Redefining Reality - The Intellectual Implications of Modern Science

experiences that are not our own, that come from our ancestors.
This collective unconscious is part of the structure we use to make
sense of, and give meaning to, the world.
Jung pointed out that the same sort of images, characters, and
events appear in myths, religions, and beliefs in contemporary
and ancient cultures around the globe. We see the wise old
central stories of cultures that could not have been in contact.
Jung called these basic ideas archetypes, and synchronicities
was the term he used for the repeated appearances of
archetypes in isolated cultural systems that could not have
details of human history but, rather, archetypes that we use as
the building blocks of meaning. Meaningfulness comes from
interpretation by the mind, but the human mind does not start from
scratch; it begins with these basic archetypal patterns, using them
events, objects, and people.
Each culture applies the shared archetypes to its own geographical
and historical context, thereby creating the differences we see in
central mythologies. But when we look at what is valued, we see a
peculiar amount of commonality, more than we would expect if the
cultures developed purely autonomously.
Notice that Jung’s extension of Freud’s work follows the larger
pattern we have discussed elsewhere in this course. We start with
the human mind as a thing, an object unto itself to be studied alone.
With Freud, the move is then made to considering humans in terms
step of eliminating the individual objects and positing a sort of
is just a mode of the larger collective reality.
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