Something in the Air

The group Thunderclap Newman had a one-hit-wonder in the late 60s with their song “Something in the Air.” It was a time of change at the end of the 60s with young people focusing on ending the war in Vietnam and getting US troops withdrawn. The song captured the zeitgeist of the time and did it with a driving electric guitar.

What is zeitgeist and where does it come from? The translation is spirit of the time. According to Wikipedia, it’s an “invisible agent, force, or daemon dominating the characteristics of a given epoch in world history.” Is this a poetic term or is there actually something in the air? Seriously.

Consciousness

Collective consciousness is a term coined by Durkheim to describe the shared beliefs, ideas and moral attitudes in a society. It’s a sociological term and the shared knowledge is learned through social interaction. It’s the consciousness of a society.

We also each have a personal consciousness, an awareness of our own thoughts and feelings. Our personal consciousness is subjective and unique to each of us. We are most familiar with our personal consciousness.

Freud went on to describe a personal unconscious, those aspects of our memories that are not readily accessible. Psychoanalysis is often designed to recover thoughts from a patient’s unconscious. Word association tests can tease things out of the unconscious. There is a famous quote from Carl Jung, “until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

In addition to a personal unconscious, Jung identified a collective unconscious, a set of ideas and symbols shared across humanity. In a 1936 lecture called The Concept of the Collective Unconscious, Jung said, “This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited.” How the collective unconscious is inherited was not made clear.

The concept of a collective unconscious is not generally accepted in modern psychology. That doesn’t mean it’s not real, only that the proof is not necessarily objective. It might be implied. Remember, there are two kinds of people in the world, 1) those who can extrapolate from incomplete data.

Joseph Campbell studied myths from around the world and over the ages and found striking similarities. Comparable ideas keep recurring among people who otherwise have no connection with each other. Campbell also studied Jung and identified the collective unconscious as an explanation for these recurring themes. This is discussed in Campbell’s book The Hero with a Thousand Faces where he identified the recurring story of the Hero’s Journey. Spoiler Alert: The Hero is you and me.

Morphic Fields

Rupert Sheldrake points to morphic fields as guiding agents in shaping human experience and growth. Morphic fields are not considered part of modern science and the theory is not embraced by biologists or psychologists. Before shooting the idea down too quickly, remember that the atomic theory of matter assumed that atoms and subatomic particles were small chunks of stuff. It was only in the 1970s that quantum field theory was developed and accepted. In order to accept quantum field theory, you have to give up the idea of small chunks of stuff. How many of us have been able to do this? There seems to be a connectedness between all the particles in the universe through quantum fields. The particles themselves are actually excitations in those fields. Some excitations last a long time (like electrons and quarks) and some for an extremely short time (like Higgs bosons). None of them are chunks of stuff. And no one knows what a quantum field is, just that they are everywhere.

Are morphic fields examples of widespread fields that we all tap into and through which we exchange information? Sheldrake would say our thoughts and memories are not contained in our brains but in those morphic fields. As yet we don’t know where memories are stored in the brain. The only proof that they are in there is the materialist view that there is nowhere else to store them.

The collective consciousness might be the result of social interactions and learning from one another, just like the sociologists say, but perhaps the connection is deeper. Could the connection be “in the air” and shared across space and time?

Zeitgeist might be a real phenomenon and not poetic at all.

Change at a Deeper Level

Changing the world might require more than changing people’s minds. It may require changes at a more cosmic level. Myths can do this, as can music. There is a reason they sing songs and tell stories in church, and it’s not because they are conveying factual information (no matter how often they say they do). They are a way to touch us at a deeper level. Soldiers march into battle to the pipes and drums because the music meets them at a deep level. Perhaps music and stories are the path to a bloodless revolution. It worked in the 60s.

These days, the local radio station has been playing the national anthem at noon every day, a new thing for them. Currently, there is a serious assault on our nation by the nation to our south. The threat is existential to our survival as a nation. I find myself stopping each day and finding an excuse to stand by the radio and listen to our national anthem, often with tears in my eyes. It strengthens my resolve to push back in any way I can and to stand strong. It’s just a song but it shakes me to my core. This is the power of song and myth.

There is more going on here than meets the eye. We ignore this at our peril.