Chapter 3: Finding Yourself in The Collective Consciousness
When I look at our culture, I see the rising waters of anguish and despair flooding through it. There are so many broken promises and dreams, so many shattered expectations, so many lost possibilities that these wounds now define the day-to-day life of far too many citizens. As we witness our families, watch the news and read the newspaper, we can see the tragic answers are the creation and promotion of cultural and individual insanity, with its resultant suffering. Mass murders, early deaths, suicides, drug addiction, alcoholism, abuses of woman and children, racism, extinction of species, destruction of our ecology, and all of the damaged relationships that fail to find healing will continue to predominate within the collective mind of mankind until we make conscious contact with intelligence, love, and sanity. We have to begin protecting ourselves from all that, to become healthy people, retain our sanity and our humanity, instead of being consumed by despair, fatalism and anger. In the words of Michael Franti: ”Life is amazing, and then it sucks, and then it’s amazing again.” There is so much suffering in the world, and it brings a universally humbling, painful reality.
Human suffering and evil are two spiritually destructive forces that humanity has dealt with each moment of its existence. Failure to address these issues directly and consciously only leads to more suffering, and enhances the collective perception of the presence and growth of evil in our world. Many causes of suffering are preventable, however, and they have their origins within our broken, unhealed minds. Suffering comes in many forms, and has many causal agents. Suffering eventually touches all of us through its many different manifestations. Suffering may arise:
- as a direct result of trauma experienced at any point in life;
- through living a meaningless life, with a resistance to change and evolution;
- through an action of intentional hostility by others;
- through incurable diseases of the body or mind;
- spontaneously as a reaction to the vicissitudes of life;
- from an inability to do what is right;
- after witnessing horrific acts of violence;
- from the inability to reconcile the belief in God with one’s own grief and loss;
- from becoming addicted to substances that were designed to take our pain away;
- from the perceived inability to speak one’s truth;
- from not having one’s voice heard in the face of oppressive powers;
- from contemplating the continuation of our daily pains into a distant, unknown future;
- from continued bullying or threatening behavior from peers, employers, religions, politicians, or family members.
Pain, and suffering, without any hope for healing, brings anger, despair, depression, loneliness, and suicidal ideation. While being an unconscious man, I contributed to this disease of the spirit and to the overall relationship dysfunctions within the world. I have been subjected to the same family and cultural forces of oppression and repression, spawned by cultural and family mutual control dramas, which daily contribute to crazy making communication and behavior between all of us. Being a family man, I have taken note of the mutual-blame game and scapegoating that circulate continuously and serves as justification for each individual holding onto their own version of our cultural disease. All of this just leads to more suffering by innocent family members, friends, acquaintances, community members, and ourselves. Who amongst us does not want life to lean more towards amazing, rather than just sucking?
Things don’t often work out according to our best laid plans. And often, if we seek out many of society’s treasured goals, we find that goals didn’t live up to our expectations. The problem is not our plans, expectations, dreams, or aspirations. These are sacred and we must retain them. The point is that it’s not solely our fault. We have been let down in ways we never should have been. We have been neglected in ways that genuinely hurts and endures. Our possibilities shrank not because of something we did or didn’t do, but for a much, much bigger reason. Much of it was beyond our control, but once we can see what other options are available to us, we can find our reservoir of hope.
Our world is filled with an infinite supply of life affirming meaning, and we can experience it if we can tune into it and our whole self. Yet, news in recent years has been dominated by references to the actions of people living meaningless lives, as indicated by upswings in opioid use, alcoholism, gun violence, murder, mental illness, poor diets, insufficient exercise, and suicide. These factors are a small part of the real story. I have seen, and I believe at the deepest level of my own being, that disease in the mind of mankind is directly related to disease within the body of mankind. This is a difficult but essential truth to contemplate and to perceive: our society has created many of the conditions for our early demise through our lack of shared meaning and values.
My male heritage and my experiences as both a son to an oftentimes toxic father, and working with many damaged men in the electrical trades and in general employment, provided the background for much of my understanding of this suffering. Patriarchy, as expressed through men as a collective consciousness, is mostly responsible for creating the present day conditions of our diseased world. Wikipedia states: “Collective consciousness, collective conscience, or collective conscious is the set of shared beliefs, ideas, and moral attitudes which operate as a unifying force within society.” Men in power would rather have our neighbors, wives and children assaulted, raped, overdosed through drug use, or murdered through gun violence, than promote and enforce healing changes. Thus, we need more women in positions of power and influence, and men need to get in touch with their potential for toxic behavior and attitudes, and begin to make necessary course changes in their hearts and souls. Yet both men and women are directly influenced, and often controlled like puppets, by the collective consciousness that we all access, and share.
Collective consciousness has a source in our ancestral and genetic predispositions, and all of the answers that our culture, our families, and all of our individual selves have dreamed up to some of the great questions of life. The answers have become part of our philosophy, our history, our religion, the substance of our hopes and dreams, and the foundation for all of our nightmares. This is the seed consciousness behind the development of our sense of self, where our own answers to the important questions of life give rise to fragmented interpretation of life, and of the universe.
Individual Conscious
We only need to look within ourselves, and to our pasts, to see how uncertain our memories are, and extrapolate that to our human history, which is also plagued by short-term, medium-term, and long-term memory loss. Even though our present history has only about 5,000 years of written records, some cultures have historical narratives that appear to have been passed down for at least 30,000 years. The aborigines of Australia claim a 60,000 year narrative, while Central and South American indigenous peoples and their shamans also claim lineages of tens of thousands of years. Western European civilization appears to be an outgrowth of the migration of African tribal members at least 13,000-30,000 years ago. The human race has a long history, but throughout human history, our brains have grown more complex with the development of language and our lives more socially connected. Much of that information is stored in our bodies and minds. But as individuals, we can only consciously access what we were around to remember.
Once we develop consciousness as developing human beings, our internal sensations, emotions, and thoughts went online and became available to make us aware of who we are. Our internally observed neural activity told us what we like and don’t like, who we love and don’t love, how experiences make us feel, what we think, why we behave the sometimes odd ways that we do, and what we want. Because this inward directed, self-sensing part of our brain can itself be seen as an input, we can be aware of ourselves being aware of ourselves being aware our ourselves, times infinity. The experience of having conscious awareness happens on levels beyond the physical plane, without typical sensorial awareness. It can feel so extraordinary and exalted that it seems like it must be the result of something more than just brain chemistry, perhaps even a manifestation of something of an otherworldly, or even divine, nature. Our nervous systems are a vast universe of sensations, feelings, and thoughts. Conscious awareness has added a window to this interior dimension where the immeasurable and the unknowable may be accessed, caressed, or manhandled, by our sense of self.
Helen Keller is a remarkable account of that very universal process. Helen Keller gives an outstanding narrative of the beginning of her own sense of self, a new self which seemed to arise out of her more instinctual, or even chaotic biological response to life. Once she recognized that the letters w, a, t, e, r represented the substance that she washed with and drank, her own unique sense of herself also arose. Literally, understanding the word and its symbolism opened the miraculous door to her self. And the ability to communicate this conscious gives us power.
There are two or more sides to every story, and the epoch of mankind certainly could have been defined historically by its nearly infinite number of interactions between members of our worldwide community, past and present, and all of the resultant stories derived through those connections, be they ordered or chaotic in nature. History is created and maintained by the institutionalized powers, and transferred to all members of the community. Our history continues to be written to accommodate the prevailing victorious powers and understandings of the age in which it was first written. Many times, the greatest, most courageous and intelligent heroes of our race remain anonymous, though their stories were captured by others. They died before they could even create a story, thus the survivors, usually less qualified and relatively more uninformed, are the historians, and their story, not the story of the real heroes, are accepted as the narrative.
Women within many ancient cultures were regarded as healers and carriers of medicine. They were loved, honored, respected, and protected by the community for those very reasons. It can be surmised that in our pre-history the balance of the masculine and the feminine through mutual understanding, acknowledgement, and equality existed and supported the good for all. Yet, mankind’s story, when told by the historical progression of women, would be much different than the story told by the history that men might present. History is rarely described and defined by the ones who were stuck at home caring for the wounded and the children, by the submissive ones, by the artists or sculptors, or by the losers in any conflict. Our history is no different, being described, and defined, by those in power, which are predominantly white male influences. Masculine energy has dominated our specie’s relationship with the universe, the world, the plants and animals, and with each other for most of recorded time, and well before the human race had any capacity to keep records. The Christian bible is replete with aphorisms and statements relegating women to the background of the church and in all relations with life. There is an imbalance within the field of the human spirit.
This oppression of women, and repression of so-called “feminine characteristics” within the male reflects in the diseased and imbalanced relationships. These principles have also become established as conscious, and unconscious, norms for perception within the collective consciousness of America and mankind in general. And, an unfortunate and dangerous outcome to this division between the man and woman is that the man is unconsciously conditioned to see the feminine aspects of himself in an objectified manner, and tries to oppress, control, and dominate those aspects, emotions, and tendencies, rather than integrate them into a complete holism within himself.
So how on Earth, or in Heaven, do we bring balance back to ourselves?
Finding Yourself in the Collective
I have attempted meditation upon my own source of pain and suffering, and what came to me was how most of what I know about myself and my reactions to the world was created by my fundamental relationship with my parents and my culture. Missing from this was any accommodations to my relationship to my world, the universe, or any concept of a higher power. My sense of self in my early years revolved around internalizing many of my parents’ attitudes. I was acutely aware of what my mother and father expected from me, what I could or could not give back to them to attempt to please them, and my defense mechanisms for managing the fallout when I failed to please them. Beginning early in my life, I also developed the desire to protect them and myself from the results of the conflict that arose in our house, either when I made yet another mistake or when my father overreacted to any situation that brought a sense of fear or threat into the home environment. I developed a need to balance whatever energy was being expressed at any particular moment, and I was very unskilled at those kind of efforts.
With the death of my father in 2017, it ended the era of subservience to his needs, and the need to protect my mother from my perception of his aggression towards her. It also ended the era of incomplete grieving for my mother’s death in 2009. I had to immediately support my mentally deteriorating father when mother died, and I had never completely worked through the grieving process. With my father’s passing, I was an orphan, and all of the entanglements that kept me wound around their lives were now physically removed. With my father’s spirit no longer overshadowing my own life, I was allowed to develop more fully into a better version of myself. For me this was an extraordinary release because the formation of my sense of self was influenced by parental bonding issues in childhood. Yet, I had assembled my sense of self to the best of my ability, the process was one of self-organization, something that neuroscientists and psychologists are still studying and understanding.
In our world, there are countless examples of self-organizing systems, and all creatures, and the minds of those creatures, are examples of that miracle in action. The evolution of all of Earth’s creatures appear to be primarily organized through the pattern created by the history of the species, and its interactions and successful adaptions with its earthly environment. The DNA appears to carry much of that history as a guide for the self-replicating pattern within all cells. Epigenetics is the study of how our behaviors and environment can cause changes that affect the way our genes work. In recent years, genetics and epigenetics continue to be studied and mined for the great knowledge about our predispositions to certain characteristics and behaviors. Yet, for humans, epigenetic research has recently shown that some of these patterns may not necessarily be unchangeable, but may be open to suggestions from changing the external environmental or even making attitude and lifestyle adjustments. Unlike genetic changes, epigenetic changes are reversible and do not change our DNA sequence, but they can change how our body reads a DNA sequence. Up to 5 percent of our genes may be amenable to epigenetic suggestions, or adaptations, and the future may show that many more genes may be turned off, or on, depending on the need of the organism. And, in a most encouraging development, there are scientists now proposing that as individual human beings, we may be an integral part of the Bigger Self that is organizing, or reorganizing, our own consciousness, and have greater influence upon our own biological system.
Our consciousness has a self-organizing principle, as it organizes itself into our unique personal sense of being, while also categorizing data, accruing knowledge, and forming perceptions. The uncertainty of self-organization in consciousness is a great mystery of life, though we now know that a healthy integration revolves around how well the impressionable being feels accepted by, and connected to the environment that the human body travels through. Thus, happier, self-loving ordered senses of self arise and are supported by myriads of successful interactions with its social and physical environment.
First and foremost is the being’s acceptance and integration into the primary family group. If we do not get the requisite positive feedback from our parents early on, we face tremendous odds against forming a happy, well-adjusted self organizing principle, or ego. And the enlightening 1995 Kaiser study of adverse childhood experiences shows the deleterious effects on our health as adults from damaging parental behaviors, either through omission or commission, or other traumatic environmental influences when we were children. Toxic masculinity, or, more precisely, an unskilled capacity to relate to people in a peaceful and mutually accepting manner, was to become a defining characteristic of my life. Coping mechanisms such as passive/aggressive behavior became my normal response to the daily challenges of life. I had internalized and normalized an incomplete composite creative advisor, or a trickster, of who I thought my father and mother were. This became a source of self-talk and feedback for me as a child, and then as an unconscious adult.
The same process occurs for our social self, too. There is another identity within us, virtually independent of our inner parental feedback creations, which we create internal cultural advisors. As an individual within a culture, I applied the same unskilled balancing mechanism within consciousness, where I would weigh and measure societal needs of me, and others that I love, with whatever my personal needs may have been. I felt out of control over so much of my own life, while feeling divided, fragmented, and so unsure of which direction to point my life towards. In several recovery programs, this fragmentation is called the committee, and we all need to do some ferocious work to get that committee to permanently adjourn. There is no peace of mind, otherwise.
We must not normalize and internalize what our failed society is, and make it part of the unchangeable forces within our consciousness. We must not bear the burden of our society’s bad behavior. While we are under control of this diseased culture, we have internalized our society’s failures, and have mistaken its failures for our own. But we dare not internalize its failings, or the oppressive qualities of this abusive culture will become part of who we are. So where can we find relief?
Alleviate Your Suffering
The Buddha had his own ideas about what constitutes mental health, and by his definition, anyone who isn’t well on the way to enlightenment is insane. Quite how literally he meant it when he said all humans are mad is hard to say. But when he looked at ordinary people like us going about their daily business, he saw a world out of balance — and a world that by necessity is out of balance, because it is composed of those same off-kilter individuals. He understood that we, collectively, misunderstand the world that we live in and misunderstand ourselves. Thus, we all end up living in a virtual reality of delusion, confusion, and distortion. What’s more, we largely share the same delusions, which means that we don’t even realize that our minds are disturbed. As Krishnamurti suggests, it’s possible to think that we’re spiritually and mentally healthy because we share our mistaken values and understandings with those around us. Collectively, our ill minds create ill social circles, and we consider ourselves healthy because we see our values reflected in our spiritually sick fellow travelers.
Creating the basic conditions that support emotional and spiritual growth might be beneficial to the entirety of our human race. People have basic needs regarding personal safety, security, and placement within the society. Here are some simple, and not so simple, human needs coupled with spiritual intention:
- To belong, to feel safe while belonging, including the desire to help and protect others while helping oneself.
- To speak up, and feel like we really were heard, and not have our spirit layered over with others’ errors in reasoning and judgement.
- To be able to listen to another at the deepest level possible, and be present in the spirit of understanding, cooperation, and collaboration.
- To feel whole, and to be able to recognize that wholeness, not only within ourselves, but within all others.
- To love all others, as well as to be accepted, and loved, with as few conditions attached as possible. Unconditional love was never meant to be reserved just for a mother’s love for her child, so it is a great evolutionary objective to attempt to be a channel for it.
- To evolve, for if we do not, we become subject to the forces of friction and chaos inherent within a closed mind and system, resulting in higher physical and mental disease and dysfunction.
To heal, we must first understand what has us under control, before we can learn how to let go of what controls us. We can place ourselves on a new, healthier path of consciousness by considering the sources of our suffering and our role in the collective conscious. Asking questions of ourselves and answering them point to foundational facts that most of us encounter or employ in our efforts to meet the needs for economic security, establish our place in society, relieve stress and keep ourselves at least marginally happy, and pursue family fulfillment.
Questions to Ponder:
- Why does suffering exist? And why does it visit me so often?
- Who and what am I?
- Are happiness, joy, and freedom possible in my life?
- What am I really looking for?
- What really is prayer?
- Does religion hinder or help a modern-day seeker of God?
- What is a “well lived life” and how do I achieve it?
- What is good mental health, or what does it mean to be normal?
- Who are my people, and where are they located?
- Why do I feel rejected so often?
- Why don’t people get along better with each other, and why have I become so isolated?
- Will I ever fit in?
- Why don’t I feel peace of mind?
- Why do some people become spiritually and emotionally disfigured by their desire for sex?
- What is the role of objectifying people in ignorance, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, and sexism?
- Why do some people exercise excessive emotional control over their partners?
- Why do I not feel satisfaction when I achieve the goals that I have set up for myself?
- Why do I not feel joy when others achieve greatness, or accomplish great things for themselves?
- Why do I sometimes feel threatened by others’ successes?
- Why do I internally try to hold others back from success and positive social acknowledgement?
- Why do I always seem to “self-destruct” right at the moment when I am about to achieve great success?
- Will I ever completely understand myself and others?
- What is oppression, and what is my relationship to it?
- What is repression, and why do I participate in it?
- Why is expressing real human emotions such a double-edged sword?
- Why are my feelings so hard to identify sometimes?
- Why are some people always so angry, indifferent, detached, or depressed?
- Why is anxiety the defining feeling of this age? And why is it so hard to heal from it?
- Where is the love that I feel is missing from my life?
- Why don’t I feel more love for myself or for others?
- Why do I continue to experience poor self-esteem?
- Why is our culture so focused on youth and physical appearance?
- Why am I so self-conscious?
- Why do I feel that I have to always be competitive, or “better than the others” just to fit in?
- Why is capitalism, dependent on competition and greed, the predominant economic system in our world?
- Why does shame and guilt control so much of my life’s experience?
- Is it possible to speak or live a lie long enough that we no longer can accept or believe the truth?
- Is a person’s silence because of an absence of opinion, or from a fear of speaking the truth?
- Why can’t some people be more emotionally and spiritually present for others?
- Why do people feel that they need to engage in mutual “control dramas”?
- Why do people endlessly pursue entertainment and/or use drugs and alcohol to excess, and ignore their own personal transformation and healing?
- Why do I have no desire to contribute to society in a more generous and meaningful way?
Not all these questions will speak to you, but some of them will. Use them to stimulate interest and curiosity to pursue your own answers. We must keep in mind the profound impact that our parental upbringing, and our immersion in our culture over the duration of our lives, has upon any potential superficial answers that we might give. It is of utmost importance to understand the fundamental dynamics of our own unique sense of self, and how we may not answer these questions in such a way that honors a more fundamental, and unknown, spiritual essence that we all have.
