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Old 01-01-2022, 10:06 AM   #666
Lanny_McDonald
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That was interesting. Thank you for sharing that. There is a lot of truth in what was said there, but also some changes the author of the referenced book would likely update as our understanding of psychology has evolved over the past 50 years. What Vallee was stating was we use our personal content to reason and explain those things we are trying to understand. This is a long held belief and has plenty of research to back it the claim. It is also how we interpret data and share information. What we use the context of our experiences to frame not only our understanding of events, but how we communicate those events. It is why you can have an artist and an engineer witness the same event, but get very different observations, very different data collections, and very different narratives about the event itself.

The concept of the collective consciousness is also interesting, but different from what Vallee was expressing IMO, especially when used to try and explain away this phenomena. Collective consciousness is a sociological concept, used to explain how we develop the constructs of social groups, the creation of shared norms, and the establishment of society itself. It is a theory that attempts to explain the larger function of human collectives and why they function they way they do. It is theorized that without a collective consciousness that societies would fall apart. You can see why sociologists and psychologists have some of the best and most lively discussions when it comes to explaining behaviors.

I'm not sure you can rely on the idea of the collective consciousness explaining anything in this regard, as the collective consciousness varies from society to society - collective consciousness being the foundations for the beliefs a society shares, and how others vary. The idea of the collective consciousness preparing us for a potential future is pretty far fetched, as that consciousness is only defined by what we know and what norms we have accepted into our catalogue of experiences. They're treading into the space of a collective imagination, which is an interesting concept but not having much support or research behind the idea. Our imagination is bore out of memory and feelings rather than experiences, but experience (shared or not) are still part of the creation of memory, and context acts as a limiter to the imagination. For these things to be a projection of our future, we would all have to share the memories and feelings, which we clearly do not do. It's an interesting thought, but was more a Jeanine Pirro approach (just asking questions) than considering the larger statement first.
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