COLLECTIVE PSYCHE
by Iona Miller, SAGI
Collective Psyche *Introduction *Manifest Destiny Manifesto *Memescape *Mass Psychology *Tavistock Agenda 2 *Reality Tunnels *Subliminazis *Biowarfare * Glocalization *Adult Development *Profiling *Image Streaming *Truth Values *Chaos Consciousness *Emotional Alchemy *Neurotheology *Synthetic Telepathy * Psi Research *Dissolution *Healing Tales *Disrupted Lives *Freestyle *Edge Artists *Intentionality *Change Agent *
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. Consciousness 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 occurred 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 re-enchantment 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 undesirable 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.
Collective intelligence and identity are externalized online in social networking and digital alchemy. This superset is a new human identity, embodying that tangibly greater than self. We are practicing higher order collective cooperation, collectively reinventing ourselves as a species. Collective conversation moves at the speed of light.
Openness, inclusivity, decentralization, nonlocality and virtuality are keywords. We are not only merging with one another, we are e-merging our nervous systems with our technology. We are letting go of personal identity to collective intelligence in a new way, teaching one another as we explore that frontier beyond the doors of perception. We are each a unique center, poised on the creative edge of evolution.
EDGEucation
As well as universities, we need subversities that undermine our outworn notions of the way things work. Learning insights combine with active imagination in creativity.Our collective aspirations are guided by archetypal fantasies. Our disenchantment and collective grief is arguably over loss of the world soul. The collective psyche points toward and guides us through the transition period we now face.
New images are arising, reframing the future. Images have healing properties. They speak to us in our sleeping and waking dreams, forging shared stories relevant to everyone in the process as well as the Cosmos itself. We cannot separate our psychophysical symptoms from the collective environment. There is a missing dimension in our worldview and mindscapes. We sense it, even though the market and media have attempted to drain all depth from our experience. Emergent events are not merely responses to economic and climatic conditions or social engineering, but eruptions of the collective unconscious.
Mobilized, the archetypal dynamics and creative forces of the collective psyche perturb psychosocial trends, creating new possibilities. Archetypes are the psychic skeleton fleshed out by events that matter. We can't keep our collective skeletons in the closet anymore. We can no longer charge the future to pay for our past. The marks have wised up and no longer trust the control systems.
What doesn't effect the Collective Psyche? Perhaps humanity has never faced more multi-dimensional challenges. We need to retrieve and upgrade our human survival technologies for our metamorphosis. Healing emerges from pathology. Edge artists are the shamans of the new millennium. Maybe we are still addicted to the Hermetic myth of futurism when we need to live in the here and now. Like Hermes, the future is a perennial Trickster: this is what you want, this is what you get -- lowered expectations. Why do we hurry to live in the future? Futurism speculates about the unknown, robbing us of the present and its opportunities.
There is no quick cure for collective ills but we can find new metaphors, deeper meaning and more relevant stories. There is no therapy but moving forward creatively into the future, experimenting with solutions. Inspiration can emerge from infinite potential in any instant.
Participatory Wisdom
The only certain way to heal the personality or the world is getting to the source of wisdom. Collective consciousness is tied to the health of each individual. Healing power emerges from integration. Looking within, we arouse our tacit knowledge for participatory wisdom -- the active wisdom of the collective psyche. The same patterns are at work in the individual and collective psyche, something ungraspable in the depths. Larger patterns are at work in the collective.
Global awareness, multiculturalism and multinationalism are basic to the collective psyche. But we fear the loss of old boundaries. Is this our collective Borderline disorder, emphasizing relationship disturbances that challenge our beliefs about ourselves? Is it the source of our unremitting crisis and vulnerability? Joy is the only antidote to anxiety. We need new models for creative art and science that move us beyond the nihilism of postmodernism into the transmodern era. The exhausted culture must die for the new to emerge from its ashes. The collective death-wish plays out in a myriad of ways. The psyche is not amenable to reduction. It cannot be contained or restricted.
Collective Psyche Definition
The Collective Psyche is a reservoir of experiences. In Jungian psychology, the collective unconscious is a part of the unconscious mind, shared by our whole species, or a society, a people, or all humankind, that is the product of ancestral experience and contains such concepts as science, religion, and morality. Jung believed this uber-consciousness is the primitive source of archetypes or universal dynamics and symbolism found in legends, poetry, and dreams. Thus, art, including technoetics, has the capacity to reveal the collective psyche.
A world view is a set of presuppositions (or assumptions) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously) about the basic makeup of our world. Everyone has a world view, whether he can explain it or not. It can be likened to a pair of glasses through which one views the world. It is important to have the right prescription, or reality will be distorted. Modem man is faced with a supermarket of world views; all of them claim to represent reality, but they are points of view about reality -- mental constructs, beliefs.
EMERGENT PARADIGM: The new paradigm embraces chaos, complexity, emergent creativity and self-organization. We all participate in the evolution of consciousness, whether our transformations are conscious or unconscious. Conscious Evolution is the ethical, philosophical, intentional governance of human change and cultural engineering.
We can each conduct ourselves compassionately with spiritual responsibility for the health and unfolding of human progress.Thinking and behaving with creative intent, we form a graceful society, approaching our ideal, incorporating loving, harmonious methods also in harmony with nature. The post-metaphysical desire is to contribute to the spiritual fulfillment of all people. The needs of the many resonate with the needs of the one.
COMMITMENT TO TRUTH: What is our shared vision today? Shared visions arise from those truly committed to their personal visions. What is the true nature of this "reality" we are creating? Are we on purpose and achieving our collective destiny or has our country been hijacked by special interests? Why do we obsessively overwork, overspend, cover up, get aggressive and perpetuate sick organizations? How can we let go of our old national identity, pass through the 'neutral zone' and experience transforming rebirth? We need a paradigm that superimposes the new on the old. First comes a change in attitudes or worldview that embodies a different set of values in cultural rebirth.
CREATIVE STRATEGIES: How can we raise the bar? Shared vision uplifts our aspirations, gives us courage and ignites our spirit. It pulls us toward an overarching goal. It creates room for risk taking and experimentation by fostering long term commitment. We can extend principles and insights from personal mastery into the world of discipline, collective aspiration and shared commitment. The vision may come before its time is ripe, but we have to try, even to fail. We need a transition plan or crisis and confusion will arise. We can look to the past to get to the root of the problem.
"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. Consciousness 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 occurred 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 re-enchantment 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 undesirable 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.
Collective intelligence and identity are externalized online in social networking and digital alchemy. This superset is a new human identity, embodying that tangibly greater than self. We are practicing higher order collective cooperation, collectively reinventing ourselves as a species. Collective conversation moves at the speed of light.
Openness, inclusivity, decentralization, nonlocality and virtuality are keywords. We are not only merging with one another, we are e-merging our nervous systems with our technology. We are letting go of personal identity to collective intelligence in a new way, teaching one another as we explore that frontier beyond the doors of perception. We are each a unique center, poised on the creative edge of evolution.
EDGEucation
As well as universities, we need subversities that undermine our outworn notions of the way things work. Learning insights combine with active imagination in creativity.Our collective aspirations are guided by archetypal fantasies. Our disenchantment and collective grief is arguably over loss of the world soul. The collective psyche points toward and guides us through the transition period we now face.
New images are arising, reframing the future. Images have healing properties. They speak to us in our sleeping and waking dreams, forging shared stories relevant to everyone in the process as well as the Cosmos itself. We cannot separate our psychophysical symptoms from the collective environment. There is a missing dimension in our worldview and mindscapes. We sense it, even though the market and media have attempted to drain all depth from our experience. Emergent events are not merely responses to economic and climatic conditions or social engineering, but eruptions of the collective unconscious.
Mobilized, the archetypal dynamics and creative forces of the collective psyche perturb psychosocial trends, creating new possibilities. Archetypes are the psychic skeleton fleshed out by events that matter. We can't keep our collective skeletons in the closet anymore. We can no longer charge the future to pay for our past. The marks have wised up and no longer trust the control systems.
What doesn't effect the Collective Psyche? Perhaps humanity has never faced more multi-dimensional challenges. We need to retrieve and upgrade our human survival technologies for our metamorphosis. Healing emerges from pathology. Edge artists are the shamans of the new millennium. Maybe we are still addicted to the Hermetic myth of futurism when we need to live in the here and now. Like Hermes, the future is a perennial Trickster: this is what you want, this is what you get -- lowered expectations. Why do we hurry to live in the future? Futurism speculates about the unknown, robbing us of the present and its opportunities.
There is no quick cure for collective ills but we can find new metaphors, deeper meaning and more relevant stories. There is no therapy but moving forward creatively into the future, experimenting with solutions. Inspiration can emerge from infinite potential in any instant.
Participatory Wisdom
The only certain way to heal the personality or the world is getting to the source of wisdom. Collective consciousness is tied to the health of each individual. Healing power emerges from integration. Looking within, we arouse our tacit knowledge for participatory wisdom -- the active wisdom of the collective psyche. The same patterns are at work in the individual and collective psyche, something ungraspable in the depths. Larger patterns are at work in the collective.
Global awareness, multiculturalism and multinationalism are basic to the collective psyche. But we fear the loss of old boundaries. Is this our collective Borderline disorder, emphasizing relationship disturbances that challenge our beliefs about ourselves? Is it the source of our unremitting crisis and vulnerability? Joy is the only antidote to anxiety. We need new models for creative art and science that move us beyond the nihilism of postmodernism into the transmodern era. The exhausted culture must die for the new to emerge from its ashes. The collective death-wish plays out in a myriad of ways. The psyche is not amenable to reduction. It cannot be contained or restricted.
Collective Psyche Definition
The Collective Psyche is a reservoir of experiences. In Jungian psychology, the collective unconscious is a part of the unconscious mind, shared by our whole species, or a society, a people, or all humankind, that is the product of ancestral experience and contains such concepts as science, religion, and morality. Jung believed this uber-consciousness is the primitive source of archetypes or universal dynamics and symbolism found in legends, poetry, and dreams. Thus, art, including technoetics, has the capacity to reveal the collective psyche.
A world view is a set of presuppositions (or assumptions) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously) about the basic makeup of our world. Everyone has a world view, whether he can explain it or not. It can be likened to a pair of glasses through which one views the world. It is important to have the right prescription, or reality will be distorted. Modem man is faced with a supermarket of world views; all of them claim to represent reality, but they are points of view about reality -- mental constructs, beliefs.
EMERGENT PARADIGM: The new paradigm embraces chaos, complexity, emergent creativity and self-organization. We all participate in the evolution of consciousness, whether our transformations are conscious or unconscious. Conscious Evolution is the ethical, philosophical, intentional governance of human change and cultural engineering.
We can each conduct ourselves compassionately with spiritual responsibility for the health and unfolding of human progress.Thinking and behaving with creative intent, we form a graceful society, approaching our ideal, incorporating loving, harmonious methods also in harmony with nature. The post-metaphysical desire is to contribute to the spiritual fulfillment of all people. The needs of the many resonate with the needs of the one.
COMMITMENT TO TRUTH: What is our shared vision today? Shared visions arise from those truly committed to their personal visions. What is the true nature of this "reality" we are creating? Are we on purpose and achieving our collective destiny or has our country been hijacked by special interests? Why do we obsessively overwork, overspend, cover up, get aggressive and perpetuate sick organizations? How can we let go of our old national identity, pass through the 'neutral zone' and experience transforming rebirth? We need a paradigm that superimposes the new on the old. First comes a change in attitudes or worldview that embodies a different set of values in cultural rebirth.
CREATIVE STRATEGIES: How can we raise the bar? Shared vision uplifts our aspirations, gives us courage and ignites our spirit. It pulls us toward an overarching goal. It creates room for risk taking and experimentation by fostering long term commitment. We can extend principles and insights from personal mastery into the world of discipline, collective aspiration and shared commitment. The vision may come before its time is ripe, but we have to try, even to fail. We need a transition plan or crisis and confusion will arise. We can look to the past to get to the root of the problem.
PARAMEDIA - THE GUERRILLA INFORMATION WAR
“Paramedia” describes what happens when peers come together in networks of influence, using media innovation. In the era of USER AS CONTENT, self-organizing people with the status skillsets of traditional media and access to media publishing tools converge in mutually-reinforcing, democratic and purposeful new ways beyond journalism and the shameless self-promotion of "Web 2.0" and other non-compliant social media and distribution channels.
DIY Media: Paramedia, including desktop cinema, is the medium of the "Naughties." Arguably, it is the single most important factor in current social evolution, light years beyond the offerings of dry pedagogy and endless Power Point presentations. It penetrates deeply into the gaps of conventional culture, rigidity and atrophy, bursting it apart at the seams, like overripe fruit. It is a chaotic factor mirroring the criticality of our times, and magnifying its influence through the butterfly effect of info-memes.
Infowars: Taking its message directly to the people who either actively seek it or come upon it synchronistically, it is a new way of teaching and learning that suits our busy lifestyles and our 'infolust' for concise, up to the minute reportage, analysis and application. As with all media, once you digest the content, you are invited to make up your mind for yourself.
Paramedia Ecology describes the peer-to-peer world of subtle interactions of the sum of all such evolutionary media interactions, networks of influence, and peer relationships. It includes social and political potential, agitprop, blogging, podcasting, videocasting, network nodes, tiny TV, YouTube, and the next thing we haven't heard about yet but will soon all be doing.
DIY Media: Paramedia, including desktop cinema, is the medium of the "Naughties." Arguably, it is the single most important factor in current social evolution, light years beyond the offerings of dry pedagogy and endless Power Point presentations. It penetrates deeply into the gaps of conventional culture, rigidity and atrophy, bursting it apart at the seams, like overripe fruit. It is a chaotic factor mirroring the criticality of our times, and magnifying its influence through the butterfly effect of info-memes.
Infowars: Taking its message directly to the people who either actively seek it or come upon it synchronistically, it is a new way of teaching and learning that suits our busy lifestyles and our 'infolust' for concise, up to the minute reportage, analysis and application. As with all media, once you digest the content, you are invited to make up your mind for yourself.
Paramedia Ecology describes the peer-to-peer world of subtle interactions of the sum of all such evolutionary media interactions, networks of influence, and peer relationships. It includes social and political potential, agitprop, blogging, podcasting, videocasting, network nodes, tiny TV, YouTube, and the next thing we haven't heard about yet but will soon all be doing.
“Paramedia” describes what happens when peers come together in networks of influence, using media innovation. In the era of USER AS CONTENT, self-organizing people with the status skillsets of traditional media and access to media publishing tools converge in mutually-reinforcing, democratic and purposeful new ways beyond journalism and the shameless self-promotion of "Web 2.0" and other non-compliant social media and distribution channels.
DIY Media: Paramedia, including desktop cinema, is the medium of the "Naughties." Arguably, it is the single most important factor in current social evolution, light years beyond the offerings of dry pedagogy and endless Power Point presentations. It penetrates deeply into the gaps of conventional culture, rigidity and atrophy, bursting it apart at the seams, like overripe fruit. It is a chaotic factor mirroring the criticality of our times, and magnifying its influence through the butterfly effect of info-memes.
Infowars: Taking its message directly to the people who either actively seek it or come upon it synchronistically, it is a new way of teaching and learning that suits our busy lifestyles and our infolust for concise, up to the minute reportage, analysis and application. As with all media, once you digest the content, you are invited to make up your mind for yourself.
Paramedia Ecology describes the peer-to-peer world of subtle interactions of the sum of all such evolutionary media interactions, networks of influence, and peer relationships. It includes social and political potential, agitprop, blogging, podcasting, videocasting, network nodes, tiny TV, YouTube, and the next thing we haven't heard about yet but will soon all be doing.
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?
The Psychic System
COLLECTIVE PSYCHE is a meta-theory of mankind and the primordial field of consciousness/matter, first proposed by Jung. We have no control over the collective psyche, the dynamic totality of all conscious and unconscious psychic processes. It is a self-organizing process with its own structure and flow (archetypes and dynamics).
Global sociopolitical life mirrors this condition (including deeply ingrained conflict, the will to live and depression). Systemic global problems are mirrored in each of us. So are collective delusions. But our collective hearts are increasingly crying out for something beyond that myopia.
We must uncover and challenge the disabling myths of the collective psyche, triggering the drive to reach for the inspirational and extraordinary. Change starts with the questions we ask because they are embedded with the potential to shift our awareness to more expansive and unexpected views. Can we harness what we've learned the hard way?
When we contemplate the same images, seeds are planted that may be unseen but express themselves through metaphor. Poised at the critical edge of creative process, we can reconfigure our strategies and resources into a living system with transcultural dialogue. All we have to do is apply decentralized, wise, creative, compassionate decisions wherever we can.
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. The dichotomy of psyche and matter has collapsed in the transpersonal perspective. Realizing we share the same field, the new paradigm encompasses psyche and Cosmos.
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 undesirable timelines and outcomes using collective psyche as applied human survival technology?
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. Is collective perversion inherent in the very processes that make us human? Collective behavior often defies apparent rationality by being toxic, pathological and malignant.
None of us is uncontaminated by what goes on outside of ourselves in the world. We all feel "violated" by some form of psychosocial trauma. This is the root of alienation. Have we become strangers to ourselves by projecting collective blame and suppressing collective wisdom?
How can we kindle a cultural placebo effect for spontaneous healing? What initiations do we need to find new meaning and make a collective transition away from "collective neurosis" toward the newly emerging concept of spiritual wellness and compassionate maturity?
Will we assume a higher level of personal and social responsibility or remain numb to our collective dysfunctional behavior? What forces are undermining our collective psyche and why do we permit them to remain in play? How can we process and transmute our collective guilt into effective transformation? Can we stop transmitting our collective dysfunctionalities to future generations?
Can we heal the traumas imprinted on our collective psyche, recognizing there will always be conflicts from organizing principles in the psyche? Archetypes are composed of autonomous dynamic tensions arising spontaneously in individuals and the collective psyche.
The Transcendent function, according to Jung, resolves the split between opposing dynamics and recognizes the spiritual dimension of the psyche. Flow describes the state of harmonious order.
Can we take a collective spiritual journey beyond competing religions and isms toward collective vision? "Recovery" has taken on new meaning in the collective psyche since the global economic crash. We have to "take stock" of the new situation. As economic foundations crumble, we can't afford to be irrationally complacent.
Psyche, Science & Society
How can we modify the processes arising in the political context without changing the social context? The collective shadow of the old paradigm still plagues us with collective memory of political events, state terrorism, covert action, control mechanisms, public visibility (transparency), collective violence, class conflict, collective security, provincial national and cultural interests.
Psychosocial trauma is repeated as violations of person and property, competition for scarce resources, discrimination, our collective involvement in torture and such Frankensteinian science as biowarfare. In the asymmetric war of repressor and repressed, these are only a few of the manifestions of such tensions and our reactions (collective action) to them.
The insult is to our entire biopsychosocial being. Our institutional approach to trauma breaks down somewhere in the process. Global trauma occurs in the context of global drama. Traditional therapeutic paradigms don't work for this kind of trauma inflicted in the macro-social context of savage plutocracy, hegemonic capitalism and brutal totalitarianism. But there are pre-existing conditions in the structure of society and we have to deal with them as best we can.
The ghosts of such large-scale structures can only be exorcised for collective welfare by the introduction of new information, new contexts, new meaning, new structures and new paradigms. Models of collective history and psychological perspectives on society effect our worldview. The collective psyche of many groups has been brutalized. We need new models of collaboration and conflict resolution at the individual and collective level.
The collective psyche itself demands resolution or at least makes us obsess on 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.
Collective intelligence and identity are externalized online in social networking and digital alchemy. The web is a window on collective psyche that invites eruptions from its depths. This superset is a new human identity, embodying that tangibly greater than self. We are practicing higher order collective cooperation, collectively reinventing ourselves as a species. Collective conversation moves at the speed of light.Openness, inclusivity, decentralization, nonlocality and virtuality are keywords. We are not only merging with one another, we are e-merging our nervous systems with our technology. We are letting go of personal identity to collective intelligence in a new way, teaching one another as we explore that frontier beyond the doors of perception. We are each a unique center.
EDGEucation
Our collective aspirations are guided by archetypal fantasies. Our disenchantment and collective grief is arguably over loss of the world soul. The collective psyche points toward and guides us through the transition period we now face. New images are arising, reframing the future. Images have healing properties. They speak to us in our sleeping and waking dreams, forging shared stories relevant to everyone in the process as well as the Cosmos itself.
We cannot separate our psychophysical symptoms from the collective environment. There is a missing dimension in our worldview and mindscapes. We sense it, even though the market and media have attempted to drain all depth from our experience. Emergent events are not merely responses to economic and climatic conditions or social engineering, but eruptions of the collective unconscious.
Mobilized, the archetypal dynamics and creative forces of the collective psyche perturb psychosocial trends, creating new possibilities. Archetypes are the psychic skeleton fleshed out by events that matter. We can't keep our collective skeletons in the closet anymore. We can no longer charge the future to pay for our past. The marks have wised up and no longer trust the control systems.
What doesn't effect the Collective Psyche? Perhaps humanity has never faced more multi-dimensional challenges. We need to retrieve and upgrade our human survival technologies for our metamorphosis. Healing emerges from pathology. Edge artists are the shamans of the new millennium.
Maybe we are still addicted to the Hermetic myth of futurism when we need to live in the here and now. Like Hermes, the future is a perennial Trickster: this is what you want, this is what you get -- lowered expectations. Why do we hurry to live in the future? Futurism speculates about the unknown, robbing us of the present and its opportunities.
There is no quick cure for collective ills but we can find new metaphors, deeper meaning and more relevant stories. There is no therapy but moving forward creatively into the future, experimenting with solutions. Inspiration can emerge from infinite potential in any instant.
Participatory Wisdom
The only certain way to heal the personality or the world is getting to the source of wisdom. Collective consciousness is tied to the health of each individual. Healing power emerges from integration. Looking within, we arouse our tacit knowledge for participatory wisdom -- the active wisdom of the collective psyche.
The same patterns are at work in the individual and collective psyche, something ungraspable in the depths. Larger patterns are at work in the collective. Global awareness, multiculturalism and multinationalism are basic to the collective psyche. But we fear the loss of old boundaries. Is this our collective Borderline disorder, emphasizing relationship disturbances that challenge our beliefs about ourselves? Is it the source of our unremitting crisis and vulnerability?
Joy is the only antidote to anxiety. We need to create better environments, newer myths, and more compassionate beliefs so we can thrive, not just survive. Rather than conspicuous consumption, new buzzwords include ZPG, "downsizing," "aging lean," "design intelligence."
We need new models for creative art and science that move us beyond the nihilism of postmodernism into the transmodern era. The exhausted culture must die for the new to emerge from its ashes. The collective death-wish plays out in a myriad of ways. The psyche is not amenable to reduction. It cannot be contained or restricted.
Politics, Economics, War, Disease, Natural Calamities, Science and Technology, Natural Resource shortages, the Population Bomb, Pandemic, Forced Migration, Climate Shift, Energy Crisis and more have the capacity to instantly morph our worldview and lifestyles.
Destructive states need to give way to an opening of imagination as we continue to free our collective selves from oppressive mythologies. Hopefully, we can find a more sustainable means of existence. Therapeutic interventions can be performed by anyone at any level.
For example, consumers are radically revisioning their spending, saving and investment patterns. Artists are learning what it means to design new bodies and virtual environments. Art can be read as the archives of collective vision. Our collective intelligence is transforming through social networking. We can retrieve our geneologies and test our DNA to find out exactly who we are and where we come from. What we find is we are all more closely related than we formerly thought.
We can benefit by a wide-ranging holistic examination of nature and our own nature as a species. Humans, science tells us, are 99% genetically identical to primates and even closer to one another -- we are one family of man. Battles are symptoms. In psychology, symptoms are where boundaries are shifting.
Collective psyche is as multi-faceted as mankind. The meme biological "race" -- a social construction -- is an irrelevant folk belief that is culturally ingrained divisive view. The global human population is genetically homogeneous compared to other mammals. There are no subspecies in our global family.
Dysfunctional Family of Man
However, we are dysfunctional, detached, alienated. The collective demands of our culture have drained us. We have endured unbearable collective "cognitive dissonance" between the traditional and transitional paradigms. Such mental epidemics arise in the collective soul. One treatment is to reinvest in perennial collective values, such as democracy. If you hold a value, you must speak for it. Lack of passion indicates numbing.
We yearn for something deeper than consumerism in terms of mass mind. Fragmentation is the metaphysical and existential condition that leads to compulsive creation of the false self as compensation for lack of authentic identity. Omega points embody our existential despair, our apocalyptic yearning, our narcissistic desire to have everything reflect our own emptiness.
Despair can lead to suicidal thoughts. In Suicide and the Soul, James Hillman suggests the impulse to suicide is psyche's intense desire to change, and die symbolically to be reborn or renewed. We also long for renewal in our global culture and for the sake of our offspring. But do we have to be collectively self-destructive in the process?
Collectively, we are experiencing a disorder of adaptation that manifests in dissociation. Distrust, greed, apathy and burn-out are symptomatic. We have only recently crashed from a series of socially manufactured hyper-manic investment "bubbles," awakening us from a delusion of limitless growth.
We've become numb and overwhelmed. Numbness masks our collective spiritual hunger, which is the root of all addiction. Our paranoid culture is hyper-vigilant with Post-Traumatic Stress.
Holding all this tension is "weathering" or wearing us out. Economic collapse has sent many back to square one, desperately trying to reinvent themselves for survival. Old personas grow constrictive when we are role-bound into conventionality or the equally cliche eccentricities. Even your rebellions are socially engineered. Identified with the social mask, when we lose our job or 'mission' we lose our identity.
In the same way, we have to reinvent our culture, fractally, from the bottom-up and top-down. Some areas of cultural activity are more pathological and malignant. We literally and metaphorically need to 'cut it out.'
Ancient cultures have much to teach us in this regard; we need to listen deeply to one another. Psycho-spiritual forces of transformation are also in play, such as conceptual reorientation and memes that remain to play out, such as 2012 and technological singularity.
The Collective Psyche is also vulnerable to manipulation through a variety of means that modulate the order/disorder scale. Propaganda is used for organizing chaos in accord with specific agendas through memes, media, education, social values, military, medicine, politics, intelligence and business. Ideas are replicators, much like genes, and can be "cancerous" and require radical treatment.
Zeitgeist
The very Fabric of Reality is woven in our collective thoughts and embodiment. Consensus reality is formulated and ratified at the level of the human unconscious where all minds are entangled. This matrix determines the context and meaning of individual and collective being.
Currently, we are in the midst of a profound paradigm shift. For the first time in history we have sweeping knowledge of the historic panoply of our planet and humanity's place in it. We know who we are but we don't know where we are going, except into the Great Unknown, the abyss that represents the universal Mystery. Indications are that we are becoming "transhuman." The sad part is most of have failed to becoming "fully human," living up to our human potential, before the transition.
Shared beliefs and attitudes operating as a unifying social force create Collective Consciousness which embodies the Social Cradle. This fractal and systems awareness can be raised to new heights through transformations in tacit and articulated knowledge with behavior rooted in new understanding. This is how new self-organizing order emerges from the death of outworn toxic systems.
In therapy, we hae to get to the root of the problem for more than a "bandaid" cure. Negative instinctual forces tend to keep this positive potential in check, but we are also capable of making quantum leaps in consciousness, particularly since our survival depends on it. We need to develop a system we can trust in once again.
The social drive behind transformation is the over-arching awareness that we are all in it together. New physics has revealed a deeper level of reality where we are at one with each other, the world and Cosmos. We need to begin operating from realization of that interconnected awareness.
Culture's Strange Attractors
Both individuals and cultures have internal maps of reality that condition their beliefs, thoughts, feelings and behaviors. C.G. Jung introduced the model of a Collective Unconscious and also a Collective Consciousness. Its primary structures are archetypes or patterns behind our religious, mythical, thought and social lives.
All the most powerful ideas in history arise from archetypes: religious ideas; the central concepts of science and philosophy. In their present form they are variants of archetypal ideas created by consciously applying and adapting these ideas to reality.
The Collective Psyche is complexed, subject to distortions in healthy dynamics. They revolve around the perennial problems of mankind -- the Strange Attractors of collective life. Projections territorialize the aspects of the collective psyche, but we are all part of that collective body.
Collective behavior also has a Shadow-side as we find in individuals. It causes us to project evil onto other individuals, groups and nations, disowning our complicity. Often there is an abyss between our overt and covert intentions and their real-world effects due to a myopia that prevents us seeing into our collective blind spots.
What is going on in the collective psyche? Oppositional thinking and projection mean we live in a time of accelerating polarization: us versus them, good versus evildoers, and splitting and projection based in creeds, isms, and other congealed dogmas. What we need to examine are the effects, not intentions, of those beliefs.
Cultural narcissism and oppositional thinking are deterants to peace in the world. We need to begin taking collective responsibility for our pathology to overcome our collective denial that has fouled our environment and interpersonal relations at the individual, national and global level.
Frontiers of Consciousness
We gain in meaning and value by fearlessly examining our collective psyche to find hidden dynamics at work below the surface of events that could make or break our intergenerational futures. These dynamics are conditioned by archetypes just like individuals share these common drives for good and evil.
Global Architectronics is the evolving architecture of our common culture, shaped by a variety of internal and external forces. Some of them plague mankind and some have the potential to raise us to a higher level of being in the world and with one another.
The dynamics of Chaos Theory illuminates the process of radical culture change and the challenges of our currently shifting society. We are in unprecedented flux and recognizing that changes in one area of the globe potentially effect the whole system. There are no "closed societies" in the Information Age. This is the era of Glocalization. Order emerges from chaos, but chaos also overwhelms us when order breaks down in our bodies, minds or societies. Then we need emergent healing that comes from deep within, not introjected from outside of ourselves but welling up from our core. In this new Depression, we need deep healing, individually and collectively.
Our sick system needs to heal from corruption and mismanagement. The planet needs to heal from human impact and overpopulation. It is a complex problem which can only be addressed by a radical shift in healing paradigms and means. The transformative process takes many forms in working with chaos through nature's way.
The Psychic System
COLLECTIVE PSYCHE is a meta-theory of mankind and the primordial field of consciousness/matter, first proposed by Jung. We have no control over the collective psyche, the dynamic totality of all conscious and unconscious psychic processes. It is a self-organizing process with its own structure and flow (archetypes and dynamics).
Global sociopolitical life mirrors this condition (including deeply ingrained conflict, the will to live and depression). Systemic global problems are mirrored in each of us. So are collective delusions. But our collective hearts are increasingly crying out for something beyond that myopia.
We must uncover and challenge the disabling myths of the collective psyche, triggering the drive to reach for the inspirational and extraordinary. Change starts with the questions we ask because they are embedded with the potential to shift our awareness to more expansive and unexpected views. Can we harness what we've learned the hard way?
When we contemplate the same images, seeds are planted that may be unseen but express themselves through metaphor. Poised at the critical edge of creative process, we can reconfigure our strategies and resources into a living system with transcultural dialogue. All we have to do is apply decentralized, wise, creative, compassionate decisions wherever we can.
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. The dichotomy of psyche and matter has collapsed in the transpersonal perspective. Realizing we share the same field, the new paradigm encompasses psyche and Cosmos.
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 undesirable timelines and outcomes using collective psyche as applied human survival technology?
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. Is collective perversion inherent in the very processes that make us human? Collective behavior often defies apparent rationality by being toxic, pathological and malignant.
None of us is uncontaminated by what goes on outside of ourselves in the world. We all feel "violated" by some form of psychosocial trauma. This is the root of alienation. Have we become strangers to ourselves by projecting collective blame and suppressing collective wisdom?
How can we kindle a cultural placebo effect for spontaneous healing? What initiations do we need to find new meaning and make a collective transition away from "collective neurosis" toward the newly emerging concept of spiritual wellness and compassionate maturity?
Will we assume a higher level of personal and social responsibility or remain numb to our collective dysfunctional behavior? What forces are undermining our collective psyche and why do we permit them to remain in play? How can we process and transmute our collective guilt into effective transformation? Can we stop transmitting our collective dysfunctionalities to future generations?
Can we heal the traumas imprinted on our collective psyche, recognizing there will always be conflicts from organizing principles in the psyche? Archetypes are composed of autonomous dynamic tensions arising spontaneously in individuals and the collective psyche.
The Transcendent function, according to Jung, resolves the split between opposing dynamics and recognizes the spiritual dimension of the psyche. Flow describes the state of harmonious order.
Can we take a collective spiritual journey beyond competing religions and isms toward collective vision? "Recovery" has taken on new meaning in the collective psyche since the global economic crash. We have to "take stock" of the new situation. As economic foundations crumble, we can't afford to be irrationally complacent.
Psyche, Science & Society
How can we modify the processes arising in the political context without changing the social context? The collective shadow of the old paradigm still plagues us with collective memory of political events, state terrorism, covert action, control mechanisms, public visibility (transparency), collective violence, class conflict, collective security, provincial national and cultural interests.
Psychosocial trauma is repeated as violations of person and property, competition for scarce resources, discrimination, our collective involvement in torture and such Frankensteinian science as biowarfare. In the asymmetric war of repressor and repressed, these are only a few of the manifestions of such tensions and our reactions (collective action) to them.
The insult is to our entire biopsychosocial being. Our institutional approach to trauma breaks down somewhere in the process. Global trauma occurs in the context of global drama. Traditional therapeutic paradigms don't work for this kind of trauma inflicted in the macro-social context of savage plutocracy, hegemonic capitalism and brutal totalitarianism. But there are pre-existing conditions in the structure of society and we have to deal with them as best we can.
The ghosts of such large-scale structures can only be exorcised for collective welfare by the introduction of new information, new contexts, new meaning, new structures and new paradigms. Models of collective history and psychological perspectives on society effect our worldview. The collective psyche of many groups has been brutalized. We need new models of collaboration and conflict resolution at the individual and collective level.
The collective psyche itself demands resolution or at least makes us obsess on 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.
Collective intelligence and identity are externalized online in social networking and digital alchemy. The web is a window on collective psyche that invites eruptions from its depths. This superset is a new human identity, embodying that tangibly greater than self. We are practicing higher order collective cooperation, collectively reinventing ourselves as a species. Collective conversation moves at the speed of light.Openness, inclusivity, decentralization, nonlocality and virtuality are keywords. We are not only merging with one another, we are e-merging our nervous systems with our technology. We are letting go of personal identity to collective intelligence in a new way, teaching one another as we explore that frontier beyond the doors of perception. We are each a unique center.
EDGEucation
Our collective aspirations are guided by archetypal fantasies. Our disenchantment and collective grief is arguably over loss of the world soul. The collective psyche points toward and guides us through the transition period we now face. New images are arising, reframing the future. Images have healing properties. They speak to us in our sleeping and waking dreams, forging shared stories relevant to everyone in the process as well as the Cosmos itself.
We cannot separate our psychophysical symptoms from the collective environment. There is a missing dimension in our worldview and mindscapes. We sense it, even though the market and media have attempted to drain all depth from our experience. Emergent events are not merely responses to economic and climatic conditions or social engineering, but eruptions of the collective unconscious.
Mobilized, the archetypal dynamics and creative forces of the collective psyche perturb psychosocial trends, creating new possibilities. Archetypes are the psychic skeleton fleshed out by events that matter. We can't keep our collective skeletons in the closet anymore. We can no longer charge the future to pay for our past. The marks have wised up and no longer trust the control systems.
What doesn't effect the Collective Psyche? Perhaps humanity has never faced more multi-dimensional challenges. We need to retrieve and upgrade our human survival technologies for our metamorphosis. Healing emerges from pathology. Edge artists are the shamans of the new millennium.
Maybe we are still addicted to the Hermetic myth of futurism when we need to live in the here and now. Like Hermes, the future is a perennial Trickster: this is what you want, this is what you get -- lowered expectations. Why do we hurry to live in the future? Futurism speculates about the unknown, robbing us of the present and its opportunities.
There is no quick cure for collective ills but we can find new metaphors, deeper meaning and more relevant stories. There is no therapy but moving forward creatively into the future, experimenting with solutions. Inspiration can emerge from infinite potential in any instant.
Participatory Wisdom
The only certain way to heal the personality or the world is getting to the source of wisdom. Collective consciousness is tied to the health of each individual. Healing power emerges from integration. Looking within, we arouse our tacit knowledge for participatory wisdom -- the active wisdom of the collective psyche.
The same patterns are at work in the individual and collective psyche, something ungraspable in the depths. Larger patterns are at work in the collective. Global awareness, multiculturalism and multinationalism are basic to the collective psyche. But we fear the loss of old boundaries. Is this our collective Borderline disorder, emphasizing relationship disturbances that challenge our beliefs about ourselves? Is it the source of our unremitting crisis and vulnerability?
Joy is the only antidote to anxiety. We need to create better environments, newer myths, and more compassionate beliefs so we can thrive, not just survive. Rather than conspicuous consumption, new buzzwords include ZPG, "downsizing," "aging lean," "design intelligence."
We need new models for creative art and science that move us beyond the nihilism of postmodernism into the transmodern era. The exhausted culture must die for the new to emerge from its ashes. The collective death-wish plays out in a myriad of ways. The psyche is not amenable to reduction. It cannot be contained or restricted.
Politics, Economics, War, Disease, Natural Calamities, Science and Technology, Natural Resource shortages, the Population Bomb, Pandemic, Forced Migration, Climate Shift, Energy Crisis and more have the capacity to instantly morph our worldview and lifestyles.
Destructive states need to give way to an opening of imagination as we continue to free our collective selves from oppressive mythologies. Hopefully, we can find a more sustainable means of existence. Therapeutic interventions can be performed by anyone at any level.
For example, consumers are radically revisioning their spending, saving and investment patterns. Artists are learning what it means to design new bodies and virtual environments. Art can be read as the archives of collective vision. Our collective intelligence is transforming through social networking. We can retrieve our geneologies and test our DNA to find out exactly who we are and where we come from. What we find is we are all more closely related than we formerly thought.
We can benefit by a wide-ranging holistic examination of nature and our own nature as a species. Humans, science tells us, are 99% genetically identical to primates and even closer to one another -- we are one family of man. Battles are symptoms. In psychology, symptoms are where boundaries are shifting.
Collective psyche is as multi-faceted as mankind. The meme biological "race" -- a social construction -- is an irrelevant folk belief that is culturally ingrained divisive view. The global human population is genetically homogeneous compared to other mammals. There are no subspecies in our global family.
Dysfunctional Family of Man
However, we are dysfunctional, detached, alienated. The collective demands of our culture have drained us. We have endured unbearable collective "cognitive dissonance" between the traditional and transitional paradigms. Such mental epidemics arise in the collective soul. One treatment is to reinvest in perennial collective values, such as democracy. If you hold a value, you must speak for it. Lack of passion indicates numbing.
We yearn for something deeper than consumerism in terms of mass mind. Fragmentation is the metaphysical and existential condition that leads to compulsive creation of the false self as compensation for lack of authentic identity. Omega points embody our existential despair, our apocalyptic yearning, our narcissistic desire to have everything reflect our own emptiness.
Despair can lead to suicidal thoughts. In Suicide and the Soul, James Hillman suggests the impulse to suicide is psyche's intense desire to change, and die symbolically to be reborn or renewed. We also long for renewal in our global culture and for the sake of our offspring. But do we have to be collectively self-destructive in the process?
Collectively, we are experiencing a disorder of adaptation that manifests in dissociation. Distrust, greed, apathy and burn-out are symptomatic. We have only recently crashed from a series of socially manufactured hyper-manic investment "bubbles," awakening us from a delusion of limitless growth.
We've become numb and overwhelmed. Numbness masks our collective spiritual hunger, which is the root of all addiction. Our paranoid culture is hyper-vigilant with Post-Traumatic Stress.
Holding all this tension is "weathering" or wearing us out. Economic collapse has sent many back to square one, desperately trying to reinvent themselves for survival. Old personas grow constrictive when we are role-bound into conventionality or the equally cliche eccentricities. Even your rebellions are socially engineered. Identified with the social mask, when we lose our job or 'mission' we lose our identity.
In the same way, we have to reinvent our culture, fractally, from the bottom-up and top-down. Some areas of cultural activity are more pathological and malignant. We literally and metaphorically need to 'cut it out.'
Ancient cultures have much to teach us in this regard; we need to listen deeply to one another. Psycho-spiritual forces of transformation are also in play, such as conceptual reorientation and memes that remain to play out, such as 2012 and technological singularity.
The Collective Psyche is also vulnerable to manipulation through a variety of means that modulate the order/disorder scale. Propaganda is used for organizing chaos in accord with specific agendas through memes, media, education, social values, military, medicine, politics, intelligence and business. Ideas are replicators, much like genes, and can be "cancerous" and require radical treatment.
Zeitgeist
The very Fabric of Reality is woven in our collective thoughts and embodiment. Consensus reality is formulated and ratified at the level of the human unconscious where all minds are entangled. This matrix determines the context and meaning of individual and collective being.
Currently, we are in the midst of a profound paradigm shift. For the first time in history we have sweeping knowledge of the historic panoply of our planet and humanity's place in it. We know who we are but we don't know where we are going, except into the Great Unknown, the abyss that represents the universal Mystery. Indications are that we are becoming "transhuman." The sad part is most of have failed to becoming "fully human," living up to our human potential, before the transition.
Shared beliefs and attitudes operating as a unifying social force create Collective Consciousness which embodies the Social Cradle. This fractal and systems awareness can be raised to new heights through transformations in tacit and articulated knowledge with behavior rooted in new understanding. This is how new self-organizing order emerges from the death of outworn toxic systems.
In therapy, we hae to get to the root of the problem for more than a "bandaid" cure. Negative instinctual forces tend to keep this positive potential in check, but we are also capable of making quantum leaps in consciousness, particularly since our survival depends on it. We need to develop a system we can trust in once again.
The social drive behind transformation is the over-arching awareness that we are all in it together. New physics has revealed a deeper level of reality where we are at one with each other, the world and Cosmos. We need to begin operating from realization of that interconnected awareness.
Culture's Strange Attractors
Both individuals and cultures have internal maps of reality that condition their beliefs, thoughts, feelings and behaviors. C.G. Jung introduced the model of a Collective Unconscious and also a Collective Consciousness. Its primary structures are archetypes or patterns behind our religious, mythical, thought and social lives.
All the most powerful ideas in history arise from archetypes: religious ideas; the central concepts of science and philosophy. In their present form they are variants of archetypal ideas created by consciously applying and adapting these ideas to reality.
The Collective Psyche is complexed, subject to distortions in healthy dynamics. They revolve around the perennial problems of mankind -- the Strange Attractors of collective life. Projections territorialize the aspects of the collective psyche, but we are all part of that collective body.
Collective behavior also has a Shadow-side as we find in individuals. It causes us to project evil onto other individuals, groups and nations, disowning our complicity. Often there is an abyss between our overt and covert intentions and their real-world effects due to a myopia that prevents us seeing into our collective blind spots.
What is going on in the collective psyche? Oppositional thinking and projection mean we live in a time of accelerating polarization: us versus them, good versus evildoers, and splitting and projection based in creeds, isms, and other congealed dogmas. What we need to examine are the effects, not intentions, of those beliefs.
Cultural narcissism and oppositional thinking are deterants to peace in the world. We need to begin taking collective responsibility for our pathology to overcome our collective denial that has fouled our environment and interpersonal relations at the individual, national and global level.
Frontiers of Consciousness
We gain in meaning and value by fearlessly examining our collective psyche to find hidden dynamics at work below the surface of events that could make or break our intergenerational futures. These dynamics are conditioned by archetypes just like individuals share these common drives for good and evil.
Global Architectronics is the evolving architecture of our common culture, shaped by a variety of internal and external forces. Some of them plague mankind and some have the potential to raise us to a higher level of being in the world and with one another.
The dynamics of Chaos Theory illuminates the process of radical culture change and the challenges of our currently shifting society. We are in unprecedented flux and recognizing that changes in one area of the globe potentially effect the whole system. There are no "closed societies" in the Information Age. This is the era of Glocalization. Order emerges from chaos, but chaos also overwhelms us when order breaks down in our bodies, minds or societies. Then we need emergent healing that comes from deep within, not introjected from outside of ourselves but welling up from our core. In this new Depression, we need deep healing, individually and collectively.
Our sick system needs to heal from corruption and mismanagement. The planet needs to heal from human impact and overpopulation. It is a complex problem which can only be addressed by a radical shift in healing paradigms and means. The transformative process takes many forms in working with chaos through nature's way.