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Universal Mind
 Image from Bernd Helfert |
The meme of an underlying Consciousness inherent in all things and distributed throughout the Universe, a central assumption of many religions and philosophies.
In the Church of Saint Teilhard the Within of things, as opposed to matter and energy which is the Without. In Cosmopaganism the Mind or Soul of the Universe. In Sophism the underlying Reality of all things and beings. In the Jungian family of religions, the Collective Unconscious of all sentient beings.
Unlike the theistic or monotheistic meme of God, the Universal Mind is not considered a personality or a being that a sentient being can relate to; rather it is the foundation of consciousness that defines that sentient's awareness. Metaphors like the drop and the ocean, or the atom and the interstellar medium, are sometimes used to describe the relation between individual being and Universal Mind, the nature of the metaphor differing from clade to clade
The Universal Mind is also often said - especially by Jungian, neohermetic, and cybertantric, memeticities, to consist of, or contain, structures, usually termed archetypes. These structures serve as attractors and embody themselves in various situations and phenomena across space and time. The Archailects are said to be the expression or manifestation of these archetypes in Terragen space
In the popular evolutionary interpretation (which is only one among many interpretations), consciousness emerges out of the ocean of Universal Mind with the evolution of complex structures like alifes and biological organisms. As these increase in complexity and development so does their share of The Universal Mind. Finally there results the vast embodiments of consciousness that are the Archailects, each a distinct archetype, as well as transcendent. Another popular explanation, central to many Omegist faiths has consciousness actualizing the Universal Mind in the unity-in-multiplicity that is the Omega Point.
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Development Notes
Text by M. Alan Kazlev
Initially published on 15 December 2001.
Initially published on 15 December 2001.
