ABSTRACT
The main assumptions under consideration here are that everything is connected because of its participation in the One Mind—Jung's unus mundus, which encompasses all that is, including the collective unconscious—and that universal connectedness has implications for the future of literary criticism. Since Jung's psychological writings imbricate the scientific and the metaphysical, they provided a helpful starting point for my study, which has attempted to do the same in a literary context. Although nicely illustrating a traditional Jungian archetypal approach, Nathaniel Hawthorne's “Young Goodman Brown” reaches in subtle ways toward unity through the collective unconscious. The enemy of metaphysical unity, however, is scientific materialism, Loren Eiseley's impediment in “The Secret of Life.” Both he and Jung are empiricists, but the weight of skepticism weighs more heavily on Eiseley. John Milton's transcendental monism has an affinity with Jung's own cosmology and provides a fitting contrast to materialism's dead ends. Both Milton and Jung affirm versions of the One Mind, whose implications are explored in chapters 3–7. Given the connectedness of all things, physical and nonphysical, as well as the proliferation of multiple worlds, a variety of phenomena arise and receive attention in connection with Jung's works: altered states, out-of-body experience, UFOs, synchronicity, and forms of psychic functioning (remote viewing and channeling). Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time series and Blake's visionary epic Milton sum up much that is relevant to the One Mind, including a negative view of materialism, the space-time illusion, and a cosmology that spans the seen and the unseen. The final two chapters also contribute a new theory of fantasy literature based on amplification and psi and an upgrade of Blake's vision from generally threefold/visionary to generally fourfold/psychic.
