Collective Psyche

Is there a correlation between the human psyche -- mood, world view -- and material resources? Or, more specifically, is there a correlation between the psyche and a relative change in resources, i.e. within one culture, from an earlier decade or century to a later one? Is there a sort of psychological history that parallels the material one?

"Now this has the form of a myth, but really signifies a declination of the bodies moving in the heavens around the earth." --Plato, The Timæus Dialogues, 360 BC

The Psychic System

COLLECTIVE PSYCHE is a meta-theory of mankind, first suggested by Jung. Today we call it The Field or zero-point. Reality dynamics is the ocean of collective knowledge and transpersonal psychology, the invisible hand of self-organization and synergistic fractal logic in complex systems. We share our essential holographic nature as fractal expressions of a field of consciousness.

Our being is implicit in the source field. Consciousnss is a superposition of unconscious and conscious between the metaphysical and physical, flowing from the micro to the macro. Our decisions occur subconsciously seconds before we become aware of them. We are all connected at this field level. The unconscious is a matrix of unconscious dynamics. The collective Shadow captures us through the personal shadow and self-interest, bridging us to the collective consciousness mass psychosis.

We sense we are ending and yet just beginning because both are simultaneously and timelessly true. Humanity's race is against time toward the great Unknown. The perennial question remains, "What is wrong with the world and why is it that way?"

Neither religion, philosophy, nor systems theory has been able to do more than balance out the negative, much like Yin and Yang. Transcendental religions seek to escape time and its dichotomies altogether.

The treasures of cultural history and spontaneous renewal reside within this living field, our connection with the primal source of life and parallel phenomena. The history of the world emerges from the multidimensional field of possibilities. Somehow life works despite infinite deviations. Viability can be anticipated if not planned. But we've outgrown Earth's carrying capacity.

Though barely aware of them, we are tied together by deep processes. We can learn to consciously understand and apply, rather than destructively act out these eternal patterns. We must learn to recognize what is being revealed even though it is always open to interpretation. We are also subject to delusions and misperceptions, so we need to learn discernment.

The Great Mill

In the archetypal realm, the beginning and end of days is always with us in each and every moment as the mythic dimension. Myth describes breakthroughs of the sacred into the profane or historical time.  Precession, marking the great cycles of life, means the sacred is intersecting the mundane as 'eternal return.' All things become truly 'real' by imitating this model of the celestial archetype. In cyclic time, what has occured will repeat.

Actions are 'virtuous' if they conform to the sacred pattern which gives the world form and meaning. Eliade suggests that the abandonment of mythical thought and the full acceptance of linear, historical time, with its "terror," is one of the reasons for anxiety today. But the fact is everything begins over and over again in each and every instant. This process of quantum refreshing means we are created anew in each moment, like pixels on a screen.

Clearly, with the Precession, we have an unprecedented opportunity to move into the metahistorical mythic flow of sacred time and perhaps help renew the world and universal history. Even without choosing it, it is being imposed on us at this time. By flowing with it, reintegrating cyclic time, we reintegrate ourselves. Rather than a literal pole shift of the Earth, it is an opportunity for a pole shift in the collective psyche.

Is the Universe calling to us through eschatological visions, such as 2012 galactic alignment, future studies, singularity, transhumanism, UFO/ET mythos, Ascension, ZPG, postmillennialism and religious visions? Nothing is preventing us from having our own "rapture" right here, right now, since it is an achievable perceptual state. Negentropic potential can emerge at any instant in complex systems.

Paradigm shift is a new way of looking at the mystery and meaning of life. Whether these competing scripts and speculations play out or not, they provide us with mythic rallying points. Seems like everybody is having that dream.

But, do we have to imagine our end to find a new beginning, to reinvent civilization? Change starts with the questions we ask because they have the potential to shift our awareness. What is inconceivable one day may not be the next. The tipping point could come at any juncture.

Aeons are marked by the Precession of the Equinoxes -- the Great Return -- which formed the root and core of mythical thought long before written history began. All major civilizations have their versions of Precession - the mythology of the Milky Way - with myths of golden, dark and perished ages. To face our own mortality is to face what it means to be most fundamentally human.

Is it the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning? The serpent of the eternal bites its own tail. Precession defines our relationship to the galaxy and is the root of our notions about the beginning and end of time. Thus, mythology is linked to cosmology and our galactic destiny. In this sense, we long to escape the confinement of our historical times. But history is cyclic, renewed in a new order, a new creation.

The mother of all myths, Precession is a cataclysmic force, the basis for myths of disorder and the end of ages. Both religious and secular models speak of violent disruption which challenges us to find new ways of cooperating and being. We have even deduced the ultimate fate of the universe, yet our own remains in question. Will the human race breakdown or breakthrough or some combination of that?

Just as order arises from chaos, we can deeply synchronize with one another to good effect, healing ourselves and perhaps our planet. We are ripples on an ocean of collective psychology which has laws of its own, as Jung demonstrated. Archetypes are attractors that organize otherwise weak interactions.

Jung called archetypes the great decisive forces in events. There are archetypal dimensions to world events, including wars, politics and mass psychology. Just because events are collective, they do not need to devolve to the lowest common denominator of consciousness. Collective events make this transpersonal voice known to us when enacted in the world. Integrating this force is transforming.

Each of us is an integral part of the untapped potential of all creation. We are bound together by the collective power of imagination. Resonance with this field provides a guiding coherence -- a guide wave -- opening us to reenchantment of world and cosmos beyond postmodern fragmentation.

Collective psyche is the ultimate source of creative solutions and inspiration for global transformation. Intelligence resides not only in, but among us all. The mythic dimension reveals itself to and through us all, making the global drama a gripping enigma.

We do not achieve excellence through violence and destruction. Wars on terror, drugs, cancer, and poverty have led nowhere. We can create together through nonlocal, nonconventional means, increasing capacity with a sense of connection and trust. There are interpersonal, organizational and sociopolitical benefits in amplifying these field phenomena through creative collaboration for the common good.

Collective Responsibility

The new cultural guide is not the manic overachieving violent hero, but the artificer or synthesizer who can "make do" and actively make things work with what is at hand in the here and now. The maker and shaper is the transdisciplinary role model of basic human urges of transformation, ingenuity and original design.

A knowledge of principles leads directly to a process of creation and problem-solving. Collective psyche is a correlated readiness to respond, living aligned with creation, literally from the ground (of our being) in the day to day world.

Futurist Paul Wildman defines an Artificer as "someone who, over a period of years and with substantial effort, resources and commitment, and as part of their responsibility as world citizen, participative and anticipatively conceives designs, establishes and learns through an exemplar project in order to demonstrate today a better world is possible for our children’s children." [Paul Wildman 15-01-2006]

Creativity emerges from the multidimensional constraints of each moment. Source of archetypes, myth and dreams, objective psyche is also the source of wisdom, genius, inspiration and adaptive value relevant in every era including our own. The very architecture of the collective psyche is evolving, pregnant with new vision. It funds our collective explorations of our sustainable futures with new ideas and inventions.

The source of what matters, energy/matter is not different from psyche. Psyche is the dynamic totality of all conscious and unconscious psychic processes. If consciousness is the root of matter, as some physics models suggest, it includes everything we imagine, experience and know as well as what we cannot know, including viable futures.

Real awareness is being present in the moment. The confluence of future and past is eternally present now, pregnant with potential. Collective psyche "remembers" the future before it arrives, runs all superimposed scenarios in the multiverse before collapsing into ordinary reality.

Collective psyche can provide prescient glimpses into possible futures. Can we, therefore, change undesireable timelines and outcomes using collective psyche as applied human survival technology? Perhaps we can, through recognizing, forming and making new patterns manifest.

Both individual and collective psyche possess layers that lie below consciousness. We can examine the beliefs and behavior of our global society, in general, just as we can analyze and foster emergent creativity in individuals with therapeutic effect. The collective shadow of the old paradigm still plagues us.

The collective psyche itself demands resolution or at least fascinates us with its elusive nature. To find peace in the world, we must find it within. Images arising in the collective psyche are internalized as dreams and visions. We sense autonomous forces beyond us at work. Deity resides in the collective psyche. Even in physics and life sciences, psyche and matter are no longer split.