Friday, June 20, 2008

Daily Dedroidify: The Collective Unconscious, the Circuit model and UFOs

Daily Dedroidify: The Collective Unconscious, the Circuit model and UFOs

Carl Jung's Collective Unconscious (Circuit 7 in Leary's 8 Circuit model) refers to that part of a person's unconscious which is common to all human beings. It contains archetypes, which are forms or symbols that are manifested by all people in all cultures. They are said to exist prior to experience, and are in this sense instinctual.

Less mystical proponents of the Jungian model hold that the collective unconscious can be adequately explained as arising in each individual from shared instinct, common experience, and shared culture. The natural process of generalization in the human mind combines these common traits and experiences into a mostly identical substratum of the unconscious.

In Jung's own words: "It transcends all differences of culture and consciousness and does not consist merely of contents capable of becoming conscious but of latent dispositions towards identical reactions. It, moreover, seems something like an unceasing stream or perhaps an ocean of images, figures which drift into consciousness in our dreams or in abnormal states of mind."

He reasoned that if mind and thus reality are, for all intents and purposes, artificial (i.e. not objectively real in the Newtonian sense, but only perceptually apparent in the Einsteinian sense), then subconscious processes could affect the external reality for a given observer. (See also "Synchronicity") Therefore, if a need or desire for paraphysical events takes place in the nervous system of a given individual, it is not impossible that seemingly "real" external occurences will occur as manifestations of these subconsious processes. It has also been reported that these otherworldly visions can occur simultaneously in groups.

The collective unconscious thus helps us understand religions, religious conversion, visions, the alien phenomenon, visions of the light, demons,... better as dreams, meditation, yoga, entheogens, astral projection, out-of-body experiences and near-death-experiences,... all can open the doorway to this collective unconscious that gets personally filtered as it were through our own reality tunnels. Opening our 7th circuit, as described in Timothy Leary's 8 Circuit Model of Consciousness which includes the collective unconscious as being the 7th circuit, or the neurogenetic circuit of consciousness - aka the "akashic records" of Theosophy or the "phylogenetic unconscious" of Grof and Ring.

In a similar manner that the medieval alchemists projected their psyche into matter, Jung felt that modern man projected his inner state into the heavens,
in this sense, the UFOs became modern symbols for the ancient gods which came to man's assistance in time of need.
However, for those that go "Yay! See there are no aliens!" don't be so arrogant to assume you're alone in the multiverse!
Jung's Collective Unconscious corresponds with the 7th Circuit, but... the 8th Circuit in Leary's model, is Cosmic Consciousness.
(Just when you thought you'd figured it out!)

(adapted) excerpt from RAW's Cosmic Trigger:
When the nervous system is turned on to this quantum-level circuit, space-time is obliterated. "Out-of-body experiences," "astral projection," contact with alien (extraterrestrial?) "entities" or with a galactic Overmind,etc., such as I've experienced, have all been reported for thousands of years, not merely by the ignorant, the superstitious, the gullible, but often by the finest minds among us (Socrates, Giordano Bruno, Thomas Edison, Buckminster Fuller, Nikola Tesla, etc.). Such experiences are reported daily to parapsychologists and have been experienced by such scientists as Dr. John Lilly and Carlos Castaneda. Dr. Kenneth Ring has attributed these phenomena to what he calls, very appropriately:
"the extraterrestrial unconscious."

This means having access to other dimensions, which String & M Theory by the world's leading physicists now include. Alien experiences can just aswell be part of the collective unconscious or the extraterrestrial (or other-dimensional), if you check stories of abductees it's clear a lot are very subjective and obviously filtered through one's individual mind. One can imagine such an experience, and one can seem to contact other beings. Nothing is for certain obviously. One can assume we exist in the material, but have access to other dimensions of space and time. Exciting isn't it? :p I'll leave you with Terence Mckenna's thoughts:

"People are so alienated from their own soul that when they meet their soul they think it comes from another star system."

"The ufo is a mirage, being cast backward into time by the transcendental object at the end of time. (...) It's a compensatory image that haunts time because time is a kind of hologram, time is a fractal and fractal means that the same pattern is embedded again and again in a relationship of self-similarity. So because the transcendental object exists somewhere ahead of us in history there must be necessarily a tiny part of it somewhere nearby. And this is what the ufo is I think, and this is why nobody's ever gonna show you a chunk of it, and they're never gonna put an extraterrestrial on television, because it isn't that kind of a creature, it's a compensatory image from the end of time."

"We have been too long under the spell of the idea that only the past creates the present, the present is actually largely created by appetite for the future and this would seem to me a highly improbable idea had I not taken psychedelics and gotten this hyperdimensional view of the system that we're living in and then we can see that yes, history is not a random walk, it's not a series of undirected random fluxuations. History is a proces of fractal self-complexification that builds on whatever it has achieved, and so upon the complexity of animal organisation is laying the complexity of human language, upon which is layed the complexity of symbolic signification of that language, upon writing is layed technology and so forth and so on, so we are in the sense of giving birth to or creating the object of our theology, which is a kind of god or goddess, and the UFO is simply an indicator that we are so close now to encountering the concrescent transcendental object that is able to haunt the skies of earth and people who live in trailer parks :p"
Terence McKenna - from Under the teaching tree

"The deeper 'layers' of the psyche lose their individual uniqueness as they retreat further and further into darkness... they become increasingly collective until they are universalized and extinguished in the body's materiality... Hence 'at bottom' the psyche is simply 'world.'"
Carl Gustav Jung

Carl Jung Streaming Video Links

2 comments:

The Secret Sun said...

Excellent, Droidy- thanks for this.

There are two Jungs- there's the Jung of the Institution- a watered down, blanderized grandfather figure created to facilitate the careers of an army of avaricious analysts and then there is the real Jung- whose approach to high weirdness was to throw himself into it with total abandon. I'm going to be working on this on the Sun- all of the conspiracy theory and Synchromysticism is Jungian to the core. Remember Jung was about the idea of a collective mind, and that implies the mechanisms of a collective consciousness and unconsciousness at work in the world, not just about sitting around with your analyst deciding what archetype you follow. In many ways Jung is the antidote to the solipsistic narcissism of the present day, whereas some of his popularizers presented it all as this introverted navel gazing thing in the 90s.

I had no interest in conspiracy or any of that until I went online and saw people like Downard and Hoffman and Bill Cooper and realized- my God, these guys are doing inadvertant Jungian interpretation and ascribing it all to the Illuminati instead of the unconscious! Of course, it's way more complicated than that, but that what makes it all so interesting.

Locker Boy said...

If you have not read Gowan,
you might want to:

BOOK I:


TRANCE, ART, AND CREATIVITY

A Psychological Analysis of the Relationship Between the Individual Ego and the Numinous Element in Three Modes: Prototaxic, Parataxic, and Syntaxic

Keywords: archetype, art, biofeedback, collective unconscious, creativity, dissociation, dream, drug effects, ecstasy, ESP, glossolalia, hallucination, hypnosis, meditation, myth, mysticism, numinous element, parapsychology, peak experience, psychic, ritual, self-actualization, tantra, trance.

http://www.csun.edu/edpsy/Gowan/