Collective Unconscious

Digest from The Collected Works of C. G. Jung

There are many things in the collective unconsciousness. If these things become consciousness, it will lead to significant expansion of knowledge.

The "collective unconscious" is not individual, but universal. Contrary to personality psychology, it possesses roughly similar content and behaviors in all places and in all individuals. In other words, because it is the same in all people, it constitutes a super psychological basis for all which exists universally in each of us." --Carl Jung

"A more or less superficial layer of the unconscious is undoubtedly personal. I call it the personal unconscious. But this personal unconscious rests upon a deeper layer, which does not derive from personal experience and is not a personal acquisition but is inborn. This deeper layer I call the collective unconscious.

"I have chosen the term “collective” because this part of the unconscious is not individual but universal; in contrast to the personal psyche, it has contents and modes of behavior that are more or less the same everywhere and in all individuals. It is, in other words, identical in all men and thus constitutes a common psychic substrate of a supra-personal nature which is present in every one of us. "

"The creator of the world did not fashion these things directly from himself but copied them from archetypes outside himself.” Jung concluded that man’s unconsciousness contains remote archaic patterns and instincts inherited from the ancestors..., so far as the collective unconscious contents are concerned we are dealing with archaic or—I would say—primordial types, that is, with universal images that have existed since the remotest times...The archetype is essentially an unconscious content that is altered by becoming conscious and by being perceived, and it takes its color from the individual consciousness in which it happens to appear."

"In all chaos, there is a universe and a secret order; among all phenomenas, there is a unified law...What we call complexity and miracles is not complicated and magical at all in nature, on the contrary, it is simple and common. We are used to project our own difficulties in understanding to things and to describe them as complex, but in fact, they are very simple and do not understand the difficulties we encounter intellectually."