In the first three installments of my “Quantum Wish” series of blogs I mentioned a concept of the collective stream of human experiences. This is a rather esoteric matter on which I did not elaborate and this may have led to some confusion. I will now take a few moments in an effort to explain what I mean by this.
Humans are complex beings and operate on at least a couple of different levels. One of these is the conscious mind. It allows for self awareness, introspection and active participation in the world around us. We can look at consciousness as the personal and private world view of each individual human. This is the “self” of which we are all familiar and interpret as “reality”. The other level is the unconscious mind. This is that part of the human psyche which is generally not perceived directly, but nevertheless can be inferred as being present. If we cannot directly perceive the unconscious mind, how do we know that it exists? Is this just some metaphysical mumbo jumbo? Let’s take a closer look.
I don’t know about you, but there have been many occasions I have had insights I could not explain through cognition alone. At times I may looked for an answer to some specific question, and arrived at no conclusion, no matter how hard I “thought” about it consciously. Later, when I was not actively pondering it, I got a certain “insight” from seemingly out of the blue. This illustrates that even though we are not consciously aware of the process; some other part of us is still churning through the facts and perhaps even gathering additional data from some unknown source. When this unseen part of us arrives at the answer, it turns it back over to the conscious mind and, voila!, the light bulb goes on and we have an inspiration. The psychological researcher, Carl Jung was a proponent of the idea of a “collective unconscious” as being a sort of “reservoir of the experiences of our species”. It is this “collective unconscious” which most closely parallels my viewpoint of the “stream” I mentioned in my previous blogs and is the source of the “unknown” data our unconscious mind draws upon when it is working behind the scenes. Let’s examine this in terms of dreams.
One common view of dreams is that they are the result of a unique state of being where the conscious mind and the unconscious mind sort of merge and interact in an intimate way. Human dreams are often filled with vivid images: locations, people and circumstances which the conscious mind does not recognize and yet seem to be somehow familiar. Part of this is the result of the mind processing the information accumulated through our daily conscious awareness. This is the regenerative aspect of dreams common to all higher forms of life. Humans, however, have dreams that go beyond simple “data organization”. They are often the source of the insights I mentioned earlier. While the dream state is thought to be common to all animal life, it is the unconscious component which is unique to humans. It is in the dream state that humans come closest to tapping into Jung’s “collective unconsciousness” in a recognizable way. There are other human states which closely approximate the dream state and further serve to allow us to recognize the presence of an unconscious reality. Meditation and hypnosis exhibit many of the same traits as dreams. These states provide the conscious mind access to the unconscious mind and as a result, the “collective human mind”.
Now we are beginning to move away from the physical and into the realms of the metaphysical. It is my belief that the conscious mind is a manifestation of the physical being and that the unconscious mind is better described as being spiritual. Let me see if I can describe this in terms of an analogy.
In 1974 Lewis Thomas, a physician, essayist, Dean of the Yale Medical School and President of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute published a collection of his essays in a book entitled Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher. In this book, he described the behavior of social insects, specifically ants. Ants live together in a collective group he called “The Hill”. Individual ants, when isolated from others in the hill displayed behaviors which were only in reaction to stimuli provided by their environment. There was no “intelligent” purpose in their actions. Taken as a whole, however, The Hill behaves differently. The Hill has organization. There is a divvying up of responsibility in which each individual ant behaves in an orchestrated way. This coordination of efforts is not the result of “the will” of any individual ant, but it is rather the result of the “merging” of each ant into something bigger than itself … The Hill. In a very true sense, The Hill is intelligent. It is composed of, but superior to, the individuals which comprise it. The Hill behaves as one being with a mind of its own.
The collective unconscious of humanity … the stream … is analogous to The Hill. Taken together, the individual humans form a higher-level being, composed of and yet superior to, any individual. This communal intelligence they participate in is generally not something people perceive. The dominance of “conscious thought” isolates individuals from the understanding that they are members of a “greater whole”. The collective human mind is a spiritual entity which exists in a place separate from our individual perceptions of reality. Some call this place a different plane or dimension. The terminology may be different, but the underlying idea is the same: we are all part of one, greater “being”.
The analogy of the collective human mind with that of The Hill is useful, but incomplete. I adhere to a rather anthropocentric view of humanity’s role in the universe. While any individual ant cannot influence the behavior of The Hill, humans have the unique ability to influence their collective mind. This is one of the basic tenants of “Quantum Wishing”. I will not rehash the way people use quantum mechanics to modify this “stream”. That was covered in previous blogs. Since the time humans first arrived on the scene, mankind has been undergoing a sort of ’spiritual Darwinism”. For now I will simply take a Zen-like approach to what the nature of reality was before humans existed … it is the sound of a tree falling in the woods with no one to hear it. It may or may not have made a noise but that does not matter. This question is beyond the scope of this blog and may be addressed in a future article.
The existence of the “one whole” of humanity has been historically relegated to the realm of mystics and sages. We term their conscious glimpses into the unconscious collective mind to be “enlightenment”. Now, our “spiritual natural selection (Darwinism)” is producing individuals who have developed abilities to understand and participate in the collective unconsciousness in a more intimate way. It is these individuals who exert the greatest influence on the sanity (or insanity) of our collective mind. These are the mystics of old and the charismatic leaders of history and they are now appearing in greater numbers. Their influence can have either a negative or positive outcome, depending upon the individual’s perspective. In order to avoid a maladjusted “collective mind”, it is critical that humanity learn the lesson of unconditional love. Previous excursions into ’behavior modification” of the collective mind by certain special individuals have had mixed results. Lessons in unconditional love steered mankind on to a path of peace and harmony. The converse, hatred and intolerance, have resulted in tragedies of huge proportions, most notably wars and genocide. Either outcome when toying around with the collective mind is equally probable. It is up to us to determine how we think collectively.
I will close by paraphrasing a quotation from George Gurdjieff,: “We are not human beings having spiritual experiences, but a spiritual being having human ones”. I guess this begs the question “is artificial intelligence (computers) an oxymoron? That is for another blog.
A Unique State of Being
In the first three installments of my “Quantum Wish” series of blogs I mentioned a concept of the collective stream of human experiences. This is a rather esoteric matter on which I did not elaborate and this may have led to some confusion. I will now take a few moments in an effort to explain what I mean by this.
Humans are complex beings and operate on at least a couple of different levels. One of these is the conscious mind. It allows for self awareness, introspection and active participation in the world around us. We can look at consciousness as the personal and private world view of each individual human. This is the “self” of which we are all familiar and interpret as “reality”. The other level is the unconscious mind. This is that part of the human psyche which is generally not perceived directly, but nevertheless can be inferred as being present.
If we cannot directly perceive the unconscious mind, how do we know that it exists? Is this just some metaphysical mumbo jumbo? Let’s take a closer look.
I don’t know about you, but there have been many occasions I have had insights I could not explain through cognition alone. At times I may looked for an answer to some specific question, and arrived at no conclusion, no matter how hard I “thought” about it consciously. Later, when I was not actively pondering it, I got a certain “insight” from seemingly out of the blue. This illustrates that even though we are not consciously aware of the process; some other part of us is still churning through the facts and perhaps even gathering additional data from some unknown source. When this unseen part of us arrives at the answer, it turns it back over to the conscious mind and, voila!, the light bulb goes on and we have an inspiration. The psychological researcher, Carl Jung was a proponent of the idea of a “collective unconscious” as being a sort of “reservoir of the experiences of our species”. It is this “collective unconscious” which most closely parallels my viewpoint of the “stream” I mentioned in my previous blogs and is the source of the “unknown” data our unconscious mind draws upon when it is working behind the scenes. Let’s examine this in terms of dreams.
One common view of dreams is that they are the result of a unique state of being where the conscious mind and the unconscious mind sort of merge and interact in an intimate way. Human dreams are often filled with vivid images: locations, people and circumstances which the conscious mind does not recognize and yet seem to be somehow familiar. Part of this is the result of the mind processing the information accumulated through our daily conscious awareness. This is the regenerative aspect of dreams common to all higher forms of life. Humans, however, have dreams that go beyond simple “data organization”. They are often the source of the insights I mentioned earlier. While the dream state is thought to be common to all animal life, it is the unconscious component which is unique to humans.
It is in the dream state that humans come closest to tapping into Jung’s “collective unconsciousness” in a recognizable way. There are other human states which closely approximate the dream state and further serve to allow us to recognize the presence of an unconscious reality. Meditation and hypnosis exhibit many of the same traits as dreams. These states provide the conscious mind access to the unconscious mind and as a result, the “collective human mind”.
Now we are beginning to move away from the physical and into the realms of the metaphysical. It is my belief that the conscious mind is a manifestation of the physical being and that the unconscious mind is better described as being spiritual. Let me see if I can describe this in terms of an analogy.
In 1974 Lewis Thomas, a physician, essayist, Dean of the Yale Medical School and President of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute published a collection of his essays in a book entitled Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher. In this book, he described the behavior of social insects, specifically ants.
Ants live together in a collective group he called “The Hill”. Individual ants, when isolated from others in the hill displayed behaviors which were only in reaction to stimuli provided by their environment. There was no “intelligent” purpose in their actions.
Taken as a whole, however, The Hill behaves differently. The Hill has organization. There is a divvying up of responsibility in which each individual ant behaves in an orchestrated way. This coordination of efforts is not the result of “the will” of any individual ant, but it is rather the result of the “merging” of each ant into something bigger than itself … The Hill. In a very true sense, The Hill is intelligent. It is composed of, but superior to, the individuals which comprise it. The Hill behaves as one being with a mind of its own.
The collective unconscious of humanity … the stream … is analogous to The Hill. Taken together, the individual humans form a higher-level being, composed of and yet superior to, any individual. This communal intelligence they participate in is generally not something people perceive. The dominance of “conscious thought” isolates individuals from the understanding that they are members of a “greater whole”.
The collective human mind is a spiritual entity which exists in a place separate from our individual perceptions of reality. Some call this place a different plane or dimension. The terminology may be different, but the underlying idea is the same: we are all part of one, greater “being”.
The analogy of the collective human mind with that of The Hill is useful, but incomplete. I adhere to a rather anthropocentric view of humanity’s role in the universe. While any individual ant cannot influence the behavior of The Hill, humans have the unique ability to influence their collective mind. This is one of the basic tenants of “Quantum Wishing”. I will not rehash the way people use quantum mechanics to modify this “stream”. That was covered in previous blogs. Since the time humans first arrived on the scene, mankind has been undergoing a sort of ’spiritual Darwinism”. For now I will simply take a Zen-like approach to what the nature of reality was before humans existed … it is the sound of a tree falling in the woods with no one to hear it. It may or may not have made a noise but that does not matter. This question is beyond the scope of this blog and may be addressed in a future article.
The existence of the “one whole” of humanity has been historically relegated to the realm of mystics and sages. We term their conscious glimpses into the unconscious collective mind to be “enlightenment”. Now, our “spiritual natural selection (Darwinism)” is producing individuals who have developed abilities to understand and participate in the collective unconsciousness in a more intimate way. It is these individuals who exert the greatest influence on the sanity (or insanity) of our collective mind. These are the mystics of old and the charismatic leaders of history and they are now appearing in greater numbers. Their influence can have either a negative or positive outcome, depending upon the individual’s perspective. In order to avoid a maladjusted “collective mind”, it is critical that humanity learn the lesson of unconditional love. Previous excursions into ’behavior modification” of the collective mind by certain special individuals have had mixed results. Lessons in unconditional love steered mankind on to a path of peace and harmony. The converse, hatred and intolerance, have resulted in tragedies of huge proportions, most notably wars and genocide. Either outcome when toying around with the collective mind is equally probable. It is up to us to determine how we think collectively.
I will close by paraphrasing a quotation from George Gurdjieff,: “We are not human beings having spiritual experiences, but a spiritual being having human ones”. I guess this begs the question “is artificial intelligence (computers) an oxymoron? That is for another blog.
A Unique State of Being
In the first three installments of my “Quantum Wish” series of blogs I mentioned a concept of the collective stream of human experiences. This is a rather esoteric matter on which I did not elaborate and this may have led to some confusion. I will now take a few moments in an effort to explain what I mean by this.
Humans are complex beings and operate on at least a couple of different levels. One of these is the conscious mind. It allows for self awareness, introspection and active participation in the world around us. We can look at consciousness as the personal and private world view of each individual human. This is the “self” of which we are all familiar and interpret as “reality”. The other level is the unconscious mind. This is that part of the human psyche which is generally not perceived directly, but nevertheless can be inferred as being present.
If we cannot directly perceive the unconscious mind, how do we know that it exists? Is this just some metaphysical mumbo jumbo? Let’s take a closer look.
I don’t know about you, but there have been many occasions I have had insights I could not explain through cognition alone. At times I may looked for an answer to some specific question, and arrived at no conclusion, no matter how hard I “thought” about it consciously. Later, when I was not actively pondering it, I got a certain “insight” from seemingly out of the blue. This illustrates that even though we are not consciously aware of the process; some other part of us is still churning through the facts and perhaps even gathering additional data from some unknown source. When this unseen part of us arrives at the answer, it turns it back over to the conscious mind and, voila!, the light bulb goes on and we have an inspiration. The psychological researcher, Carl Jung was a proponent of the idea of a “collective unconscious” as being a sort of “reservoir of the experiences of our species”. It is this “collective unconscious” which most closely parallels my viewpoint of the “stream” I mentioned in my previous blogs and is the source of the “unknown” data our unconscious mind draws upon when it is working behind the scenes. Let’s examine this in terms of dreams.
One common view of dreams is that they are the result of a unique state of being where the conscious mind and the unconscious mind sort of merge and interact in an intimate way. Human dreams are often filled with vivid images: locations, people and circumstances which the conscious mind does not recognize and yet seem to be somehow familiar. Part of this is the result of the mind processing the information accumulated through our daily conscious awareness. This is the regenerative aspect of dreams common to all higher forms of life. Humans, however, have dreams that go beyond simple “data organization”. They are often the source of the insights I mentioned earlier. While the dream state is thought to be common to all animal life, it is the unconscious component which is unique to humans.
It is in the dream state that humans come closest to tapping into Jung’s “collective unconsciousness” in a recognizable way. There are other human states which closely approximate the dream state and further serve to allow us to recognize the presence of an unconscious reality. Meditation and hypnosis exhibit many of the same traits as dreams. These states provide the conscious mind access to the unconscious mind and as a result, the “collective human mind”.
Now we are beginning to move away from the physical and into the realms of the metaphysical. It is my belief that the conscious mind is a manifestation of the physical being and that the unconscious mind is better described as being spiritual. Let me see if I can describe this in terms of an analogy.
In 1974 Lewis Thomas, a physician, essayist, Dean of the Yale Medical School and President of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute published a collection of his essays in a book entitled Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher. In this book, he described the behavior of social insects, specifically ants.
Ants live together in a collective group he called “The Hill”. Individual ants, when isolated from others in the hill displayed behaviors which were only in reaction to stimuli provided by their environment. There was no “intelligent” purpose in their actions.
Taken as a whole, however, The Hill behaves differently. The Hill has organization. There is a divvying up of responsibility in which each individual ant behaves in an orchestrated way. This coordination of efforts is not the result of “the will” of any individual ant, but it is rather the result of the “merging” of each ant into something bigger than itself … The Hill. In a very true sense, The Hill is intelligent. It is composed of, but superior to, the individuals which comprise it. The Hill behaves as one being with a mind of its own.
The collective unconscious of humanity … the stream … is analogous to The Hill. Taken together, the individual humans form a higher-level being, composed of and yet superior to, any individual. This communal intelligence they participate in is generally not something people perceive. The dominance of “conscious thought” isolates individuals from the understanding that they are members of a “greater whole”.
The collective human mind is a spiritual entity which exists in a place separate from our individual perceptions of reality. Some call this place a different plane or dimension. The terminology may be different, but the underlying idea is the same: we are all part of one, greater “being”.
The analogy of the collective human mind with that of The Hill is useful, but incomplete. I adhere to a rather anthropocentric view of humanity’s role in the universe. While any individual ant cannot influence the behavior of The Hill, humans have the unique ability to influence their collective mind. This is one of the basic tenants of “Quantum Wishing”. I will not rehash the way people use quantum mechanics to modify this “stream”. That was covered in previous blogs. Since the time humans first arrived on the scene, mankind has been undergoing a sort of ’spiritual Darwinism”. For now I will simply take a Zen-like approach to what the nature of reality was before humans existed … it is the sound of a tree falling in the woods with no one to hear it. It may or may not have made a noise but that does not matter. This question is beyond the scope of this blog and may be addressed in a future article.
The existence of the “one whole” of humanity has been historically relegated to the realm of mystics and sages. We term their conscious glimpses into the unconscious collective mind to be “enlightenment”. Now, our “spiritual natural selection (Darwinism)” is producing individuals who have developed abilities to understand and participate in the collective unconsciousness in a more intimate way. It is these individuals who exert the greatest influence on the sanity (or insanity) of our collective mind. These are the mystics of old and the charismatic leaders of history and they are now appearing in greater numbers. Their influence can have either a negative or positive outcome, depending upon the individual’s perspective. In order to avoid a maladjusted “collective mind”, it is critical that humanity learn the lesson of unconditional love. Previous excursions into ’behavior modification” of the collective mind by certain special individuals have had mixed results. Lessons in unconditional love steered mankind on to a path of peace and harmony. The converse, hatred and intolerance, have resulted in tragedies of huge proportions, most notably wars and genocide. Either outcome when toying around with the collective mind is equally probable. It is up to us to determine how we think collectively.
I will close by paraphrasing a quotation from George Gurdjieff,: “We are not human beings having spiritual experiences, but a spiritual being having human ones”. I guess this begs the question “is artificial intelligence (computers) an oxymoron? That is for another blog.
I will close by paraphrasing a quotation from George Gurdjieff,: “We are not human beings having spiritual experiences, but a spiritual being having human ones”. I guess this begs the question “is artificial intelligence (computers) an oxymoron? That is for another blog.
