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 How to Live Without Losing Your Life |
Other Writings The Balance between Love and Money Understanding the Universal Unconscious The Crisis of Privacy Faith and Voting Is Death a Choice or Fate? Happy People Raising the Minimum Wage |
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Understanding the Universal Unconscious The Universal Unconscious, more typically referred to as the Collective Unconscious, is a psychological theory first promoted by Freud and later expanded on by his pupil, Carl Jung. The historical roots of the theory come from a variety of religions that viewed the existence of the Universe not as beginning and ending with a single point, but existing within a world in which the relationship between all creatures and things was symbiotic and timeless. Most monotheistic religions and clinical schools of psychiatry have rejected the theory of the Collective Unconscious because it acknowledges the reality of existence of things that cannot be perceived through rational experimentation. The Collective Unconscious is only revealed through historical investigation and intuitive psychological exploration. Carl Jung summarizes the Collective Unconscious well by saying that the Collective Unconscious is your psychic inheritance or the reservoir of our experiences as a species, that while we are never directly aware of it, influences all of our experiences and behaviors. Jung points to instances of deje vu, common mythology among unrelated peoples, universal symbols and other parallels in dreams, fantasies and artistic creation that occur with near simultaneity and common meaning among unrelated peoples as examples proving the existence of the Collective Unconscious. Is a common language of experience that every human being is born with without having had that experience in their personal life. The Collective Unconscious is the root of our empathy in which our ability to feel and identify with another person is not based upon our understanding through our own experience, but our ability to relate to them based upon an understanding what an experience means in the scope of human life. He breaks from Freud in dividing this understanding of the Unconscious into two very unique and unequal levels: the Personal and the Collective. The Personal Unconscious is specific to an individual and can be affected and manipulated by the person's experience and efforts, the Personal Unconscious can change. The Collective Unconscious runs much deeper. It is not, as some people believe, a Universal Mind, but is a shared record of existence. The influence of the Collective Unconscious is in how we integrate our individual experience and understand the world. Depending on how our Personal Unconscious is developed, we can either utilize the knowledge that comes from the Collective Unconscious to understand our experiences and those of others; or we can set up a conflict between our selves and our place in the world around us. What is forgotten in most discussions of the Collective Unconscious is that while we may only see its influence through an understanding or our reactions and behaviors, our choices in our personal lives affect the future influence of the Collective Unconscious. Our lives become a part of the history of our species that the future is born with. What we do, or choose not to do, can have a culminative effect that can change the nature of humanity. The very archetypes that Jung uses to mark the Collective Unconscious exist because they represent the perfection of reality of human experience. The mother, the child, the hero are all perfections of stages that our psyches move through. The consistent effect of humanity rejecting the perfection of life and its unity will most likely result in a permanent change to the universal ideals of humanity. We will no longer enter into life with a notion of what it means to not only be alive, but to be a part of the Universe. We will supplant the experience of being a species with a skewed set of references based upon highly subjective and superficial forms of the Unconscious that have become valued because they reflect the Individual more than the Universal. The experience of the Collective or Universal Unconscious is not rooted in the individual experience yet there are many trends that try to force the Universal experience into an individual understanding. Doing so makes of the experience one driven by personal ego and the inconsistent Personal Unconscious. By understanding that the Universal Unconscious is something which we share in as a species and that exists beyond our lifetimes, yet can be influenced by them, begins to move a person into living in a symbiotic relationship with the Universe because they have ceased to define the Universe by how it relates to themselves and instead begin to see themselves as an active participant in the timeless existence of the Universe. By exploring the evidence of the influence of the Universal Unconsciousness in your own life, you can begin to understand the call to the role in the existence of the Universe that you alone can fulfill. The symbols that you are drawn to, the stories, the dreams that you have: if you begin to look at these things for not just what they mean to you in your life, but how they place you in a historical context, you begin to discover your unique purpose and potential for contributing to the health and survival of the Universe. |
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