A few months ago, I wrote a post called Gaslight.
At the time, I thought I was writing about manipulation, memory,
and the strange ways humans can become disconnected from reality.
Looking back, I think I was writing about something else entirely.
I think I was writing about certainty.
Or more specifically, the uncomfortable realization that certainty is often an illusion.
How many things do we know because they're true?
How many things do we know because we've repeated them long enough to stop questioning them?
How much of our reality is actually ours?
Those questions sent me down a rabbit hole.
The kind that starts with one innocent Google search and ends three hours later with fourteen browser tabs open and absolutely no chance of going to sleep on time....
Somewhere between reading about consciousness, archetypes, mythology, symbolism, and human behavior, I stumbled onto Carl Jung.
Which, okay, wasn't surprising.
The internet loves Carl Jung. People quote him constantly. His ideas show up in self-help books, podcasts, psychology discussions, spiritual communities, and motivational Instagram posts.
What surprised me was where I remebered him from.
Alcoholics Anonymous.
The Discovery I Didn't Expect
I most commonly knew Jung as the archetypes guy, right? The shadow guy. The collective unconscious guy. Most do not know he had a connection to Alcoholics Anonymous, and thankfully so right :P
The story begins with a man named Rowland Hazard.
Hazard struggled with alcoholism and sought treatment from Jung in the early twentieth century.
After working with him for an extended period, Jung reportedly reached a difficult conclusion.
Traditional psychology wasn't enough.
Years later, AA co-founder Bill Wilson would write to Jung, thanking him for the role he unknowingly played in a chain of events that helped influence the creation of Alcoholics Anonymous.
When I first learned this,
I stopped reading and immediately fact-checked it.
Its always sounded too strange to be true....
Yet there it was. The actual correspondence still exists.
You can read the letters yourself.
Further Reading: The Bill W. and Carl Jung Letters
What fascinated me is the pattern....
I kept running into the same thing over and over again.
Different people. Different centuries. Different fields.
The same fricken questions.
Why Does Jung Keep Showing Up Everywhere?
The deeper I went, the harder it became to define where Jung's work actually belongs.
Psychologists reference him.
Writers reference him.
Religious scholars reference him.
Philosophers reference him.
Artists reference him.
At some point, you stop asking why Jung is relevant and start asking why he keeps appearing in conversations that seem completely unrelated.
Part of the answer is that Jung wasn't particularly interested in reducing people to symptoms. He was interested in stories. Dreams. Symbols.
Meaning.
He spent years studying myths, religions, and cultural narratives
from around the world and what he noticed was something strange...
Cultures separated by geography, language,
and history often told remarkably similar stories.
Heroes. Wise elders.
Tricksters. Flood myths.
Death and rebirth narratives.
Journeys into darkness followed by transformation.
Different names. Different settings.
Suspiciously similar structures.
His explanation became one of his most famous ideas: the collective unconscious.
Further Reading: Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (IAAP)
The Collective Unconscious
The collective unconscious is one of those concepts that gets simplified online until it barely resembles the original idea.
Jung wasn't arguing that people share memories.
He wasn't describing a psychic Wi-Fi network connecting every human on Earth, okay? His proposal a little was more subtle, a little more demure :P
He believed humans inherit common psychological structures.
Patterns. Templates. Ways of organizing experience that appear repeatedly across cultures and generations.
According to Jung, archetypes emerge from these structures.
That's why certain stories resonate regardless of where or when they're told.
The hero's journey isn't compelling because one culture invented it particularly well. It's compelling because it reflects something recognizable about being human.
And candidly, whether Jung was right is a separate discussion...
The interesting part is that the question keeps refusing to go away.
Why do certain symbols feel familiar?
Why do certain stories survive?
Why do certain ideas seem to reappear across centuries?
Further Reading: Jungian Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
Then Things Got Weird
Why'd they get weird, well...
Because eventually Jung led me to another concept.
Morphic resonance.
Rupert Sheldrake proposed the idea that patterns
become easier to repeat simply because they have happened before.
The theory remains controversial and is not accepted by mainstream science. Still, the question behind it grabbed my attention.
What if learning isn't entirely local?
What if patterns leave traces?
What if ideas spread in ways we don't fully understand?
Again, I'm not arguing for the theory.
I'm interested in the fact that people keep arriving at similar questions.
Psychologists ask them.
Religious traditions ask them.
Neuroscientists ask them.
Philosophers ask them.
Consciousness researchers ask them.
Everybody seems to be standing in different places
while pointing toward the same horizon.
Everyone Keeps Pointing at the Same Mountain
When I wrote Gaslight, I thought I was exploring perception, I wont lie.
I thought I was writing about reality.
I thought I was writing about certainty.
Now I'm wondering if I was writing about connection.
How connected are we to our memories? To our cultures?
To our stories? To the generations that came before us?
To the ideas that shape how we see the world?
The deeper I go into these subjects,
the harder it becomes to separate them...
Psychology becomes mythology.
Mythology becomes philosophy.
Philosophy becomes consciousness research.
And somehow Carl Jung keeps standing in the middle of the intersection.
The Question Keeping Me Awake
Let me be more than clear here:
I don't know whether the collective unconscious exists.
I don't know whether morphic resonance exists.
I don't know whether consciousness is individual, collective, biological, spiritual, or something we don't yet have language for.
What I do know is that human beings have been asking remarkably similar questions for a very long time.
Questions about meaning, identity, connection, about what exists beyond the limits of our own perspective.
Maybe that's coincidence.
Maybe it's pattern recognition.
Maybe it's something deeper.
I have no idea
.I just know I started researching consciousness and somehow ended up reading letters between Carl Jung and the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.
For a rabbit hole about connection, i guess that feels strangely appropriate.
Further Reading
The Bill W. and Carl Jung Letters
https://www.aagrapevine.org/magazine/1963/jan/bill-w-carl-jung-letters
Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (IAAP)
https://iaap.org/resources/academic-resources/collected-works-abstracts/volume-9-1-archetypes-collective-unconscious/
Jungian Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (EBSCO)
https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/jungian-archetypes-and-collective-unconscious
Carl Jung's Letter to Bill W. (WCCM)
https://wccm.org/outreach-areas/addiction-recovery/carl-jung-letter-to-bill-w/
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