Yesterday we discussed the basic concepts of consciousness and the unconscious. Carl Jung broke these concepts down further and suggested that there are both individual and collective aspects of each. Individual consciousness is the awareness of your personal experience of your senses, thoughts, and emotions. The individual unconscious includes those contents of your mind which are unique to you and have not yet been made conscious.
The collective includes a larger group and can exist and many levels. Collective can refer to your family, your workplace, your community, country, the earth or the entire universe. The collective consciousness then, is the group’s awareness of its own experience which includes things like culture, traditions, laws and accepted beliefs. The collective unconscious is all else which is “out there” but not yet manifested.
Everything that is, ever was, and will be is part of the collective unconscious. As individuals we draw from the unconscious to manifest our reality. Thoughts arise from the unconscious and we make choices about what to do with them. Our actions lead to results and the process continues. As we think and act, we add our little bit to the whole and the universe expands.
The unconscious has always existed and was certainly there before the cloud and the internet. Yet these modern technologies create a great analogy to help us better understand. The internet seems to be an infinite source of information that we can search quickly for access to just about anything we want to know. The internet cloud has only been a part of human existence for about twenty years. Think how fast its grown and how far it’s come in that time. Now, imagine being able to tap into the infinite resources of the unconscious!
