That which is Immortal in mortals, and possessed of Truth, is a God and established inwardly as an energy working out in our Divine Powers.

Rig Veda IV, 2.1

During the first world war, Carl Jung’s critics were anything but shocked by his apparent descent into madness.

Describing it himself as a period of “psychosis”, he entered a state in which he could induce hallucinations at will. Every night after dinner, he would retire to his study and attempt to access the “unconscious” through methods he extracted from ancient manuscripts and alchemical texts.

What seemed to be an assault on his mind, Jung embraced as an expedition. This thing would communicate with him through audible voices and visions, and he would respond.

Instead of frightening him away, these fantastic experiences would become the catalyst for one of the most far-reaching ideas he ever conceived: an inherited, communal, timeless dimension of the human psyche. His attempt at depicting these primordial encounters in his many journals, often relying on enigmatic symbols and phrases, have since been published in The Red Book.

What Jung encountered during this period convinced him that, out of this shared psychological foundation emerged the images and scenes encountered in our dreams, visions, hallucinations, and other non-ordinary states of consciousness. It contained the rubric for mysticism, mythology and religion. Even the patterns of normal, every day life – everything meaningful to us – could find their origin in this deeper layer of “Mind”, the Nous.

Despite the widespread attempt to completely ignore his theories for many years following his death, this idea, along with the entire body of his work, has re-surged in popular culture through science fiction, spirituality, and even academic science.

Jung achieved a victory that we are still beginning to appreciate.

He referred to this period of his life as his “confrontation with the unconscious”. While a gold-mine for inspiration, it rattled him. It brought him confusion and isolation. He would emerge from this period grateful for the experience, but with a word of caution to his eager students: don’t follow me.

The name Jung would give to this primal force lurking in the heart of every human being, and which almost completely subsumed his own identity, was the collective unconscious.

In this article, we will come to terms with what exactly Jung meant by the “collective unconscious”. We’ll find support for this theory in science, philosophy, history, and anthropology. We’ll examine the language of the collective unconscious, the archetypes; timeless patterns that pervade human history and the cosmos at large. Finally, in the second part, we will get a glimpse of what this vast force is actually making and accomplishing on our “pale blue dot”.

Illustration from Carl Jung’s The Red Book.

When the Gods Collide: Mythology as a Clue

Beneath the canopy of the Amazon rain-forest, the Spanish conquistadors met a ghost. They found it in all the pre-Colombian peoples, in their myths and in their culture. It triggered a vague memory long extinguished in the heart of the West.

It was the spirit of a humanity still swimming in mystery and mysticism.

The Spaniards would find themselves immersed in a living mythology, a religion whose grandiosity rivaled their own Catholicism. Celestial jaguars, eagles, and snakes hovered over indigenous tribes from Mexico through the entire expanse of the Americas.

But European eyes, adjusted to the light from medieval stained-glass, could only see demons.

We are well aware of the horrors inflicted upon the indigenous of the Americas. Massacres, persecutions, forced conversions. The actions of the conquistadors against these people would bare a striking resemblance to how Carl Jung described any unwelcome confrontation with unconscious forces: hostile.

What Christian Europe failed to see was its own reflection. They couldn’t see that Christianity was cut from the same cloth as the religion of the Amazon, and built upon the vital force that erected their own Celtic mythology of old: the collective unconscious itself.

The conviction that there is a separate reality just beyond the limits of perception, from which everything in the universe emanates, runs throughout every culture we have ever found, ancient and modern. No matter which form it has taken, humans everywhere have independently arrived at strikingly similar metaphysical beliefs and religious mythologies.

For Carl Jung, there were no coincidences. The common patterns that emerge again and again in every religion ultimately come from something programmed into the human experience.

“There are present in every individual,” writes Jung, “besides his personal memories, the great primordial images…the inherited possibilities of human imagination as it was from time immemorial. The fact of this inheritance explains the truly amazing phenomenon that certain motifs from myths and legends repeat themselves the world over in identical forms.” (The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious)

The pre-Colombian people had been just as attentive to the ancient voice of the collective unconscious as the rest of the world.

Enki, the Sumerian god of the Seas, “instructs Atrahasis to build a boat in order to rescue his family and other living creatures from the coming deluge. After the seven-day deluge, the flood hero frees a swallow, a raven and a dove in an effort to find if the flood waters have receded. Upon landing, a sacrifice is made to the gods.” Photo Credit: Wikipedia Commons.

“In the Aztec creation myth of the Five Suns, Chalchiuhtlicue presided over the Fourth Sun, or the fourth creation of the world. It is believed that Chalchiuhtlicue retaliated against Tlaloc’s mistreatment of her by releasing 52 years of rain, causing a giant flood which caused the Fourth Sun to be destroyed. She built a bridge linking heaven and earth and those who were in Chalchiuhtlicue’s good graces were allowed to traverse it, while others were turned into fish. Following the flood, the Fifth Sun, the world which we now occupy, developed.” Wikipedia.

“I am going to bring floodwaters on the earth to destroy all life under the heavens, every creature that has the breath of life in it. Everything on earth will perish. But I will establish my covenant with you, and you will enter the ark—you and your sons and your wife and your sons’ wives with you. You are to bring into the ark two of all living creatures, male and female, to keep them alive with you.” Genesis 6: 17-19. Photo Credit: National Geographic.

Here is where Jung leaves academics and scientists, with their revulsion to even appearing to link arms with a percieved mysticism, behind. Their opposition leans heavily on the unfalsifiability of his theory.

How could one possibly conduct an experiment which either proves or disproves the collective unconscious?

How could anyone test whether archetypes exist inherently in human consciousness?

Jung freely expanded the scope of science beyond laboratory walls, and from there derived his answer. With a bird’s eye view he saw not just an aggregate of individuals, but the living history of a single organism of which we are all a part.

The experimental evidence, in the eyes of Jung, had been around for a very, very long time.

His clinical practice of psychoanalysis would support the theory. He observed mythological motifs consistently emerging from the dreams of people who hadn’t any exposure to the ancient legends which they mirrored. Children would recount dreams which could have been easily transposed into ancient Mesopotamian mythologies. And as he buried himself in esoteric manuscripts he seemed to only find stronger support.

He would be convinced that he had all the evidence he could ever need.

It’s not that the ancient Hebrews, Babylonians, Greeks, Celts, and Aztecs trace their roots back to one monolithic religion whose contents had been distorted through a generational game of “telephone”. This falls flat of truly explaining the commonalities between myths that, like European Christianity and the Meso-American nature religions, are separated by mindbogglingly vast distances of time and space.

No. Rather, the fabric out of which every religion and mythology is cut must be weaved into each one of us from the very beginning of our lives. The evidence, for Jung, is jumping out at us; from all the world’s religions, to dreams and the patterns that emerge in daily life.

The psyche is filled with the potential to recognize patterns which, as Jung asserts, couldn’t possibly be only learned. There are just too many patterns, too many intricate similarities for our current notion of natural selection to explain away. They must be, somehow, innately within us. This is the storehouse of the collective unconscious.

We are born with the ability to identify some of the most significant patterns we could ever encounter. Jung called these archetypes, and they are built into human consciousness through inherited symbols.

These symbols are the hieroglyphic language of the collective unconscious, carrying within them all the emotions and sensations they evoke when we are confronted with their archetypal source.

They evolve over time, appearing under the disguise of deities and demons to one generation, and cultural icons, celebrities, and political figures to the next.

It’s this repeated encounter with the same basic pattern, packed in with all the emotions and thoughts they arouse, that etches them deep into the collective unconscious.

The collective unconscious is nothing more than the entire collection of the archetypes.

Through a kind of Darwinian selection, the most useful archetypes are transmitted to the offspring because the ability to recognize them brings evolutionary success. For example, it is far more useful to be able to identify what constitutes an archetypal hero, even if such a pattern is purely constructed from subjective values and opinions, than to inhabit a world of moral ambiguity, where cowardice is as equally valid as courage.

When the force of logic convincingly argues “there is no objective value in the world”, no inherent goodness to something like “heroism”, a retort wells up from deep within us; an instinctive rejection from the collective unconscious.

Because, the entire collection of humans who populate our ancestral history, who continue to live on within the collective unconscious, have overwhelmingly experienced the exact opposite of what logic tells us: there are things which are objectively meaningful. It has been far more useful to the vast majority of our ancestors to be utterly convinced that there are things which have inherent value: archetypes that transcend time, place, and culture.

Such an “illogical” belief ignites the fire of rage in a mother whose child’s life is threatened. It compels a lover to pursue the beloved to the ends of the Earth. It plants firm the feet of a warrior on the battle-line, facing down the enemy. Archetypes, and only the archetypes, inspire the individual to place their own well-being below a higher good.

Those who behaved as if nothing was objectively worth anything simply didn’t last, they hadn’t the advantage of those who were possessed by the archetypal gods.

To live as if there was something out there, somewhere, more meaningful than their own lives inspired our ancestors to take the most important risks they could possibly take. To see one’s own self as some small part of a transcendent narrative was innately useful, however illogical it may seem.

This is the retort of the “two-million-year old self”, the inherited collection of ancestral experiences that exists in each of us. Modernity can keep its precious logic – the ancient survivor within each of us chooses meaning, it chooses life.

These re-occurring patterns, the archetypes, are recognizable to most all of us today precisely because they were deeply meaningful to every ancestor who had encountered them. They studied and worshiped these symbols, and this devotion indeed worked like a kind of prayer, granting them the psychological tools for success. It was the belief in their prayer, the belief in transcendence, which brought about super-natural (archetypal) aid.

The Great Mother, Father, Wise Old Sage, The Hero, The Jester…For Jung, there are literally hundreds of archetypal symbols.

A favorite example of Carl Jung, the Mandala, uses a pattern that appears in the symbology of many human cultures. Jung considered it a symbol of the archetypal Self.

The Dendera Zodiac of Egypt, a map of the cosmos dated to around 50 BCE.

The labyrinth of Chartres Cathedral, early 13th century. Again, characteristically segmented into quadrants as with each of the above examples.

Archetypes, Symbols, and Ancestral Memories

These archetypes contain the lived experiences of countless organisms throughout our entire ancestral lineage, and not just in our homo sapiens past.

There is a primordial survivor who lives in each of us and “remembers” what it was like to encounter the archetypes in each of the lives it has lived, who remembers how to be both hero and sage, king and queen, man and woman.

Even deeper in the psyche is the 140 million year old vertebrate, who remembers our ancient oceanic home, our life scurrying through ancient forests, our oldest predators and pleasures.

“This collective history,” writes Anthony Stephens in The Two-Million-Year Old Self, “is biologically encoded in the collective unconscious, and the code owes its origins so remote as to be shrouded in the primordial mists of evolutionary time.”

The ocean, the sun, the trees…repetitive, generational exposure to significant symbols creates whatever meaning they will contain for our descendants.

But these are still mere symbols, representations of something bigger than themselves. The sting of fangs sinking into the flesh, the creeping burn spreading throughout the body, the look of horror on people’s faces, the realization of an immanent, excruciating death gets wrapped into the symbol of the spider itself, for example, representing the entire experience of this particular kind of horror.

Symbols represent an entire experience, and this entire experience is distilled into an archetype through generational repetition.

But since there are nearly infinite possible variations of any one experience (what it’s like to experience love, for example), there is no perfect symbol which fully encapsulates every aspect of the experience; it would simply be incomprehensible.

We never encounter the archetypes as such. The collective unconscious provides a mental bridge to overcome this infinite distance, between form and matter; a basic, universal pattern that gets modified and personalized in the lives of every individual.

We never encounter masculinity or femininity, or good and evil, as pure abstractions but as represented in tangible things encountered in the real world.

The Wise Old Sage might appear strikingly different to 11th century China than to stone age homo sapiens. Maybe one is an introspective recluse, another powerful and vivacious, still another some combination of both. But whatever is common between them, i.e. wisdom, mental fortitude, perception, etc. is contained within each encounter of the archetype.

The Great Mother archetype could be encountered not only in a physical mother, grandmother, step-mother, etc, but also in places, animals, and physical objects.

That is to say, archetypes are inherited potentials. The basic pattern is filled in by our own unique encounter with the world. In the words of Jung, they become “activated” at various moments in the narrative progression of our own lives.

But how did they get in us?

Where, exactly, do the archetypes and the collective unconscious come from?

Jung’s theory implies a biological transmission, from parent to offspring, of the archetypes of the collective unconscious. They are, as we might say today, epigenetically inherited.

Some years ago, an experiment was conducted in which lab rats were conditioned to fear the smell of acetophenon by pairing a light electric shock to the moments when the scent was wafted around their cage. Remarkably, the offspring of these rats also demonstrated fearful behaviors in its presence, shuddering at the smell.

But this stimulus should have been completely neutral for the offspring, according to our traditional understanding of stimulus-response conditioning, since they had never been exposed to the scent. It was demonstrated to have effects for at least two generations.

There’s been credible speculation that, even in humans, a parent’s stress can influence modifications of the stress receptor hormones in later generations. There’s been similar demonstrations of an inherited predisposition to depression and addiction.

The growing field of epigenetics studies this phenomenon of heritable phenotypic changes, changes that affect gene expression and activity. It implies the biological transmission of the effects of novel molecular changes acquired within the life-time of a parent and passed down to the offspring.

It’s been observed to influence behavior, mental health, cognition, and personality.

Is it a mere coincidence that these are the precise areas in which we see the manifestation of the archetypes most vividly?

Despite the concept of “inherited memory” being often relegated to pseudo-science, some version of the idea is gradually receiving validation through the scientific method. Research has linked both long-term memory formation and learning to reversible epigenetic changes to the hippocampus and cortex of lab rats.

You can almost hear the ghost of Jung shouting of course!

This is deeply connected to what he observed in practice, a conclusion he was forced to accept based on his own encounters with the unconscious. It played out on the largest possible scale: from the movements of planets and stars, to human history and society, to individual lives.

Archetypes literally contain ancestral memories. By transcending the limits of reason, exiting the realm of normal consciousness, we can contact the ancestral spirits that live within ourselves, we can see from their perspective and experience the world as they did. This is the domain of the collective unconscious.

Jung was especially interested in the shamanic traditions, spread across the globe, which profess the ability to commune with their ancestors. He came to believe that this was truly happening in states of ecstasy and visionary experiences.

With the aid of plants, like mescaline and psilocybin mushrooms, through dance, through sensory deprivation, like in pitch black caves, or through the dozens of other methods people everywhere have devised to go beyond the immediate world; people have accessed what the Vedic tradition might call the Akashic Record, the complete story of the entire Tree of Life.

Stanislov Grof, psychiatrist and renowned pioneer of psychedelic studies, developed “transpersonal psychology” as a genuine practice for psychological healing and development. His inspiration for the theory came from his experiences with “non-ordinary states of consciousness” induced through the ingestion of psychedelic compounds, meditative practices, and his own method called “holotropic breathwork”.

Like Jung, Grof observed the re-emergence of mythological motifs in the minds of his patients. But, far more shocking was their vivid experience of being someone else in another life time. They would exhibit knowledge of events that should have been completely unknown to them, memories of things which they would have never experienced.

The trans in “transpersonal” comes from the theory that, by elevating one’s mind beyond the restrictions of normal, waking consciousness, people can access a deeper layer of the psyche that is not confined to one’s personal history, but is something shared in common.

The thousands of accounts of “near-death experiences” from across the world testify to a dimension of the psyche that transcends personal memories and experience.

There is a long way to go to create a firm empirical connection between the collective unconscious and epigenetic inheritance, but even if further study reveals this is not a possible mechanism, Jung’s perspective, comfortably sitting far above the limits of time and space, has no need of an explanation that satisfies our current understanding of biology and the universe.

There is much more implied in the concept of “archetype” than mere psychological phenomena.

For Jung, while they are fundamental to the existence and survival of living organisms, they revealed the behavior of inorganic matter as well. From particles to electrical currents to the movements of the planets…they were a “bridge to matter itself”.

Archetypes precondition all existence, since everything follows general patterns wherever we look. The brilliant physicist Wolfgang Pauli claimed the archetypes offered a major contribution to our understanding of the underlying principles of the universe, for this very reason.

In some mysterious way, the patterns of life mirror the patterns of geological formations, weather, stars, and galaxies. Up and down the cosmos, there is an ancient perspective from which identical patterns are re-emerging at every moment and at every scale.

This is the jumping-off point which led Jung to the I Ching, alchemy, and other esoteric traditions which uncovered the dynamic aspects of the psyche embedded in the material world

In the words of Grof,

The psyche of each of us is essentially commensurate with all of existence and ultimately identical with the cosmic creative principle itself. Grof, The Cosmic Game

The Meaning Making Machine

There was a recent story of a man who was literally cured of blindness, despite having been blind since birth. After the successful operation, the man was having incredible difficulty adjusting to the assault of completely incoherent sense data. He described what it was like to ride in the passenger seat of a car driving down the freeway after the operation as sheer visual chaos. He had no depth perception, no way of understanding that everything whizzing past his window would not suddenly collide with the car. Colors, shapes, movement…none of these made any sense.

He had absolutely no frame of reference, no context, no ability to properly categorize and individualize what he was seeing. It was a pandemonium of sensations.

The human mind only works when it has a stable frame of reference, from which it can distinguish things in the world from one another. If sensations cannot be pinned down in any definitive way to something distinct, they become incoherent babble.

But this is just a tool, a useful shorthand for functioning in our version of reality. In no way does this need to correspond to what actually exists for it to still be better than the nihilistic alternative.

There is no hard physical boundary between a mountain and a valley, no point at which the earth definitively becomes one and not the other. But, despite them being physically continuous, our minds impose categories upon both in order to make sense of what we see; this is a mountain and not a valley, and that is a valley and not a mountain.

This can be said of all sense impressions. At some point our mind makes an arbitrary, often automatic, decision of what is included in our concept of “that thing”, and what is not.

It has to be this way. A world in which everything appears as literally one whole thing – where each particle and planet appear indistinguishable – is not a world in which thinking and acting like a human are possible.

But isn’t it a little coincidental that that’s exactly what existence seems like to us, who can only function in the world with a distinct sense of “I”? Our only reference for “existence” is to exist as a unified “something”, as an I am. But like everything we encounter in the world, we too are a conglomeration of different things; memories, sensations, emotions, physical characteristics, etc. all mixed together.

All of these get joined together as a “me”, while everything else gets filtered out as not “me”, just like how we distinguish the mountain from the valley.

The very same act of the mind which takes color, shape, size, movement, etc. and joins them together into a unified something in the external world also makes a unified “me” out of the vast universe within our own minds and bodies, populated by countless memories, emotions and sensations. Both are fundamentally arbitrary, neither have to necessarily exist exactly as they appear.

This is not a coincidence. The exact same mechanism, consciousness, is constantly doing both. We are always individualizing everything we encounter, the more aspects of it we experience, the more distinct it becomes. We have a relatively permanent notion of “I”, not by chance, but because we happen to encounter ourselves the most!

In both the external world and the internal world, we project meaning onto chaos. We take disorder and impose order upon it.

Demonstrating this same unifying power of the mind, this popular image shows the power of the mind to project a symbol upon chaos to render it intelligible.

The Rorschach inkblot test acts as a similar chaotic canvas for the meaning making machine, often used for the purpose of extracting the images and symbols which lie just below the surface of awareness, in the unconscious.

1902 — by John William Waterhouse — Image by © Christie’s Images/CORBIS

This is what an archetype does, it creates an intelligible harmony out of emotions, events, and sensations which can then be spotted in the wild, in the real world: a multi-functional mental tool for navigating the chaos of life.

When we can’t see any intelligible logic behind the movements of nature, or in those forces which compose ourselves, we call upon that vast storehouse of the collective unconscious to help us project a pattern upon the chaos.

It protects our minds from the type of chaos experienced by the man cured of blindness. It is the resource for meaning, for making sense out of a senseless world, for imposing pattern and order.

The collective unconscious is a meaning making machine.

“The whole of mythology” Jung wrote, “could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective unconscious…We can see this most clearly if we look at the heavenly constellations, which original chaotic forms were organized through the projection of images. This explains the influence of the stars as asserted by astrologers. These influences are nothing but unconscious, introspective perceptions of the activity of the collective unconscious. Just as the constellations were projected into the heavens, similar figures were projected into legends and fairy tales or upon historical persons.”

Our ancestors studied the heavens each night and saw an unintelligible drama played out among the stars...what did it all mean? As creatures who could only live in a meaningful world, just like us, there must have been a deeper meaning in the heavens that reason simply could not see.

It’s this leap of faith, this willingness to ignore what their eyes told them was random, that awakened the deeper powers of the meaning making machine.

This is where they contacted the collective unconscious, at the frontier of reason. When meaning is sought beyond logic, the mind becomes receptive to more ancient powers of discernment. Cause and effect, the immovable arrow of time, spacial distance…all become arbitrary.

Once we learned to communicate with these ancient forces, to exercise this power to project symbols upon the stars, it was only a matter of time before we unlocked the entire night sky.

We can scoff at primitive astrology all we want. We can mock ancient “superstitions”. We can look back on our ancestors with a sense of embarrassment, priding ourselves on our rationality. But anyone who has studied the cultures of the Native Americans, the Aboriginals, or any “uncivilized” society knows that they have a depth of understanding to their world unmatched in the Modern West.

They had more of an understanding of each animal and plant they encountered than any person today has of their iPhone or television.

These people intimately knew their surroundings, they remembered massive amounts of information, they could navigate the most challenging environments. They could do this because literally everything meant something. Everything mattered, nothing was random. A leaf, a star, a gust of wind, a crow…all had some purpose. This belief in a giant meta-narrative was highly practical, it engages the meaning making machine on its highest possible setting; a psychological tool for mastering their world, however “superstitious” or “unscientific” it may appear to us.

Mythology, as the inevitable result of the collective unconscious, bestowed a massive evolutionary advantage, if only through its effect of enchanting the world with inherent meaning.

Without this grasping for meaning, without resorting to the irrational, we would not have ever made any scientific progress in any sphere whatsoever.

James Clerk Maxwell’s revolutionary equations, which succeeded in conceptually harmonizing the two great forces of electricity and magnetism, were inspired by an intuition that there must be a symmetry which mathematically describes them both. But, there was no logical necessity which demanded this must be the case. He felt that there was a fundamental unity in these forces which remained unknown, and consequently discovered it.

Where does this intuition for harmony and order come from except from something a priori?

We even do it today…what else could we call the widely popular “many worlds theory” in physics, or “panpsychism” in philosophy, than a conscious leap into the absurd, based on a hunch? These are nothing more than unproven intuitions that originate from a deeper level of the psyche, where reason has not yet tread.

Is it just a strange coincidence that these theories bump up against some of the world’s oldest mythologies and metaphysics?

Or, rather, are we being led right back into the realm of the collective unconscious yet again?

In the next part, we’ll zoom as far out as possible. Drawing from thinkers like Teilhard de Chardin and Alfred North Whitehead, we will see that the collective unconscious wants something. It’s becoming something – plodding along, relentlessly. It will appear as one giant organism moving in a direction, towards a goal sitting at the end of history.

This final destination is what the entire universe strives to become, the incarnation of something we could only call God: the Collective Self.

(Top Image: Galatea of the Spheres – Salvador Dali)