Collective Traumas

The Global crises we face today are unique in many ways, not only in their scope, complexity, and urgency, but also in that for the first time in human history each and every one of them is caused by humans. They are creations of our individual and collective behavior and can therefore be traced, in significant part to psychological origins: to our individual and collective beliefs, greed fear, fantasies, defenses and misperceptions. Our global problems are global symptoms, and the state of the world reflects the state of our minds.

Roger Walsh wrote those thoughts in his 1984 book, The Psychology of Human Survival. Global issues are front and center in the thoughts of millions of people around the world. Finding a solution for global warming, starvation, repression, and an assortment of other social and political issues is complicated, or at least we think it is. We try to solve these issues using the same thinking process that created them. We search for solutions from science, religion, and other external sources, and as we do, we begin to realize that these collective traumas teach us something about the nature of consciousness.

Our beliefs are catalysts for physical action. We want to wage war, destroy, and conquer what we fear and don’t understand, but those actions only create more of what we focus on. The more we push against these perceived enemies, the more we experience them. Resistance is the oil that keeps us frying in our own greasy perceptions. The world is a collective environment, and it is created by individual and mass impulses. Impulses are manifested non-physical energy. We catalog impulses in our physical beliefs system, and they become part of who we are.

Consciousness expresses energy using different qualities, organizations, and diverse forms in order to experience physical reality in some way. The chaotic world we experience is the result of a great merging and mixing of consciousness, and a continual exchange of non-physical information, which results in an open-ended exploration of physical possibilities. From that non-physical consciousness concoction, mass and private events emerge, and we experience physical life using choices, perceptions and desires.

There are many kinds of consciousness, and they combine in an endless fashion. Our consciousness is not one thing; it is a conglomeration of different aspects of consciousness that swamp together to form an identity. Our individual consciousness mixes with other forms of consciousness in several ways. That process creates a sense of individuality as well as other psychological realities, which we do not focus on. We count on products of consciousness like religion, science, and cultural tendencies to triumph over our self-created environment, but they only form a mosaic pattern filled with the cut-glass of our beliefs. Our beliefs hide the messages that are transmitted by our psychological environment, and that sets a worldly stage where perceived events of all types occur. That stage shapes mental events, and expands the nature of our consciousness.