itself, the intuitive side. Jung wrote, “In the end the only events in my life worth telling are those when the imperishable world interrupted into this transitory one”.

Jung’s theories have re-awakened a curiosity in man to discover this concept of Soul.

Normal waking consciousness is but one type of consciousness. Parted from it by the most delicate of screens, lie other forms of consciousness entirely different. Most of us go through life without ever discovering their existence but when we apply the required stimulus whether by choice or by accident they appear to our wonder and amazement.

The problems facing modern man are rooted in the increasing polarization between the conscious mind and the unconscious, between thinking and feeling, mind and Soul. The disassociation of the rational mind from the primordial or instinctual one is a growing danger to humanity. The more dependent we are upon reason and the rational logical mind, the more our instinctual side appears to drive and overwhelm us. We need to create a bridge between the conscious and the unconscious elements of man’s psyche. We need to convey a sense of wholeness through the acknowledgement of the multifaceted nature of man. In separating nature from Spirit and excluding Soul from physical matter an essential part of man’s wholeness has been lost.

The wholeness of mans nature is available to us through the founding of a relationship with a deeper center of consciousness. By establishing a dialogue with the unconscious, we are able to develop Spiritual insight.

More and more people are finding that our belief system of the past no longer serves us. What we need is a pathway to Spirituality grounded in introspection, self-knowledge, and intuitive insight. This belief system should include an ethical responsibility to life in all its forms - both the seen and the unseen.

The evolution of man’s psyche has brought about the gradual differentiation of consciousness from the purely instinctual and unconscious drive of an animal, to the development of the capacity for reflection through a highly skilled intellect. Through the process of evolution however our most fundamental aspects have been shattered. We have separated mind from body and spirit from nature. We have lost our sense of interdependency and our participation in a sacred universal contract.

As with all species living on planet earth at the deepest level we are connected. In addition to holding instinctual drives, the collective unconscious pools all intellectual experience. The collective unconscious is the heritage of our species and what each individual does affects the whole.

Self-awareness grounded in Soul is our connection to a new Spirituality.

The psyche of modern man is once again awakening to the fact that the Spirit is not something separate from the body but is the life force itself. Man is not something separate from nature. Man is a part of nature, a part of this universal intelligence. We are only now beginning to awaken to our interdependency - to the necessity of the interconnectedness of all aspects of life.

Einstein understood this as he wrote “A human being is part of the whole we call universe. A part limited in time and space. Man experiences himself as something separate from the whole, a kind of optical illusion of his consciousness. This delusion has imprisoned us. We are restricting ourselves to our personal desires and to the affection of only a few persons who are nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this illusion by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

Body and mind, or matter and psyche are two aspects of an underlying intelligence using them as vehicles of expression. The psyche of man extends into a dimension beyond time and space and there is a continuity between the physical world and this other dimension. An awareness of the connection between ourselves and the infinite, is an essential part of the development and evolution of our individual psyche as well as for the collective benefit to our species.

Every thought we have affects every cell in our body in turn affecting the whole of nature. Human consciousness is at the very heart of our universe. Since the nature of consciousness is the key to our awareness of this other dimension then a study which welcomes the experiences of each and every one of us including our feelings, insights, intuitive promptings and imagination is long overdue.