The Collective Conscious
“This
magic word, which always ends in “ism,” works most successfully with those who
have the least access to their interior selves and have strayed the furthest
from their instinctual roots into the truly chaotic world of collective
consciousness.”
The wisdom of knowing that we are
in the
Collective
Conscious
opens our eyes to a
reality that we can navigate.
Instead of being
susceptible to
the tides of social hysteria, we may have the
ability to steer our own ship.
“A
collective attitude enables the
individual to fit into society without friction,
since it acts upon him like any other condition of life.”
Were not the autonomy of the
individual the
secret
longing of many people, this hard-pressed phenomenon would scarcely be able to
survive the collective suppression either
morally or spiritually.
For this he needs
the evidence of inner,
transcendent experience which alone can protect him from
the otherwise inevitable submersion in the mass.
Masses
are always breeding grounds for psychic epidemics
Resistance
to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized
in his
individuality as the mass itself.
The smaller the personality, the dimmer and more unconscious it becomes, until finally it merges indistinguishably with the surrounding society, thus surrendering its own wholeness and dissolving into the wholeness of the group. In the place of the inner voice there is the voice of the group with its conventions, and vocation is replaced by collective necessities.
But even in this unconscious social condition there are not a few who are called awake by the summons of the voice, whereupon they are at once set apart from the others, feeling theselves confronted with a problem about which the others know nothing. In most cases it is impossible to explain to the others what has happened.
The fact that the conventions always flourish in one form or another only proves that the vast majority of mankind do not choose their own way, but convention, and consequently develop not themselves but a method and a collective mode of life at the cost of their own wholeness.
As we are influenced by the collective consciousness, each person’s arising of consciousness affects those around them, or who come in contact with that person. The collective energy field is strengthened by positive energy and weakened by negative energy.
“Individuation and a life lived by collective values are nevertheless two divergent destinies. In Jung’s view they are related to one another by guilt.”
(The)
great war has taught practically everybody that the
things that have the greatest weight are the imponderabilia, the things
you cannot possibly weigh, like public opinion or psychical infection.
The whole war was a psychical phenomenon. If you are
looking for the causal root of it, it could not possibly be explained as arising
out of the reason of man or out of economic necessity. One
could say that
Any great movement of man has always started from psychical
reasons; so it is our experience that has taught us to believe in the psychical.
Therefore we are rightly afraid of mob psychology, for instance.
But the mass-man is good for nothing – he is a mere particle that has
forgotten what it is to be human and has lost its soul. What our world lacks is
the psychic connection; and no clique, no community of interests, no
political party, and no State will ever be able to replace this.
This
ocean of the collective conscious has much more influence over our behaviour
than we think. Depending on your
personal environment a collective
negative energy field can
influence you to become something you
don’t want to be, compared to a
collective positive energy field
which nourishes and encourages you to become everything you
want to be.
That all beings have an effect upon each other in one way or another is
indisputable. Once people give
themselves over to this
collective energy field they serve at the will of it,
which is why incidences such as massacres and
holocausts occur.
This dark energy side of the collective is concurrent with
ignorance,while the light ‘good’ side coexists with
wisdom and spirit.
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Fortunately though, any one human being can – with a tremendous burst of mental creative energy – produce a tide of consciousness that can act back on the hidden collective conscious and either modify or add to it.
The
average person is still possessed by collective consciousness and, under its
influences, talks as if he knew all the answers. For example, people tend
to regard a humanitarian attitude as being their own, forgetting that it is
derived from the Christian
Weltanschauung.
They fail to realize that it is collective and
that it is part of a
Weltanschauung
they no longer share. Power is the hidden motivation behind such
behaviour. TPoPA 222
The growth of culture consists, as we know, in a progressive subjugation of the
animal in man. It is a process of domestication which cannot
be accomplished without rebellion on the part of the animal nature that thirsts
for freedom. 2EoAP 19
In group narcissism, the object is not the individual, but the group to which one belongs. Group narcissism asserts that "either my country or my religion is the most wonderful, the most cultured, the most powerful and the most peace-loving".
It has significant sociological functions. It enhances the solidarity and cohesion of the group. It gives satisfaction to the members of the group. Even an individual who usually feels miserable may frequently compensate by feeling a part of "the most wonderful group in the world." Indeed, one's degree of group narcissism is commensurate with the lack of real satisfaction in one's life. The ideology of group narcissism ostensibly defends human dignity, decency, morality and right. Devilish qualities are ascribed to the other group; it is treacherous, ruthless, cruel and basically inhuman. When group narcissism is inflicted with a wound, real or imaginary, the reaction is very intense, leading to hostility. JViJP 78
Even
adult persons often have no idea how to cope with the problem of living, and on
top of that are so unconscious in this regard that they succumb in the most
uncritical way to the slightest possibility of finding some kind of answer or
certainty. Were this not so, the numerous sects and –isms would
long since have died out. But, thanks to unconscious, infantile
attachments, boundless uncertainty and lack of self-reliance, they all flourish
like weeds. MC 750
The
opposites must unite
…. At one end everything is order, but rigid; it is a kind of madness, and that
overadaptation you get from
drugs. The excess of reasonableness that people have
after an episode is a form of madness. It is mad to be as
coldly reasonable as that, and the opposite is another form of madness.
If you cannot keep in the middle between the two you are lost, which is
exactly the tragedy of the book. If you take it on a
political level, you see the same thing in society: mad mass-psychosis
emotional movements where people go around with either a Celtic cross or a
Hakenkreuz, or whatever it maybe be, raving in emotion and feeling whole.
It is so wonderful to walk in thousands through the streets, just
howling, for then you feel whole and human. But then there
are the police and order, business order, the law and all the rest (…).
Then you regress into what is called the restitution after revolutions in
which everything is in order, but power dominates and people are deadly bored
and think how nice it would be if they could go back into the chaos of
revolution, where at least life flowed.
You
see more and more how nations now switch between those two poles, just as
individuals do. Groups do the same everywhere, and that is
why we have to deal with the problem. It is urgent just now.
For instance, those people behind the barricades in
This collective behaviour, such as in a football game, is enfolded in each individual and in turn each individual is unfolded into the entire crowd.
Watching someone perform an
action triggers mirror neurons, making the viewer feel, to an extent, like
he is the doer. The greater the observer's personal draw to the action, the
more intensely he feels that he's the one hitting a home run, Hirt says.
The end result is "a vicarious sense of
success," according to Hirt: For a moment, a fan feels athletically gifted,
unstoppable, and adored. A University of Utah study showed
that during
tournaments, die-hard fans experience the same hormonal surges athletes
do. "They even become more optimistic about their own life when 'their'
team wins and gloomy about their personal future when 'their team loses,"
says Hirt.
Psychology Today February 2011
‘Diehard fans will continue to back losers when the team is central to
their
sense of who they are”
Scientific American Mind – Sept/Oct 09
“Here
we must ask: Have I any religious experience and immediate relation to
God,
and hence that certainty which will keep me, as an
individual,
from dissolving in the crowd?
TO THIS QUESTION THERE IS A POSITIVE ANSWER ONLY when the individual is willing to fulfill the demands of rigourous self-examination and self-knowledge.