"Collective wisdom helps us transcend the duality of self and others because it is a reminder that we are part of a larger framework from which we act out our role. As Shakespeare recognized, alone we are merely players, each with our exits and entrances, but as members of something larger, we become something extraordinary. “Consider,” another wise poet said, “how the stars that shine more brightly manage to combine in constellations, get a name.” So too with collective wisdom: When we are in service to that which is life affirming and needed, we become something greater in combination with others."
~ The Power of Collective Wisdom: And the Trap of Collective Folly
This brings to mind Joseph Campbell quoting an essay by Schopenhauer, “The Foundation of Morality.”. “How is it, he asks, that an individual can so forget himself and his own safety that he will put himself and his life in jeopardy to save another from death or pain — as though that other’s life were his own, that other’s danger his own? Such a one is then acting, Schopenhauer answers, out of an instinctive recognition of the truth that he and that other in fact are one. He has been moved not from the lesser, secondary knowledge of himself as separate from others, but from an immediate experience of the greater, truer truth, that we are all one in the ground of our being.” Campbell uses this story in many of his recordings and it appears in his “Myths to Live By.”
http://www.mythicjourneys.org/newsletter_feb07_campbell.html