The Collective Breakdown

I use this term all the time: The Collective. It sounds creepy and ominous, like the Borg. Actually, it's something as natural and universally present as air. It is all-pervading, infusing every aspect of life, the workforce and intelligence that is moving behind the scenes to keep the Grand Plan on track, and most people don't even know it's there, or that they are even a part of it. 

I was driving home from work a couple weeks ago when the thought came to me (I wonder from where? Heh) that I would like to have some sort of official written-down definition of what The Collective is. And almost immediately, it began forming in my mind. I mean, I already feel like I generally know what it is, but putting it concisely is another story altogether. How do you sum up something so big in only a few words?  Well here's my initial crack at it:

The Collective is the combined energy, knowledge, and consciousness of every spirit, incarnate and incorporeal.

OK, so to me, that means something, but to others it may mean absolutely nothing. What exactly is a spirit? What do you mean, incarnate and incorporeal? How can consciousness be collective at all? Well, those are all good questions, so I think just to have some structure to break this subject down, I'm going to work through the good old five Ws and see what I come up with:

Who is The Collective?

As I tried to say in my attempt at a definition above, The Collective is you and me. And by "you and me" I mean our spirits or souls or whatever name you would like to put on the unique essence/energy that is the You that is animating your body, thinking your thoughts, and feeling your emotions. This is the energy that while conjoined with your body, enables the body to have a life, but is not dependent upon the body for its own existence in turn. This is why people have "out of body" and near death experiences and that sort of thing; these are some common examples showing how impermanently attached our souls actually are to their vessels. 

The Collective is also Them.  And who are They? Well (and come on the journey with me here for a minute), from what I have learned, when the human body where your spirit is currently residing ceases to function, your soul will detach from the flesh, but it will not simply disappear and become nothing. It's still around, existing, without a physical vessel. It has moved from the material side of The Collective to the immaterial side. Everyone's unique energy, both during its time in a body and its time not in a body, make up The Collective.  My personal search for truth has lead me to agree with the concept of reincarnation, and while many spirits do participate in a repeated cycle of lives in physical bodies, I have also learned that there are entities within The Collective that have never inhabited a body. But they are just as fully-formed of souls as you or me.

What is the Collective?

Hah! This may be the most difficult concept of all to wrap words around. I may try for some metaphors, because I know that makes abstract concepts easier for me to understand. The Collective in fact, often likes to convey messages to me in metaphors as well for this reason. I've already said that The Collective is comprised of both the Dead and the Living (as I've mentioned in earlier posts, I may just use those terms for simplicity's sake, despite the fact that I don't really care for their connotations.), but for the most part, us living folk do not seem to have much awareness of the Dead, or even our own connections with everyone else in this massive tapestry.  But we're all part of it, all connected, to each other, to the Dead, to everything. It's an entire spiritual ecosystem, all parts affecting one another. Unlike most of us live people, The Dead do not have the limitations imposed by a physical body, and they, in fact, are aware of each other, and of us. This is where it gets interesting. They have access to near boundless information because not only are they aware of each other, and able to communicate, but they are able to do so almost instantly because they do not have to wait for one person to open their mouth and say something and have sound waves travel into the ear canal of the other person, or wait for an email to be sent and read for the other party to receive the information. If one entity has a thought, another can know it. And that's it. There is no necessary medium for the communication. The knowledge of One is the knowledge of All. This is why you can use a talking board and speak to an entity you don't know from Adam, and ask him about your grandmother who passed away. Even if you don't directly speak to her, he can know what she knows and relay it to you fairly reliably. If the living side of The Collective (you and me) has snail mail as a means of communicating, the dead side has the internet with Wikipedia. The mind-blowing part of all of this is that because the dead are all constantly aware of each other, they become, in essence, one consciousness. A single unit comprised of many. My term The Collective is actually short for The Collective Consciousness. Due to its generally unified nature, The Collective much better than more spiritually isolated fleshy creatures like us to act with concerted effort to carry out actions and plans. Which they have. A Grand Plan as a matter of fact. They can see the big picture while you and I are bogged down in what's-for-dinner and doesn't-that-bastard-understand-that-if-he-takes-two-parking-spaces-like-that-his-car's-gonna-get-keyed?

Where is The Collective?

Well... everywhere. The living side is accounted for: see a person - they have a soul. There is a part of The Collective.  As for the dead side? Everywhere we are, they are. Honestly, they do a lot of hanging around us, because a sizable chunk of their activities involve meddling (in a good way) in our affairs. They're trying to get us to do the right thing, follow the path we're supposed to take to learn whatever lessons have been proscribed for us to learn in this life. I always think it's funny that movies and TV imply that graveyards and abandoned creepy houses are full of "ghosts." Sure, there are some of the dead who have their own issues to work out and are shunning the living, but from what I understand, most of them are near where we are. And not a lot of us are chillin' in cemeteries, aside from funeral parties and the people who work there. Why go to a grave to "visit" a loved one who has passed? They are not with that body anymore. Just talk anywhere you happen to be and they will hear you. And if your loved one doesn't personally hear you, rest assured one of Them will be around to hear you and convey the message. From what They have told me in the past, the average living person has about 2 - 3 dead people hanging out near them at any given time. Think about it. Right now, they are there with you. In your living room. At the KFC. At the dentist's office. At the cube farm where you work. They may be "assigned" to you (more on that later) or maybe they are just passing through the area and have stopped to take an interest in you much like we would stop to watch a street performer on our way walking to another errand.

When is the Collective?

That was an awkward paragraph header. Do I go with consistency between the headers or reasonable grammar? Meh. 

Questions of "when", of course, pertain to time, so let's explore Time and The Collective briefly. You and I generally experience time in a linear fashion if our brains are in good working order, free from neurological issues and intoxicants. We can see a clear progression from past to present to future. I have learned that the spirits on the Other Side of The Collective do not exist in a linear timeline, so to speak. One of them once said to me that they are like the point on a three-sided pyramid; they exist in a place where the lines of past-present-future all come together in one place. On a practical level, this explains why when we communicate with them, they are able to discuss past events and even past lives, and also give us their thoughts on what is likely to happen in tomorrow: all of these realities exist at once for them. Quite mind-boggling when you try to wrap your head around it, but there's that flesh container again limiting our avenues of perception.

How is The Collective?

This question could mean many things. How is it's nature? Is it benevolent or malicious? My positive nature makes me want to say benevolent, but I don't know if there is even that much bias. It wants us to succeed in learning our life lessons so that we move along on the path of spiritual evolution, but it also encompasses the universal need for balance. And some of our lives have some unpleasant learning in store for us. By that I mean that even though none of us wants anything bad to ever happen, there is nevertheless a need for both heroes and villains in the world. It is sad, but there are going to be murders as a counter-balance to acts of selflessness. For every nice person there will be a jerk somewhere to even things out. There will always be filthy rich people as well as homeless people, geniuses have to be balanced by dumbasses. That's the duality of everything, and it has to be that way. It cannot be unbalanced. As much as we want everything to be sunshine and rainbows, or things will get seriously out of whack, if I may bandy about some professional jargon.

Or maybe the "how" refers to organization. Does this Collective have any sort of structure or is it total chaos, every spirit out for himself? Yes, so far as I have seen there is some sort of structure. Do I know the full blueprint of the entire building? No. I have only been down a couple of hallways so far. The parts I have explored have taught me about a variety of duties/jobs/positions that different spirits have on the other side, and that some are more "in charge" of affairs, if you will, than others. One thing I have asked in the past was whether there was a single entity at the top of any sort of hierarchy and they responded clearly that this was not the case. That there was a type of hierarchy but that no single person was in charge. I will probably explore this again, but it's one of those Big Questions that is really involved and difficult for them to explain to me in a way that I will understand, and those seem to take a lot of time and energy on the board, not to mention that there are some things we have discovered that they are "not supposed" to tell us.

Have I covered it all? Not hardly. But I'm sure I have elaborated long enough that if you have made it this far you deserve some sort of internet medal for Blog Perseverance or something. Thanks for hanging in there. These won't always be so verbose, but at the beginning here I am getting a lot of background information out of the way.

Until next time!
Love and Peace.