[SonikJesus]

Originally Posted by SuchFriendsAreDangerous

 

Carl Jung calls these figures archetypes. Our subconscious mind shares many collective experiences, sights, sounds, smells, and especially figures. This is why our religious and mythic experiences have a commonality, they draw actively from the same source, the human subconscious. In our dreams, visions, nightmares, apparitions, and hallucinations our mind uses this seemingly hard-wired mental imagery to create a narrative and bridge to explain our thoughts and feelings. However, neither Jung or Joseph Campbell took this to say that the substance of religious experiences, visions, or terrors are entirely fabricated by the mind as a means to make sense of itself. Jung believed that the psychic archetypes naturally had to have an actualized counterpart in reality separate from the internal workings of the mind.

Myself, I feel that in a spiritual world, where non-material entities can interact with our immaterial selves, our material brain uses these archetypes to translate the experience into our consciousness, similar to how I feel about dreams. Its not that they're not real, its that they are not real in the sense that we experience them. The visions are like smoke or incense giving substance to the invisible force of wind..

Funny I was thinking about something like that after I made the post. I was thinking about the other possibility of it coming from our mind and basically supporting my belief that we all come from one consciousness which is why we experience a lot of the same shit mentally.