Jung's Collective Unconscious
"Anyway," I continued, "all this talk of collective consciousness reminds me of Carl Jung's work on the collective unconscious. I'll read this passage from The Holographic Universe…"
The holographic idea also sheds light on the unexplainable linkages that can sometimes occur between the consciousness of two or more individuals. One of the most famous examples of such linkage is embodied in Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious. Early in his career, Jung became convinced that the dreams, artwork, fantasies, and hallucinations of his patients often contained symbols and ideas that could not be explained entirely as products of their personal history. Instead, such symbols closely resembled the images and themes of the world’s greatest mythologies and religions. Jung concluded that myths, dreams, hallucinations and religious visions all spring from the same source, a collective unconscious that is shared by all people.
One experience that led Jung to his conclusion took place in 1906 and involved the hallucination of a young man suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. One day while making his rounds Jung found the young man standing at a window and staring up at the sun. The man was also moving his head from side to side in a curious manner. When Jung asked him what he was doing, he explained that he was looking at the sun’s penis, and when he moved his head from side to side, the sun’s penis moved and caused the wind to blow.
At the time, Jung viewed the man’s assertion as the product of a hallucination. But several years later he came across a translation of a two-thousand-year-old Persian religious text that changed his mind. The text consisted of a series of rituals and invocations designed to bring on visions. It described one of the visions and said that if the participant looked at the sun he would see a tube hanging down from it, and when the tube moved from side to side it would cause the wind to blow. Since circumstances made it extremely unlikely that the man had had any contact with the text containing the ritual, Jung concluded that the man’s vision was not simply a product of his unconscious mind, but had bubbled up from a deeper level, from the collective unconscious of the human race itself. Jung called such images archetypes and believed they were so ancient it’s as if each of us has the memory of a two-million-year-old man lurking somewhere in the depths of our unconscious mind.
Michael Talbot
"Are these archetypes Markov-blanketed blueprints, too?" Zac asked. "If they exist within the Human blueprint, then presumably all humans would collectively inherit these ideas."
"Yep," I said. "I haven't looked into it too much, but on the surface, Jungian psychology is quite fascinating. Archetypes are just ideas that are communicated via symbols. For example, the word 'cat' in English and the word 'gato' in Spanish are symbols that represent the same idea: a four-legged feline. If I want to communicate this idea to an English speaker, I need to use the symbol, 'cat,' because she won't derive any meaning from the symbol, 'gato' — and vice versa."