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The German poet Goethe once said that “he who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth.” Three thousand years is already a gold mine to draw knowledge from. What more if it is possible to draw from the memory of our whole species? The collective unconscious is a term coined by Carl Jung to describe a “reservoir of the experiences of our species.” Sadly, I think that to be able to acquire these memories consciously is still impossible. We’re not even sure if the collective unconscious actually exists. But its existence and our innate ability to acquire memories from our collective unconscious involuntarily are things that I believe to be true.

In a classroom discussion, my FIL12 prof once cited an anthropologist’s possible rationale to the Filipino’s habit of urinating on walls. He said that land was communal to Filipinos prior to colonization. Because of this, walls were rarely used to enclose portions of land. When the Spaniards conquered the Philippines, the Filipinos were introduced to land titles. Walls were built around lots, which angered the early Filipinos. This anthropologist believed that the Filipino’s habit of urinating on walls is a subconscious manifestation of the precolonial Filipino’s indignation for walls. The present day Filipino inherits this subconscious distaste from the memories of precolonial Filipinos in the collective unconscious.

In Richard Linklater’s Waking Life, one of the minor characters in the story explored the topic of reincarnation. She believed that reincarnation was just a poetic expression for collective memory. People who believe that they are reincarnations of Alexander the Great or Cleopatra are not really reincarnations. She thought that these people acquired these memories of Alexander the Great or Cleopatra from the our collective memory.

One field of study where parallelism is very apparent is in literature. One example would be the myth of the great flood. Two sources of the myth immediately come to mind - the Hebrew story of Noah and the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh. Apart from this, other versions of the myth appear in various cultures around the world. To name a few, India has the story of Matsyu, the Greeks have the myth of Deucalion, and the Aztecs also have their own version. All of these stories include a warning from a higher being to a chosen few, and their eventual survival to repopulate the land.

To further expound on uncanny coincidences in literature, I will recount a story which happened four years after Philip K. Dick wrote Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said. Dick met a nineteen-year-old girl, Kathy, who had a boyfriend named Jack. Later on, he then learned that Kathy was a drug dealer. Soon, he also learned that she is having a relationship with a police inspector. What is puzzling is that these real people were identical to the characters in his novel - Kathy, who is a drug dealer, has a boyfriend named jack, and is having a relationship with a police inspector. He told his priest about this incident. As he was telling this story to the priest, the priest interrupted him, saying that he was narrating the Book of Acts. True enough, the events and characters in the novel were parallel to those in the Book of Acts.

I do not think that certain parallelisms are only mere coincidence. There has to be a meaningful pattern in all of these - reincarnation, unintentional similarities in literature, and even urinating on walls. There must exist an intricate lattice of coincidences which connect to each other brought about the collective unconscious. To quote a character in Repo Man: “Suppose you’re thinkin’ about a plate o’ shrimp. Suddenly someone’ll say, like, plate, or shrimp, or plate o’ shrimp out of the blue, no explanation. No point in lookin’ for one, either. It’s all part of a cosmic unconsciousness.”