Chapter Two: Finding Ourselves in the Collective Consciousness

Chapter Two: Finding Ourselves in the Collective Consciousness

“There are times shells, or walls, are necessary, but more often we can reveal ourselves by being who we are.  Neither hiding nor revealing ourselves will prevent our share of pain, but in being who we are, we get to be part of the Universal stream, not just a nut in a shell waiting to fall.” — Mark Nepo

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, and 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 promotion of cultural and individual insanity, with its resultant suffering. Mass murders, early deaths, suicides, drug addiction, alcoholism, abuses of women and children, racism, extinction of species, ecological destruction, and all of the damaged relationships that fail to heal will continue to predominate within the collective mind of mankind until we make conscious contact with intelligence, love, and sanity. 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. Instead of being consumed by despair, fatalism, and anger, we have to protect ourselves from all that, become healthy people, and retain our sanity and our humanity.

Human suffering and evil are two spiritually destructive forces that humanity has dealt with at 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. Pain and suffering without any hope for healing bring anger, despair, depression, loneliness, and suicidal ideation.

While being an unconscious man, I contributed to this disease of the spirit and 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, making communication and behavior between all of us crazy. Being a family man, I have taken note of the mutual-blame game and scapegoating that circulate continuously and serve as justification for each individual holding onto their 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 toward 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 don’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 hurt and endure. Our possibilities shrank not because of something we did or didn’t do, but for a 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, and take more appropriate actions.

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 selves. 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, and suicide. These factors are a small part of the real story. I have seen, and I believe at the deepest level of my 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 perceive: our society has created many of the conditions for our early demise through our lack of shared meaning and values.

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.  My male heritage, my experiences as a son of an oftentimes toxic father, and my working with many damaged men in the electrical trades and general employment provided the background for much of my understanding of the popular recent term “toxic masculinity” and the suffering that results from unconscious participation in our collective consciousness. Patriarchy, an important category within toxic masculinity, is mostly responsible for creating the present-day conditions of our diseased world. 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 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 answers to the important questions of life give rise to fragmented interpretations of life and the universe. But we are also more than the collective conscious.

The Aborigines of Australia have a very attuned concept of our collective consciousness, but they call it “the Dreaming”.  The Dreaming is their people’s deep well of memory.  It stores a wonderful mixture of sacred, mythical, and practical ideas, passed on from the ancestors.  The Dreaming is the place where all of the past exists, the place in which their thoughts, beliefs and sacred memories remain protected.  Its wisdom explains the land, the sky, the sun and stars, and all living creatures upon Mother Earth, including why they are here, how they should be related to, and why all living things should collaborate with each other while sharing the landscape.

Their mothers, fathers, grandmothers, and uncles pass the information of the Dreaming learned from their forebearers onto all who listen.  And those who listen remember well, and retell the stories to the children as has been done since arriving in Australia, according to their accounts.  The Dreaming keeps this information securely in existence and it exists far beyond the memory of any one individual within the culture.

Individual Consciousness

Once we develop consciousness as evolving human beings, our internal sensations, emotions, and thoughts become available to make us aware of who we are. Our internally observed neural activity tells us what we like and don’t like, whom 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. 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. 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.

Helen Keller gave an outstanding narrative of the beginning of her sense of self, a new self that 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, and r represented the substance that she washed with and drank, her unique sense of herself also arose. Understanding the word and its symbolism opened the miraculous door. As she added more words, she could feel herself growing bigger and more engaged with the world with a new, expanding intelligence. Verbal structures became infused with sensorial experiences, creating enhanced memories.

We only need to look within ourselves and at our pasts to see how uncertain our memories are and extrapolate that to our human history, which is also plagued by short-, medium–, 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 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 language and social connection. 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.

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 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 less informed, are the historians, and their stories, not the story of the real heroes, are accepted as the narrative. Yet, I guarantee that most of these stories were written by men, with their testosterone-laden understanding.

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, acknowledgment, 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 from 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 described, and defined, by those in power, which are predominantly white male influences. Masculine energy has dominated our species’ relationship with the universe, the world, the plants and animals, and with each other for most of the 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.

The Journal of Current Anthropology described a 2014 anthropological study of skulls of humans over tens of thousands of years that surmised that the reduction of the levels of testosterone in our male ancestors probably led to higher levels of cooperation and collaboration. An obvious conclusion is that the effects of testosterone, though still defining the narratives of our storytellers, our relationships, and our history, aren’t as harmful as they used to be on our Mother Earth and feminine-sourced energy. Yet our planet continues to be ravaged by testosterone-inspired imperialism, overconsumption, and competitiveness between peoples and nations. So testosterone still reigns supreme, overrunning non-masculine-based energy centers, as it has for tens of thousands of years.

This oppression of women and repression of so-called feminine characteristics within the male reflected 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. An unfortunate and dangerous outcome of this division between man and woman is that the man is unconsciously conditioned to see the feminine aspects of himself in an objectified manner. This leads men to try to oppress, control, and dominate those aspects, emotions, and tendencies, rather than integrate them into a complete holism within themselves.

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 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 were created by my fundamental relationship with my parents and my culture. Missing from this were any accommodations to my relationship with 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 kinds of efforts.

The death of my father in 2017 ended the era of subservience to his needs and the need to protect my mother from my perception of his insensitivity, or even 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 my 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 less conflicted, more empathetic, and overall much 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 appears to be primarily organized through the pattern created by the history of the species, and its interactions and successful adaptions with its earthly environment. 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 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. They may be open to suggestions from changing the external environment 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, scientists now propose that as individual human beings, we may be able to influence the organizing or reorganizing of our consciousness. We may also have a greater influence on our 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. The enlightening 1995 Kaiser study of adverse childhood experiences shows the deleterious effects of damaging parental behaviors on our adult health, either through omission or commission or other traumatic environmental influences from childhood.

Toxic masculinity inspired traumatic wounding—with its effects of preventing the development of a skilled capacity to relate to people in a peaceful, collaborative, and mutually accepting manner—became 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 whom 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, that we use to 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 myself and others 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 toward. 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 we must not 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 the control of this diseased culture, we have internalized our society’s failures, and we have mistaken its failures for our own. But if we internalize its failings, the oppressive qualities of this abusive culture will become part of who we are. So where can we find relief?

Alleviate Your Suffering

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 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. To feel like we were heard, and not have our spirit layered over with others’ errors in reasoning and judgment.
• 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 only for a mother’s love for her child, so we evolve by being a channel for it.
• To evolve. 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 can 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 acknowledgment?
• 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 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 do 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 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 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 will. Use them to stimulate interest and curiosity to pursue your answers. We must keep in mind the profound impact that our parental upbringing and our immersion in our culture throughout our lives have upon any potential superficial answers that we might give. It is of utmost importance to understand the fundamental dynamics of our 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.

Why Now?

We all have the internal power to change. We only need to learn how to consciously access the power that is greater than our resistance to change and bad habits and express its infinite healing potential. For me, the choice became between living an inspired life, or leading a self-destructive life. For those who continue to embrace toxicity to their detriment, and the detriment of others, there are healthier, more life-affirming choices to be made.

Why would anybody want to change, anyway? I changed because I was going to die, and I wanted to see if life had any lasting, eternal meaning. I had to stop telling life solely what it meant to me and be watchful and silent enough so that life could reveal a deeper meaning. I had to let go of my misunderstandings of the words that I used.

We will never heal if we allow ourselves to remain helpless and ignore our responsibility for healing our problems. We must ask difficult questions, and each of us must begin the search for the truth of our existence.

• What value is there to our life and our story, if we refuse to tell the world about it?
• What is the value of our love, if it is never shared with all others?
• What is the value of our vocal abilities, if we neglect or refuse to use them? And what is the value of our voice, if we perceive that few care to listen to us anyway?

The investigation of personal trauma, my response to it, and my search for truth is an exercise in compassion, understanding, and healing, and it need not be maudlin in nature. And doing so is important because we must speak truth to power, whether it is the illusory power of our past or the ongoing materialistic and/or divisive cultural powers of the day, or we’ll lose our breath and become oppressed and overcome by it.

We don’t have to die to find our final freedom. True freedom is the path, the goal of all healthy life experiences, and the only reason that I am still here. We can be healed. Not only did humanity make it to the moon, but each of us also has the potential to reach God, truth, love, compassion, healing, and light after we leave the launchpads of our own lives. Life is more about building a better state of consciousness, with enhancing the life-affirming qualities, and the cultivation of greater insight. We are all capable of making our unique paths on our journey to the higher dimensions of our life experience and its supporting consciousness, and we can develop the willingness to share those inspired words with others.

The deadly Conspiracy of Silence continues; are you part of it? Instead, develop a healing message, walk the talk, and share the journey with others. Prepare for indifference. Prepare to share love with the multitudes of fellow travelers on this lifelong journey. Sometimes, the salvation of this planet, and ourselves, demands that we speak our truth, act upon it with others, and, finally, grow into the somebody that we were destined to become.