Belief in a mind greater than our own, an external mind that
can relate to us in a helpful way, is a recurrent belief in human history. To honor this archetypal psychic entity,
let’s just call it Big Mind.
Now, depending on time, place, and culture, people imagine Big
Mind in different ways: as spirits and deities of magic, of shamanism, of polytheistic
religions; as constructions of monotheism like God, Brahman, Wakan Tanka; as
all kinds of angels or demons; as carefully defined philosophical agents or
beings like the Hegelian Geist or Bergsonian elan vital; as entheogenic formations of consciousness; as
hallucinations of various kinds that qualify as psychotic; and so on. In light of this historical
proliferation of forms, I think we’re justified in forming the hypothesis of
Big Mind: vague and general, I mean no more than something I could also call extended,
subliminal, or transcendent Mind.