Collective Consciousness: The Journey IS the Destination

by IJHC Editor

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We are all woven together in a single garment of destiny.
-- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Carl Jung originated the term collective unconscious, after observing that there were concurrences in imagery appearing in his dreams and those of patients. The dreams included universal archetypal images of people, places, animals and story lines that very often related to mythic characters and stories in oral and written traditions from around the world. Pointing to a truly collective consciousness was the fact that the myths were not restricted to the country, culture or ethnic origins of the dreamer. In many cases, the meaning of the dream imagery was in no way apparent to the dreamer, but when Jung interpreted the imagery to the dreamer there was immediate recognition of its relevance to the person's inner world and a facilitation of progress in therapy,

I vividly recall the case of a professor who had had a sudden vision and thought he was insane. He came to see me in a state of complete panic. I simply took a 400-year-old book from the shelf and showed him an old woodcut depicting his very vision. "There's no reason for you to believe that you're insane," I said to him. "They knew about your vision 400 years ago." Whereupon he sat down entirely deflated, but once more normal.
-- Carl Jung (1964, p. 69)

Jung suggested that the information and imagery common to diverse individuals, both in the present and across vast periods of time, related to a shared, collective unconscious.

While Jung is probably the most familiar modern explorer of collective consciousness, this is a concept that has been discussed through many hundreds of years, as in Plato's "Forms," St. Augustine's "Ideas of God" and the Vedic tradition's "undifferentiated pure consciousness" that manifests into individual awareness (Orme-Johnson).

Explaining collective consciousness is a challenge

To anyone in Western society who has not experienced or read about this, the concept of collective consciousness must seem odd, at the least. How could someone share imagery in her dreams with another person? How could there be images that were recorded in classical Greek and Roman mythology, as well as in mythologies of other diverse cultures spanning many millennia, which appeared in the dreams of people today who had never previously heard or read of these myths?

Extrasensory perception and parapsychology (psi) research

It is not uncommon for a person to know what someone else is thinking and feeling. This occurs more often between people who have a meaningful relationship, and can happen when they are miles apart and not connected by ordinary means of communication.

The most common of these are psi perceptions of a family member in distress or danger. Numerous reports detail how a mother, other relative or friend had an inner intuitive awareness when someone close to them was endangered, had an accident or died. The closeness of the people involved suggests that intuitive links may be formed between people who feel strongly about each other.

More difficult to explain are apparently random psi perceptions between strangers who have no apparent relationship. Here is a typical example of this type of spontaneous psi communication :

... in... 1910... I related to my husband that I had had a horrible dream the previous night. He looked at me inquiringly, and I said, "I dreamed of a man and a woman with a team on a wagon. One horse was a big bay. They drove onto a bridge which had sides like an inverted 'V.' When they got to the middle of it, the bridge went down. The bay horse reared and tried to go backwards. I saw the man. He had a piece of board right through his chest.

We discussed the entire incident for what it was, as we thought, a very bad dream. As a matter of fact, I explained to my husband that I knew neither the man nor his wife and did not recognize the road.

The next day my husband went to town. When he came home, he looked at me with a strange look and said, "Your dream came true... Mr. And Mrs. ____ came into town to the mill to get grain ground. They left about four o'clock to go home. The ____ bridge collapsed with them. Both were killed. There was a piece of wood driven through his chest. The one horse was a big bay. There was an eyewitness to the tragedy.

This occurred at least twelve hours or more after my dream. I did not know the people or the locality where it occurred. (Rhine 1967, p. 117-118)

Psychic experiences are common during counselling, bioenergy therapies and spiritual healing.

"Kelly," an intuitive counsellor, saw in her first session with "Trudy" the mental image of a woman threatening Trudy with a raised fist when she was a young girl. Trudy had made no mention of this, but readily confirmed the traumatic experience of a baby sitter who had abused her when she was 5 years old and threatened her with further harm if she revealed this to her parents. This image quickly opened doors into psychological issues that were interfering in Trudy's life, preventing her development of trust in people close to her and making her intimate relationships angry, stormy and unsatisfying.

Such intuitive perceptions provide dramatic shortcuts in counselling. Without them, it might take many more week, months or even years to uncover the buried issues that created ongoing problems but are totally outside the careseeker's conscious awareness. Physical symptoms are often the products of such buried issues.

Extensive experiments over the past 60 years have confirmed that nearly everyone has some measure of psychic awareness (Edge 1986; Nash 1986; Radin 1997). This includes telepathy (mind-reading or sending messages mentally), clairsentience (knowing about objects directly from the objects), precognition (seeing the future) and retrocognition (seeing the past). These were discussed in an earlier editorial (Benor 2002), so anyone reading this on-line can see further details by clicking on this link.

Interestingly, non-believers in psychic phenomena often demonstrate their psi awareness by performing significantly below chance expectations on tests of their psi abilities (Palmer 1971). This suggests that one's unconscious mind adapts the use of psi abilities to conform to one's beliefs and disbeliefs.

Once we accept that near-universal psi awareness exists, then collective consciousness is clearly a fact, not just a possibility. Each of us has the ability to be in psi communications with anyone, anywhere and anywhen.

Just as nerve cells in the brain interconnect with many other cells, producing a network that is, collectively, far more than the sum of its individual parts, so too with collective consciousness. The collective awareness of mankind is far more aware and potent than that of any individual participants in the collective consciousness. Each individual in the collective consciousness is also more comprehensively linked than are brain cells with each other, because brain cells have limited connections with other while each consciousness in the collective is constantly in communication with every other.

This may seem highly speculative, but interesting theories and some research evidence supports the existence of a collective consciousness.

Rupert Sheldrake (1987), a biochemist and cell biologist formerly at Cambridge University, proposed that there are morphogenetic fields of consciousness. These are species-specific awareness/ memory banks which hold the collective experiences of individual members of the species. Take, for instance, the species mus domesticus, the house mouse. Morphogenetic fields are repositories for the memories of successes and failures of individual mice who learn about finding foods, avoiding dangers, getting along with other mice, and so on. This provides a theoretical explanation for animal instincts, such as nest-building and caring for their young.

Others have proposed that such instincts are conveyed through genetic inheritance, where selection of the fittest encodes the tendencies towards particular behaviors because those are the behaviors of the successful members of the species. In other words, certain behaviors are encoded within an organism's genetic endowment. Those who survive have more successful behavior patterns, which are passed on in their sperm and eggs to their progeny. While this is an apparently logical suggestion, it does stretch credulity when it comes to complex behaviors such as nest building and annual migrations.

Though it is difficult to imagine how an intricate bird nest design could become encoded in genes, morphogenetic fields would allow for much more rapid storage and retrieval of complex information and behavior patterns. Mental images and behavior patterns could be stored as energetic or informational fields within a collective field of consciousness.

Interestingly, there are experiments where the hypothesis of morphogenetic fields suggest this is a much more likely alternative than genetic memories. For instance, members from a purebred line of rats were trained to run a maze in a laboratory in America. Successive generations of these rats were quicker to learn the same maze. This was hypothesized to be a function of genetic transmission of learned behavior (McDougall 1927; 1930; 1938).

Years later in England (Crew 1936) and again in Australia (Agar et al 1942; 1954), distant cousins of the American rats -- who shared the same ancestors but were not descendents of the American rats -- were run in an identical maze. Their rate of learning was markedly more rapid than that of the American rats had been -- in the experimental rats who were rewarded for successful running of the maze, as well as in the control groups who had no rewards for learning. Some of these rats were successful on their very first trials! Neither genetics nor socially learned behaviors could account for these findings.

Other, prospective experiments have been performed, with suggestive support for inter-member access to learning within a species. For instance, several visual puzzles were shown to people in the UK. The average time it took for them to solve these puzzles was recorded. The puzzles were then shown on TV to several million viewers. Following the program, another group of people (who had not seen the TV program) was shown the same puzzles, and they were able to solve them much more quickly (Sheldrake 1989). Sheldrake proposes that the collective experience of the viewers was stored in a morphogenetic field and thus became available to those who were subsequently challenged with the same puzzle.

Although Sheldrake does not call this collective consciousness, this appears to me to be a more likely possibility. There is no reason to hypothesize an external repository for such memories. If telepathy, clairsentience, precognition and retrocognition connect each member of a species to every other member -- not only in current time but across all of time -- then each individual is like a brain cell in a collective consciousness.

Communications between species

Human-animal communications are also reported very commonly, and these may occur in either direction (Sheldrake 1999).

The clearest human-animal psi interchanges appear to be with intuitive people who have a gift for communicating with animals. On BBC TV a few years ago, an animal psychic was interviewed about a race-horse she had helped. The horse had been running very poorly and the owners could not figure out why. The psychic picked up from the horse that he was upset over not having had a holiday that year, and was, in protest, deliberately refusing to work his hardest.

The owner responded, "This horse is telling you stories! I sent him off to Scotland for a month last summer, as I've done in previous years."

After further communications with the horse, the psychic reported, "He says that he did go to the same place as he had a holiday before, but this time they worked him the whole time. Essentially, he's on strike!"

The owner checked and discovered that the horse had indeed been worked while in Scotland. When the horse was given a real holiday, he ran as well again as he had before.

Animals have also been shown to respond psychically to humans. Rupert Sheldrake reports on a series of dogs who would behave in distinct manners (such as running to the door and barking when no one is there) sometimes twenty minutes in advance of their owner's return home. To check that this was not simply a matter of daily routines, Sheldrake arranged with the owners to return at random times that were distinctly outside their routine travel times. The dogs still responded minutes before their masters' return, sometimes beginning with their departure from work, or even with the time they made the decision to leave work (Sheldrake 1999).

Shamans around the world report that the web of consciousness encompasses all things in the universe, including humans, animals, plants and even so-called inanimate matter (Krippner and Welch 1992).

Human-plant communications appear to occur in both directions. When shamans seek herbal remedies, they may go walking out in the wilds, holding in their awareness the need for a medicine for a particular person with a given illness. They report that the plants communicate to them the qualities that they could offer for the healing of the problem in focus. Conversely, studies have shown that healing intent can produce significant enhancement or retardation of plant growth (Grad 1965/1976).

An unusual example of plant communications was seen in the life and work of Luther Burbank, a nurseryman in the early part of the last century. Burbank was able to produce over 800 new varieties of fruits, vegetables, flowers and trees -- an astounding achievement which is unrivalled by anyone before or after. One of his pet projects was the production of a cactus without thorns, which he hoped could provide fodder for flocks in arid lands. When asked by Swami Yogananda how he produced the cactus, he answered,

"The secret of improved plant breeding, apart from scientific knowledge, is love...

While I conducted experiments to make 'spineless' cacti... I often talked to the plants to create a vibration of love. "You have nothing to fear," I would tell them. "You don't need your defensive thorns. I will protect you." Gradually the useful plant of the desert emerged in a thornless variety (p. 411).

Cleve Backster (1968) developed a study around a violent interaction with plants. He found that plants have a fairly steady-state electrical potential when galvanometer electrodes are placed on two points on a leaf. However if something negative was done to the plant, it registered a sharp change in its electrical potential. Backster than had a person uproot and stomp on one of a pair of plants. The second, intact plant reacted with drastic shifts in potentials. Furthermore, this plant reacted in a similar manner whenever the "plant murderer" returned to the room, but not when other people were in the room.

Backster repeated this a number of times, developing a game of plant murder: Each person in a small group would be invited to pick a card from a playing deck without showing anyone which card s/he had drawn. Whoever drew the queen of spades was the murderer. This person (without the knowledge of the others) went into the room where two philodendron plants were located, uprooting and stomping on one of the plants. When the intact plant was wired subsequently to a galvanometer, it reacted strongly when the murderer returned to the room, but not when anyone else in the group entered the room.

Shamans and gifted psychics report that trees have great wisdom. Dora Kunz (van Gelder Kunz1978), one of the developers of Therapeutic Touch, wrote of tree spirits with whom she was able to communicate in great detail. She reported that they have a very stoic and accepting attitude about the environmental devastation that is proceeding apace on our planet. While not at all happy or approving of it, they accept what is and hope for better.

Sensitives, such as Kunz, also report that rocks have a quiet and wise sentience, though this is very different from that of biological organisms. Some view the wisdom of so-called inanimate matter as far deeper than that of biological organisms, because inanimate consciousness has been pooling its collective wisdom over a much longer period of time (van Gelder Kunz1978).

Quantum physics shows that non-local action and interactions occur instantaneously between particles that are separated by any distance. The overlaps of quantum physics with consciousness and collective consciousness is a topic of its own, beyond the scope of this paper, but worthy of mention here (Capra).

Gaia

James Lovelock (1979) proposed that the planet Earth can be perceived as a geobiological entity that is composed of all the mineral, animal and vegetable matter within, upon and surrounding it in its atmosphere. Our planet as a unit has many of the characteristics of a living organism. For instance, it tends to maintain certain variables within fairly steady ranges. While it has short-term weather and longer-term climate changes, its water and air remain fairly constant in composition and temperature -- just like a biological organism maintains its homeostasis with fairly constant temperature and chemical compostion.

While Lovelock views the steady state of Gaia as a mechanistically balanced, complex ecosystem, others have suggested that Gaia has a consciousness that guides many of its processes.

Imagery as a vehicle for human collective consciousness

Pictures speak much more loudly than words for many people. They may also be more condensed and concise vehicles for conveying information through transpersonal dimensions, especially in the process of these awarenesses filtering through the deeper layers of our mind.

This may be one of the reasons that psi impressions arrive more commonly in dreams than in most other states of mind. The dreaming mind may be ready to project images into conscious or semi-conscious awareness, and thus to stimulate awareness of psychic communications.

Imagery may serve transpersonal awareness in other ways, as well. Sue Benford (2002) suggests that Christ and other luminaries throughout history have been aware of the power of images to speak to people of all ages and levels of education and spiritual development. This is why they often speak in parables, which partake of collective consciousness and allow each person to interpret their messages as they are ready to absorb them.

It appears that mythic, archetypal imagery resides in a collective conscious of mankind, and is available as a vehicle for expressing and processing emotions and conflicts. There may be layers and layers of interconnectedness. Marie Louise von Franz (1980), a Jungian analyst, suggested that there is a core layer of the mind in which universal consciousness resides, a layer in which all of mankind participates, and that extending out from this core are increasingly differentiated and localized layers that are limited in their scope of awareness.

Collective mental health

Our personal psychology is just a thin skin, a ripple on the ocean of collective psychology. The powerful factor, the factor which changes our whole life, which changes the surface of our known world, which makes history, is collective psychology, and collective psychology moves according to laws entirely different from those of our consciousness. The archetypes are the great decisive forces, they bring about the real events, and not our personal reasoning and practical intellect. .... The archetypal images decide the fate of man.
-- C.G Jung (Collected Works, Vol. 18; 371)

What can we say of the state of the collective consciousness of Gaia?

It is impossible to know fully, much less to comprehend the consciousness of an entity that is vastly more complex than its individual components. This is particularly so from the perspective of one of its components, namely a single human mind. We may still speculate from our understandings of systems theory, individual and group psychology, sociological studies, and spiritual awareness.

First, what can we say about the current state of humanity's collective consciousness?

Jung pointed out that there are polarities of thinking and feeling, sensation (outer senses) and intuition (inner senses).

In traditional societies, intuition and feeling are primary ways of relating to the world, be it that part of the world that is immediately present in physical form or those parts that are commonly described as consisting of subtle energies, spiritual or transcendent.

In western society (focusing my own synthesis of the relevance of Jungian polarities to the prevalent majority views), we have emphasized the thinking and sensation aspects of relating to the world, while ignoring, dismissing or even denigrating the feeling and intuitive ways of knowing our world. This has had major consequences on many levels:

1. We relate to ourselves primarily through our physical bodies.

a. We have developed a system of medicine that addresses the illness a person has, while largely ignoring the person who has the illness (Osler).

b. Material comforts have become the focus of our lives, with material gains becoming the goals of our working lives and providing the measure of our personal successes.

c. We have neglected our feeling and intuitive sides for so long that these have come to feel strange, even alien to us.

d. Physical existence is all there is. Death is the end of existence.

e. Our planet provides resources that we use to our individual advantage, making the most of what we can extract from our environment because if we don't do this, others will take what we could have had.

2. We relate to others as physical beings who have the potentials to either enhance and satisfy or diminish and frustrate our material needs.

a. Each of us individually, and groups of us collectively (families, clans, communities, societies and nations) seek to protect and enhance our personal physical possessions in cooperation or competition with other groups, but generally with out own benefits at the forefront of our intent.

b. When our lives do not develop as we wish or plan, we tend to look to factors outside ourselves that we can blame for our misfortunes.

c. When misfortune is chronic, we often turn this blame into hatreds that justify in our minds many sorts of attack on the "others" who we feel are depriving us of what we want or need.

If we reach out to the world through our feelings and intuitions, aware that we are a part of the collective that is Gaia, the world appears very different and we relate to it very differently.

1. We relate to ourselves as beings of energy.

a. Our bodies are the densest form of energy, with feelings, intuitive and spiritual awarenesses all blending in a symphony of our beingness.

b. Spiritual dimensions are primary, with all the rest of our being evolving from this level.

c. The spiritual is known as real beyond question, available for guidance, inspiration and healing.

d. Physical existence is a garment we wear for a lifetime of explorations.

e. Each of us is responsible for guarding and contributing to the wellbeing of the planet, through thoughtful and considerate husbanding of its resources for present and future generations.

2. We relate to others as energetic and spiritual beings who are intimately related to ourselves.

a. Each of us is responsible for guarding and contributing to the wellbeing of the planet, which is -- in its totality -- an extension of ourself, as we are, reciprocally, a part of it.

b. When our lives do not develop as we wish or plan, we ask ourselves, "What is it that I/we have done that generated my/our misfortunes?".

c. When misfortune is chronic, we ask "What is it that I/we am/are believing or doing that is generating my/our misfortunes?"

The meaning of life

Life is the only game in which the object of the game is to learn the rules.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant

My assumptions are that

1. Life is a cosmic university, with each soul enrolling for lessons that will help it grow. Lessons come through our inner awarenesses and through our interactions with others.

2. The Infinite Source created life (in the forms known to us) as a vast and intricate lesson in forgetting, so that through remembering there will be a deeper appreciation of knowing.

3. Every aspect of the universe is sentient.

4. Each of us is intimately related to the All -- not just to those parts of the world we interact with physically, but to every aspect of the cosmos, on every level of reality.

While these axioms lead to far-reaching implications and conclusions, this discussion will focus primarily on the social and planetary levels of participating in the collective consciousness.

If everything were heavenly on our planet, then there would be few lessons to learn -- as we know them today. Without having souls volunteer for the parts of villains in the dramas of individual and group relationships, there would be no victims or tragedies, no heroes or grateful damsels, no diseases or doctors, healers or healees, disasters or miracles.

Our collective consciousness is learning lessons, just as our individual consciousnesses are.

As people living in the physical world in ever-increasing collective groups, we have not mastered the art or science of harmonizing our individual intents and actions within the collective, much less our shared collective within groups larger than one person.

The collective experience of health and illness is a case in point. Our bodies do very well in most cases, when left to their own regulation. Within each of us there are many biological thermostats -- regulating temperature, heart rate and breathing, monitoring oxygen and carbon dioxide levels in our blood, ensuring that the acidity and concentrations of chemicals in our tissues remain within ranges that support biochemical reactions that sustain life.

As sophisticated as science and medicine are, we have barely begun to appreciate, much less to understand the complexities of the normal functioning of the human body. Yet in western medicine, we boldly intervene in people's bodily functions, administering treatments that address just that level of focus. For the most part, we ignore the psychological, relational and spiritual levels completely, addressing people as though they were bags of chemicals needing adjustments through the administration of further chemicals.

This has led to the ridiculous situation in which conventional medicine is the fourth most serious cause of fatalities in the US, after heart disease and cancer, and more frequent than automobile accidents and homicides.

Our relationship to the environment is another case in point. We have focused on the immediate material gains we can derive by exploiting the environment, ignoring future consequences of our actions. The land, seas, and air are being polluted at rates that are seriously impairing our quality of life, and will increasingly threaten the survival of life as we know it on our planet. We can no longer drink water without concern about the myriads of chemicals from medications excreted into the water and recycled, as well as the fertilizers and pesticides that are in ever increasing use.

On some level of our being, each of us is aware of our participation in a greater, group consciousness - as evidenced by research in psi and morphogenetic fields. Each of us can contribute to the good of the collective through our conscious intent -- as evidenced by research on the Maharishi effect (discussed by Orme-Johnson in this issue of IJHC).

All things in the world have been made
in consideration of everything else.
Everything in the heavens,
on the earth,
and under the earth,
is penetrated with connectedness,
with relatedness."
-- Hildegard of Bingen

We may come from a belief that nourishing resources are scarce and that the world is a cruel and untrustworthy place. This self-centeredness could come from the teachings of our family, our society and religion, or maybe from experiences of trauma that leave us angry and fearful, perhaps even hateful and vengeful. With a focus on protecting ourselves and taking advantage of whatever we can in our relationship to the collective, we play the game of life to maximize our personal benefit at the expense of anyone who is weaker than ourselves. We may simply work from a focus of greed, hoarding for ourselves whatever we can amass.

Within this framework, we are motivated by material gains, power, and fame. We ignore the plight of those weaker or less fortunate than ourselves, or put ourselves up by putting them down. We seek to be kings of our mountains, throwing down anyone who tries to usurp our position and power. This creates a world of scarcity, with a few people living well and the majority who struggle to survive.

This negativity resonates with negative archetypes. Within the collective consciousness, there are aggregates of energies of hurt, anger and hatred which have accumulated across space and time. Any time we act from our dark sides, we contribute to and strengthen these collective negative energies, and invite their presence in the world.

At the other end of the spectrum, many explorers in the realms of collective awareness suggest that we can benefit ourselves at the same time that we contribute to the benefit of the collective welfare. Motivations here are for pleasure in healing ourselves, others in need of healing, and our planet. Working through a collective consciousness for the collective good is noted repeatedly in meditation (Heifetz; Levine), psi awareness (Radin), mysticism (Bolen; Course in Miracles) and spiritual healing (Markides Fire).

Within this framework, we assume that there is a potential abundance for all. If we contribute to the good of all, we are contributing to our own good, as "they" are a part of "us" and as "we" are a part of "them."

There is a goodness, a Wisdom that arises, sometimes gracefully, sometimes gently, sometimes awkwardly, sometimes fiercely, but it will arise to save us if we let it, and it arises from within us, like the force that drives green shoots to break the winter ground, it will arise and drive us into a great blossoming like a pear tree, into flowering , into fragrance, fruit, and song...into that part of ourselves that can never be defiled, defeated, or destroyed, but that comes back to life, time and time again, that lives-always-that does not die.
-- China Galland

Those with selfish motives may more commonly be drawn towards politics and industrial hierarchies that offer ample opportunities for amassing material resources and exercising power over others. Sadly, with such people in power, the collective good of all is usually ignored. Sorely lacking in such systems is a collective conscience! If we do not develop this, our planet will not survive as we know it.

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; and through this vision I can help my people. 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.
-- Black Elk

What can you as an individual do to make this world a better place? I share from the collective consciousness that brought the following in my email as I drew close to finalizing this editorial:

Some human behavior is incomprehensible to me. How someone can advocate violence against innocent people is a tragic mystery. How they can find people willing to carry out the massacres and the cruelty they intend is even more incomprehensible.

History is filled with ugly crimes against spirit, often carried out by those whom we would have thought to be of the highest conscience and awareness. In fact, man's inhumanity to man is the basic theme of the history of humanity, dominating the story line.

The mind boggles, spirit withdraws, hardens in the presence of the news of what it going on, the systematic abuse of the human spirit. We have the capability to be so beautiful, so kind, so loving, that I am left shaking my head in despair and amazement.

And so, far from being a naive little exercise in spiritual self indulgence, my consciousness of the value of love becomes the doorway of spiritual recovery for not only myself, but for my fellow man.

What we believe and practice makes a huge difference. I cannot allow my hopes and expectations to sour me on the human race. The collective consciousness needs its islands of love, the waterways that transmit this love, and the enduring intention to heal.

My love and yours change everything. We mean that humanity will not miss the beauty and wonder of the love that floods the planet with the life force. DNA is, itself, hope. Life energy bursts continually, a model for us to watch and learn from, to worship and incorporate into our very being.

I go into the stillness to contemplate and to strengthen my spiritual awareness. If I don't I will be swamped in the flood of pain and confusion that drowns ideals.

I keep remembering I am here to love. That is what life is all about. That is what we are evolving. That is the spiritual test today, this day, right now, to love no matter what.
-- John MacEnulty (2003)

Acknowledgments:
I am grateful to David Orme-Johnson, PhD and Ruth Sewell-Benor, RN for their thoughtful and helpful comments on this editorial, some of which were incorporated in this discussion.

In this issue of IJHC

In the ebb and flow of tides of papers and articles that wash across the editor's desk within the cosmic ocean of collective consciousness, this issue of IJHC brought several articles related to collective consciousness -- the topic of this month's editorial.

Jenny Wade, PhD, brings us a qualitative study that focuses on the similarities between transcendent states of consciousness and Near-Death Experiences (NDEs). Within these experiences, which are perceived as being much more intensely satisfying than the sexual encounters themselves, numbers of participants reported visions of mythological beings. In some cases these were images that had been known previously to those who perceived them, but in many cases they were completely unknown and unrecognized -- until the researcher identified them from their descriptions. This fresh study brings us new evidence for a collective consciousness of mankind, and new ways of understanding ways of perceiving transcendent planes of awareness.

Richard Dell, principal of a school in England for the bright and highly able, writes of the healing of nations, pointing out many of the similarities between healing of personal issues and healing of national conflicts.

David Orme-Johnson, PhD, suggests that the collective consciousness of mankind can be brought to a greater coherence and peacefulness through the practice of transcendental meditation by individuals within the collective. He marshals over six hundred studies that explored this possibility, many of them demonstrating increases in peaceful behaviors and decreases in violent ones in cities and nations around the world.

Richard Dell, MA, suggests that the principles of complementary/ alternative medicine can be extended to understanding how to heal governments and nations.

ML "Max" Roth advocates for deeper study and understanding for Reiki masters, pointing out that there is a wealth of cultural tradition and wisdom surrounding Reiki healing, often missed and ignored by those who make do with weekend courses as the sum total of their studies of healing.

Bernard Grad, PhD, provides a gem of unusual healing effects. He found that when this healer held bananas briefly, they would dessicate, shrink and turn brown, rather than turning soft and mushy, breaking open, oozing their contents out and leaving their skins in dried shreds. I have seen only one other report of this effect of healers in the world literature (Cassoli 1979).

Mara Merritt, a medical student, tells us of her struggles to reconcile her experiences on her rotation through obstetrics and gynecology in a conventional hospital with her work with midwives who practice natural childbirth.

Jeri Mills finds that Reiki healing can markedly alleviate the side effects of radiotherapy that is given to people with cancer. See review of Mills' book in the May issue of IJHC.

Larry Lachman, PsyD, surveys a spectrum of recent reports on wholistic therapies.

Agar WE et al. Fourth (final) report on a test of McDougall's Lamarckian experiment on the training of rats, J Experimental Biology 1954, 31, 307-321.

Backster, Cleve, Evidence of a primary perception in plant life, International J. Parapsychology 1968, 10(6), 329-348.

M. Sue Benford, Strong Woman: Unshrouding the Secrets of the Soul, Nashville, TN: Source Books 2002, (Reviewed in IJHC Volume 3, No. 2)

Benor, Daniel J. Intuition, International J Healing and Caring -- On line 2002, 2(2).

Bolen, Jean Shidona, The Tau of Psychology: Synchronicity and the Self, New York: Harper & Row 1979.

Capra, Fritjof, The Tao of Physics, Boulder, CO: Shambala 1975.

Cassoli, Piero, Il Guaritore (Italian), Milan, Italy: Armenia 1979.

Crew, FAE, A repetition of McDougall's Lamarchian experiment, J Genetics 1936, 33, 61-101.

Edge, Hoyt L. et al, Foundations of Parapsychology: Exploring the Boundaries of Human Capability, Boston/London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1986.

Foundation for Inner Peace, A Course in Miracles, London and New York: Arkana 1985.

Galland, China. The Bond Between Women: A Journey to Fierce Compassion, New York: Riverhead/ Penguin 1999.

Grad, Bernard R, Some biological effects of laying-on of hands: a review of experiments with animals and plants, J. American Society for Psychical Research 1965(a), 59, 95-127 (Also reproduced In: Schmeidler, Gertrude (ed.) Parapsychology: Its Relation to Physics, Biology, Psychology and Psychiatry, Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow 1976).

Heifetz, Harold (Ed), Zen and Hasidism, Wheaton, IL: Quest/ Theosophical 1978.

Jung, Carl G. Man and his Symbols, Garden City, NY: Windfall/ Doubleday 1964, p. 69.

Jung, Carl G. Collected Works, Vol. 18; 371

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Rhine, Louisa E, ESP in Life and Lab: Tracing Hidden Channels, New York: MacMillan 1967.

Sheldrake, Rupert. A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Formative Causation, Los Angeles: Tarcher 1981; rev. ed. 1987.

Sheldrake, Rupert. The Presence of the Past, San Francisco: Collins 1989.

Sheldrake, Rupert. Dogs that know when their owners are coming home, New York: Three Rivers/Random House 1999.

van Gelder, Dora (Kunz), The Real World of Fairies, Wheaton, IL: Quest/Theosophical 1978.

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