Collective Unconscious
‘Collective Unconscious’….!! (?) Oh no!!! I can almost hear some of your ‘Collective Groans’ elicited by that title. And, be scalded by such likely derisive protests: ‘Oswald Hanciles wants to lure us into one of his most perplexingly philosophical theses again’! Some of you would be chiding me in your mind: ‘What we need to focus on in Sierra Leone today are problems of rice, palm oil, school books, jobs, etc. – not esoteric mumbo jumbo’. If you are thinking along those lines, you would remind me of a content in one of my ‘intellectual bibles’ that etched in my mind – which I read hundreds of times – some thirty years ago, while working in Liberia. It is titled, ‘Beyond Words and Thoughts’, by Joel Goldsmith. Goldsmith is the founder of an esoteric mystical school, ‘Summit Lighthouse’, in California, US. Goldsmith tries to teach humanity to kindle his “consciousness” – and ‘all other things would follow’: mansions, private jets, happiness, fame, etc. “Consciousness” is a beguiling word for most of humanity however.
BEYOND ‘Words and Thoughts’ (?!!)
Goldsmith writes in his book (“Beyond Words and Thoughts”: don’t gloss over that title. ‘Thoughts’ are supposed to be the ‘last point’ of human consciousness; but, to go BEYOND thought…?!!) that often people would approach him to overcome their lack of money; and he would tell them that they would get the money they seek when they alter their “consciousness”. And, people would say to him, “I say I want MONEY…And, you are telling me about ‘consciousness? ’”. Goldsmith writes that the attitude of these people is like a person who says he wants wooden furniture; and, the person would be told he should plant trees, and the person would respond thus: “I say I want wooden chairs and tables, and you are telling me about trees” – he would fail to realize that from trees would come thousands and thousands of wooden chairs and tables. So, it is with “consciousness”. We now have an idea what “consciousness” is all about – the ‘seed’, the ‘egg’, the ‘womb’, the source, of all things. Now, what is this “collective unconsciousness” about?
What is ‘Collective Unconscious’?
Collective unconscious is a term of analytical psychology coined by Carl Jung (Carl Jung is said to be one of the pacesetters in the modern science of psychotherapy about a hundred years ago). Collective unconsciousness is said to be part of humanity’s unconscious mind. (Well, that of other life forms with nervous systems also). For us to understand what the ‘collective unconscious’ means, let us grasp what the ‘personal unconscious’ means.
According to Jung, the ‘personal unconscious’ is the personal experience unique to each individual – the hug of your mother; the fights you witness between your parents; your riding a bicycle as an infant and falling down inside the pig’s fetid trough; the soaring excitement of your first kiss; your being heckled in primary school for making a grammatical howler, etc. The experiences of your personal thought and action stored in your memory are your “personal unconscious”.
On the other hand, the “collective unconscious” collects and organizes those personal experiences in a similar way with each member of a particular species – i.e., the human species. (So, it could mean there is a ‘collective unconscious’ for dogs as a species; the collective unconscious of elephants, cats, rats, etc…). Postulates Jung: “In addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents.” (This is a difficult to grasp theory, given the wonders of the GENOME project which guides us to how our nose would resemble our father, but, how our lips would resemble our great grandfather, etc.; and has also identified thousands of genes responsible for thousands of diseases in mankind – but, not a ‘thought genes’, so to speak).
Jung linked the collective unconscious to what Sigismund Freud (another ‘mind Guru’) called “archaic remnants” – mental forms whose presence cannot be explained by anything in the individual’s own life and which seem to be aboriginal, innate, and inherited shapes of the human mind. While your mind could be reeling at those facts, let me follow with words that could really get you swooning.
The new ‘X Factor’ of the Emerging Collective Unconsciousness
Over the past hundred and fifty years or so, mankind has discovered two invisible forces: electricity and electromagnetic waves. You see, we take for granted the ‘common radio’ today. But, reflect a little. You are in your village in Kailahun. You tune the radio receiver, and, instantly you get connected to London, Beijing, Washington….thousands of miles away. There are no physical connections between you in Kailahun listening to your radio and the man in London broadcasting to you. There are fiction novels showing how primitive man on first encountering a transistor radio receiver would wonder as to who was speaking in a little box. Today, we know that we can save a lot of our computer files in ‘external drives’ (which are tangible), and, billions of bytes of information in ‘computer clouds’ (which are intangible). What some new generation thinkers are saying is that we are now emerging into understanding of the probability of a new invisible force which is termed as the collective unconscious mind.
This collective unconscious mind is said to be the force that gives continuity from one life to the next. It is said to be ‘x factor’ which connects all our lives, and us to other non-man species. I wonder whether most of you reading this piece are aware of the knowledge of the cosmos – of the Big Bang Theory; of billions of galaxies; of our expanding universe, and, probable ‘multi-verses’ beyond what our best telescopes hovering can ‘see’ today; of Black Holes….of Dark Matter…..and Dark Energy.
Scientists are saying that more than ninety percent of the universe is made of something they call Dark Matter. (Mind boggling!! For even with that which man can see, or, speculate on –the billions of galaxies; and, probable trillions of suns; and, likely zillions of planets revolving around these suns – is dizzyingly awesome!!). This ‘Dark Energy’ is for now unknown. Man knows it is there because of its gravitational effects on what man can ‘see’ with telescopes, and measuring tools which can figure out what happened billions of years ago. It could be that what is not known is where this ‘collective unconscious’ is…..
The Universal Mind…..
It could be possible that all our Collective Thoughts are being ‘stored’ somewhere….The New Testament Biblical writers some 2,000 years ago could have been futuristic when they teach that ‘every word we utter is being registered in heaven’…..Could there be a ‘Universal Mind’ ….a place where all geniuses of all times have stored their ‘collective thoughts’? In obvious words or indirectly, most inventors or creative people claim to have tapped into this ‘collective unconscious library’. That could mean, every second, we all ‘put information into this collective unconscious library’ which we all are intrinsically part of – and, which we can tap into. In other words, every human being is, potentially, a genius!! Joel Goldsmith teaches that the process of improving on one’s ‘consciousness’ is to ‘consciously become what we unconsciously are’. Put simply, every living man is ‘unconsciously’ clever, ingenious, rich….- and, we can consciously become wise and rich!! Aaaaaa!!! Heavy, eh!! Let me dilute that heavy ‘ehbeh’ a bit.
From Poverty Consciousness to Wealth Consciousness
The UNDP Human Development Index has been putting Sierra Leone among the ten least developing countries in the world over the past thirty years or so. Look around at Sierra Leone. Fertile soils. Some of the most marketable mineral resources in the world. In per capita terms, some of the densest concentrations of quality brains in the developing world are Sierra Leoneans. Sierra Leone’s poverty is absolutely not as a result of resource scarcity; or, even ‘brain deficit’ – it is as a result of a ‘poverty consciousness’. Once we get to the ‘genetic roots’ of our ‘collective poverty consciousness’, we will henceforth only have as a distant memory the time when we were collectively poor – becoming collectively as wealthy as Norwegians or Singaporeans. What I write here is similar to what the new evangelical churches have been preaching in their ‘prosperity sermons’. We have to spread such messages so that our collective unconsciousness can tap into the Universal Mind that is inherently us…..(Warning! You must read this article at least five times!! And, very slowly. With a pen, underlining key words and concepts).
Oswald Hanciles
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