The Unus Mundus: A Composite Universal Self and the Subtle Body

Monday, July 8th, 2013

In addition, to developing the capacity to hold or “channel” life force, our psyches can also generate intrapsychically created phenomena. Our experiences create thought and feeling reactions that shape our understanding of the world in the creation of a cognitive map and the formation of complexes. The life force that flows through the human psyche moves through the templates of archetypes into the conception of complexes. Complexes are feeling tone clusters surrounding an archetypal core. Occultists believe that this psychic process of creating complexes leads to the creation of “thought forms” that hold psychic power and have the potential to demonstrate “palpable effects.” They originate within the human psyche but may become capable of existing outside of the human psyche, in the subtle body and energetic field..

In Eastern religion the subtle body is often referred to as prana, chi, or kundalini energy. Inca shamans call this kausay. It is the vehicle that links ordinary and nonordinary reality. Indigenous medicine people believe that there are latent and powerful natural forces alive in the world that can be worked with and channeled if the capacity to “hold” energy (the shaman’s definition of power) through conscious intent is developed through practice and ritual. This is a little different than Jung’s concept of archetypes forming complexes in the individual psyche because it occurs in the objective psyche, the world of collective experience.

As a medicine person develops the capacity to move and work with kausay energy, changes occur in the etheric energy field. This shamanic medicine practice is done with conscious intent. Castaneda has written about the energetic appearance of the subtle body:

“When they are seen as fields of energy, human beings appear to be like fibers of light, like white cobwebs, very fine threads that circulate from the head to the toes. Thus to the eye of a seer, a man looks like an egg of circulating fibers… The seer sees that every man is in touch with everything else, not through his hands, but through a bunch of long fibers that shoot out in all directions from the center of his abdomen. These fibers join a man to his surroundings: they keep his balance; they give him stability.” [1]

Patrick Harpur has added to the description of the subtle body by explaining it as a “daimonic,” imaginative body, which “is the soul that can be lost, the soul that, in the shaman, takes otherworld journeys.” [2] In his writing on nonordinary reality, oriented from the perspective of western culture, Harpur has proposed that the subtle body is the aspect of our conscious awareness. It exists outside of the experience of the rational ego, and leaves the body in “the out of body” experiences and “near-death” experiences. This is when we are able to perceive our actual physical form from outside of ourselves.

The subtle body includes all aspects of the individual experience – conscious and unconscious, in waking and dream states, in past and present, as well as being a blue print for the future. The subtle body of the individual connects with all living things through an energetic field. It may be imagined as a web of light made up of a continuum of layers between spirit and matter. Jung said that psychic healing comes about through numinous archetypal experience, which is a function of the subtle body. He described the subtle body in relation to the psychoidal realm, as the point where soma and psyche meet, – the objective psyche.

Jung described the “objective psyche,” as the unit or layer existing underneath the sum of the archetypal structures.[3] Both Jung and Von Franz have described this as the existence of an anthropos, “the ancient idea of an all-extensive world-soul, a kind of cosmic subtle body.[4]” Jung has also referred to this as the unus mundus, or “one world,” which is a “composite universal Self” exists in what he called “the psychoidal realm,” the central ground of empirical being, existing beyond time and space.

A shaman moves into a state of connectivity by experiencing through his or her own individual subtle body, which becomes the conduit into experiencing on a much greater, collective scale, from an individual to the universal state of the unus mundi. The shamanic collective as an energetic expression contains the archetypes, and is the unlimited depository of man’s universal psychic heritage. In Peruvian shamanism, the collective of the land, is similar to the collective unconscious in the psyche; it is the depository of all experience in nature, and is linked to “membership,” and an affiliation with a sacred mountain. The concept of affiliation with a mountain is similar to the function of Christ in the Christian religion as a link to God. The mountain as a collective spirit is a “bodhisattva,” an intermediary between the person and the collective.