Using
All Our Senses
“…day
after day, we live far beyond the bounds of our consciousness; without our
knowledge, the life of the unconscious is also going on within us. The more the
critical reason dominates, the more impoverished life becomes; but the more of
the unconscious, and the more of the myth we are capable of making conscious,
the more of life we integrate. Overvalued reason has this in common with political
absolutism: under its dominion the individual is impoverished.”
C.
G. Jung (Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, p.302; Vintage Books, Division of
Random House, 1963 edition)
We are
a nation of rational people—at least, we thought so. Since Rene Descartes (born
in 1596) described the human body in mechanical terms and furthered the notion
that we are merely a collection of parts, we have thought in rational terms and
rejected ideas that phenomena such as premonition, visions, dreams have
important content. It’s perfectly right that his philosophical ideas about the
mechanics of humanity came when it did and made such an impact, because, as a
species, we needed to move in that direction, away from superstition and
imaginary scenarios—like demons creating illness, and people being possessed
when they experience depression. But it’s also possible that we threw out the
baby with the bathwater.
We are
a collection, not a single entity, made up of the inherited genetics of all
humanity, and specifically of our line of ancestry. Our personal history, our personal
unconscious, is an archive of what has happened in this lifetime. It is a
fraction of what lies within us. As Jung said, our collective unconscious
continues whether we are aware of it or not. And most of us aren’t. Sometimes
we know things that no one has objectively taught us, and sometimes we display traits
of ancestors we never knew existed—even look like them. We have senses beyond
the five physical ones, including the extrasensory perception of intuition, the
energetic system of our chakras, and we have an interoceptive system that
monitors the organs inside our bodies. We have stored memories that we are
unaware of until they pop into consciousness unbidden—some that don’t belong to
us but come from past lives, or our ancestral inheritance. We enter foreign
places that feel familiar, we meet people we feel strongly that we have met
before, though we don’t know where or when. Awareness of something comes to us
in a flash, but we have no idea what brought it, or sometimes, even what it
means. We are far more than meets the eye.
Certain
religions have taught us to be afraid of our collective unconscious, probably
because it may take us away from the fundamental beliefs that religion espouses.
There was a time recently when even the idea of imagining something was suspicious.
Our rational minds decide whether to listen to information coming from
something other than our five senses, or to shut it out. When we refuse to
allow in information coming from our sixth and seventh senses, we impoverish our
experience of life. It is equivalent to lopping off a limb in that we cut
ourselves off from most of the content of our unconscious mind. It’s been said
that we only use 10% of our brain power. Perhaps the other 90% resides in the
collective unconscious which has access to Universal Consciousness. Maybe we
are afraid of our own power. Imagine that. Better yet, meditate on that.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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