Someone asked this question to J. Krishnamurti, and he told how group consciousness affects the individual consciousness and how individual conscious affects the group consciousness. Let’s see…

How group consciousness affects the individual consciousness?

If you see the left image, the dot in center is an individual having his own psychology, conditioning, inclinations and belief systems. He has immediate circle of family, and family also has certain beliefs, thoughts, rituals, attitudes and conditioning that is coming down from generations. The next circle is of relatives having particular conditioning and psychology; next cycle comes of neighbors and friends, then of society and culture, then of regional cycle, and then of nationality, and each one having their own ideologies and bullshits.

You can think of how many layers are there over the head of an individual. How much he is conditioned with each layer, totally influenced and affected, and living a “$#&*^” (don’t know what to say) life.

How individual consciousness affects the group consciousness?

When an individual starts living consciously, he is thrown out from each group one by one, because he no longer follows their ideologies, belief system and nonsense. He transcends all the conditioning and psychology of family, friends, culture and nationality. He becomes a true human being, a universal man. And this man add to the group consciousness a new awareness, a new insight, a better consciousness, a new quality – as all the enlightened people did and are doing.