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by Kingsley Dennis November 21, 2019 from KingsleyDennis Website
And not only badly, but in a way that is detrimental to our own well-being.
It would seem more than strange, verging on the insane, that any creature would wish to deliberately harm its own environment and support systems.
Yet for us humans we have the significant added factor of being conscious of our actions, and self-conscious in our reflective understanding.
So, again, to ask,
It appears that this question has been asked many times in the past, over and over, by many thinkers, philosophers, sages, and mystics.
It is a question that has concerned a great number of people for a long time. And yet I can only suspect that the issue is of great concern today because for the first time in our human history we are behaving as a global species.
With our communication technologies we are sharing our ideas, stories, opinions, and the rest, all across the planet.
We
can know almost instantly some news from a far-flung corner of the
world. And so, at this time in our human history, a negative
presence in our collective mindset would be disastrous.
Briefly, I shall discuss this in regard to the work
of psychologist C.G. Jung.
Jung coined the term 'collective unconscious' in his 1916 essay 'The Structure of the Unconscious' and went on to articulate his ideas further in later publications.
In his essay 'The Significance of Constitution and Heredity in Psychology' (November 1929) he wrote that,
In this essay Jung wrote that,
Importantly, Jung considered that this collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited.
That is, we inherit a 'psychic life' that is filled with 'occurrences' that stretch back to earliest beginnings.
We could very well be dealing
with a psycho-pathogen - that is, a mind virus - that infects our
individual minds from the underlying collective realm.
Such a mental pathogen would act in the same way by installing its own malware program in our minds.
For most of the time we are unaware of it, as it acts alongside our own 'normal' mind until a time when it takes over almost completely.
Over time our own mental make-up - our psychological state - would adapt the foreign 'invader' and assimilate it into its own functioning as a way of normalization.
In other words, we would eventually come to
consider it as our mind.
Our space-time continuum is not empty but consists of highly dense energy that forms a non-local field.
Modern scientific philosophers also hypothesize that this non-local field is conscious. [i]
Everything in our physical universe is a projection, or secondary manifestation, from this underlying non-local field. Similarly, human consciousness exists as a non-local phenomenon, operating both within the human mind-body complex as well as without.
This perspective helps us to understand how a mental virus could infect and affect human life regardless of location and physical proximity.
The reality in which we
live is suffused with our mental projections. As Jung taught, our
unconscious thoughts form a part of the world just as do our
conscious thinking.
Before we know it, we are having malicious or angry psychosis-like thoughts, which then could easily manifest into actual behavior.
The question is,
Since the mental pathogen is a non-local phenomenon then it is possible that we all are infected with it to varying degrees.
Or, it may be more accurate to say that this mind has us. And the worst of it is that most people will be unconscious and unwitting carriers of this pathogen.
As Jung said,
Later in his life Jung was even more direct and forthcoming about the dangers lurking within the human psyche.
He stated that,
Jung was clear that psychic epidemics were a reality and put forth that humanity is in great danger exactly because the human psyche is in great danger.
Similarly, physicist and thinker David Bohm, who was also aware of this mental infection, considered in his later life how we might combat this problem:
The only true alternative to the 'wounded mind' lies first in our recognition and acceptance of its presence. This mental pathogen, whether it is called the wounded mind or a psychosis-virus, is really a turning away and denial of the human spirit.
To overcome
its influence, we need to turn inward to find strength and support.
We are reminded of the popular quote from Krishnamurti,
We can recognize the presence of the wounded mind when it enters into our thinking as it seeks to strengthen the rational 'logical' component and attempts to over- intellectualize everything.
This 'false psyche' that implants itself into us brings along its own convoluted logic. This topsy-turvy nonsensical thinking is an inversion of true values.
It is responsible for developing what I call the 'old mind' thinking patterns, namely,
Such terror as it can produce doesn't need to come from guns or bombs (although this is one unfortunate form); it seeks coercion, compliance, and ultimately control, by manipulation and malicious influence.
Such control can come from,
... all of whom place us under influence, force us into passivity, or emasculate us through debt. And such enforcers may wear the smartest or the most expensive of clothes and come with a smile upon their faces.
Each of us can be
both a recipient of the wounded mind as well as a potential healer
for ourselves and others.
A personal experience of trauma may serve as a catalytic process that can later help to facilitate healing within others.
Since as a species we share a
collective psyche (Jung's collective unconscious), then we also
share in the collective wound of humanity.
...but more so between the inner freedom of the human spirit and the constraints of our mentally-corrupted societies and cultures.
We need to ask ourselves the question that Don Juan posed to his student Carlos Castaneda:
The most important things in the world are not to be found in any place external to us.
Any
society or culture that does not recognize and support the human as
a spiritual being will ultimately be lacking in a viable, long-term
future.
***
The source of this trauma is still unclear and up for debate. It may be a collective psychosis of civilization, a devolutionary impulse/presence, or a combination of these. Or else it may be something other but with similar aspects.
Yet whatever may be the root cause, it is still quite clear that a traumatic presence lingers within the collective psyche of humanity, and it needs to be recognized for what it is - and expelled.
Perhaps the traumas we are seeing inflicted upon the world today are part of this expulsion - a sort of public exorcism.
In this case, we can all act as our own
'wounded healers' in order to evolve toward our destiny as a noble
human species upon this planet.
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