Primordial Images of puddings, and bell bottoms.

I am not a psychologist, or a scientist and I can only just barely do math, however I believe in the Universal Collective Unconscious.  This was a theory originated by Freud and expounded on by his younger colleague, Carl Jung.   For me the UCU explains why children today have an seemingly intrinsic ability to ride a bike, to drive a car, even to use a computer.  In Jung's words, the collective unconscious is "the deposit of ancestral experience from untold millions of years, the echo of prehistoric world events to which each century adds an infinitesimally small amount of variation and differentiation" (1928, p. 162). (Retrieved May 16, 2010 from: http://psych.athabascau.ca/html/Glossary/demo_glossary.cgi?term_id=%221178%22)


Every now and again I have an experience that makes me realize that perhaps my thoughts are not my own; actually, I am convinced I have never had an original thought.  For example, in the mid- nineteen eighties I was working as a bicycle mechanic.  The owner, my employer was a friend and we spent many hours talking about the future.  "What do you really want to do," he asked?  "I want to teach," I answered. "But if that doesn't happen (which at that time was the way it was looking), I would love to open a bookstore and maybe sell coffee, cheesecake and other fresh baking as well."  No more than a week later my employer called me out of the back to introduce me to a couple in the shop.  "These people are opening your store," he said with a laugh.  They had in fact just bought a place in which they were going to open a bookstore and bakery.  The mid to late eighties was around the time of the start of the coffee culture in BC.  I suppose it was just a fluke, but who's to say that all flukes aren't created by the universal collective unconscious.


Another time, in the late fall, I went to the local kitchen shop to see about buying a pudding mold for my Christmas puddings.  The store owner had one, but thought perhaps there was a second one in the basement.  I said I would check back in.  A week or so later the owner came out of the store and said she had found the second mold.  I had already made my puddings (which turned out excellently I might add), and wasn't feeling financially flush so I said thanks but no thanks.  The next time I was in the shop the owner told me that the same afternoon that I turned down the pudding mold a tourist had come into the shop and had inquired as to whether she might have a pudding mold.  She was gobsmacked.  She had only sold one or two since the store had opened and now she had sold two within a week.  

The universal collective unconscious is also equated with psychic ability.  Perhaps some people are more in tune to the collective waves than others.  In the book, Jung and Tarot: an archetypal journey by Sallie Nichols the author states, "[Jung] recognized at once, as he did in so many other games and primordial attempts at divination of the unseen and the future, that Tarot had its origin and anticipation in profound patterns of the collective unconscious with access to potentials of increased awareness uniquely at the disposal of these patterns". (xiv) I was told once that I was a sender; that my thought were easy to read.  If that's true am I responsible for the return of the seventies? In June of 1993 I hosted a seventies themed party at my house, ever since then there has been a global seventies revival. Sorry, I'll try to be more careful in the future.