ESSAY SUBMISSION: The Collective Unconscious in the Light of That Which Experiences
Brian Wachter
Carl Jung devoted an extraordinary
amount of time to endorsing the process he called, “the
reconciliation of opposites.” In this ad hoc procedure two opposing
qualities are combined to compose a third quality. This can be seen
in the well-known interference pattern created by two waveforms in
the famous double-slit experiment of quantum mechanics. Jung's
friend, physicist Wolfgang Pauli, likened such a process to quantum
superposition, where one object can be two things at once.
In
considering Bernardo Kastrup's theory that consciousness itself is
the base layer of reality, we see a reverse image of the fundamental
situation of Jung's ontology, that of the so-called collective
unconscious (CU). What is the relationship between these realities?
Reacting to them in a constructive way in the case of the experience
of the individual person, there is strong symmetry between the two.
The act of bringing into consciousness those components of the psyche that reside beyond the wall separating the alter from the collective, called by Jung “individuation,” is the goal of Jung's analytical psychology. Discovering the conscious contents of that which experiences (TWE) seems to be the point of metaphysical idealism. Can we derive a third thing from the two realms? What can be both conscious and unconscious?
Dreams.
Jung, of course, viewed
the dream world as explicitly unconscious. Kastrup views dreaming as
a conscious endeavor: “Empirical fact is an experience with a
higher degree of sharing but, ultimately, of exactly the same
fundamental nature as your nightly dreams.”
Jung's science of the unconscious is mature, with millions of pages devoted to its nature and to its implications. Kastrup's TWE is brand new. I don't possess expertise in Schopenhauer but my impression is his idealism is a distant ancestor to Kastrup's essentially new worldview.
The CU and its archetypes are steeped
in mystery, age and feeling tone. Kastrup's universal consciousness
seems fresh, in contrast. Despite the depth and range of stories that
rest in the collective unconscious, and Jung's emphasis on the fact
that it belies a more or less fragile consciousness, it lacks the
ontological finality of Kastrup's TWE. This is natural given that the
CU rests upon explicitly unknown epistemological and ontological
ground. In fact, the hidden nature of the CU caused Jung to issue
multiple warnings to those who would seek to know themselves in this
context. In contrast, knowing TWE should be easy. It is, after all,
made of consciousness.
It simply is, right in plain
sight, though Kastrup asserts that we, the human alters of universal
consciousness, are instances of consciousness separate from the
collective, he issues no prohibition on the accessibility of the
collective. He has even reasoned that dissociated alters can meet in
the collective, provided they originate within the same individual
alter and that alter has dissociative identity disorder—in other
words, multiple personalities.
What happens to the emotional tone of the CU when it is cast as TWE? The light of consciousness softens its emotional content. You won't hear about knowledge held by TWE as “haunting,” as is the case for many dreamlike data that arise from the so-called unconscious.
It is useful to remember that anything
known by an alter is also known by TWE, and consciousness exists even
in the absence of everything else, including the CU, which is made
from absence. I do not think it unreasonable to posit the existence
of a field of consciousness, possibly populated by consciousness
particles. “Awareons,” anyone? This wouldn't even earn the title
of “strange” in a world full of the enigmatic properties of the
quantum, and the autonomous archetypes of the collective unconscious.
--Brian Wachter
