Volume 3, No. 3, September 2003
COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS:
The Journey IS the Destination

Daniel J. Benor, MD
 

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.  

Figure 2. Wholistic View of Beingness and Relatingness

Full editorial in International Journal of Healing and Caring - On line,
            September, 2003, Volume 3, No. 3

You may quote from or reproduce these editorial clips if you include the following credits and email contact:
Copyright © Daniel J. Benor, M.D. 2002 Reprinted with permission of the author P.O. Box 76 Bellmawr, NJ 08099 www.WholisticHealingResearch.com   DB@WholisticHealingResearch.com