One Huge Think Tank

One Huge Think Tank

Recent neuroscientific research on mice reported by Nature and New Scientist, suggests that some experiences can influence subsequent generations. For example, in one such study mice trained to fear a specific smell seemed to be able to pass on their trained aversion to their descendants, which were then extremely sensitive and fearful of the same smell, even though they had never encountered it, nor been trained to fear it. Interestingly, changes in brain structure were also found. The researchers concluded that “The experiences of a parent, even before conceiving, markedly influences both structure and function in the nervous system of subsequent generations.”

Scientists are now beginning to speculate that similar genetic mechanisms could probably be linked with phobias, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorders, as well as other neuropsychiatric disorders in humans.

If the Swiss analytical psychologist C J Jung had been around, he would only have called it yet another manifestation of racial memory or collective unconscious. “In addition to our immediate consciousness,” he wrote, “which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche, there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals.” Jung believed this collective unconscious didn’t develop individually, but was inherited. It consisted of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which could only become conscious secondarily and which gave form to certain psychic contents. Our bodies have an anatomical prehistory of millions of years, as does the psychic system.

Jung even saw UFOs as an expression of something in the collective unconscious, as an updated version of ‘the gods’ of old and the ‘little people’ of popular folklore. He wrote a book called Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth Of Things Seen In The Skies in 1958.

It’s through the medium of the collective unconscious that information about a particular time and place can be transferred to another individual mind. This was how Jung explained to himself the feeling of restlessness one evening and then the dull pain that woke him at about 2.00 am, passing from the forehead and to the back of the skull, the day one of his patients shot himself in the head.

An alternative view is that an individual mind has access only to its own store of memories from the past — that is, all the experiences and knowledge that the psyche has so far acquired, not only from the moment of birth but from parents and their parents and so on, as the neuro-scientific study of trained rats mentioned earlier clearly demonstrates.

According to this view, not until a much higher level of consciousness has been reached will an individual mind have direct access to other parts of the universal mind, even though we are always part of it. This idea doesn’t contradict any of Jung’s theories about archetypes. In fact, it makes them more vital because of a slightly different emphasis: instead of the archetypes existing outside the individual consciousness in a collective unconscious to which one must first gain access before contacting them, they exist within the individual as real memories.

Zoologist and anthropologist Lyall Watson, who had been following such studies for a large part of his life, thought there was a need for a new term for the common awareness that can be shared by a group: Sama —composed of two Sanskrit roots — sa meaning together, and ma meaning think, ‘something that links together or is of like mind’. ‘Sama’ describes those parts of an individual or society which share information, whether they be in the germ cells or in the mind.

The thalamus and hypothalamus, part of the so-called old brain common to all animals, controlling the autonomous nervous system, has been thought by some to be the area responsible for memories, impulses and feelings which we attribute to the collective unconscious. On the other hand, awareness and appreciation of the collective unconscious can be extended into a more transcendent experience of cosmic consciousness.

Om Namah Shivay