Posts Tagged ‘creation’
Dreams and Your Ancient Past
Through the Eye of Dreams
There has been a conjuring trick performed in regard to our view of who we are. It is almost as if we have stepped into a photo booth, and instead of a realistic image of ourselves being produced we are given one with most of our features missing. The strange thing is we usually accept this distorted image of ourselves as real, though most of us feel odd about it, and some of us actually get around to searching for a different image.
What I mean is that we have the notion from the current popular mythology of reality that we are produced by the combination of our parent’s sperm and ovum. The genetic combination is, we believe, the print of who we are.
I know this is a massive simplification, and I am not saying it as a criticism, simply a statement of popular belief. Nevertheless it is a belief that shapes the concepts people have of themselves. But the sperm and ovum, the genes, do not provide language, they do not give us culture, books, music or religion, despite any connections there might be. Children raised by animals do not develop any of these culturally given enhancements. They are not innate. See Animal Children.
The myths of our times also suggest that our personality is either God given; or it is formed out of the whims and neurosis of our parents and events during our infancy; or perhaps it is just made that way like a piece of equipment stamped out in a factory or by the position of the stars at our birth, and there’s not much one can do about it. This modern myth goes on to suggest that the only eternal life any of us can hope for is that arising through procreation. It is only our genes, we are assured, that will live on if we successfully procreate and our children survive and prosper. Because of this, it is further explained, our sexual urge drives us all forward into the convoluted avenues of sexual relationships. And these are factors influencing how the image we have of ourselves comes out strangely distorted.
I sometimes think there is an odd quirk in human nature that makes us want only one answer to any riddle in life. It is as if there can only ever be one right thing, one truth about anything, and everything else is thereby false. This is a, ‘if religion is correct, then science is wrong’ type of reasoning, as if they are both looking at the same piece of the cosmos from the same direction. It is like the Indian story of the blind men describing the elephant. One has his hands on a leg, another on the trunk, and so on. None of them are able to see the whole animal and therefore have a distorted impression of it.
Therefore one must beware of the urge to avoid insecurity by hanging on to the tail of the elephant and feeling one is safe because at least we know what the beast is. It is in fact dubious whether we can ever know ‘the beast’, though it might be possible to have an intuition or sense of it. The universe and the mystery of life and consciousness are so vast that none of us can possibly hold all the factors involved in mind at any one time. Therefore we cannot possibly arrive at any inclusive understanding of the big questions – why am I here? What is life about? How did life come about?
Coming back to the distorted image we can arrive at of ourselves, if we take time to consider our origins, it can bring us a bit more toward a feeling of wholeness and sense of reality. For instance it is obvious and wonderful how the bodies of our parents, through the gift of their own genetic material, have shaped our own body and its inclinations. This much is now demonstrable, but where I want to go from here is to look at common human experience in an uncommon way, through the eye of a dream.
The Voice of My Dead Forebears
The dream is that of a man in his mid forties.
“I am walking along a cobbled road going slightly down–hill. I know as I dream that I am in Italy. I do not feel a stranger in this land, and am learning the language.” Ron.
Ron describes his exploration and insights into the dream by saying:
This was a very short dream and I didn’t think it had any real significance, but I was regularly exploring my dreams, and it interested me because I couldn’t understand what it referred to in showing me learning the language. I had never learned Italian and was not doing so.
When I relaxed and allowed the free flow of my associations and feelings, the first part of the dream was easy. My father was born in England of two Italian parents. So being in Italy, a country I had never visited myself, I could immediately feel and understand as referring to my family on my father’s side and the influences that has left in the way I think and live.
But I felt myself falling deeper into the dream. It was something I had learned to do. I not only kept the question ticking over quietly of what does the dream indicate, but at the same time I relaxed control of my thoughts, my body and emotions. This is like being half asleep in a state where the body can twitch spontaneously, and perhaps I can even hear myself making slight vocal sounds, and yet I am wide–awake watching what arises. Because of this state a flow of memories began to arise about my father, and I realised something I had only been partially aware of before.
My father had taken over the family shop when his father had died. The shop was in London, just over a mile away from the old Covent Garden fruit and vegetable market. Most days my father walked, pushing a barrow, and in later years drove to the market to buy produce for the shop. I often went with him, helping carry and load, and perhaps push the barrow. In my youth I wasn’t aware of it, but now in my flowing memories I realised that my father was very distant or cautious in his dealings with the market salesmen and porters. A distinct and overall realisation arose out of the many memories and impressions; it was that my father was expressing a particular type of caution in all his dealings with other people. I saw this as keeping who he was secret – keeping his head down.
As I saw this in my father it hit me with great power that this attitude had passed to me, and although I expressed it in a different way, I had inherited it with equal strength. Why? And, how?
The perception that was taking place was not like my normal thinking. It comprehensively gathered memories and put them together in a way that made patterns and themes stand out. So as the process of insight was taking place I saw just how the urge to keep my head down, not stand out in the crowd, not get involved with people, had influenced my actions. For a start I had never voted in my life. This was because I could never identify with groups pushing for power. I had avoided everyday social activity, although relationships with individuals were not threatening.
Now I started seeing how this attitude had passed to me so strongly. My thought, as I witnessed the flow of memories, was that perhaps such information was genetic, because my father had never talked to me much at all. He had certainly never urged me to keep out of the limelight – to keep my head down, and until now I hadn’t been aware that he had been doing it himself, so it wasn’t simply conscious emulation. I can only say that I ‘saw’ how it had happened. What I mean is that through the still flowing memory and feelings it was as if I could actually look into the heart of things and see how they worked. The insight I achieved was that we as humans, like other mammals, in our earliest years particularly, still learn like most mammals do, and that is not verbal at all. A massive amount of information is absorbed from our parents without any effort or awareness.
What Ron realised is that just as a fox cub ‘learns’ how to hunt from its parents, so we absorb the deeply etched survival strategies of our parents simply by being around them. If genes come into it anywhere, they perhaps create the reflex response that instinctively draws in the survival tactics that perhaps even our parents themselves have never really been aware they live by. In doing this the higher animals learn what cannot be passed on as instinct, what is not ‘hard wired’ into them. This holds in it a tremendous advantage because ‘hard wiring’ takes a long time. Through this faster method we learn what to be afraid of, what to eat, how to hunt, because the lessons learned by pain through many generations are exhibited in our parents behaviour in dealing with events. The experiments with apes in Japan, where Imo the macaque ape learned the ability to wash sweet potatoes to remove sand grains, show how this was passed on from this one female to the whole group, and then to subsequent young macaques, and illustrates how survival information is passed on non verbally for generations. An important aspect of this is that whatever of such information is held in the present generation, it is an accumulation of skills and responses learned over many generations, and is the fundamental survival strategies of that particular family or group line. Ron goes on to say:
The degree of this was staggering to me. It led me to wonder just where my father had got the information from, and although this was obvious from my own perception of where I had received the messages from, the resulting experience profoundly moved and impressed me. It taught me things about myself I don’t think I could have learned in any other way. A floodgate of impressions rushed into my awareness at such a pace I can only record the main ones.
Suddenly my mind let the power of the messages my father had carried and passed to me speak, as if they were alive. I experienced what appeared to be a direct connection with my far ancestors. This may sound strange, but my father had, as it were, handed me a recording. He and I had been impressed with the cover and it had led us to live in a particular way. But now I had put the recording on the player and the ancient originators expressed their own message.
Obviously this is only an analogy to convey the experience, but in some way the message played out in me from centuries back. From it I learned that my forebears had lived in Italy during a period of great religious and political tension. The pressures to conform had been enormous. Not only were my ancestors told to believe in a particular sort of God, but also to accept leadership from people they had no respect for. If they did not live this belief and submit to it they were killed or rejected by the community they had been born into. In their own words I heard them saying to me something like ‘The worst was they did not kill us, but they cut our vine at the roots. They burnt our land and they killed our children. If you want your sons to live, teach them not to hold their head up, but to keep their eyes on the ground.’
And out of that trauma the message had been passed to me many generations later. It was survival. I was still living it, but perhaps it was time to reappraise.
I Am an Ancient Thing
Ron’s description helps us look at what is a common experience, and in a different way, an established observation in biology. It is common knowledge that animals learn through example. It is common knowledge that traits pass on through generations. What is added here is the powerful way such behaviour can pass on in humans. It shows how we communicate behaviour to our children without any conscious intention. Looking through the eye of dreams we see here a psychological or psychic [ii] realm that extends beyond the mere transmission of behaviour. It includes or leads to meaning, to understanding ones roots. This may seem mysterious or unfeasible if one has not actually experienced the way the dream process puts apparently abstract experience into imagery leading to insight. [iii] If one has witnessed this process at work, what Ron speaks of does not seem remarkable.
Looking through the eye of Ron’s dream there is a suggestion that aspects of Ron’s personality did not begin with his birth. Parts of his personality preceded his birth, being carried and passed on by his father. This module or facet of Ron’s character had been formed hundreds of years previously. It had been part of the lives of his forebears, and had been carried forward into his life. It did not pass on to Ron through any genetic material. It entered him through absorption of the behaviour of his parent. So it is saying that just as the genes we receive are ancient and passed to us, this survival information is also ancient and passed on. It influences who we are as profoundly as any genes.
Of course, Ron is only seeing his connection with his father. There would also be packages of behaviour and information handed to him by his mother. [iv] So not only can one have a ‘gene pool’ from which our being is formed, there is also a ‘behavioural pool’ acting as a similar resource. This does not so much shape the body, but certainly gives form to the character and responses. In fact unlike the genetic passage where a set of genes in the mother is united with a set from the father, the behavioural pool may have several ‘sets’ or packages which can be triggered by different environmental circumstances. My experience suggests that the behavioural packages from the mother and father certainly do not splice as do the genes.
The behaviour Ron observed in himself, in his father and grandfather, although according to Ron’s insight it arose at a particular period in history, it obviously rested upon traits already existing in the family from an even more ancient past. So the trauma of persecution may have modified existing traits rather than set in place entirely new ones.
Because of pre–existing traits, another family might have responded quite differently to being subjugated. They might have pushed for dominance rather than anonymity. They may have aggressively opposed, sought opportunity to join the ranks of power, or actively supported as a subordinate.
This is supposition based on insufficient evidence; but if the basic idea of the passage of behaviour is correct, it shows human nature as having several dimensions to what forms who they know themselves to be. These are almost like different streams from the past meeting in the person, and in some way passing on into the future, perhaps separated again. For instance we have the stream arising from the body and its genetic material; we have the stream arising from cultural language with all its massive inbuilt data; we have the behavioural pool that we inherit, again with massive innate information. When we begin to look at what it is to be human from this perspective we see we are multi dimensional creatures, existing in the flow of huge streams of influence. And these streams themselves mingle in different ways creating a variety of experiences and further dimensions.
Coming back to Ron though, there is certainly a transitory and short lived aspect to him, in that his unique body and many of his personality traits will only exist during his physical life. But facets of Ron have existed for millions of years – in the genetic stream for instance. And even in his highly ephemeral personality itself, there are parts that have had a long life before Ron woke to his personal existence. For instance the language he was brought into existence by and the behavioural influences he absorbed.
This makes nonsense of the myth that we only have eternal life through procreation. It also suggests that if Ron identifies with the aspects of himself that are short lived, such as the transitory aspects of his body, his less permanent personality traits, his changing likes and dislikes, then he faces death. All that he thinks of as himself will perish. In this sense he cannot survive bodily death.
In fact it seems as if Western society faces the issue of death in a much more catastrophic way than other cultures. The reason for this is that many older cultures see the personality as transitory anyway, and identify more fully with the family ancestors and the longer lasting aspects of life.
It might be argued that as the behavioural traits passed on to Ron preceded him, he cannot really identify with them as himself, so cannot see them as an aspect of himself that has a long life. The problem here is that hardly anything in the personality is unique except perhaps the exact mixture of traits and responses, memories and dreams that make up that particular person. Everything is taken from somewhere else, or is a mixture or development of what already existed. We all identify with the contents of our mind, our language and our traits, yet these are not new with our own personal awakening as a person. So we cannot separate Ron from what he has inherited. It is still him. If it has a long life, then we must say aspects of Ron have a long life.
Once we grasp this idea of the passage of behavioural traits from generation to generation, I believe it can be observed fairly easily in everyday life. Much of folk beliefs suggest it without filling in the details. Such sayings as ‘like father like son’ – ‘like mother like daughter’ have the belief implicit in them. The generally held view that each nation has a different cultural identity also suggests it. In fact we often use the word culture to describe the behavioural traits peculiar to a particular group of people, in reference to their observable behaviour traits which are passed on from generation to generation throughout the group or nation. We are therefore talking about a behavioural pool with particular characteristics.
I have frequently observed family groups out shopping and seen the intense mimicry of a child for its father or mother, even to certain positions of the hands, or posture of the body. Such passage of very particular behavioural traits is especially noticeable in the learning of language. The unique sounds of certain words, even within one language such as English, are mimicked in an extraordinary way by children, creating a local dialect in which sounds are made that are often quite difficult for people outside of the area to make.
It is innate in us to soak in and mimic the behaviour of those close to us. That is obvious. All I am adding to that is the suggestion that deeply seated personality traits, and the shape of our psyche, are also radically influenced in the same way. Not only do we soak in actual behaviour, but we are capable of transforming the messages coded in behaviour into personal psychological experience such as described by Ron.
I Speak Therefore I Am
That our often closely guarded personality is made up of pieces of behaviour that existed long before we did, may be a strange idea to many people. The way we present our film stars and pop idols as special, or particularly talented; the way we often think of ourselves, is as hermetically sealed units that have been influenced from outside by environment and people, but on the whole we are unique. Sometimes people even adopt a superior attitude, as if to say ‘I am vastly different to the rest of humanity’. This makes it difficult for us to actually observe our origins.
If we think of an acorn, it is easy enough to believe that if we planted it, a tree would grow from it that would be very much the same as the trees from which its genetic material arose. In its particular growth however, factors of soil, weather and events would shape it to its own uniqueness. With human beings we think similarly, except we commonly leave out factors of great importance, factors which contribute to our personal existence in such a major way that to forget them is to be like the blind men with the elephant once more. For example a tree doesn’t learn speech, or the customs of its cultural group.
Particularly in past centuries, when there was a much closer relationship between humans and wild animals, it was noticed that if a baby was lost and raised by a creature of the wild, such as a she–wolf or bear, the child never became properly human. Being human is not innate. Something rubs off from functioning mature humans onto their babies to make them into human beings. The major differences are that the baby raised by an animal lacks self awareness; it cannot speak any language other than that of the animal it was raised by, and it lacks a sense of time; and in many cases there is a deep sense of connection with animals and the natural environment. Its reactions to surroundings are those of the animal it was raised by. Thus the behaviour traits it learned were not those of the human animal, but of the mammal that mothered it.
A headline in the Daily Star on April 17 1991, at the time the film Dances With Wolves was popular reads: “TRAGIC BOY’S DANCE IN WOLF’S LAIR.” It goes on to say:
A tragic orphan brought up by a pack of wild wolves will never be able to live like a normal man, say doctors. The boy who REALLY danced with the wolves was aged about seven when he was found 29 years ago in the wastes of Southern Russia by a team of oil explorers. He howled like a wolf and savagely bit one of the oil men who christened him Djuma – the Wolf Boy.
Professor Rufat Kazirbayev said doctors had battled to re–educate him to act like a normal human being – but failed. They are now giving up the fight.
“His mind is with the wolves. He will howl at the moon for the rest of his life,” he said.
Djuma, now about 36, is still in hospital. He still crawls on all fours, eats raw meat and bites when frightened. He can speak only disjointed phrases – “Mother dead. Father dead. Brother dead. Sister dead. Mother nice. Father bad.”
Dr. Anna Ticheenskaya said: “presumably his family were killed in a purge. He has shown us in sign language how his mother saved him by throwing herself over his body.”
Djuma has learned to brush his hair, clean his teeth and use the toilet “Like a trained animal.” But when taken to the zoo he howls as if he was urging the animals to take him to freedom. Sadly that will never happen. Djuma will probably spend the rest of his life in the clinic where, doctors say, he spends his days like a dog – half asleep and dreaming.
The autobiography of Helen Keller helps in understanding what may be the difference between an animal, or an animal man like Djuma and a human being with self awareness. Helen, made blind and deaf through illness prior to learning to speak, described how she lived in a dark unconscious world lacking any sense of self until the age of seven when she was taught the deaf and dumb language. At first her teacher’s fingers touching hers were simply a tactile but meaningless experience. Then, perhaps because she had learned one word prior to her illness, meaning flooded her darkness. She tells us that “Nothingness was blotted out.” Through language she became a person and developed a sense of self, whereas before there had been – nothing.
This ‘nothingness’ described by Helen Keller is difficult for most of us to imagine, having all our life been exposed to other human beings through behaviour and speech. Helen describes it as having no awareness of personal pain or events. She says that perhaps things happened to her, perhaps they were painful, but as she had no personal self to appreciate this, they were merely passing tactile sensations. She was not personally disturbed by them because she had no ‘person’ to be disturbed.
The learning of language was the pivot around which Helen’s self awareness evolved, with its attendant ability to think, to have a sense of ‘I’ or ‘me’ and all the personal relationships with others and the world arising from that. Without the learning of a complex language which holds in it the concept of ‘selfhood’ there is apparently no possibility of self awareness. Without the passage of the ‘behavioural pool’ from a human being to a human infant, there is no possibility of a self aware human maturing from the baby.
The information gathered from the many cases of ‘animal children’ suggests that not only do the behavioural traits of the fostering animal pass to the child, but also the state of soul can be thought of as a form of behavioural response which is also learned. In other words, self awareness, which is so taken for granted in our own life, is passed to us as a learned response by the humans who are our role models and mentors. Selfhood is not genetically given, it is a behavioural response.
The story of Imo the macaque mentioned earlier helps us imagine a possible first scene for the emergence of self awareness in the human species.
There must have been a gradual development of the complexity of language bringing the pre–human to the point where self awareness was ready to emerge, but hadn’t quite been realised. Then, perhaps an event or a particular situation in the life of the pre–human triggered the new awareness. Suddenly the pre–human was self aware and stepped into human experience.
This must have been a momentous experience for the individual or individuals it occurred to. If compared with the descriptions of people in our present times who achieve a new state of awareness such as Maurice Bucke describes in his book Cosmic Consciousness, it was probably a ‘religious’ experience – something appearing to have been visited upon the individual from a power exterior to them. In such cases the experience, the new state of awareness, usually only lasts a short time, but may become more prolonged as the individual is further exposed to it. One might even speculate that just as animals will repeat an action that provides food or pleasure, so the experience of self awareness in early pre–humans may have led to ritual performance of actions, or the re–creation of circumstances, that were part of the first experience. These I imagine as the roots of religious ritual. I believe such achievement of a new type of awareness by certain individuals is also behind traditions such as yoga and Sufism. This can be observed in particular in Subud in which one individual experienced what he was certain was a new experience and passed it on to others through contact. In his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes gives a detailed historical perspective of these beginnings in the not so distant past.
The following dream of Joan C. illustrates and further describes the collective life of early humans, and the experience of developing from it to self awareness. Joan’s work on the dream provides us with another example of the information possible to gain through the eye of dreams.
In my dream I was in the garden of a large house. To the right of the house, my right that is, I saw the garden had been changed. I realised that I knew the garden from childhood, and there used to be a large pool by the house in which we all bathed when young. The ground sloped up from the house and was rough, but part of it had been dug over. The care and skill with which this had been done deeply impressed me.
There were no direct associations I could make with the house or the pond, so I started allowing spontaneous material to enter into the dream, allowing my mind to roam freely and show me out of what images and feelings the dream had been fashioned.
I started with the pond, and had the most unexpected set of fantasies and feelings bubble up from within. The garden when we were children referred to a condition of mind, which I now experienced, in which a group shared a common awareness, and felt at one with their environment. In other words there was no separate identity. No one in the group knew themselves as an individual. I knew as I experienced this that it was about the early condition of human beings, and was represented in the Bible as the Garden of Eden. It was about the history of our development as human beings. It showed me that in the early stages of evolution all human beings lived in a state of awareness in which they had no sense of separation from nature itself. They had no sense of individual existence either, but lived in a sort of paradise where there was no idea of birth or death or right or wrong. They felt at one with each other in their small groups and with the forces of nature.
When I experienced this I understood at last what the story of Genesis meant. It was about stages of psychological development, not physical or mythical history. Humans had come out of the pool though, out of the collective awareness, and at that point I experienced a mass of impressions and images I still cannot completely understand. The images suggested that at first, maybe one or two humans climbed out of that pool, and they left a mark. They climbed out and put one stone on top of another. The images developed further into suggesting that many ancient monuments were an expression of this enormous sense of the newly found identity – of personal existence.
I understood this to mean that one or two humans had achieved personal identity. In that state they realised something about themselves – they could say ‘I am’. They could ask ‘Who am I?’ That had never been possible before.
I need to say what arose in me were not those words or memory or vision of definite events, but a sense of touching or experiencing an overall memory, a vast overall process. So I am trying to put into words what I sensed. It was such a wonderful thing, so full of experience, to see this that I want to try to describe it. At the same time, it was an immense process and difficult to capture.
What I felt was that the pool was a collective consciousness such as Jung speaks of, and that it still exists now in our unconscious. At the early stages of human development though, it was the everyday experience, but the individuals who attained self awareness began to build a new type of life. They left stone monuments, carvings, paintings in caves, stone circles, pyramids; each person, each group realising deep down that this new level of awareness was a thing to be given and built. The Sphinx is an image of this half way state of human and animal.
This is where words are difficult, but the dug ground in the dream depicts it. If the son of a farmer takes over the farm, his work and achievement are built upon what his father did with the land. The father’s work is built upon by the son, and is a continuation, of what his father did. Even if one was to take a piece of land which had never been farmed before, one would farm it with tools, experience and attitudes developed gradually through thousands of years of human effort. I saw that I, although I am not usually aware of it, am formed out of the ideas, words, attitudes, pleasure and pain left to me as a heritage by millions of people. If I had not been raised by modern humans I would, in fact, not have developed an identity. My identity is a gift to me from the great river of human beings who left a mark, one stone on top of another, a concept enshrined in art, a struggle or love immortalised in stone, a realisation and transcendence depicted in a religious ritual or in a new word.
The garden, the dug plot was myself, my personality. But my personality, the attitudes and reactions of its very foundations and structure, the words with which my mind realises its existence, are the living remains of countless other lives and their endeavour, their love, their ignoble failure, their genius and their prayers. I AM my ancestors. That I have also dug that plot by my work on my dreams, by trying to transform the unwieldy loam of myself into finer stuff, gives me a place in the river of life, in the eternal process of continuity.
Most important of all, perhaps, in such simple acts as writing out this dream, I leave a mark. I etch upon the world the sign of my own realisation, the changed lines of transformation. For self consciousness is a sort of collective consciousness which forever depends upon giving, and upon physical records of living beings to enshrine its existence. Without living beings who carry the words and responses gradually developed by myriad ancestors; without books, paintings, music, science and architecture, we have no existence as people. In one generation we could be swallowed up by that pool, that sea of self–forgetting symbolised by the waters that swallowed Noah’s contemporaries. Even now, without the love of giving, that sea can swallow us. That was my dream.
Joan’s description further illustrates how our mind, approached in the right way, can pour out realisations and insights that are deeply educational. It is a form of outpouring and mental function that few of us are ever taught to look to or use in our schooling. But it IS a common experience in the sense of it being described in all the cultures throughout history. It IS accessible.
Joan and Ron’s descriptions taken together also say that there is a function in the human mind that takes external information, such as language, behaviour and architecture, and treats it like a code. Perhaps if the example of the printed word is used this makes it easier to understand. A book might be a couple of hundred years old. A baby who grows and is taught the language of the book can eventually read it. As it is being read, what was a physical object unfolds in the child huge amounts of information and imagery. Perhaps it moves the child emotionally also. It may even explain aspects of their own existence they knew nothing about before.
That is not an exact analogy, but Ron and Joan suggest that the external objects of culture we see around us and take for granted, actually produce in us the release of a massive amount of information and deeply felt experience. Most often however, we fail to appreciate this as it is covered, or obscured by the dominant sensory impressions and taught responses, as already described.
When it is appreciated and released, the result is probably due to a complex interaction between genetically produced inclinations, the environment, and culturally provided education, plus an up–welling of unconscious material from the ocean of information we all live within. This fuller understanding of our cultural environment is probably necessary for optimum survival, but is not necessary to become a conscious individual stumbling along through life.
The View So Far
Looking through the eye of dreams and human experience, such as Ron and Joan’s dream–work and the account of Helen Keller, a situation is described stating that our personal identity rests on –
- The passage of behavioural traits from adults to the new born.
- The learning of language.
- The interaction between people affirming personal identity.
- A collective consciousness. This is created physically by the written and spoken word, but also by all other works of humanity such as music, art, architecture, and of course social structure. Its fundamental base is living human beings who have learned language and carry ancestral behavioural traits. In a sense, the enormity of who we are is external to us and our body and brain are decoding instruments.
- The collective consciousness is a code that can come to life in the individual. Only the cultural environment plus the personal response to it make a whole.
- A collective unconscious is the source of our personal existence.
The Collective Unconscious
Some thinkers, like Jung and Sheldrake, see individual human consciousness like an island in a huge ocean in which there are countless other islands. Above the surface of the water – waking self-awareness – there is a sense of separate existence, with definite boundaries where the shore meets the sea. Beneath the surface however, one island is connected to all other islands. The land stretches away under the waves and rises here and there into other islands. So, it is thought, personal awareness, beneath our everyday consciousness, shades off into a connection with a collective unconscious we all share. Through this connection we may be able to arrive at insights into other people otherwise denied to us.
In recent years there has been a lot of research very strongly suggesting that the quantum level of the universe is such a universal memory and consciousness. See Physics – new physics and the mind
Jung describes the collective unconscious as the ‘inherited potentialities of human imagination. It is the all controlling deposit of ancestral experiences from untold millions of years, the echo of prehistoric world events to which each century adds an infinitesimal small amount of variation and differentiation. These primordial images are the most ancient, universal, and deep thoughts of mankind.’
However, such ideas have been stated long before Jung and modern psychology. Eastern philosophy has talked of the akasha, the fundamental substance that holds in it memory of all that has happened. In Western occultism levels of awareness have been defined for hundreds of years. At the end of the 19th century Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke wrote about Cosmic Consciousness that was described as having the same universality as the collective unconscious.
A lucid experience describes this very clearly:
Now it seemed as if my awareness went beyond the frontier. This was a very visual experience. I was seeing a vast desert and I knew this represented immense periods of time, perhaps what we call eternity. So it could be called the Desert of Eternity. Here and there in the desert were huge rock formations, a little bit like what one sees in Monument Valley in Arizona. But these rock formations were not plain or slightly coloured rock. Also they were immense. They had the appearance of massive mosaics – brightly coloured mosaics. But the mosaics did not form illustrations or patterns. However, some pieces of the mosaics were larger than others. And each piece might be in itself multicoloured and a sort of miniature pictograph.
As I looked at these massive formations I understood that they had been carved or created through events in the passage of time. Each mosaic, each part of the overall mosaic, had been formed by enormous creative acts, or by long-standing actions. So these latter were like ideograms or archetypes. So, for instance, mother creatures have cared for, fought for, died for their young. This pattern of behaviour has been so enormously potent and perhaps we can use the word successful, that it has created, shaped aspects of eternity. It has left its pattern, its artwork, on time itself. Thus eternity honours that pattern by giving it a place in the very structure of itself. No one being created such a mosaic in the formations. Such a mosaic was large and had in it the essence of all the lives that formed it.
So the rock formations and the mosaics on them represented influences that will flow into the future. They were sources of power or influence that shaped the phenomenal world. They were the body under the coat so to speak. See Archetypes – Links to
This explains some forms of intuition, as one person’s mind is said to connect to all others beneath the surface in the unconscious. In this way, questions or inquiry about a particular person will draw information pertaining to them from the enormous collective unconscious. In fact Einstein said that “Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust – we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper”. So our individual consciousness is rather an outcrop of a huge and ancient collective consciousness.
Edgar Cayce discovered in his adulthood, that he could put himself at will into the state of mind in which he could tap this unconscious reservoir of knowledge. Because he could diagnose people’s illness without examining them, his work was supported by doctors. Investigators of psychology and philosophy also sought him, and he dictated 14 million words while in this state of wider awareness. His findings suggest that we all have this ability to tap the wealth of unconscious information – truly a collective unconscious – but few of us can bring it to waking awareness. His biography, There is a River, and Seer Out of Season, are astonishing and inspiring books to read. See: Edgar Cayce.
We see this markedly in animals that are largely instinctive. Birds have no present memory of how to fly or build a nest, yet when the time comes they draw on something that enables them to express the collective experience of their species.
I am a Child of the Universe
If this connection is a fundamental part of everybody’s life, the waters of self and the waters of the ocean are not separated. Jung called this universal consciousness the collective unconscious. Other cultures have given it other names – the ocean of Brahm for instance in Hinduism. Within Buddhism there is also the phrase, ‘the dewdrop slips into the shining sea’. Australian Aborigines call it The Dreamtime.
The image of the dewdrop slipping into the ocean illustrates the individual becoming aware of melting the boundaries of their personal awareness, and becoming aware of the ocean of sentience within which they exist.
When we first begin to ‘hear the voice of God’ again – i.e. feel the immense power of the collective unconscious, the foundation of our awareness – we are often afraid, even terrified, as the story of Adam and Eve depicts. The fear arises because whether we admit it or not, we feel we might be swallowed up, be lost in the immensity. Basically it is a fear of death. See What Happens When I Die?
Reaching the shore of consciousness
Looking back at the psychological history of humanity, at their emergence of identity out of an animal level of awareness, all consciousness was originally merged, as it were, in a great ocean or pool. At that point no creature had crawled out of that pool. Nothing had arrived at self-awareness. No sense of separateness or identity had emerged. Then out of that ocean onto the shore of self-awareness, perhaps for moments only at first, a daring creature crawled and said – ‘I am’. Doing so they left a mark – footprints, two stones rolled together, scratches on a rock, a cave painting. And those creatures still in the ocean looked out upon others and wondered, until a spark was struck in them too. Perhaps struggling for a closer view they emerged and gasping also exclaimed – I am – and added another rock.
So the ocean is the world of sleep, babyhood, life of the nameless herd, consciousness immersed completely in the streams of instinct, reproduction, eating, sleeping and the senses, the collective unconsciousness. But the shore is the pathway of consciousness, the spoken word, art, drama, music, education and questioning enquiry. We all take this path if today we can say ‘I am’! We too, in our infancy, emerged from the collective consciousness. We too were gained a soul, an identity, when we were given a name and speech. You too stepped out of the great waters of life – and will meet them again at death. See Programmed
As already quoted, Jung describes this as the ‘inherited potentialities of human imagination. It is the all controlling deposit of ancestral experiences from untold millions of years, the echo of prehistoric world events to which each century adds an infinitesimal small amount of variation and differentiation. These primordial images are the most ancient, universal, and deep thoughts of mankind.’
What this means in practical terms is that through our dreams, or through any of the ways people access this immense reservoir of human experience, we can find patterns of behaviour – archetypes – and whole memories of people who have lived through and found solutions to the problems we face, or defined the understanding we are seeking. Also, Cayce found actual details of medicines and techniques that had been used successfully in the past and were part of the memory within the collective unconscious.
In trying to present this to sceptical colleagues and intellectuals and scientists of his time, Jung tried to explain his observation of a strata of being in which individual minds have their collective origin in a genetic way. This seems unlikely, and Rupert Sheldrake sees it as a mental phenomena. Dr Maurice Bucke called it Cosmic Consciousness. J. B. Priestley saw it as ‘the flame of life’ which synthesised the experience of all living things and held within itself the essentials of all lives. If we think of it as a vast collective memory of all that has existed, then we can say the life of Edgar Cayce exhibited a working relationship with it.
Such a collective level of mind would explain many things, such as telepathy, so called out of body experiences, life after death, which have always been puzzling because it is difficult to explain them using presently known beliefs. Mostly this difficulty has been because our language and the concepts arising from it insist of a duality of mind and body. However, researches into the nature of fundamental particles – quantum – show us that such divisions do not exist, except in our limited sensory view of the world.
For more information See: Quantum Physics; Levels of Awareness – Levels of the Brain – Consciousness – The Brain Mind Split; Cayce, Edgar; archetype of the self; religion and dreams; sea; Dimensions of Human Experience
Australian Aborigine Dream Beliefs
The Australian native peoples are divided into more than 500 tribal groups. These tribes are also of two major types – those who live inland, and those who live along the coastline. The separation of tribes and the division provided by the environment led to differences in views about the nature of human life and death, and the part dreams played. But some beliefs, such as reincarnation and the ‘Dreamtime’, were universally held.
Dreamtime refers to an experience and to beliefs that are largely peculiar to the Australian native people. There are at least four aspects to Dreamtime – The beginning of all things; the life and influence of the ancestors; the way of life and death; and sources of power in life.
Dreamtime includes all of these four facets at the same time, being a condition beyond time and space as known in everyday life. The aborigines call it the ‘all-at-once’ time instead of the ‘one-thing-after-another’ time. This is because they experience Dreamtime as the past present and future coexisting. This condition – See: altered states of consciousness – is met when the tribal member lives according to tribal rules, and then is initiated through rituals and hearing the myths of the tribe.
Although Dreamtime may sound rather mystical or mysterious to the Western mind, the experience is based on understandable and observable facts of social and mental life which are unfortunately little valued in Western society. For instance the present is observably the result of past actions or events. Present society is particularly the result of past great men and women and their – heroic – deeds. For the Australian native peoples, as with many other ancient races, the heroic deeds of past ancestors were remembered with great veneration. It was seen that all present life, and even the personal skills and character of tribal members, arose out of the life of the ancestors. The ancestors, their deeds, and what arise from them into the life of the tribe in the present, are all held in the Dreamtime beyond the shifting events of things happening one-after-the-other.
The aborigine people believed that each person had a part of their nature that was eternal. This eternal being pre-existed the life of the individual, and only became a living person through being born to a mother. The person then lived a life in time, and at death melted back into the eternal life. See Archetype of the Big Bang
In writing about the state of mind – the mental world – of early races, J. B. Priestley – in Man and Time – says that if we are to properly understand the ancient peoples we must never project onto them our own state of mind and rational thought. Studies have shown that ancient people experienced what is called an undifferentiated state of mind. Their sense of being a separate and independent person was much less than is commonly experienced in modern life. They did not separate their religious life, their social life, their economic life, their artistic life and their sexual life from each other. This is obvious to even a casual observation of such societies, or even third world cultures, where religion and eating, and work are all very much connected. To be banished from the tribe was tantamount to death for primitive individuals, so deeply were they identified in psychological and practical ways to the rest of the tribe. But it is not an unusual thing for a modern man or woman to leave their place of birth, their family or their country, and live abroad. Such simple facts illustrate the deep divide between the modern and ancient state of mind.
If we remember our early childhood, with the absence of an awareness of passing time, the fullness of each day, the eternity of a week or a month, the enormous and unquestioned – if still untraumatised – sense of connection with our family, then we will have an idea of the mental world of the older races. For the aborigine these facts of their life were tangible realities, known through their inner experience in dreams and waking visions. Prior to the development of the reasoning and questioning mind, people did not consider things by thinking about them in neat ideas and definitions. Like the parables in the Bible or Aesop’s fables, which say so much, but do so with images and through the relationship of one thing or person with another, early human beings thought in pictures or dream like images. So the aborigine would meet the influence of the ancestors in their life as an actual visionary person, rather than thoughts about tribal history. With the visionary meeting would come deep feelings and insights, making it a real educational experience. This is exactly how dreams express, and in this manner most creative or problem solving ‘thinking’ was done by ancient peoples. Therefore the entrance into dreams, or into a condition in which the imagery of dreaming could function while awake, as in visions or altered states of consciousness, was important for the aborigine. Common ways of accessing this state of mind were through ritual or initiation rites. In this way enormous learning experiences could be met, a sense of complete identification with ancestors and tribal history achieved, and personal change or growth accomplished.
This condition of mind or being in which time is ‘all-at-once’ and the past is felt as intensely close as the present, is a natural and fundamental state. It is what the baby experiences in the womb prior to the separation at birth and the development of concepts through the learning of language. So the rituals which enable the aborigine to return to the womb of all time and existence enables them to feel connected once more to all nature, to all their ancestors, and to their own personal meaning and place within the scheme of things. The Dreamtime is a return to the real existence for the aborigine. Life in time is simply a passing phase – a gap in eternity. It has a beginning and it has an end. The life in Dreamtime has no beginning and no end.
The experience of Dreamtime, whether through ritual or from dreams, flowed through into the life in time in practical ways. The individual who enters the Dreamtime feels no separation between themselves and their ancestors. The strengths and resources of the timeless enter into what is needed in the life of the present. The future is less uncertain because the individual feels their life as a continuum linking past and future in unbroken connection. Through Dreamtime the limiatations of time and space are overcome. It is a much observed feature of aboriginal life that knowledge of distant relatives and their condition is frequently displayed. Therefore if a relative is ill, a distant family member knows this and hurries to them. Often the intuitive knowledge of herbal medicine is gained also.
For the aborigine tribes, there is no ending of life at ‘death’. Dead relatives are very much a part of continuing life. It is believed that in dreams dead relatives communicate their presence. At times they may bring healing if the dreamer is in pain. Death is seen as part of a cycle of life in which one emerges from Dreamtime through birth, and eventually returns to the timeless, only to emerge again. It is also a common belief that a person leaves their body during sleep, and temporarily enters the Dreamtime.
The aboriginal tribes are connected with their local landscape in a way that perhaps no other race of recent times is. The landscape is almost an externalisation of the individual’s inner world. Each tribe had a traditional area of the land which was theirs alone, and it was believed that in the Dreamtime the ancestors shaped the flat landscape into its present features. Each feature was in some way an act of the ancestors, and therefore the tribe. Like many tribal peoples, the Australian native people were deeply dependent upon their beliefs, the landscape and their inner life for their identity and strength. This makes them vulnerable to anything which disrupts their beliefs, although, apart from such vulnerability, they have a greater psychic sense of wholeness and identity with their tribe and environment than is common in Western individuals.
See the feature Spirit-Child: The Aboriginal Experience of Pre-Birth Communication.
Archetypes
A page with all Archetypes listed.
Although the word archetype has a long history, Carl Jung used it to express something specific he observed in human nature. He said the archetypes are a tendency or instinctive trend in the human unconscious to express certain motifs or themes. These themes, such as death and rebirth are found throughout history and present day cultures. Jung saw them as universal, and as existing innately within what he called the collective unconscious. They are particularly apparent in religious beliefs, in literature and in the arts.
One of the important features of archetypes is they are not learned behaviour, but behaviour that is in some way innate, or unconsciously formulated or absorbed. For instance while walking near a sea-front with my wife, we saw a small boy running frantically and crying. It was near a road, so I picked him up in case he ran blindly in front of a car. As I held him his legs were still moving as if he were running. He had lost his mother and was completely panicked. As I held him I could hear his mother calling for him. I shouted back and she came and collected him, assuring him of her care.
The child did not have to learn how to feel afraid if he was separated from his parents. He didn’t have to be taught how to feel terror and to do all he could to regain contact. It is a universal response for children to feel emotional pain at the loss of a parent, and to do all they can physically or symbolically, to re-establish contact. You could say the boy was experiencing archetypical behaviour. This innate behaviour has probably arisen out of millions of years during which to be separated from ones parents or group meant probable death.
This bonding behaviour is common to most mammals, and is an example of archetypal responses. The urge to find a partner and reproduce is also an archetype, as is nest or home building, caring for young, and the urge to gain respect within ones social group. We each have an innate urge toward wholeness in some form, and toward the emergence and flowering of our own being. We each face such experiences, along with birth and death, in one way or another, in common with all other human beings past or present. The enormity of such experiences in our life are often expressed in themes of art, myths, or symbols such as the mandala, the cross, sunrise and sunset. The little boy’s loss of his parents and the enormity of what he felt is seen in many folk tales such as Babes in the Wood. Such symbols and stories remind us in some degree of the mystery involved in the fact that not only are we as an individual sharing the experience of being a man or woman, but this has happened to people since the beginning of the human race, and will continue after our life has ended. So although our life is a personal event, it is also part of an inconceivably immense continuum. Our personal life plays out themes or patterns which have been lived and added to thousands or millions of times before.
It is this collective experience which can be considered as the archetype. For instance if we could superimpose all the male faces, and all the female faces, of everyone alive today in two separate images, the resulting images would be the graphic archetype of a human male and a human female. The images would include all the features, all the racial types, all degrees of intelligence and honour. In terms of such experiences as puberty, marriage and death, the collective human experience creates such an archetype. The difficult question is how?
But it must be understood that the archetypes are all originated by human responses and behaviour – or at least by the behaviour of life forms on this planet. The holy, the devilish are all expressions of ourselves which we project as outer figures.
Jung differentiated between instincts and archetypes however. Although both are universal potentialities within us, the instincts are inherited tendencies toward behaviour, such as sex and the flight or fight response. An archetype Jung said is an inherited tendency toward certain mental or feeling responses. For instance the myth of the hero/heroine or saviour figure is world-wide and in all cultures. Because Jung believed that dreams frequently express the archetypal tendencies within the individual, he often turned to myths, fairy stories or religious motifs, to illustrate the contents of a dream. Seeing such themes arise in the dreams of people who had not studied world religions or mythology, Jung believed that far from religious and mythological stories having been consciously invented by historical authors, they had arisen directly from the unconscious in dreams or visions, and had simply been reported. Anyone who has spent time exploring the depths of their own dreams will find sympathy with and proof of this view. But as such they are still arising from human experience, but one which originates in the unconscious ability to have an overview of human experience and provides images of its findings
However, there is another important way of considering archetypes. It is that certain processes in nature and therefore in human life, reflect processes that are part of the very foundation of cosmic functioning. For instance stars are born from the death of other stars and solar systems. Birth follows death. Resurrection and new life arises out of cataclysmic destruction. Also, the very structure of our universe, as understood in quantum physics, shows how the immanent, the here and now, the limited and the physically real, is at the same time one and the same as the timeless and transcendent.
The personal experience of being a woman or man, of birth, childhood and death, are all expressions of cosmic processes, and can be understood much more deeply when seen as such. These archetypal patterns are true not only in cosmic events, but also in the most minute of human affairs.
Another way of understanding an archetype and how it came about is to consider something like a house. The earliest of human types erected shelters when these were needed. Some of the apes did the same. Over the millennia since those early beginnings people have seen what was done in the past and developed it. The old types of houses are still built around the central essence of what those early house builders had in mind. But now the house as a general object is an immense range of possibilities built around a central and ancient human and animal behaviour. This essence of house, this immense collection of behaviours humans have gradually developed around house construction is an archetype. It is an essence of all the behaviours employed in building a house. It is a deeply buried pattern of racial and cultural memory. It influences current house builders just as it influenced ancient ancestors. It is also a living thing, constantly absorbing whatever is new and being a source of creativity an influence in present individuals.
An expression of these archetypal forces lies at the heart of all major religions. As Barbara Sproul points out in her book Primal Myths, we unfortunately confuse a mythological account of an archetypal pattern with an historical account. Or we look at the mythologies of the past and see them as statements of ignorance, instead of wonderful summaries of insight into these great patterns of human behaviour, thought and feelings that pervade our life.
We see this wisdom and shrewd summary of insight in the pantheon of gods and goddesses some ancient cultures erected. Many of these gods were expressions of archetypal themes, such as death, rebirth, and womanhood. In other words, behaviour or experience repeated times beyond count. A sheep dog has in itself a greater propensity to herd animals under direction than many other dog breeds. Through rituals and worship of the gods, perhaps ancient people touched similar reservoirs of strength and healing innate in themselves, buried there by the immense number of lives that left traces of genius, or persistence against odds, of curiosity or love. Without such, the individual might find it more difficult to face the fact that death waits at the end of life, or to allow sexuality to emerge into their life at puberty. From the collective experience could arise ways of dealing with problems, or strengths, that did not reside directly in the person’s conscious personality. The negative side of this is that occasionally a person completely identifies with an archetype. For instance one may meet the archetype of Christ and come to believe that one is now the incarnation of Christ and ones mission is saviour of the world. Such powerful identifications cause dangerous alienation from a down to earth relationship with people and life. In some cultures, such as India, this may not be to harmful, in that other people may accept the identification and see the person as a guru or divine incarnation.
Another way of looking at this is of seeing that as our body and human personality are expressions of forces and processes in nature – archetypal forces and processes – we have within us enormous reserves of strength, creativity and survival. When faced by difficulties or crisis in life, turning to these reserves brings much greater power to our life than if we face them with our own limited conscious resources.
A girl suffering from anorexia told me a dream in which she was cutting off her own breasts with scissors. It takes little imagination to see the dream as portraying the development of her sexual traits – her breasts – and depicts her trying to rid herself of them. Perhaps she ‘cuts them off’ by not eating, and thus not giving her body and psyche enough energy and nourishment to mature. In the past, it would have been recommended that she give offerings to a goddess, thus aligning her with the unconscious archetype or power to become a woman. Such methods were the form of psychotherapy used by ancient cultures.
Jung’s theory of the archetypes has never been generally accepted, perhaps because it is difficult to test objectively. In more recent years however, through the tremendously amplified access to the unconscious made possible in psychiatry through such drugs as LSD, a lot more information about unconscious imagery has been made available. From this it seems possible that certain synthesising aspects of the mind produce images to represent huge areas of personal experience, i.e. the Mystic Mother or Madonna representing our accumulated positive experience of our mother, as well as the fundamental female processes seen in the fertility of the earth; and the witch as representing the frightening and negative aspect. These symbols, already presented to us outwardly through our cultural art and religious images, appear to become focal points for personal experience and realisations to crystallise around, often with enormous emotional power. Also, language and literature themselves present immense variety about all aspects of human existence and how we can usefully meet it. Each of these inputs can add to personal experience, understanding, and feelings. These cultural inputs influence our relationship with hugely important aspects of our life, such as marriage, childbirth and social relationship. Also, the fundamental processes of nature that are involved in marriage and giving birth, as seen in the unity of the sun’s energy, allied with the earth’s fertility, bringing forth life, lie behind all our human experiences.
The propensity for human beings of widely separated cultures, language, age, or gender, to meet with the same symbols in their dreams, fantasies or religious feelings suggests, not necessarily a collective unconscious, but certainly an innate sensing of collective human experience, and a meeting with the forces of the cosmos active in us. Because the mass of experience we hold, or live within, is largely unconscious, it does seem likely that when we are unguarded in our sleep, or at times of stress or heightened feelings, the themes and images connected with archetypal experience would emerge. At such times our dreams depict aspects of our individual relationship with this collective human experience, with Life itself, or what we have harvested from it. Such dreams suggest that the essence of all experience is somehow available to us, and that we are directly part of the huge processes of the cosmos.
For instance if a married woman with two children falls in love with a man outside of her marriage, and her family and cultural values stress the wrongness of such feelings, she is likely to experience enormous conflict. This conflict could lead to depression, withdrawal or suicide. But in the end what she is struggling with is the opposition between personal drives – her love for the man – and her cultural and family standards. If we look at the way men and women live and survive throughout the world, then such standards appear purely local. They are not innate. So underlying the ‘local’ customs she is trying to honour but is in conflict with, exists a human potential for many different ways of dealing with love and attraction. This enormous human potential is one of the archetypes, and is represented by light, a holy figure such as Christ, or a sparkling ocean. To consciously meet this archetype could reduce or remove the conflict.
Our largely unconscious connection with the massive potential that we hold within, and our direct existence within the warp and woof of cosmic and natural forces, forms a dynamic ever moving and developing process that our conscious and apparently independent personality interacts with. This is much like our relationship with language, which existed prior to our birth, and which we only use and become a living expression of during our short lives. Language is a reservoir of past thought and endeavour, a huge and wondrous living force which holds in it the essence of all great lives and thoughts. Within language can be found as much history as can ever be found by archaeological digs. From it we gain personal self awareness and interpersonal communication. We may add to it and use it, but it is never limited to our personal self. In fact much of our meeting with collective human experience may be a meeting with language and all it conveys and produces in us.
If we could become conscious of an entire language, we would see how we and the language we use has emerged out of an immense history, an amalgamation of all human experience, constantly shifting. We would have a vision of the extraordinary mind, love, pain, and multifaceted nature of human life. This would be a god-like experience. It is perhaps the sense of such huge and real reservoirs of human experience that we sense unconsciously, and erect a god or archetypal image around.
The simplest definition of the archetypes is that they are symbols of our own enormous potential. In particular they depict potential that still remains unconscious, and the details of archetypal dreams shows us how we are relating to that potential.
But a simple way of thinking about an archetype is to consider what your reaction to the idea of death is. Whatever your response is, such as dread, avoidance of thinking about it, desire for it, you may consider it to be very personal. But your response is typical of millions of other human beings. It is also coloured and even promoted by the culture in which you live, the literature and art of your culture, or that you have been exposed to. Such collective human responses to the major life situation we face, are therefore archetypes – patterns of behaviour laid down and deepened by millions of human lives.
Whatever may be the explanation of these archetypal images and intuitions, they are important because they give us a sense of how we as an individual, and human beings collectively, have been able to develop our identity amidst enormous forces of unconsciousness, collectivity and external stresses. They depict graphically the universal levels of experience out of which our personal self is woven. They also give some personal experience of how at some level of our being we are intricately intermeshed with all creatures, with all the cosmos. This is no longer simply an imaginative or mystical idea. It is also one which is expressed by scientific thinkers such as Bohm, who says ‘Deep down the consciousness of mankind is one.’ See: collective unconscious.
The following gives a vivid example of a potently archetypal dream, which in its drama gives C. A. an immediate experience of his conscious personality being part of something vaster and more ancient. The dream has in it a number of archetypal symbols – the star; light; the female; marriage or unity; and the eternal circle of life.
Example: Before I went to sleep that night I focused on the question – Who am I, really?
The dream was vivid, and still gives me shivers to this day. I dreamed that I looked up and there was this incredible star that was emanating points of light in the sky. It got brighter and brighter and the bottom-most point reached down to where I was and transported me up to the star. The points of light came out from the centre in all directions, and I found myself on the end of one of the horizontal points. A wonderful (female) voice spoke to me and said this is who you are, and I had the strong sense of being located at the end of the horizontal light bar. Then she said and this is who you are and carried (transported in some way) me to the next bar of light, where I saw another version (incarnation?) of myself (in a different time and place, although I knew that the essence of this version of me was really me). She continued transporting me from bar to bar where I experienced myself in many different versions in the past, present, and future. I had different skills and interests that were the focal point of each version of myself–a musician in one, a farmer in another. Some of the versions were females, although I experienced the same sense of self in all of them. Then she returned me to the horizontal bar of my current self and said to me that all of this is who I am, but that now she was going to show me who I really am. Then she drew me into the centre of the star (light, energy source) where I merged with her and could see each of the emanating points of light as manifestations of a single source or spirit. It was one of the most incredible feelings of being integrated and whole that I’ve ever experienced, and I basked in the feeling for a while just absorbing and soaking it in. Then she returned me to myself (with a cosmic wink) and I slept peacefully for the rest of the night. Ever since then I haven’t felt the need to ask who or what I am, and I’ve seen my various abilities and struggles in life in a totally new way. C.A.
When considering any of the archetypal forces that act on our psyche, it needs to be remembered that there is never a single way of relating to them. It is helpful to use Hubbard’s concept of the panther on the stairs to identify the different ways we can relate to an archetype. For instance, if there were a black panther on the stairs of our house, there are several ways we could relate to it. We could attack it, flee from it, avoid it, ignore/neglect it (for instance by making out it wasn’t really there), succumb to it, or we might even make friends with it, or learn from it through observing it.
Similarly, with one of the most powerful of archetypal confrontations we can face, that of death, we might relate to it in a particular way. Perhaps we run from the image in our dreams, or even make out it isn’t there. It is therefore worth remembering that whatever stance we find ourselves in, there ARE other possibilities.
What is the difference between a normal dream symbol and an archetype?
If you begin to explore your feelings and associations with an archetype it starts to take you beyond what you personally have previously known and experienced. The archetype is a pattern or influence in a level of consciousness that, while it is a deeper level of your own being, yet is at the same time a collective pattern formed by many human beings or even animals. It is often full of collective wisdom and energy, both positive and negative, depending upon how you relate to it. In the original Greek and Roman the word referred to a template, mould, copy, pattern or model. So there could be an archetype of the human body. Such an archetype would not look like any one person or gender, but include all forms, all types of human body. In the way it is used here it refers to this type of fundamental and inclusive pattern formed by immense numbers of human actions and responses to particular life situations or environments. Being such huge sources of influence we as an individual can draw from them particular needs or energy.
Example: Now it seemed as if my awareness went beyond the frontier. This was a very visual experience. I was seeing a vast desert and I knew this represented immense periods of time, perhaps what we call eternity. So it could be called the Desert of Eternity. Here and there in the desert were huge rock formations, a little bit like what one sees in Monument Valley in Arizona. But these rock formations were not plain or slightly coloured rock. Also they were immense. They had the appearance of massive mosaics – brightly coloured mosaics. But the mosaics did not form illustrations or patterns. However, some pieces of the mosaics were larger than others. And each piece might be in itself multicoloured and a sort of miniature pictograph.
As I looked at these massive formations I understood that they had been carved or created through events in the passage of time. Each mosaic, each part of the overall mosaic, had been formed by enormous creative acts, or by long-standing actions. So these latter were like ideograms or archetypes. So, for instance, mother creatures have cared for, fought for, died for their young. This pattern of behaviour has been so enormously potent and perhaps we can use the word successful, that it has created, shaped aspects of eternity. It has left its pattern, its artwork, on time itself. Thus eternity honours that pattern by giving it a place in the very structure of itself. No one being created such a mosaic in the formations. Such a mosaic was large and had in it the essence of all the lives that formed it.
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So the rock formations and the mosaics on them represented influences that will flow into the future. They were sources of power or influence that shaped the phenomenal world. They were the body under the coat so to speak. |
Am I more influenced by certain archetypes more than others?
You probably are, and reading through the descriptions and questions below may help you define what patterns you link with most strongly.
Can I change the way archetypes influence me?
All of us live in a powerful archetype called a paradigm. Other words meaning something similar are groupthink, mindset and worldview. For instance during the 19th century the common paradigm or world view was that described by the physics of the time. It seemed to know all the answers, saw the atom as the fundamental form of matter, and thus stated there was nothing beyond the physical form and brain. This led to a view of the world we called materialism. The materialistic viewpoint was a paradigm. So many people lived it and believed it that it had immense influence on individuals, and still does. It more or less created or helped create the way they saw the world and how they related to life events. But in 1906 Max Planck published what has come to be known as his quantum theory. This, with Einstein’s theory or relativity and all that arose from them, revolutionised physics and created a huge paradigm shift; one that is still only slowly entering general personal awareness. From this new paradigm the atom was by no means the fundamental particle, Human observation or consciousness was seen to be a powerful factor in how sub atomic particles manifested.
The point being made is that if you are aware that your world view is most likely formed out of an extant paradigm or world view, and this is a form of archetype, the awareness of this enables you to not be controlled by the archetype and capable of extending or rejecting it.