You've probably heard of Collective Consciousness or Shared Consciousness. What does it mean and is it real?

Collective Consciousness refers to a wider consciousness that is shared by a group of seemingly separate beings. The seemingly separate beings have their own point of consciousness or awareness within the collective. The individual consciousness is like the crest of a wave. It is at the forefront, but there is a great depth behind it, so to speak, the collective consciousness.

Understood this way, we can see that the individual consciousness isn't really individual. It is a focused point of the collective. It's worth sharing the sheet of paper analogy again, as it shows how the seemingly individual points of consciousness work. Consider a perfectly clear sheet of paper, which we can understand as Consciousness. Consider then that numerous circles are drawn on the sheet and represent multiple perspectives or points of awareness. We may then consider that each circle or point of awareness has a core consciousness of its own. But really its own consciousness, if it were to turn and look at it, is the one consciousness of the whole sheet of paper. Each apparent centre of each circle of awareness is the same one consciousness. We can say it's at the centre of each circle of awareness, but it's not really the centre. The Consciousness is the whole sheet.

So that is considering Consciousness as a whole. It's a way of understanding the nature of Consciousness in which many seemingly separate conscious or aware beings appear. They are not truly separate, although their circle of appearance may make them seem different to each other. Seemingly at the heart of each apparently separate being is the One Consciousness. I use the terms 'seemingly' and 'apparently' because that's not really how it is. There is just One Consciousness. Not really many beings.

So the One Consciousness is like the Supreme Collective within which the multitudinous points of awareness appear. And this example branches out through the play of the universe, like a tree branches out. There are clusters of points of awareness from one branch and clusters from another, and so on, and so on. It is in this way that the pattern of many from one multiplies through the appearance of points of awareness or seemingly separate beings. Each 'branch' stems from a collective point. So the collective consciousness of one group is shared and seemingly separate from other groups. Yet all groups stem ultimately from the same One Consciousness, like great branches reaching outwards from the main trunk of the tree.

When people gather under a certain heading or group there develops a shared consciousness where seemingly separate individuals within the group begin to co-ordinate with the whole group and work as one or with the same purpose. This could be a family or a football team, a business or a nation. Admittedly, there isn't always cohesion in a family, football team, or even a business or nation. This is a play within the world of opposites, so there is always imbalance. There will be those in tune and those not in tune, and they will clash. That's a simplified way of putting it. It would be more accurate to say that those within a collective are more or less in tune, so there will be a variety within the collective. The collective is not static. It will rock and interact within itself and with other collectives that are like it but different.

Here are humans, rocked in the sway of the human collective consciousness, pushed and pulled by the collective of the nation, the collective of the family, the sports team, and so on, and flowing with the collective of the evolution of humanity.