A Treatise on the Life Experiment
by Nicole Terry
On the Collective Consciousness
What is Society? What becomes of the individual self within Society?
A group of individuals divided and reintegrated into a whole at the loss of individuality creates a collective consciousness. Collective consciousness no longer has a tendency toward self-sufficiency, self-motivation, and self-will. The separate, but unified collective consciousness perceives the world through a single lens, called Morality that has been standardized. When consciousness categorizes the rest of the world by Morals, disorder of the personality occurs. The world does not “make sense” to the disordered personality because it attempts to arrange the world according to moral standards. The construction of a society is complete when a collective consciousness can force the individual to comport to moral standards by way of Law. Collective thinking attempts to compress all thinking into a singularity, so that the enforcement of collective order can be owned, managed, and controlled easily by an external will (that the collective consciousness knows as God or State) with little or no resistance.
The individual, however, refuses to accept blindly any view within the collective. The collective consciousness’ desire for the annihilation of any individual opposed to the collective view is the means to bring order out of what the collective consciousness perceives as chaos. The vacuum of the collective self obliterates any sense of individual self. The only way to bring about a collective consciousness over Thought is to murder anyone that does not adopt voluntarily, or cannot be assimilated forcibly.
The collective consciousness is not motivated by reason or intellect or curiosity, or other such faculties of the mind, but is motivated by Kant’s idea of moral duty.1 It is the duty of the moral agent to eradicate anyone unwilling to accept the authority of an external will. The individual is then perceived as a danger to the collective pursuit of happiness, and to the collective consumption of any means leading to temporary satisfaction. “And still more happy, if, reasoning in this easy manner, we can undermine the foundations of an abstruse philosophy which seems to have hitherto served only as a shelter to superstition and a cover to absurdity and error!”2 Fear in the collective is never achieving the promised happiness, and consequent release from anxiety. But if all were united, all could fear collectively and retire to the benefits of happiness in the absence of not fear, but of opponents to fear. Such that, fear would no longer have a wall upon which to cast a reflection (the individual), so the perception of fear disappears from the collective consciousness; giving happiness to the collective because the collective would no longer have anything to compare its fear. The collective perceives in the external world, not-Fear, which, in the collective consciousness, is synonymous to the absence of fear.
The emotion Fear causes consciousness to behave aggressively or causes submission to any external force perceived as greater in power to will. The collective consciousness behaves likewise. The collective consciousness attacks the individual with morals and standards, because the collective perceives intellect as a threat to the validity of its belief structure. A belief structure can be described as a mental construct upon which consciousness communicates its identity to others. The collective consciousness uses belief structure to form moral judgments and to establish relationships with other congruent beings. A belief structure looks for similar beliefs, rather than challenges to beliefs. Similar beliefs lend credibility and validity to the original belief structure, strengthening that belief structure, giving the form more solidarity, and providing that belief structure with purpose. Anything that opposes the belief structure is perceived as disorder. Fear in the collective consciousness grows rapidly, as new minds are assimilated, and as each new individual consciousness is encountered. The collective must turn everyone to its point of view. The collective consciousness that has abandoned intellect for security provided by an external will, also surrenders the faculties of will and rationality. It has abandoned the means of self, the means to discern, and the means of awareness of environment, so must look to an external force as guidance to protect it from danger and provide it with means to provide itself with the necessities of life. However, since the concept of self is abandoned, a belief structure is constructed in the mind. The belief structure is constituted of the supposedly innate idea that an external force exists, though invisible to the eye, but that omni potently provides protection. Without question, the collective consciousness opts for faith in the mysterious ways that this omnipotent force operates in the world. With faith, belief, and no concept of self, the collective consciousness has a foundation as strong as its belief and faith. But since its belief and faith are based on nothing, it has nothing as a foundation. Without a foundation, the collective consciousness is always in danger of collapsing, or terminating. So, through a fear that is written into the code of the belief structure, the collective consciousness commits itself to bring others into the fold because it thinks that this will lend it strength. The collective consciousness must grow, or die, at an expense to the individual, who must be sacrificed in order to preserve the collective consciousness.
The Idea of God as an Omnipotent Preserver
The foundation of the belief structure within the collective consciousness is the concept made real that I will call the Omnipotent Preserver, but what the collective consciousness and institutions of religion call “God.” The collective consciousness believes the knowledge of the existence of the Omnipotent Preserver to be innate, etched upon the mind because the Omnipotent Preserver placed it there.3 The omnipotent preserver superimposes itself onto the consciousness of the collective, that it becomes sole provider of the means to perpetuate the collective consciousness, while the full extent of its intentions remains mysterious and unknown.
The consciousness projects its identity onto that of the omnipotent preserver and submits to the authority of the omnipotent preserver. As ubiquitous giver and receiver of all information, the omnipotent preserver is both priest and prophet to the collective consciousness and holds the ultimate result in manners of thinking. The omnipotent preserver as omnipresent supplier and provider, critic and censor of all information, possesses power over the fate and destination of the collective consciousness. In this way, the omnipotent preserver is able to exact a form of control over possible futures or lifetime existence of the collective consciousness, as well as the ability to reduce probabilities to a predetermined and manageable One. This control over every movement of consciousness is carried out through social institutions such as government, religion, schooling, employment, and the most powerful, the family unit. By nurturing the natural will toward kinship already prevalent within human nature, the family unit becomes the agent of the omnipotent preserver and a means to perpetuate the holistic idea of equality. In the family unit, one is constantly faced with moral choice: comply with the collective consciousness or perish beneath it. It becomes a question of free will, yet the individual must be obedient to command, or suffer punishment. The collective adores this, while the individual bears it.
On the Institution of Mental Health to Preserve the Collective Consciousness
Is it possible to be mentally ill?
Would not a definition of consciousness first have to be standardized before the possibility of mental illness could be concluded? If consciousness is “a person’s observing or noticing the ‘internal operations’ of his mind,” and, if consciousness is intrinsically aware of the external world and the internal, hence possessing a formula of processing information, whether internal or external, is it possible for such an abstract to be ill?4 Furthermore, ill as compared to what? For would there not need to be a normalized standard before which all persons with mind are judged with illness of the mind? How is it possible to determine if a mind were mentally ill if any possible arrangement of existence can be? Would not whoever sat in judgment of consciousness first have to know consciousness? Not only know a single mind, but know all consciousness, and comprehend history of consciousness in order to interpret “mental illness”? Even if psychiatry seeks to ascertain the history of patient behavior, which is but a series of events passed, would it be possible to reveal every possible nuance that induced the appearance of behaviors that caused the ultimate event now determined mentally ill? How could it be determined with certainty that those series of events are the product of a mentality that is ill? Unless psychiatry comprehended the motivation behind each event and could connect those isolated events into a stream of consciousness, how could psychiatry demonstrate an illness of mentality? Hume writes of Man’s construction to lend cause and effect to events, when he cannot actually perceive cause and effect.
“In a word, then, every effect is a distinct event from its cause. It could not, therefore, be discovered in the cause, and the first invention or conception of it, a priori, must be entirely arbitrary. And even after it is suggested, the conjunction of it with the cause must appear equally arbitrary; since there are always many other affects, which, to reason, must seem fully as consistent and natural. In vain, therefore, should we pretend to determine any single event, or infer any cause or effect, without the assistance of observation and experience. But notwithstanding this ignorance of natural powers and principles, we always presume, when we see like sensible qualities, that they have like secret powers, and expect that effects, similar to those which we have experienced, will follow from them.”5
Is not a psychiatrist human? If a psychiatrist is human, is she then not susceptible to the beliefs of the collective consciousness, and does not know that she is acting according to that belief structure? If she holds a belief structure, how can she identify mental illness?
Does psychiatry then possess some sort of special insight into the mind of Man that it can pronounce judgment of illness in the mind? With the faith in psychiatry’s ability to see into the very structure of consciousness and know that it is ill; that it is not thinking as it should, that its consciousness has somehow become diseased, psychiatry has been elevated to the level of a god. And psychiatry is used as a god, believed by the collective consciousness to be all-knowing in pronouncing a consciousness ill or no, thereby passing judgment on consciousness.
What constitutes mentality as well? What are the examples of mental health? If there is a system of standards, by which mentality must oblige so that it may be said all mentality should do this as demonstration of wellness, does not such decision make mental illness a moral judgment? If psychiatry is supposedly an objective arbiter, from where does she draw reason to label anyone mentally ill? An argument can be presented that psychological tests measure beyond behavior into the realm of how the mind processes information, how the mind thinks. But if one is taking a psychological test, does that not imply that there are right and wrong answers? In order for the test to be “graded,” do not the answers have to be categorized? And out of this categorization, are not some of the answers mentally ill, and some not?
From where does psychiatry inform itself that such an act or mind is a product of mental illness or sanity? And then according to what does it deem the sentence? If psychiatry were truly objective, each patient before it would have infinite probabilities involved, therefore, infinite diagnoses. A person acting as agent of psychiatry could spend a lifetime without issuing the same diagnoses. However, there are standard diagnoses, so from what objective source does the psychiatrist retrieve her information? Objective according to what if each diagnosis is the same? How can psychiatry make an accurate proclamation of mental illness?
So then, for what is psychiatry?
Psychiatry then is a machine that oils its cogs with the willed ignorance of the collective consciousness. A psychiatrist serves as the agent of the collective consciousness, a weapon that the collective consciousness uses to remove the individual self from view so that the collective can continue to feel better about its position. In effect, upholding individuality and a sense of self as a condition or medical impairment that can be repaired, and if not repaired then locked away in a hospital among others like it, so that the collective consciousness does not have to look at it. As if to be an individual was something dirty, something undesired, a person without morals. “To avoid this intolerable condition men have devised a system of rules which we know as law and morality. [Whose] purpose [is to override] need to preserve social harmony [to] ensure a broad similarity in fundamentals.”6 If there are mentally ill people, and those mentally ill people are separated from the rest, then the collective consciousness can point and say, “That is what is insane,” and “that we (the collective) are right in our thinking.”
On Moral Argument
Are there really two sides to a moral argument?
Moralization is the process of categorizing thought into the illusion of a two-sided argument. Morality is to perceive argument as “A and not-A.” That is to say if person One does not hold A as a belief then person One holds not-A as a belief. “A and not-A” are the same side of the same concept; such as Good and not-Good, except not-Good is called Evil; God and not-God, not-God being called Satan. But not-Good and not-God are of the same stuff as God and Good. A mind that succumbs to cognitive dissonance does not know the opposite of itself. It holds only a belief structure that it believes it knows what it is to be Good and what it believes it knows to be God. But in fact knows only what it has been told is Good and God; therefore, when such a mind encounters another that does not hold the same belief structure, it perceives the other as not-God, and not-Good.7 Two persons who both hold a religious denomination argue about whose version of God and Good is the correct one, and presents the argument as if their belief structure were a universal truth. Why would a discussion of versions be an argument at all, are not both parties speaking of a belief structure about God and Good? If the idea of God in the mind of man is there because it was God that caused the idea of himself to be in the mind as Descartes suggests, then what would be the point of arguing about versions?8 Is not God, God? If God is omnipotent, would not the idea of God encompass all versions? Then the moral categorization has nothing to do with the argument, but with the perception of the moral agent holding the belief. If person Two does not agree with the version presented, then person Two is perceived as molesting the character-ego of person One, and vice versa. So, the ego strikes back with words rather than materiel weapons. Both parties fail to realize that their points of view are similar, save for the minor differences caused by the effects of historical subjective experiences.
In a collective consciousness, in which everything must be condensed into a single philosophy disbursed across an entire culture, and in which individuality can be said to be scarce, and that the very happiness and pleasure depend on the consent of everyone to the standards of the collective consciousness, any moral argument breaks down into war of mere beliefs and cultural thinking. The framework of the collective consciousness depends on the inclusion of everyone that the collective consciousness may be preserved. “If these motives–and we might add pride, jealousy, and sheer stupidity–get the upper hand, there results . . . a condition of war.”9 In a two-sided argument, there is a position of observation and objection, so that the “version” of argument is the subject of the argument, and the parties are involved objectively. The character of the subject becomes the target of disagreement. There is no need to degrade the personal character, and no need to react emotionally to perceived stimuli. The moral agent is the subject in a moral argument, and the version the object; therefore, the moral agent is unable to “see” the opposite as not of itself. The emotions, hatred and fear, are written into the code of the argument as natural and instinctual reactions to the threat of belief. Because of this, Religion exists independently of the church, priests, and bibles. Religion is a process within the philosophy of culture itself and inseparable from it. Religion and collective thinking through habitual actions, customs, traditions, and ceremony have shaped the consciousness, until it has become the very fabric of reality. To do away with Religion would be like committing an act of genocide. Religion is no longer a thing, but a process of thought. Church, education, and other social institutions are merely stage setting perceived by the senses, a place for people to spend a finite amount of time during their lifetimes. Religion has become not just an abstract idea abided by, but a concept manifested and acted out on a physical canvas.
On Experience and Perception
Are objective experience and subjective experience possible?
Experience can be said to be an action in motion. The philosopher, David Hume, has written on subjective experience and perception through the senses.10 If a being experiences as it passes through life, then experience can be said to be a chaotic totality in which a mind is the point of reference and the only constant. A man can be changed, yes, but a mind as a whole remains the same throughout. Would it not then be more accurate to say Experience of Objection and Experience of Subjection? If I choose to experience my life by observation, then my experience of life is viewed through a scope of participation that is both active and passive. As I can actively participate while remaining observant if I am aware of myself and of the environment in which I find myself. Experience of subjection suggests passive participation, for I have surrendered my mind to the will of an external force. My experience is one of moral categorization, a pseudo choosing, where I prefer to have decisions made for me. Here, I can be persuaded through my senses towards whatever feels most pleasurable. Experience of Objection, though, requires logical conclusions or processes to discern among numerous amounts of variables that can result in as many instances to be interpreted in an infinite number of meanings. The products of experience of objection are records of thought-processes culminated into manifestations able to be witnessed. But I would retain my awareness of will and mind, and by it do I determine decision before motion. Experience of objection, the way of the individual consciousness, could be said to be a means within an end to a means of an end. The relationship between the objective mind and its environment is a reciprocal one.
In an experience of subjection (the way of the collective consciousness), perception collects into identity, that identity becomes All (any varying perceptions are forgotten), and All becomes the new perception, as neither measurement of actual events nor actual individual, but a reflection in the mind before which all judgments are based. It is confusing words describing an event with the actual event itself. The “little voice inside your head” serves as conscience for the subjective life and keeps the psyche trapped perpetually in the pursuit of reunion with the omnipotent preserver.
“The center of mystical religion is the mystical experience, which at its highest development dominates the consciousness, excluding all awareness of words, nature, even of the mystics own self. In this experience the individual feels himself pervaded and transformed by the divine, identified with it in an individual unity. The world and all its ordinary concerns seems naught as the mystic is caught up in the ineffable bliss of this union.”11
The subjective individual projects a complete image of the perceived label onto the external world, and allows his perception to fill in any gaps that may exist about the actual event, until there is no difference between the actual perception and the image planted in the mind.
What is the effect on the individual’s conscious mind if the individual is forced into choosing to act against his sanity in order to pretend as if he has adopted the collective consciousness? To act before the collective consciousness, the individual must enter into a schism, as the individual must have hold of what he knows to be truth and what he knows to be false simultaneously. Therefore, a reasonable individual being must resort to double-mindedness, because only the reasonable being must deceive both itself and others.
On the Velocity of Ignorance
What becomes of a collective consciousness that advocates willful ignorance, morality, and cognitive dissonance? That seeks, without awareness, to stamp out a sense of individual self before it can begin to form in the mind? That loathing of intellect and individual will is imprinted into the very code of the collective consciousness, so that all thought is motivated by this implanted hatred? What of future generations begat by such a collective?
Entropy measures the amount of disorder within a physical system, and lack of information about the structure of the system.12 Combining entropy with a system of information, like a world wide web , eventually progresses to greater amounts of loss of information. Lack of information increases at a rate multiplied by a geometrically growing population.13 Each new generation will lack more information than the preceding, until ignorance becomes the normal standard. By information, I do not mean information as it is normally understood; I mean the impression of moral duties, and social standards on Locke’s “clean slate” of the mind, to form a subjective experience that assumes the order of institutional society, without questioning why such institutions exist. If the individual, who is considered abnormal, because of his refusal to swallow “mass assumption” would be a threat to the perceived order of the collective consciousness system. A mind that assumes mental illness, and that assumes collective consciousness as the comradery of a nation, of sports game fans, of friendships, and that assumes education as the pursuit of learning, rather than the carving out the future routine of employment within the system, and that assumes religion as a building, and not a state of mind, is considered “normal,” and therefore, non-threatening. Artificial order must be absolute to remain order, if not, the system breaks down. Throughout history, there have been examples of “undesirables,” of men who “revolted against a mass of assumptions that were deeply embedded in their own consciousness,” like Copernicus, Galileo, Socrates, and Nietzsche.14 Men who questioned the status quo, and were hated for doing so. More so, individuals who were a threat to the established authority of social institutions that sought to control information and manipulate social order. The individual is volatile to the finite system, his existence shows that institutions are fallible, and not divine, that the world is not a predicable series of happenings caused by an intelligent designer, but a mass of clashing free moving molecular structures in constant motion.
On the Life Experiment
The collective consciousness assumes that suffering is natural. But why do humans suffer? Is it the design of a god, caused by original sin, or is it the choices that Man makes? The choices for which he wishes to be unaccountable? The choices he would rather have placed outside of himself in social institutions like State, Government, Church, God?
Social Institutions are the same, a means to surrender individual will to an external force, so that the collective can pretend that what it has caused with its willed ignorance is “okay”, and not its fault. The Ultimate Cognitive dissonance was to rationalize that God “works in mysterious ways.” The collective consciousness hides its actions from itself, locks them inside the closets of its mind, and then goes to medicine men who perform psychological surgery, so that the legend remains fresh and consistent.
“But this obscurity, in the profound and abstract philosophy, is objected to, not only as painful and fatiguing, but as the inevitable source of uncertainty and error. Here, indeed, lies the justest and most plausible objection against a considerable part of metaphysics, that they are not properly a science, but arise either from the fruitless efforts of human vanity, which would penetrate into subjects utterly inaccessible to the understanding, or from the craft of popular superstitions, which, being unable to defend themselves on fair ground, raise these intangling brambles to cover and protect their weakness . . . and lie in wait to break in upon every unguarded avenue of the mind, and overwhelm it with religious fears and prejudices. The stoutest antagonist, if he remit his watch a moment, is oppressed. And many, through cowardice and folly, open the gates to the enemies, and willingly receive them with reverence and submission, as their legal sovereigns.”15
Has Man reduced himself to such states of infancy that he is loath to entertain the thought that someday this elaborate illusion that he has created called Life Experiment will end? Must he delude himself that life is so horrible (yet somehow beyond his control, and under an omnipotent being who gave him free will) that he must wait now (as if life were a great waiting room at the doctor’s office) to get to the kingdom of God later? Why does he wait idly, wasting time with matters that are within his control, but that he refuses to grasp hold of because he has convinced himself that “That’s life” and “it’s easier that way”? Why does he put on costumes and masks each day to appear on the stage, lies to everyone he sees, and calls it truth? Is the only universal truth that Men are selfish liars? Is Man willing to allow the world to continue on this path because he is afraid to provide for himself? If he allows the world to be ruined by such social creations as morality, religion, mental illness, and society, he is afraid to take care of himself. Humanity is disgusting for submitting to the external will of others. If Man truly believed in a god, why does he not exercise the free will supposedly gifted him? Why not love God freely, and still provide for the self? If one loves God freely, why would he need to attend church? Why would he need to read the holy bible? For what? Can he not remember that he loves God freely? Is Man that pathetic? Is he that stupid?
Who convinced him that suffering was normal? Why does he not find that Will and destroy it for daring to deceive him? Why does he see himself as powerless beings? What is wrong with Man? He has life, and he has consciousness. How can he waste it on television and churches and politicians, and education and holidays and consumption and morals and labor? How can he do this to himself and yet sleep at night?
The collective consciousness abandons intellect for morality. The very thing that involves no intellect or discernment, no need to learn; the very antithesis to progression and evolution of the human species. The collective consciousness has willed itself into a womb, so that it can feel better about deluding itself, while killing consciousness, and murdering the minds of each new generation. Yet, it says it believes in an afterlife, in a soul? Because it believes in these things, it is capable of performing the most abominable of acts, the most heinous of crimes against consciousness and will. Yet it says it believes in the human soul. But it takes the most horrible of events, and says God works in mysterious ways, so that it does not have to look at itself, and study its reflection and see that it is the monster, that it is evil, not some fictitious comic book character called Satan. There is no cosmic battle, only the war between Man and himself, struggling against his own delusions of grandeur. The collective consciousness likes to make examples of Hitlers, and Saddams, and Al-Quaedas, so that it can say, “I do not look like that. That is not I. I do not do those things” and it can blame an external thing, rather than the cancer that exists inside it, consuming it. Ultimately, the collective consciousness cannot lie to itself and remain sane. The monster within it creeps out in all the secret things it does not tell spouses, friends, or priests about. That it hides in dark, obscure corners, and in the light condemns, to prove that it is not the monster. So that it can be a good Christian. So that We are good and They bad. It allows institutions like the psychiatry machine and justice system and schools to prove that it is what is normal and sane, and anyone that does not contribute with the same lies is abnormal and insane, so it can sleep at night, comfortable in its delusions and illusions.
We should ask ourselves, what have We done?
© Copyright 2008 Nicole Terry ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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