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to restrict us to some orthodox and traditional means in our relationship with the divine. But the psyche will not be bound up or restricted and will act out, bursting its bonds and seeking its own path. Our modern culture is becoming a form of living therapy, for better or worse. We see this in every avenue of modern life, from traditional media to the internet.

Art has always lead the way in the emergence of the human psyche. Our unconscious, as Jung showed us, is archetypical and symbolic by nature. It makes itself known in dreams and visions and manifests collectively through art, music and literature. Much can be learned about a culture through those media as the analyst learns about his patient through dreams and symbolism. Through the emergence of modern technology we are each able to express ourselves and experience the expressions of others unlike any time in history. We watch the raw human interactions, and even take part at times, on the flood of "reality shows" on TV. We watch and even participate as people pour their souls out through blogs and on you tube. We pour out our own souls and let others dissect our inner most thoughts and feelings online. We even experiment with latent subconscious personae through online role play games and social networks. Our modern "connected" culture has deep psychological affects, but are they leading us to salvation or into a morass of individual and collective psychosis?

We have become much more open with our inner psyche, our personal and collective "dirty laundry". We openly flaunt or quirks and eccentricities for all the world to see. We live a life online that is often quite different than the mundane lives we live in the day to day world. We say and do things that we would never dream of in our mundane life. We have become a split personality both individually and collectively. There is the everyday "us" which comprises the mass of people getting up and going to work every day, then there is the cyber culture we live in online. There we are citizens of the internet and can act out our dreams and fantasies in virtual anonymity. But that division is quickly evaporating.

The cultures are merging, or as Jung would have said, the unconscious content we have projected onto the internet and other media sources is being integrated into our collective conscience. Whether this is a good thing our bad for our culture is yet to be seen, but it will continue. Our modern schism of mundane and cyber cultures represents the schism between conscience and unconscious parts of our psyche. As we integrate the aspects of the cyber culture into our daily lives we will continue to project the contents of the collective unconscious into cyber space. The effect is a collective individuation process. We are entering a new frontier in psychology, un-thought of by the fathers of psychology. But we have yet to master even our own inner lives, how dangerous will it be for this process to continue uncontrolled? The result could be a quantum leap in enlightenment or our entire culture falling into a sort of mass psychosis or schizophrenia. It would be interesting to hear Jung's ideas on this new phenomenon, or Fraud's views concerning the level of porn on the net.

Learn more about this author, Maxwell Cynn.
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