Introduction
I have never understood why our medical and scientific establishment is so narrowly focused on materialist explanations for consciousness and the human psyche. Perhaps it has something to do with the “prove it!” mentality of the scientific method. This is understandable, but I believe such a narrow definition of consciousness has led us down a path that has squashed human potential both individually and collectively.
The unconscious and the subconscious are emphasized in psychology and psychotherapy. Medicine is strictly materialist, and even a suggestion otherwise (such as Bruce Lipton’s theory of epigenetics) draws harsh criticism from “authorities.”
Carl Gustav Jung and the Collective Unconscious
Fifty years ago I was intrigued when I discovered the renowned Swiss psychologist Carl Jung and his book, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Jung suggested that all human beings are connected via an inherited psychic space. Jung said that this psychic space contains archetypes that influence our individual experiences and shape our understanding of the world. This sounded good to me.
Archetypes are universal symbols and primordial images that influence human behavior and thought across cultures and throughout history.
Here is a brief AI summary of some of these archetypes:
The Hero: Represents courage, overcoming obstacles, and achieving goals.
The Shadow: Represents the hidden, often negative, aspects of the personality.
The Anima/Animus: Represents the feminine side in men and the masculine side in women.
The Wise Old Man/Woman: Represents wisdom, guidance, and spiritual insight.
The Trickster: Represents chaos, deception, and challenging the status quo.
Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious is fascinating because it describes symbols and concepts common to everyone throughout history. According to Jung the personal unconscious is individual, but the collective unconscious provides a deeper, shared unconscious that every human being shares.
Jung expanded on Freud’s conception of the individual subconscious mind and applied it collectively to humanity as a whole.
But why is the unconscious mind the connecting link of the psyche?
Emphasis on the subconscious and the unconscious suggests that our understanding of consciousness and the mind is limited.
Unfortunately, neither neuroscientists nor psychologists have satisfactorily defined these terms. What is generally accepted is that consciousness comes from neurons firing in the brain. The mind, somehow and mysteriously, also exists in the brain. But no one has ever been able to discover in what part of the brain mind and consciousness exist.
Collective Consciousness
French sociologist Emile Durkheim defined collective consciousness as the set of shared beliefs, ideas, and moral attitudes that provide a unifying force within society. However, Durkheim, and others, see collective consciousness merely as people’s shared understanding of existing social norms.
Durkheim wrote:
The totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society forms a determinate system with a life of its own. It can be termed the collective or common consciousness
In my opinion this definition is a step forward from Freud and Jung, because it proposes that a collective consciousness exists and has “a life of its own.” This implies that it is a living, dynamical system that is constantly changing.
A Different Tack
Authorities have taught that the subconscious and the unconscious are parts of the mind we cannot reach, even though it has tremendous power to, at unpredictable times, overwhelm our conscious mind and strongly influence our actions (“crimes of passion.”) Huh? The subconscious mind can reach the conscious mind but the conscious mind can know nothing about the subconscious? There is something wrong with this idea.
In law, a person is said to be not guilty of murder because he or she was temporarily insane at the time: the subconscious/unconscious mind rears up from some undefined area and makes us do things. A society of individuals that defines its own mind as something that cannot be inspected and controlled is going to have problems!
The collective unconscious/subconscious mind paradigm, to its credit, is an attempt to explain man’s irrationality toward itself. But perhaps our materialist conception of the human mind creates a bias toward anti-social and dehumanizing thinking and actions.
Rather than define a collective unconscious, it makes more sense to me to define a collective consciousness, but in a more enhanced way than Durkheim did. Perhaps there is really no subconscious or unconscious at all; perhaps what passes for the subconscious is part of a collective consciousness.
Physics and the zero-point energy / Aether
Let’s step away from psychology and psychotherapy for a moment and discuss the physical counterpart to the unconscious/subconscious mind.
During the development of quantum mechanics in the first half of the 20th century, it was discovered that even at temperatures of absolute zero – where there should be absolutely no movement and everything should be dead – there is still energy. This energy, often called zero-point energy (ZPE), is said to come from quantum vacuum fluctuations at the very smallest scale, and is a sort of counterpart to the subconscious of the human psyche. When physicists tried to calculate this energy they discovered that it was practically infinite.
Underlying the physical universe we experience at the macro level is a substrate of energy within the fabric of space that is completely in equilibrium. The good news is that we are slowly learning to access this quantum substrate, because it can be scaled up to our level of reality.
“Quantum vacuum fluctuation” is really a misnomer because it implies that space is entirely empty. The discovery of zero-point energy shows that space is not empty but contains an invisible substrate of energy, or an aether. In his paper “Ground state of hydrogen as a zero-point fluctuation state,” physicist Hal Puthoff shows that atomic structure itself is dependent on zero-point energy. Otherwise, why don’t the electrons, which have negative charge, collapse into the nucleus that contains positively charged protons? There must be a source of energy that keeps the electrons moving around the nucleus.
Nobel winning physicist Richard Feynman is said to have stated that there was enough energy within a coffee cup to boil the world’s oceans.
So the aether turns out to actually exist.
The Consciousness Field
I prefer to think of the aether not as “quantum fluctuations” but as a consciousness field.
The aether (zero-point energy) fills space and is present everywhere in the universe. This means that every particle, everywhere in the cosmos, is linked, and implies that consciousness is also connected everywhere in the universe.
The consciousness field concept unites Eastern philosophy and spirituality with Western science.
The Collective Consciousness – A Different Take
What might the enhanced collective consciousness space look like?
Jung defined archetypes that have an energy or existence of their own. In the collective consciousness paradigm, the consciousness field is composed of thought impulses. These thoughts are themselves alive because they constantly proceed from the minds of living beings. Here, “mind” and “consciousness” are attributes of awareness that do not depend on physical bodies.
All 8 billion of us contribute to humanity’s consciousness field, which we can imagine surrounds the earth as a field of subtle energy, analogous to the atmosphere.
Several years ago I made a short YouTube movie that attempts to describe this concept. You can see it here.
Implications of the Consciousness Field Concept
Traditional materialist explanations for consciousness and mind require that they come forth from material objects like the brain. It is odd to me that an esoteric or spiritual definition of consciousness is so rigidly and even angrily rejected by the “authorities.”
The consciousness field is a dynamic, ever-changing space composed of thought forms from living beings. It substitutes consciousness for unconsciousness.
Materialist definitions of awareness and the human psyche have led to the insane world we live in today. So our conception of human consciousness must be wrong-headed.
Ultimately, consciousness is non-physical in the sense that it is independent of physical bodies, as we have discussed in previous posts. To understand this idea more fully, meditate on or investigate this question: “What happens after I take my last breath?”
I made another short movie that attempts to explain how consciousness might have an existence independent of physical matter and energy. You can see it here.
In the human consciousness field the collective consciousness is constantly changing and morphing, depending on the thoughts, beliefs, expectations, and conclusions of human beings in real time. The planetary thought space links all human beings together. Each individual affects everyone else as thought impulses impinge upon our consciousness. We are all connected in a conscious manner.
Concluding Thoughts
I thought Jung made a good stab at explaining human behavior, but his theory is still materialistic. The collective unconscious is said not to be developed individually but is passed down genetically, just like physical traits.
In physics and cosmology, materialist reasoning require us to say that the universe came into existence as a result of physical interactions. Some cosmologists are fond of the Big Bang theory, where all of the universe’s matter and energy came forth from an undefined singularity. But then, where did the singularity come from? This leads us into endless philosophical rabbit holes where causation always comes from events that are logically prior.
Moreover, science knows that it cannot explain why 95% of the matter and energy in the universe is missing. Made-up terms like “dark matter” and “dark energy” are coined and then accepted as fact to substitute for a lack of understanding.
Dark energy and matter can be explained by an aether, but that concept horrifies physicists because it has been accepted for so long that space is empty. It would contradict long-held and cherished theories about the universe.
In medicine we have to come up with something better than the “Human beings are meat bodies” paradigm. In psychology and psychotherapy, the subconscious mind and the collective unconscious, similar to dark energy and matter, are just placeholders for a lack of comprehension.
We need satisfactory answer to questions such as “What is consciousness?” and “What is the mind?” These answers can only come, in my opinion, from a paradigm that unites a non-material consciousness with the physical world.
