Collective Unconscious and Collective Conscious

 In defining “Collective Unconscious” Carl Jung is quoted as saying that ‘The form of the world into which [a person] is born is already inborn in him, as a virtual image’. There are volumes of papers and books on this topic by Carl Jung himself and other scholars. This is a theory to explain one aspect of human behavior, particularly behavior common to all humans from different cultures and lands.

Is there a “Collective Consciousness” also? This must also be inborn, an awareness of one’s own mind and of the “minds of others”. May be, “collective unconscious” is the same as “Collective Conscious” but Carl Jung used it for a different purpose and emphasized the absence of being consciously aware of our behavior.

Those were my thoughts when I was reading a pictorial essay on the “aerial acrobatics” of swarms of starlings. I have seen those swarms too (called murmurations according to the article in the National Geographic magazine). Obviously, each bird in the swarm knows the “mind and direction of movement” of its immediate neighbors and all of them interconnect so that they have a collective “mind”. Can it not be called a component of the collective consciousness of the starlings?

The same thought occurred to me when I was watching a group of birds flying alongside our boat for almost 15 or 20 minutes when we were sailing between islands in the Galapagos. They were flying in formation with two birds in the lead position. Periodically, two birds will move from the end part of the formation and take over the front lead position. How did they know?

Several years back, I watched an osprey couple raise their brood on the banks of the Choptank River. It was amazing to see the male and female taking turns watching the eggs. The female and male will take turns bringing “food” for the chick. The female will teach the chick how to fly and she will not leave the nest for good till the youngest one can take off on its own. How did the mother know it is her responsibility?

Is it not acceptable to call all this “collective Consciousness” of the species – built in and inherent in their body, brain, mind, and psyche? We, humans, certainly have a collective consciousness if only we know how to touch it. In addition, humans also have language which makes it possible to have a meta-consciousness, an awareness of awareness (in backward loops). Awareness implies a subject and an object. Taken to its origins, it is a state which ends in a Pure Subject. This is what the Advaita philosophy calls the Brahman.

How can we touch these states when the emphasis is always on the “I” and the “me”?

(Thanks to "Kannan" for a key suggestion)