#c20th

"we're all sleepwalkers [...] Powerful forces construct social reality - parenting, schooling, television, advertising, dress code, corporate ethos, military drill. They're all, Charles T. Tart suggests, variations on hypnosis. Mostly we walk around in a semi-trance. We want what we're conditioned to want. We're like hypotised subject who happily eats an onion thinking it to be an apple. We only believe the onion's an apple, Tart says, because we've built a mutually re-enforcing sense of reality with one another. This is known as consensual reality, or consensus trance reality. It's what makes a football result seem important, drives fashion, and causes a day to be spoiled by a make-believe tragedy in a soap opera. The implication is that we're all living a dream, a myth, and that if we don't persist, and insist on what C.J. Jung called 'individuation,' - if we don't start living our own dream and being authentic to our own deepest calling - then life itself will be sucked away by the energy vampires of consciousness. Jung surmises: 'The individual who is not anchored in God can offer no resistance on his own resources to the physical and moral blandishments of the world.'"