Collective Consciousness & Cultural Healing

Author: Duane Elgin
Format: Report
Length: 40 pages
Publisher: The Simple Living Network

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Item #: BCCCH

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This is a wide-ranging inquiry into collective consciousness and cultural healing. These are among the core themes of this report:

Collective crises and collective consciousness. The condition of the world reflects the condition of our collective consciousness. Collective or group consciousness (also sometimes called the empathic field or collective knowing) provides a common context from which we can collectively recognize--and begin to heal--the psychic wounds that divide humanity (such as racial and gender oppression and injustice). Perhaps the most basic challenge that we face is to awaken our capacity for collective knowing and conscious action so that we can respond successfully to the immense social and ecological difficulties that confront us.

Collective consciousness and cultural healing. With conscious cultural healing, the human family could work through the reservoir of unresolved pain that has accumulated through history. With healing, we could free up our collective psyche and place much more of our collective attention on building a sustainable and meaningful future. What a remarkable "project" it would be if humanity could learn to mobilize itself around the evolution of culture and consciousness instead of around enemies. We could then begin the common work of building a sustainable, satisfying, and soulful species-civilization.

Excerpts:

11. The Mass Media and the Collective Madness of Materialism

It is impossible to consider the condition of collective consciousness in the modern world without exploring the connection between a culture's consciousness and its television-viewing habits. Television has become humanity's primary window onto the world and the primary mirror in which we see ourselves. Globally, more than 60% of the world now has access to television and this percentage is growing rapidly. In the U.S., 98 percent of all homes have a TV set. It is the most common fixture in U.S. households. There are more homes with a television than with indoor toilets, stoves, or refrigerators. What is more, the average person watches more than four hours of television per day -- which means that, as a civilization, Americans watch approximately one billion person-hours of television daily. Thus, it is not surprising that most Americans say they get most of their news from television. During the course of a year, the average American will see approximately 25,000 commercials. These commercials are much more than advertisements for products; they are highly sophisticated vignettes that promote materialistic values and attitudes and a materialistic way of living in the world.

There may be no more dangerous challenge to our future than the hypnosis of commercial television which trivializes the human experiment and distracts humanity from our larger potentials. By programming television for commercial success, we are programming the mindset of entire civilizations -- perhaps even the species-civilization -- for evolutionary stagnation and ecological failure. The use of television to promote exclusively materialistic values has become a massive mental health and public health problem for the United States and the world. Americans -- and much of the rest of the world exposed to American television--are in an impossible double-bind: the mass media that dominate our consciousness tell us to buy more, while our ecological concerns for our planet tell us to consume less.

Carl Jung says schizophrenia is a condition where "the dream becomes the reality." Has the American dream of a consumerist lifestyle become our primary reality? Is this media-manufactured reality increasingly out of touch with the reality of the Earth and our evolutionary potentials? Is the current use of the mass media implanting a deep, and unnecessary, conflict into our collective psyche?

About The Author:

Duane Elgin is a researcher, author, and speaker with 30 years of experience in exploring the co-evolution of culture and consciousness. He is the author of three books: Promise Ahead: A Vision Of Hope & Action For Humanity's Future, Awakening Earth: Exploring The Evolution Of Human Culture & Consciousness and Voluntary Simplicity: Toward A Way Of Life That Is Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Rich. He is also the author of two reports: Global Consciousness Change: Indicators Of An Emerging Paradigm and Collective Consciousness & Cultural Healing. In addition, Duane co-authored (with Joseph Campbell, Willis Harman, and others) the book Changing Images of Man (Pergamon, 1982).

Duane was formerly a senior social scientist at the Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International), where he co-authored numerous studies on the long-range future; for example, Alternative Futures for Environmental Planning: 1975-2000 (for the EPA); Anticipating Future National and Global Problems; and Limits to the Management of Large, Complex Systems (both for the President's science advisor). While at SRI International, he also participated as a subject in a range of scientific experiments on parapsychology over a period of several years. Prior to SRI, Duane worked in 1970-71 as a senior staff member for the joint Congressional-Presidential Commission on Population Growth and the American Future. From 1981-1989, Duane was the founder and director of the non-partisan and non-profit organization Choosing our Future. The mission of COF is to revitalize citizen participation through the innovative use of tools of mass communication. COF conducted research, took legal action with the FCC, developed a pilot "electronic town meeting" (aired on ABC-TV in San Francisco), and organized a "community voice" organization to produce televised forums for citizen dialogue and feedback. Duane has an M.B.A. from the Wharton Business School and an M.A. in Economic History from the University of Pennsylvania.

Related Resources:

Voluntary Simplicity Toward A Way Of Life That Is Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Rich - Revised Edition
      By Duane Elgin (Paperback)

Promise Ahead A Vision Of Hope & Action For Humanity's Future
      By Duane Elgin (Paperback)

Global Consciousness Change Indicators Of An Emerging Paradigm
      By Duane Elgin (Report)

Living Legacies How To Write, Illustrate & Share Your Life Stories
      By Duane Elgin & Coleen Ledrew with foreward by Angeles Arrien, Ph. D. (Hard Cover)