As human beings we have our own consciousness. We ask ourselves who and what we are and what we are capable of. We can do this very well by ourselves. But the answer also comes from outside ourselves. We are given language by our parents and by society. And we are given stories. Fairy tales, stories from the Bible, stories from our parents and grandparents. And at school we are given stories about our country and about science. These stories give us many answers (whether they are true or not).
Some of these stories are very old. Fairy tales were written down 300 years ago, but are probably much older. The oldest stories in the Bible are about 3,000 years old. Parts of these stories, such as the flood-myth, are even older. (A variation of the flood-story is found in the Sumerian Book of Gilgamesh.)
Ideas about civilisation, governance and justice are also passed down from generation to generation. Characters and concepts from all these stories have been with us for thousands of years. They help us build our daily lives and our societies.
But what actually happens to these characters from all these stories when someone hears them and later passes them on?
Cinderella
Suppose your grandmother tells you the story of Cinderella. Your grandmother has a picture of these characters. She tells the story as she learned it. But she has already changed it a little. the Cinderella character who lived in Granny's world will now live in yours. Your Cinderella is similar to Granny's, but a little different. Over the course of your life, you will probably hear the story told and received by different people, with different phrases, with different emotions. Your image of it will change as a result. When you tell the story, it is a different Cinderella than the one that has been told before. Maybe not even in the text, but in the feeling in your voice, in your facial expressions. And in the person you are telling it to, a new Cinderella comes to life.
All those Cinderellas that have come to life in all those consciousnesses throughout history have something in common. They belong to the same collective character. When I talk about my Cinderella, you automatically bring up your Cinderella. And our Cinderellas communicate through that, what I say affects how you see yours.
In all our consciousness there are countless Cinderellas communicating with each other. They are all a bit different, all based on the slightly different stories told and processed by all those slightly different brains. So there is a collective Cinderella, even though it is also a collection of communicating individual Cinderellas. It is it’s own collective identity, and it guides us when we think of her.
Cinderella is different for each individual, but also has characteristics in each family, in each region. And she changes over time. She tells us a slightly different story over the centuries. Dozens of generations she has been teaching us. We have learned from Cinderella's story, but Cinderella has also learned from us, she has changed as a result. And the Cinderella we have changed continues to tell us a new story in every generation.
God
This is also applies to the other characters in our collective consciousness. We are overwhelmed by them. They want to share all their knowledge with us. And they learn from us as we pass on their knowledge in a slightly different way, adapted by our own lives.
God is such a character. God has been around for at least 100 generations. God teaches us who we are, but learns from us who he/she/it is. He gives us ancient lessons about what people can do and how they should live, but it learns from us what it is and what it can do.
The disappearance of God is also part of our collective consciousness. In some areas the figure has almost disappeared. In others it is still very much alive. The collective character learns from both stories. It teaches us how to live with and without God. God is much bigger than an individual. It has a collective identity built up from billions of stories over 100 generations. God exists as a collective character and has been guiding us through life for centuries.
The collective stories with their characters and concepts are not just our inventions. They play an important role in how we see the world, how we see ourselves, and how we give meaning to ourselves and the world.
This is not all positive. We fight and die for our gods, for our country, for our collective worldviews propped up by narratives. Our individual consciousness is so much a part of the collective consciousness that we sometimes give our lives for it. And we can hardly escape it. At most, we can change the details of the stories and try to tell them differently. But that too is a process that has been going on for a long time, and we are actually part of it. Every generation does it.
Our collective characters have power over us. They form their own identities that influence us and learn from us. They also wonder who they are and what they are capable of, and we help to give them answers. Their self-image also changes over time. We are part of the collective consciousness of humanity, that lives together with us.
When we write a book, when we talk to friends about philosophy or politics, even when we just think, we are doing it for the collective consciousness. We change it a little, and we get meaning in return. And a mild form of immortality, our adaptation of the collective consciousness, can last for many, many generations.
Globalisation
If humanity is really 300,000 years old, and we count on an average of 30 years per generation (historically it is a little shorter, but this is easier in our calculations), then there have been about 10,000 generations of beings we consider our own kind, with roughly the same characteristics as we have now. So we have been telling stories for 10,000 generations. It may have been much longer, but we don't know if ancestral species could have done the same.
The remarkable thing is that we are not just individuals or families, we are part of this collective consciousness from the beginning of humanity. I think that partly explains the success of humanity. We are much more a part of the organism of humanity, the organism of collective consciousness, than cats are a part of a collective cat community.
For the vast majority of all those generations we told our stories orally. About 5,000 years ago we began to transmit stories through writing. This had the strange effect that the stories changed less, the characters changed less from region to region, from generation to generation. Although it did happen with the interpretation of the texts.
In modern times, stories are changing drastically again. The internet makes communication very easy. But also makes changing text easy. The 'certainty' of written sources becomes much less with the internet. In this respect, we are going back to the days before writing.
Another effect is that we can now easily learn about all the stories in the world. Even the collective characters from different cultures are now easily connected.
At the same time, it seems that everywhere the old stories no longer work well. They have brought us fantastic things, but they have also created entirely new problems. The power and responsibility to dramatically affect an entire planet is new. But we don't yet know how to manage it properly.
With the loss of the 'truth' of the stories passed down through writing, the mixing of all the stories from all the cultures AND the completely new problems created by our power, many of our old stories no longer work. The characters from our collective consciousness that have led us here have no answers either.
Engage with the characters as you see them. Bring them into our world and ask them questions. Perhaps you will help them to new answers. Perhaps new characters, new stories, new concepts will emerge from this dynamic. The collective consciousness needs all of us to properly help support future generations.