All of us in our individual conscious personalities float like corks in a sea of light – and these corks have a certain porosity. Though we are different in our life experiences, temperaments, and conditionings, we are nonetheless united in what occultists have called the World Soul or Spirit side of Nature, what scientists have called the Universal Energy Field, and what psychologists have called the Collective Unconscious. .
You have your own ‘ego’, the rational mind with feeling, reason and its own conscious memories; but there is an aspect of your being which seems to be entirely external to you, from which your individual personal consciousness rises like a mountain from its surroundings. Within this collective mind are not your own personal memories, but the memories of the entire human race.
Within this collective essence are the energetic imprints of all that has ever been. Every war, every wedding, every religious mystery, every birth, every death, every victory and every tragedy. In reality, the past never really goes away; everything that has ever happened leaves an imprint in the sea of the collective unconscious, and from this sea emerges each of our conscious personalities.
Some personalities are very sensitive to this energetic field; we might say that in some the veil separating the ego from the collective unconscious is thinner or more prone to fly open, flooding the conscious mind with the “archaic images” or archetypes that reside in this layer of the mind which is common throughout humanity. Such people are like sponges to the astral environment, sensing — whether they know it or not — the remnants of past incarnations, the lessons their ancestors have learned, and the revival of those recurring themes.
Others of us are like ceramics or hardwoods, almost impervious to the influence of the tides of this sea, remaining more steadfast and stubborn in the objective mind and the physical world. However open we may be to this ‘inner side of creation’, it is nevertheless part of us – or rather, we are part of it.
The Eternal Return
While by no means a modern or new idea, the notion of the collective unconscious has been made most famous by the psychoanalyst CG Jung. Jung put forward the idea archaic images or archetypes– primordial symbols that sleep in the subconscious levels of the mind.
Jung noted that as soon as normal consciousness declines, it releases psychic energy into the vast repository of the subconscious levels. As these images become active, they tend to rise beyond the censorship on the threshold of the mind and emerge on the conscious levels. This is what happens in ordinary dreams and fantasies, as well as in mystical visions, psychedelic hallucinations, and even psychotic breaks. It’s also what happens when we feel a certain kind of “magical” meaning in a certain object or person; Special meanings are projected onto the images that have an affinity with the archetypes, and this is often what happens during intense romantic attraction.
Jung was inspired to this line of thinking by observing the repetition of archetypal stories in different cultures throughout history. There are certain patterns that appear throughout the world in fairy tales, folktales, myths, religious rituals and cosmologies, often with astonishing and inexplicable similarities. Figures like the thief of fire, the slayer of dragons, the great flood, the fall from paradise, the sacrificial mysteries, the virgin birth, the hero’s betrayal and the ritual dismemberment appear in every corner of our world and in every time period . .
But even more bizarre to Jung was the fact that these archetypal images also recurred in his patients’ dreams—with even precise details that were in common with the ancient myths—when it was quite impossible that the patient had read or heard such stories.
Jung believed that these archetypal images split around certain centers because they formed an image human processes Psyche in symbolic imaginary form. He concluded that stories are not so much expressions of the nature of man as the nature of man expression of the forces symbolized in these stories!
The psychologist
Such figures as the serpent, the fish, the sphinx, the auxiliaries, the World Tree, the Great Mother, the Enchanted Prince, the wise old man, the wizard, and so on represent certain figures and contents of the Collective Unconscious, and these huge collective thoughtforms are charged with the emotional energy of their creators.
This stored energy is available to each individual member of the group – a fact that magicians, monks, sages and even Jung himself make use of.
Ironically, the nature of the Collective Unconscious was explained to Jung in a dream by the Hellenistic philosopher Philemon. As Jung writes Memories, dreams, reflections:
“His figure first appeared to me in the following dream. There was a blue sky like the sea, covered not by clouds but by flat brown clods of earth. It seemed as if the clouds were parting and revealing the blue waters of the sea between them. But the water was the blue sky. Suddenly a winged creature appeared from the right and sailed through the sky. I saw that it was an old man with the horns of a bull. He held a bunch of four keys, one of which he held as if about to open a lock.
Philemon and other figures of my fantasies taught me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche that I do not produce, but that generate themselves and live their own lives. Philemon represented a force that I was not. In my fantasies I had a conversation with him and he said things that I had not consciously thought. For I clearly perceived that it was he who spoke, and not I.
He said I treated thoughts as if I had generated them myself, but according to him, thoughts were like animals in the woods, or people in a room, or birds in the sky, adding, “If you saw people in a room , you wouldn’t. think that you made these people or that you were responsible for them. ”
There is a distinction between you and the object of your thought. There is something in you that can say things you don’t know or don’t intend to. There are worlds of wisdom within you that have taken ages to gather.
Are you listening?
