Ghosts, psychic phenomena, deja vu, dreams… are they all linked? The further I delve in to understanding the unconscious mind the more I wonder what it is capable of.
The common metaphor for the human mind is that of the iceberg. That is, the conscious mind is the part of the mind that you can see floating above the water. However, lurking below is a colossal mass that dwarfs the conscious, visible part… the unconscious mind. Capable of billions of concurrent operations, scientists have only begun to fathom its capabilities, and given the limitations of the conscious mind, perhaps we cannot ever consciously comprehend the capabilities of the unconscious.
Recently I was reading the “QI Book of General Ignorance”. A fascinating book that debunks popular theories on all sorts of stuff, and a great book to memorise if you want to spoil almost any smalltalk.
One of the book’s most interesting spoils is the answer to the question “what is the earth’s largest organism?” Blue whale, right? Wrong! In the Malheur National Forest in the Blue Mountains of Eastern Oregon, there is a Armillaria ostoyae fungus estimated to be some 10 square kilometers in size. This also potentially takes the medal for oldest living organism, at some 2,000-8,000 years old. It seems that below the forest floor, all of the fungus to see are linked by roots and filaments. Interesting, don’t you think?
So this got me wondering how far down does the unconscious go, and does it stop? Perhaps instead at some deep level it is linked by roots and filaments to every other unconscious mind… and does this explain so many other interesting phenomena, such as the same creatures and story structures cropping up in the mythology and cultures of geographically isolated races? Dragons, the hero’s journey, good vs evil, the concept of deities, all present around the world long before people travelled further than the next village.
So what else is there? I mentioned the hero’s journey… why does this resonate with every culture, why are films such as Star Wars and the Matrix (both overtly modelled on this story structure) so popular the world over, why do people take such films and stories to their hearts irrespective of culture? Probably because they are repeats of the same stories found in ancient myths from every culture. Mythical creatures such as dragons - why are they so similar the world over? If you accept that if there were dragons we would have found fossils by now, then why this form? Did it come from dreams, from nightmares, and if so why did people’s nightmares have the same representation the world over?
And then I wonder if the unconscious is one organism, what else is it linked in to? Every creature on the planet? The planet itself? If it was linked to time and space would that explain deja vu? Do all these stories and thoughts occur simultaneously across the world because we are all one organism?
Hmmm or is a mushroom just a mushroom? I wonder.
