The Collective Unconscious in Shamanic Work

Inside every human mind, there is a level of mind that deals with change or transformation

Collective Unconscious mind was first defined in depth by Carl Jung. Jung believed that one way to describe the personality unconscious is through archetypes of the unconscious.

Archetypes are energies existing in the very deep levels of a person's mind. These archetypes rule over attitudes, opinions, and desires of the surface mind. A change or transformation comes through the unconscious mind through the archetype of the surface mind.

Jung's work becomes very entwined in thought. Simply he believed that these archetypes are played out in every person's life in some way. An example, Jung termed one archetype as temptress. This type of archetype if it was the powering energy in the mind wound causes a woman to tempt both men and women through manipulation in every way (using Jung's definition of the archetype not society's).

In the shamanic world, we see that every aspect of personality, every aspect of any given situation, can be termed and defined by an archetypal energy. The energy itself is what the shamanic world works with. As this relates to the collective unconscious, we see any situation or any person, we assign an archetypal energy to it. This is the beginning of tracking.

Archetypal Energy:

When we first begin to work with archetypal energy, we need to determine what energies are resonating within before we can look at the collective unconscious.

Using either Carl Jung's archetypal or Caroline Myss identification, find three to five archetypal energies that you most closely resonate with. Remember, we all have both the hero and the villain energies within us. So be honest with yourself when you are selecting your archetypal energy.

As an example:

The gossip archetypal is also the best networker archetypal.

Once you have identified your 3-5 archetypal energies look to the collective, to the world society around us and see if you can define a way in which the energy is played out in a collective manner.

The idea here is that the archetype of the collective unconscious is really a part of the evolutionary growth process of the mind of all.

When anyone seeks to consciously change or transform themselves they are really seeking to evolve the mind to a new level of awareness. This awareness always leads to the archetypal energy that is shifting - including the archetypal energy of a ruling intelligence or spirit that is all things at all times.

Why do we care from a shamanic perspective?

One of the pieces of shamanic work is tracking energy. The first step in being able to track energy is learning to identify the type of energy you are tracking. When you step into the collective energy of the universe one must be able to separate it like undoing a knot of threads which are all the same color.