Day Four - Cobwebs

31 Days of Spooky Symbols

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

As you walk through the dark corridor, sticky threads cling to your skin, reminding you that you’ve stumbled into a space that’s long-forgotten. Cobwebs. We think of them as indicators of abandonment or decay, but they can signify something much deeper.

Think of cobwebs as the architecture of the unconscious. They stretch across corners of our mind, connecting concepts that we don’t even notice until we brush up against them in a moment of synchronicity. And if we pan out from the scene a little, we see that they actually connect us across the entire house—a wide web, so to speak.

One of the areas on which Freud and Jung disagreed was the concept of the unconscious mind. Freud believed it was deeply personal, the product of individual experiences. Jung, on the other hand, believed that there was an additional collective unconscious (UC)— that we essentially inherit a set of knowledge and symbols ancestrally as humans.

This explains many archetypal symbols throughout history, including commonalities within different religions, phobias, moral codes, myths, and dream imagery.

Scientists are still studying the collective UC, looking at how it could impact social media trends, for example. There’s also a research project on global consciousness, the idea that consciousness may extend outside the container of our human brains. That research shows a small but significant shift in a network of random number generators set up around the world during major global events (like 9/11) or massive celebrations and festivals.

The idea is that events that draw widespread attention or evoke emotions have an impact on parallel directional shifts across those number generators. And those findings lead scientists to wonder if mental energy can create a shift in the physical world if it all harnesses together.

Pretty fun stuff to think about, right? We are so connected in this web of life. Imagine what we could do.