Collective Consciousness – The Dawn of Awareness

Dreams are an expression of biological life forming a dim awareness of itself, an ill-defined awareness as it came alive in the creatures swarming on our planet. Life became conscious in that way millions of years ago. From the human point of view we do not see it as a powerful form of consciousness. But the focused self-aware consciousness of human beings feeds back into that unfocused ocean of awareness because we are a connected part of it. That fundamental awareness, or what the Australian aborigines call the Dreamtime, and what a lot of people probably mean when they use the word God, is transforming constantly through the impact of new experience. This transformation comes about through an interaction between the focused self-awareness of human beings and that fundamental awareness behind existence. That core awareness is archaic and ancient, a collective experience of everything that has lived. That core awareness is unfocused, but in that is its wonder. It doesn’t particularise. It doesn’t end up being any one thing. It remains all encompassing, a collective. Because of the interaction between physical life forms and that core awareness it is evolving all the time.

At times I have explored that deep ocean of unfocussed sentience, and at one time as I dropped deeply into it I had the sense, or the awareness, that life has a unified consciousness. In that consciousness life has the awareness of millions of years of experience through all its creatures. This awareness developed into a living framework, a living matrix. Life learned how to build, how to develop an integrated system. The lesson was learned slowly, but it was unfolded from the already existing building blocks or framework that formed the universe. Integration means connectivity. It means symbiosis, working together for mutual gain. It means love in its most profound sense – the giving of self to another as happens in pregnancy and child rearing; as happens in life where to survive we live on the death of other things such as when we eat plants or animals.

All that life has learned is now a great matrix of influence that continues to flow into the way things work, and who we are. This is like an enormous structure that directs things and holds them to that pattern. I suppose this could be seen as a sort of establishment – what is established. But this would not be a real insight into that collective awareness. Because all the time, in a sort of flashing newness of creativity the collective awareness constantly upgrades, it constantly experiments, it constantly tries out new things. It does this because of the factor of randomness, because an aspect of the universe and life is chaotic, and it has through that a freedom to do the unexpected. And Life integrates what it learns.

Life learned how to build, how to develop an integrated system. The lesson was  learned slowly, but it was unfolded from the already existing building blocks or framework that formed the universe. Integration means connectivity. It means symbiosis, working together for mutual gain. It means love in its most profound sense – the giving of self to another as happens in pregnancy and child rearing; as happens in life where to survive we live on the death of other things such as when we eat plants or animals. All that life has learned is now a great matrix of influence that continues to flow into the way things work, and who we are. This is like an enormous structure that directs things and holds them to that pattern. I suppose this could be seen as a sort of establishment – what is established. But this would not be a real insight into that collective awareness. Because all the time, in a sort of flashing newness of creativity the collective awareness constantly upgrades, it constantly experiments, it constantly tries out new things. And it integrates what it learns.

Human society with its immense variety, it is enormous range of experience, its conflicts, its pain and challenges, is the most amazing source of experience and experiment. It constantly presents variety and opportunity to try out new things. And I saw that life is learning about energy exchange, about shifts, about not holding on. Or perhaps it has learned that and it is offering that as possible behavioural responses to us human beings. In any case, for me personally, I saw that I do not need to hold on to any particular form of relationship. One of the most powerful stances we can take is that of balance. Not holding on to the shifting experiences we meet is the balance that allows us to move and shift according to this moment, this need, this person we are dealing with now.

I saw that dreams express an archaic wisdom. They express that wisdom mentioned above that the collective awareness has gathered through unimaginable variety of life experience. It expresses the possibility of all the behavioural responses that it has learned. For instance, in human society there are all manner of relationship between the man and the woman. There are men with one wife, no wife, or many wives. There are men who never enter a relationship all their life. There are women with no husband, with one husband, with several husbands, or several partners. Of course the unusual forms of sexuality such as prostitution and homosexuality explore yet more varieties of personal experience. It isn’t that any of these are right or wrong, they are simply variations on a theme. As in music that satisfies, the theme may explore conflicts, pain, or discord as the music moves toward integration, toward synthesis and satisfaction.

It is not only genetic coding that influences us to respond to present events. There is also an experience that lies behind that coding. There are the millions of years of life experience that led to the code. The archaic in us exists because of connections. The whole matrix of life exists because of connections. Many of these are obvious as we see in the food chain, as we see in the relationship between plant life and the sun and the earth. We see these connections in the way that bacterial life and plant life and human life work together. One thing relates to and depends upon another thing. At a deep level we all acknowledge that dependence. We feel it as a sort of holiness or awe. We see it as a fundamental truth but unfortunately often ignore it.

Our tribal religions frequently, and unfortunately, get disconnected from that archaic source of life. The religion, although it states it is about the creative impulse in us all, often doesn’t help us to connect with that creative source, with that internal archaic awareness. So dreams, and the love that people have for each other, are always a more direct route to re-connection. They take us back to that wisdom, that tried and true experience. They arouse again the awareness of our connection with each other.

Some things life has learned are fundamental. Of course the collective consciousness has experience of all types of human relationship. That core experience knows that it is only out of the death of one life form that another exists. It is only by acknowledging and living our place in the scheme of things that we keep our own connection with that core of awareness open. In that way we maintain our integrity and growth. Each of us, from our forebears, from the circumstances of our birth and culture, through pain or wonder experienced, have achieved a particular shape or personality structure. Being that shape, we do not need to conform to somebody else’s shape or requirements. It is the variety that the core awareness treasures and absorbs. Our particular shape has its own qualities and weaknesses. What does need to happen though, is that we need to stand openly, as the shape we are, before that fundamental awareness. We need to bring ourselves just as we are to that connection with life so that it may experience us more fully. In that connection we share with it, and it shares with us. It savours us, and we savour it. If we feel guilty or attempt to hide parts of ourselves, then we remain unwhole. Unwhole in the sense that part of our nature is the core awareness. If we lack that we are only a fraction of what we might be. We are the odd shape we have become. With our core connection we are whole no matter what shape we are. Without that connection we remain separated and alone. See You Are a Dual Being

Certain things are holy, like motherhood, or fatherhood. They are holy because they are so fundamental to life as it expresses on our planet. Marriage is such a holy thing because it represents and is an expression of the wonder of reproduction and parenthood. This should not be confused with partnership, such as occurs in a homosexual relationship.(1) Because things such as marriage, that manifest the most primordial aspects of life, are holy we need to honour them, and perhaps kneel before them in some way. They transcend any one person’s life and experience. Because of this, things like motherhood develop into an immense archetype. In other words they become a focused collection of uncountable human experiences. All such huge areas of experience are patterns in the core awareness. They are immense patterns in the internal structure of human life. And although life itself honours them, although life itself largely flows through the patterns they are, life does not stop us making leaps right beyond the boundaries of those archetypes. In that way we make new connections new possibilities for life itself and for the environment.

() That is not to say that a homosexual relationship does not express another of the most profound aspects of life, that of love. But love should be seen as a transcending influence rather than simply a genital desire or an expression of need or dependence.

See Sorg.