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Appendix II
PAST AND CURRENT INSIGHTS ABOUT CONSCIOUSNESS
Accumulated data from both the hard sciences like physics and the soft, like psychology, challenge commonly held concepts about matter, consciousness and man’s fundamental identity. These findings imply that our human identity may extend beyond time, space and the physical body detected by our senses. They have done much to stimulate the growing general revival of interest in spirituality in Western society, mainstream psychiatry’s resistance aside. Following is a summary of some of these findings.
In the early 1900’s, Carl Jung introduced the concept of the collective unconscious, and the idea that we may well extend beyond space and time and ultimately be a part of a higher dimension of reality than that represented by the physical world. He believed that our consciousness could tap into this higher reality—drawing from it intuitive and creative insight, wisdom and direction. This collective unconscious, which more recently has been termed the objective psyche, was the deepest layer of the unconscious, Jung felt, and was ordinarily inaccessible to conscious awareness. It constituted by far the largest area of the mind, and its content was not derived from the life experiences of the person but from the entire human race—the whole history of psychic functioning.
Jung believed that the collective unconscious represented the wisdom of the ages, a knowing far superior to that of a single individual. Its contents—or archetypes—and its symbolic representation— archetypal images—were expressed in the basic
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