Telos Initiative
Telos is a term used by the philosopher Aristotle to refer to the final cause or purpose of something. Our telos is to seek truth and cultivate wisdom using dialogue and rational discussion. The podcast will cover a wide range of topics in various genres and we hope to grow with our audience toward our ultimate purpose in this mystifying existence.
Telos Initiative
Episode 9 - Collective Consciousness
What if collective consciousness is the key to unlocking a deeper understanding of reality? Join hosts Angelo Cole, Chris Vigil, and Matt Maes as we explore this profound concept, diving into interpretations that range from panpsychism to Jungian psychology. We dissect how collective consciousness emerges when individual minds intertwine, creating something profoundly more powerful. Our discussion takes us through familial attunement, the layers of the unconscious, and universal archetypes—those timeless symbols like the mother or the magician that bind humanity across cultures.
On this journey, we shift our focus to the power of unified collective pursuits, drawing parallels between the operation of the Mars Curiosity rover and religious practices. Consider how distributed cognition and rituals guide us toward greater truths, and reflect on the importance of focusing on ultimate goals instead of getting lost in the rituals designed to help us reach them. Through judgment and self-reflection, we ponder the connections between individual actions and collective aspirations, urging a broader understanding of our shared journey.
Finally, we navigate the tumultuous terrain of belief systems and paradigm shifts, examining the emotional and intellectual challenges they bring. Through metaphorical knowledge trees and color spectrums, we explore the evolution of collective knowledge and its influence on perception. Our conversation extends to the interconnectedness of life, communication, and perception, challenging us to foster a mindful relationship with the environment. By personifying nature and recognizing Earth as "Mother," we promote a deeper respect for the world around us. Tune in for a thought-provoking episode that challenges you to rethink your place within the tapestry of collective consciousness.
Hello everyone, welcome to the Telos Initiative. I'm Angelo Cole.
Chris:I'm Chris Vigil.
Angelo:And I'm Matt Maes.
Angelo:Today we are going to talk about collective consciousness, which is a topic really special to me, and we've all tried to prep a little bit for this one, and so I hope you enjoy it a little bit for this one, and so I hope you enjoy it.
Angelo:So, first of all, I guess I'd like to try and define what I mean by collective consciousness. We could really get into some broad offshoots, because there's an aspect of it where we could be talking about panpsychism, which is the idea that, um, consciousness is present in all of reality on some level, like everything is related to something with consciousness. Okay, um, we have done a podcast previously on what consciousness is, so we at least have some ground covered there where it's not just an egotistical psychological phenomenon, but it is a phenomenon based on what's happening when a group of conscious entities get together and communicate, interconnect, and we could even get into something along the lines of dreams, the subconscious collective consciousness as the collective unconscious, which is a jungian psychology, which is sort of related to archetypes and some of those things. So, yeah, this topic is definitely, uh, a big one. So I guess where would you guys like to start?
Chris:well, uh, define it. What? What is collective consciousness?
Angelo:collective consciousness is the phenomenon where multiple conscious entities come together and something greater than the sum of its parts comes out as a result. I don't know if I have a very good, specific definition.
Matt:Okay, I also think of the word cohesion in terms of what lies beneath the surface that we all innately can gather around or we can innately agree upon. That's one level. It's funny the more you know, we bond together to say what you know. My family will watch my, you know, my son and my wife. They could see me make a certain facial expression and they could read, just from a certain twinge right like oh, you know, that's what you know, that indicates a certain expression, or they understand that about me, or I can do the same for them.
Matt:I can notice when something, when something shifts one way or the other.
Matt:And so us having that awareness and attunedness, then we can, we can individually, collectively, have an understanding around what's happening with our psyches, what's happening with our moods, our states, what is coming through each of us.
Matt:But then, even below that, there's what's happening below the surface that none of us consciously understand, the unconscious that we're, you know, the onion skin that we're trying to bring into consciousness.
Matt:You know, and thinking a lot about, about this subject, the collective unconsciousness, I, you know, I I kept coming back to these, these two sides where we have the uh, the relative, agreed upon consciousness that we can, you know, we can bond around, we understand and and it's, it's more, it's closer to the surface, I think would be a good way to understand it or a good way to think about it. And then what we don't know, that we don't even know the mystery. You know the mystery that lies underneath, you know where is the realm of symbols, or where symbols point to, I should say, and dreams, and you know the great mystery that we may attempt to reach our hands into and find well to be in tune with it. You know, I think meaning points us closer to it. You know, it's that being in tune with that primal, what word would you even give to it, the primal phenomenon.
Angelo:You said phenomenon, primal like, like something akin to the the id uh,
Matt:maybe they
Matt:I think the id could be
Angelo:because the collective unconscious is related to the id in young in psychology I mean that you have your personal unconscious, which is all of the, the personal experiences and subconscious things that make up who you are. You have your ego, first and foremost, right, and that's the things that you are consciously aware of and you put forth as your yourself. And then you have the personal unconscious, which is like my experiences, my mother, my uh, personal, uh, dreams and personal archetypes. And then the collective unconscious is like, even deeper than that. It's almost something that comes through, uh, comes through your genetics and your lineage. It's hard to say that it's entirely biological, because there is a cultural element to it. The collective unconscious is something that influences humans universally. So things like the archetypes of the mother, the archetype of we, the archetype of we talked about archetypes before as well I think things like the magician and the sovereign and all of that are related to this deeper thing ingrained in every single one of us universally.
Matt:Yeah, definitely, and I love that we're going to the archetypes universally. Yeah, definitely, and I love that we're going to the archetypes and the, the, the locality and the universalness. Actually, I think would be it'd be helpful to paint a to, to kind of carve a road from, say, we have the local consciousness, like the, the, you, just you, and then you in a collective and you in your culture, let's say, and how that culture relates to other cultures, which would be like the, much more universal, and how all those, all those connect together. So there are all these, all these different layers, right, all these different layers of of consciousness, and even more than that. I I mean, that's really kind of an abbreviation, to be honest, of course.
Angelo:Well, I do think this whole concept is just a heuristic for all of us. To kind of follow, it groups a very complex system up into one large thing. So when you say something like oh, my subconscious, something bubbled up from there, it's like what are you talking about? Because you have so many layers, like you said, like an onion skin to who you are.
Angelo:There's who I am when I'm around other people, who I am to myself, who I think I am, who I am as a human being, who I am as a man, who I am as, depending on what your race is like, those are just like on the surface and then, subconsciously, there are things that you might even find hard to describe. You know, there's weird stuff that that might be completely unique to you. Like you had this one experience and this is how you took it and that pushed you in this direction, and nobody else really has that or knows about that in the same way you do. Um, you might share something with a sibling. What if you're a twin and you and your twin kind of uh, have some hidden language or you kind of know what each other is talking about just because you came from the same place.
Angelo:There's some subconscious thing going there, and when we're talking about a collective, it's almost like as a culture. We have cultural things that we all do that are completely unique to our culture. We have biases, we have things that we take for granted. We have, we have collective dreams, even if you think about it. Um, yeah, we, that's the stories we tell in our movies. We have cultural, iconic movies that we're all like, oh yeah, um. I like to think the first one that comes to mind is something like the terminator. That's like a cultural icon for america. I feel like the terminator is like this archetype of how robots take over the world, and it's so ingrained into us that now that we're facing uh, issues with ai, it's like this what about the, the Terminator? What about Skynet? Is that where this is all headed? And it's because that's like this subconscious, dream-like story that we've told each other. The Matrix is another good one.
Matt:There's something that is deeper than perhaps we are able to express just with words or just with our process of, of articulation. And you know, going back to the, the archetypes, real quick, I was thinking about this, uh, this parable of the eye, of the needle, if you might oh, yeah, yeah where you have to sacrifice your riches, you have to sacrifice these things.
Matt:you'd be too weighed down to go through the eye of the needle right, so you have to cast these things aside Now, within the context of the story, that has a certain meaning, but that, as a, let's say, like psychological template, that's extremely useful in a lot of different contexts. And in this context, going back to the archetypes, let's think about your mind. And if you were to turn your eyes backwards to look at the inside of your head, to the subconscious.
Matt:That's kind of what we're trying to do when we're trying to dive into and analyze the collective unconscious.
Matt:But the very but it evades the very tool that we're trying to use in order to apprehend it, right.
Matt:So we have to sacrifice what our minds think about the collective unconscious. We have to sacrifice thinking about what our bodies, our senses are telling us. We have to sacrifice our monkey mind, let's say, all these things that get in the way of being able to simply pass through the needle and be in touch with that collective unconscious, to have a physical, felt, a felt presence, experience of it, right. But once we're able to do that, then you know, it's like that mystery has a certain viscous viscosity, like a water being able to be fluid and pass through. You know, if it's, it can't be too way, we can't be too weighed down in order for that to come through. So when we open ourselves to it, that's when it comes through, that's when the insight is able to wash over our minds and our bodies and that's when we can be in a participatory relationship with it and we can live out that collective unconscious in a deep level, because we're able to surrender ourselves to it.
Chris:I really like what you're saying and how you're saying it. I would just I'm not sure if the removal of my ego and the cessation of my dreams and desires in such a powerful way is designed to let the unconscious live through me. I think that's something that's more reserved for um, the boundless, omnipotent deity that resides over our reality, like I think that's what we're looking to channel in that sense, um, but I am okay.
Chris:so if I could try to dial this back just a tiny bit, sure sure Right because when Jung defines the collective unconscious, you know, he says that we have an ego, we have our own experiences, and these experiences sublimate our personal unconscious, right? Personal unconscious, right. So then, um, the collective unconscious, then, is inherited both from our genetics, our biology and our culture, and and um, the, the closest thing that we can get to understand, like seeing and understanding and defining what the unconscious is, are the archetypes, right? The mother, the father, the magician, the warrior, um, but is that what we mean when we say collective consciousness? Or or is collecting consciousness just cohesion? Well, like religion, what you know, well, I do that.
Angelo:That's why I think collective consciousness is tricky to define, because we're talking about a really broad category here and it does get confused with the collective. Unconscious isn't the same thing as collective consciousness. We could be talking about the religious impulse and cohesion and a collective will. That's something different than our collective archetypes and, where we come from, we could be talking about a hive mind, so to speak, and that's not what Jung was talking about. Okay, which is?
Chris:I know this topic is a little bit broad, which is kind of why I wanted to bring it up and see what you guys really thought on it, because so I think it's really tricky, because when Jung defines a collective unconscious, we're seeing that word consciousness and that's what's really triggering me to fall back into Jungian definitions for that. Should we redefine it as the collective cognition that we're all experiencing? Because a cognition has free will. My cognitions have free will, or at least I think I have free well, yeah, that's contentious and we can contend about that later um yeah, let's.
Angelo:Let's get into a little bit more on what you mean by cognition and maybe this idea of distributed cognition. I'd like to dive a little deeper into that. I love this idea of distributed cognition. I'd like to dive a little deeper into that. I love this idea of like a collective will and to bring it closer to something a little more scientific and stable. Let's talk about something like the, the. I forget the robot that they pilot on mars, but there's this machine curiosity.
Matt:I think yeah curiosity.
Angelo:Yeah, so curiosity on mars. Is this really great example of distributed cognition? Because it's not like one guy with a remote control piloting uh, curiosity and seeing what's going on. There's a collective team all making decisions together on how this robot is moving, not just one aspect of it, but everything leading up to getting it to Mars and what it's seeing and interpreting all that data, what direction they get to search and everything. It's like. This collective group of people are all operating through this one singular body, which I find fascinating. And this isn't some ethereal panpsychism, hive mind sort of thing. This is something that everyone can agree. You, collectively, are in a group effort, uniting through a machine.
Chris:Okay, so if we can do that for a robot that we put on Mars, what's our purpose for if we try to aim for something doing something like that collectively on Earth?
Angelo:Well, I think, what do you mean? What's our purpose? We can have multiple purposes. It's almost like that's just one method.
Chris:Wait a minute For which you could use distributed cognition for, for would you call us like collect? So this group of people right collectively maintaining and using this robot on mars, the curiosity rover on mars? Would you call that collective cognition or distributed cognition? Uh, that's collective right, because it's aimed towards. Well, I called it distributed cognition.
Angelo:But I feel like it's kind of the same thing when you're saying distributed, you're distributing from a collective okay, alright, like to me it's going hand in hand. I said distributed to kind of try and distinguish it from this collective consciousness thing we're getting okay okay.
Angelo:So I also think that's the religious impulse. That's the point of religion. So you'll hear a lot of people talk about, oh, this difference between religion and spirituality. I think that it's operating on somewhat of a false premise, this idea, because religion's a loaded word. So when you say religion, a lot of people think of a power structure. Religion is this sort of opiate of the masses and it's got this top-down hierarchy and there's these people who think they know what's going on and they're imposing their beliefs on other people and they're just telling you what to do. But that's not really what I think religion actually is.
Angelo:When I talk about religion, I think it's more of something more akin to this distributed cognition thing that we touched on. I think it's something more like a group of people. Regardless of the hierarchical structure. They're all coming together collectively for the same purpose and reason, and the more they unite as one body, as one thing, pursuing whatever it is ultimate truth or goodness or however you look at it, they're all moving in the same direction together. And that's when you start seeing things like rituals being played out and and narratives and stories. You get you get some sort of archetypal behavior bleeding into that action, uh, that collective uh pursuit, I should say so.
Chris:I think that's another example of distributed cognition I like how we went from collective consciousness to collective pursuit. Like it's not. It's one thing to just think about collective right, it's another to pursue something collectively right well, we are the telos initiative and it's all about pursuit.
Angelo:It's all. It's all about meaning and purpose and what you're headed towards and ultimately, I do think that is really at the bottom of just about everything, which is why it's so fascinating. You can talk about something wildly different like religion versus this curiosity robot on Mars, and you can get to the same root, right.
Matt:Well, it seems we keep going back to unification between people at all these different levels from, say, the people working together to operate curiosity, distributed cognition, and then you have them each collectively working together towards.
Matt:Actually, when we talk about religion, I think of the body of Christ and how we think of the body of Christ, where we think of the body of christ, where we are the body right like we as the, you know, we as beings in the church, all collectively make up this unified thing of the body. So when we have this different, maybe the purpose of the different rituals in church is not so much this sort of rigid you must do this and that and the other for its own sake. Because when it becomes self-referential for its own sake, that's where it starts to fall apart, and that's where people are like why are we doing these things?
Matt:But to have a cohesion and a reason why you're doing all these things, actually, also think of Confucius, one of the things he said. That was perhaps one of the wisest things they ever said. The wise person points to the moon and the fool only looks at the finger. Nice.
Angelo:You know, what I mean by that. Yeah, because you're like look at the moon and you're like, oh yeah, that's pretty cool.
Matt:Like the moon, is the actual thing, that's the telos, that's the reason for it all, that's the source of meaning itself, that's the source of the aliveness. That's, I mean, really the source right. And then you have people just looking at the functions, looking at the actions that are supposed to facilitate, pointing towards what that thing is Well, there's a judgment element there, isn't there, Like you're looking at the finger.
Angelo:Why are you looking at the finger To be like, oh, is your finger even pointing in the right direction, right, right? It's kind of a criticism of the finger when you, instead of looking at I just I just thought of.
Matt:I just thought of this too. I've never thought of this before. In this context is there's this well, and it's funny that the finger pointing to the thing, the finger, is not the point right also, also, but on top of that when someone is pointing at somebody in blame or judgment, there's this thing like you've got four more fingers pointing back towards yourself, right, right so looking at yourself,
Chris:there's okay well well, from now on, I'm gonna have zero.
Angelo:It's gonna be that guy yeah this is a very well, that's a very. Those watching this is a very fierce emotion right here.
Matt:But you know, but there's also this, this pattern of people who are very pragmatic and say spiritual leaders, very outwardly focused and very mission driven, very uh, function oriented, very, you know, directive, outward directive, but then their inner life or their home life can be total crap because you're not paying attention to that. You're paying all of your attention, all investing all your energy on being mission oriented and outward, and there is definitely, of course, purpose to that. You definitely should be, you know. But you need to also regard what's close to home too.
Matt:You can be so you can be so busy out there conquering other lands that you can not be defending your own home space right, which I do.
Angelo:Think that is a a problem. I've heard come up a lot for religious leaders and such which is why also why I think the catholic church says priests shouldn't be having, uh, families and such. I think that was the purpose of that whole thing.
Matt:Yeah, to not even have a home family to worry about.
Angelo:Because you can't serve two masters.
Chris:For the Roman Rite. That's true For Eastern Catholics, you can be an ordained priest and be married and have children. But what you said reminds me of a time in my life when I was, I think, I just started deconstructing catholicism, like in my early 20s, and I was right, kind of out to sea, without a sail, without a compass, and I remember I was like now have to do, if I'm not going to follow Jesus and the church, now I have to devote myself to something else. And I thought I mean what's a better mission to have than do what I can to establish world peace and solve world hunger, which I could never do anyway. But then I shared that do anyway, um. But then I shared that with my spiritual director and he goes. You know you're sacrificing the mission giver for the mission. You know you're, you're focusing way too much on on psych to do something and not focusing enough on the one who gives you what the thing to do, your purpose and that you know that's great.
Matt:And to go back to a point that you're responding to as well, like in terms of surrendering your what's let me expound on that a little bit Like surrendering the body, the senses and the mind and those things. I don't mean to just simply give them up, but that the thing that you're surrendering to actually fulfills them in a deeper way.
Matt:Right. So because they don't always know what's best for themselves, so because they don't always know what's best for themselves, the warrior could be going out and just doing all these different things without a purpose or without loving those things you know so. So it's that centeredness that fulfills them. And even going through the darkness, you're able to even find those hidden gems in the darkness, and you have a reason why you're going through it and you have, you have a light that you can carry going through it. You can, you can have a reason why you're going through it and you have a light that you can carry going through it. You can have a well, I mean centeredness, I think, is the best way to put it.
Angelo:Yeah, I like that you use that word, because when you say centeredness, it means there's a center somewhere. What are you oriented around? So I think there is something fruitful to the notion that you need to be skeptical. You need to try and pursue things on your own, orient yourself in the right direction, discipline yourself, but at some level you have to recognize that doing everything on your own isn't going to put you in the right spot all by yourself. You're going to have to completely reinvent the wheel, which is where I think, coming together as a collective, you have to, at some level, trust others. You have to put trust in. Maybe it's a tradition or maybe you put your trust in the scientific method and all the people who are oriented around that. Maybe you put your trust in a group of people motivated to do something that you feel really passionate about. But on some level, you have to trust something bigger than yourself you have to trust something bigger than yourself.
Chris:You have to put a little faith in something.
Matt:Put a little faith in something, and you need that faith in order to undergo that path as well, because you have all of these beliefs that are built up from all these different sources, all these different experiences that you had, and you'd like to think of the of yourself as being in touch with the truth of those experiences. Like, yeah, I went through that and I, you know, I, yeah, I'm in touch with reality. Yeah, I understand that, you know, but it could not always be based on what is substantial, because you're just trying to put things together the best that you can, going through these experiences, right. But then you get to a certain point where, like you say, you have to reinvent the wheel. You can't just rely on what are placeholders in those situations. You have to really dig in. You have to say, like, what are these actually built up upon?
Matt:right what are these beliefs actually actually built up from? You know? And being able to go down there and and really, really, I wish it were as easy as just like. Let me just pluck out this little belief from here and just toss it away. You know, it'd be so easy.
Angelo:Depends on the belief right.
Matt:Yeah, and the more practice.
Angelo:How much is anchored on that belief Exactly? Is it a core belief, you know?
Matt:Imagine how much of your life you may have to reorient based on the removal of that belief. You know it sends you on a journey. Based on the removal of that belief, you know it sends you on a journey.
Matt:And then, imagine that we have a whole classroom of people who all have these different, varying experiences, all these different beliefs that are built up from all these different places, right, and you're trying to center around something you know. You're trying to center around these core things that are substantial and you're coming from all these different places. You have all this different variation happening at the same time within all these people, right, so that, in terms of the archetypes, like that could be the sovereign. That is a gravity that pulls them all together. You know that pulls them all from all these different places. Right, where you can sort of sense this call from amongst all of you, right, it's a good reason to cast aside these false beliefs that you've built up, to really question those things. It's that sense of being able to lead you to that light.
Angelo:Yeah, that can be a very painful process. That's why talking about religion or politics and all of those things is always so contentious because you're touching on something that hits a nerve. Really, it's something really deep down that hits a nerve. Really. It's something really deep down. If you cut off a belief, way down at at the core of what you put your trust in, everything above it shatters, and then where are you have to completely rebuild? Um, but it's also why people who have had a complete paradigm shift and gone through that painful process, uh, they, they cling so much more tightly to their newfound belief like to have two paradigm shifts in a row. That's gotta be rare, you know.
Angelo:So let's say, you know you grew up really religious and then you found, like all of this stuff, something about it. It seems dishonest. It just doesn't convince me. On a certain level it's paints even. Even if you think of it as liberating, it's painful to cut that out because that's all. Your whole family is attached to that. Everything that you knew growing up, all of these experiences Maybe you went to youth groups and church camp.
Chris:Yeah, you just uprooted all of that.
Angelo:When I finally deconstructed all my stuff.
Chris:It took years to do that Right and then I came back Right and it was painful and it's painful. It was painful to do both honestly.
Angelo:Yeah, yeah, but still I would say the second time around is more painful Because you take pride in the fact that you uprooted that first thing and you were like look, look at all this that I discovered.
Angelo:And then you kind of get set in your ways. You think you finally found the answer, and then you get stuck in a rut again, and then you eventually uproot that again. And then you're always questioning yourself. You're like did I do the right thing? Am I just slipping back? Because, I'm afraid, was you know what? What is really the reason that I go back?
Chris:but I mean so I well, here's a problem that I think we're running into um, which is that you're really I would say you're more heady than I am.
Chris:We're both pretty like heady, smart guys, but um I'm more visceral, I think I, like I, I deconstructed my beliefs and then I went and I had some crazy hecking experiences and that, and taking those experiences, the problem I'm trying to face here is the intellectual versus experiential belief systems and what was the foundation of those? And, matt, you know, we really haven't talked much about that, but I'm sure you've had like a deconstructing experience or also reconstructing experience for yourself.
Angelo:Oh yeah, um, and ours was in their early 20s, I think, and I mean I'm still in a point in my life where I'm like I am not quite sure what's going on. I think I'm headed in the right direction, but if I had to do another big shift, um hey, I've been down that road before you know. I like to think of, uh, these, uh. I have this concept called knowledge trees, where I like to think of, like all of this stuff that you build up through the course of your life is sort of like this big tree, okay, of knowledge, and when you, whenever you have a big paradigm shift, it's like taking an axe and chopping the trunk down and then you have to grow a completely new tree.
Matt:But it's it's related to what you were talking about earlier, where they're like these core axioms, right yeah, well, if there's, if there were one concept, if I were to wave a magic wand and there were one concept that we all would understand, it would be the pendulum. Right, right.
Matt:So you have this extreme over here, and you have this extreme over here and this plays out in culture a lot, where, say you can be, you can simultaneously be pro women, having rights and having you know, having agency and having latitude in all these different ways and still be able to hold um the purpose of men, the purpose of masculinity, and all these things in in synchronous, in in in sync right because the other way, like this extreme is like very, you know, like not to get into a whole can of worms with, like all society's things, all that type of stuff, but uh.
Matt:But I'll just say this side over here, as the thinking of itself is the necessary antithesis to this extreme over here and this one thinks it's the necessary antithesis over here now. They both have very good points at their core, which mean in the middle, but you have to have understanding in order to find yourself in that middle right. But much like chess, they're both playing what's? You both go towards the center, People trying to claim the center right.
Matt:Which is the battleground, which is where all the stuff goes down. Right, but that conflict erodes when you have this mutual understanding of you know, collectively understanding truths all over the place, that there are truths all over the place and you don't have to fight about them, right, but you know, going back to, you know wonderful statement, wonderful statement by you about discarding these beliefs and having this paradigm shift that leads you over. This way, you can swing so far over here and you can think I had to go through so much. I used to be this kind of person, used used to have these kind of beliefs, and I went on this journey and I ended up over here and you can think that this is the destination, when really the center is the final.
Matt:It should be the final destination, right? Because you can be so convinced that over here, this extreme is totally the right answer. You know, this extreme is totally the right answer, you know, but it's a deception that's what I thought you know enough to think that you're correct, but not quite enough to know when you were full of crap. It's hard, it's very hard.
Angelo:It takes humility to admit that you don't know, especially when you make an effort and you pursue truth and you. It takes humility to admit that you don't know, especially when you make an effort and you pursue truth and you study and you read all kinds of philosophy and science and literature if you're smart, you do that.
Chris:If you're me, you didn't do that you just went right off the deep end laughter.
Matt:Many of us do.
Angelo:I do like this. I have this theory where those trees that I was talking about, these trees of knowledge that you kind of build for yourself, maybe, if the roots reach deep enough, they'll find some. They'll find that they can connect to a bigger tree.
Matt:Yes, okay Like there's some.
Angelo:I have this idea that maybe there's some big, larger collective tree. You know collective knowledge, tree tradition and if you can reach your roots down, you can feed from the same source that this tree of truth is ultimately feeding through whatever hippie it's collective man, we gotta talk about the collective.
Matt:That's like what aspens do you know? Yeah, aspens at you know underground they all connect together.
Angelo:So really it's like it's like one aspen tree that comes up above the ground as many aspen right, right, that's kind of uh what I was was getting at, but I was even thinking um with fungi. There's this thing called the uh mycelium network oh yeah and so uh describe that mushrooms mushrooms are fungal, some, some forms of mushrooms.
Angelo:They are interconnected underneath the ground through a network that's very similar to neurons in our brains and so they communicate with each other and they almost operate something like one, a singular organism. So in a weird way it is kind of like a hive mind. We don't exactly know how they're talking to each other, but we know based on evidence, like you can walk somewhere in a forest and, um, there will be fungal patterns where your footprints were in a long distance and it's hard to say, well, this is this individual fungus and this is this individual fungus. When it's all connected through this underlying network, it's like this really intense collective hive mind underneath the ground. It's fascinating really.
Chris:I honestly I'm not like an expert in my celium networks or anything, I feel like that was the example we should have started with to clarify what the heck we were talking about from the beginning. I don't think. I don't think it clarifies much, because this topic is really broad.
Angelo:we've we're talking about distributed cognition. We're talking about the religious impulse. We're talking about distributed cognition, we're talking about the religious impulse and we're talking about literal hive minds under the ground.
Matt:Let me go to another one too. I think this is fascinating to think about. If you think about the whole color spectrum, right, let's say the color wheel, and each one of those evokes a certain sense we have a sense about. You know how we feel about those colors, what that color represents all those things and they're not necessarily just defined by these solid borders.
Matt:We can try and break them up that way, like with with the color wheel right say this is this color, this is this color and this is this color but they all kind of blend together. Really they are.
Matt:They're connected by gradients rather than by solid borders right yeah, but if we were to look at each one of those colors and imagine we're talking about about integrating, you know, integrating from the unconscious into the conscious. It's a recognition of what that color is and imagine trying to pick out from all of those colors the ones that we think shouldn't belong there, or ones that we're disgusted by, or things that we avert our eyes from, but it's still part of this whole color spectrum nonetheless.
Angelo:You know, colors are fascinating. There was a point in time where we didn't see certain colors, and it's not because we physically couldn't see them, it was like psychologically, we just didn't have a word or definition for what that color was, so we just grouped it with a bigger color or a different color, um, so something like I think it was either like the iliad or the odyssey or something like that. They're talking about how green the sea is, because at that point in time they didn't really have this word for blue, so they lumped it in with green, and if you showed them greens and blues, they would all think of them as like the same color, just like we would think oh we have uh, like greens and dark greens like, yeah, that's all green.
Angelo:but we created a word that differentiated green from blue and that went into the psyche of everyone and now we all collectively perceive a new color because we redefined it.
Angelo:Same thing with something like brown. Think about brown. Brown is just dark orange and if you would have called it dark orange you would see it the same way. You see dark green to green, but when you see brown you think it's this completely other thing. You don't even realize it's actually orange. I mean, maybe you do if you really were curious enough and looked into that. But brown is almost like its own thing, like trees are brown and dirt is brown and hair is brown and skin is brown.
Chris:You don't think you're looking at orange people yeah, you know, sorry, you know the camera's not facing the right way, but I'm looking at this cardboard box over here and I'm like that's definitely not orange at all.
Matt:I don't know but again we come. It is though well that one's probably. It's probably the lighting and we we come back to, to gradients too. I mean that box could be like two percent orange or so two percent like light or two percent, you know all the two percent orange and like 98 percent. You know this other color that makes it that really kind of light brown yeah, but I would say, where does the color brown actually live?
Angelo:people like to think maybe it lives in the objective world, because there's like a certain wavelength of brown. It's like not exactly. Well, maybe does it live in your mind because you perceive brown, you create brown in your mind, right, and it's like almost, and in some sense yeah. But there is a sense where it's a collective thing, because we came up collectively with this word brown and that word for brown existed before you were taught what brown was as you were growing up. That came from your culture just as much as it came from your sight.
Chris:This is quite an interesting. What do you call it tangent? Because now I've got to know what is the exact wavelength of a brown thing is it?
Matt:orange is it orange like?
Chris:what's going on?
Angelo:here I have to know well, there's hue saturation and lightness when it comes to color. So the hue the hue is what? What color it is? That has to do with your cones, right? Okay, your cones are perceiving. So you have a cone that perceives red, cone that perceives green, cone that perceives blue.
Angelo:So actually, whatever we have three, they that's yeah red green blue so the combination, yeah, okay, the combination of what you see from your cones in your eye is right, how, uh, what hue you're going to see, and then the intensity of that color, which is the amplitude, not the frequency of the wavelength, but but the amplitude is picked up by your rods and that's going to be the brightness. The more intensity there is, the more blown out and white it's going to be.
Chris:I already knew this, but God, you're smart, I mean yeah art school Okay yeah.
Matt:Take my invisible crown.
Chris:No, I mean, it's actually really cool when you guys were in the cones and remembered amplitude versus frequency. I don't remember that. You don't remember the amplitude of a wave.
Angelo:Well, now I do so. Frequency is how frequent that wave that's the frequency, the frequency of that wave.
Chris:Yeah, that's the frequency. The frequency of that wave, yeah, that wave.
Matt:There we go. Good stuff. I'm going to have to do research on that. That's great.
Angelo:That was adorable. He does.
Chris:Okay, but anyways Back to collective consciousness.
Angelo:Yeah, collective consciousness.
Chris:Well, I mean AKA distributed cognition. Yeah Well, I would say collective consciousness, yeah, collective collective consciousness.
Angelo:Uh, well, I mean, aka distributed cognition yeah, well, I I would say that's a subset, right, that's one, one way to talk about the collective consciousness of people. But what I was getting at with color is that colors aren't just something that live in the individual mind. I, I don't think, I don't think the question of, oh, do I see the same red that you see? I think it's highly unlikely that we would see different reds just because, like randomly, I think we all collectively kind of have the same neural network in a sense, and we're not just pulling from our individual neurons.
Matt:there's something deeper there it's like the variation may be just so slight. It's like how do you even attempt to point?
Angelo:well, yeah, it would be useless to talk about, because as long as the variation is there, we're perceiving things differently. Who's to say what my unique experience versus your unique experience even sees?
Matt:Well, and that could be. I feel like this could be even broken into a whole other episode as well, of the relative experience versus the individual, or the relative individual experience versus the collective experience, which a lot of people seem to sway from this one to this one. You know, you could have people who are just.
Chris:You know, I have a and how do those two things relate to objective reality?
Matt:Yeah, exactly, as a whole, exactly right, and while they're, yeah, okay, that's a great way to frame it. So people who, um, you know, I have a friend who is very emphatic on this notion that every single person is just individual unto themselves, right, which there's a lot of validity to the core idea of the individual, the sovereign person that is you. Also, in this same universe, we are all connected by a lot of cohesion, a lot of relation between us. Otherwise, things would just be so random and variant that they would, I mean, frankly, we'd be all over the place. You know, like how would you have any agreed-upon definitions of things other than having, like? You wouldn't have a dictionary, wouldn't be a thing. You know, we wouldn't even have the notion of trying to define words unless there were something there to point to.
Angelo:But that's right, that's why we well, yeah, the whole, the whole foundation of communication in and of itself is you've got an individual subjective thing inside you and I've got an individual subjective thing inside me, and how are we going to share things from inside you with things from?
Chris:inside me. The mycelium network doesn't have that problem. They can just freely share.
Angelo:But me, and you have to like you know the mycelium network doesn't have that problem.
Matt:They're all looking at us. What's your problem? What's your guys' problem? They're all looking at us. Which are problems? Which guys problem? I mean you can. You can have your cake and eat it too. You know, like with the collective unconscious and the realization, the live experience of you know, of that mystery and also you being the lens through and the prism for that to come through.
Matt:You know, for that to, you know, to be able to live that out and to be able to have the fluidity of your own individual life experience and the you know, the real, alive sense of yourself you know the alive sense of your unique self within all of that so I have another word for you.
Angelo:What's that? There's a word called umwelt. It's a german word. Your umwelt is something like your unique subjective experience and everything involved with you and every creature has their own individual umwelt, and your umwelts can overlap a little bit, depending on your shared experience. So you, as a human being, share an umwelt with me in the sense that we see the same color spectrum, theoretically, that we taste the same type of foods. The same way, we inhabit similar bodies. We experience things in a very, very similar way, being the same species, but your umwelt compared to the umwelt of a frog might be radically different. But even with a frog, you might share some things in common with the frog with respect to something like a mollusk or something really foreign to an animal living on land.
Matt:Yeah, oh, my God, now this is a whole thing. But animism, right? Oh, like a very primal sense of you embodying a certain creature. Think about it. When you're doing something like you're getting down on all fours and you're crawling and acting as if you're a wolf, like you can be in touch with that wolf consciousness or leaping like a frog you notice how many different capacities we have like these different creatures. Like you know, like an octopus, I can use my arms like tentacles and wiggle them around like this.
Angelo:Yeah.
Matt:And grab onto things, right, but it's, you know, that primal sense of the, of nature being able to live through you as an individual, you know?
Angelo:So then we're going going now we're leaning into panpsychism right, but that's you know.
Matt:Like you know, like joseph campbell spoke about this a lot as well like the like the universe as a thou rather than it you know we think of things around us as it.
Matt:But when you think of it as it, then it's strictly for its utility most of the time, like you're using this computer, you're using this microphone or a box or something like that, but when you have a ascribe a sense of presence to it or realize a sense of presence about it, or realize a sense of presence about it, that has that it has. It may not always be animated, but it has its own consciousness nonetheless, like plant life. You know, like we, that that may be. The next step up too, to think about it is that we may not always think of plants as moving or flowers, as you know, having their own soul or that type of.
Matt:Thing right, but what if they did? You think about what if that did? Why do you care to water that plant? Why do you like name your things? Why? What is this thing with, like naming your different things? I mean, when you're naming a thing, what are you doing? But but ascribing a personhood to it? Right an identity yeah, exactly so when you realize that, so you might, you know, take more care and regard for what's around you, the things that are that are around you, right?
Angelo:yeah, just because it's inert doesn't mean it doesn't deserve some sense of respect.
Matt:Yeah, exactly.
Chris:I like that approach. I do like to personify all of the fruits and vegetables I work with there you go.
Angelo:It's because I grew up on veggie pans.
Matt:I'm putting out apples. I'm like you guys are going to do great. That's Timmy with cucumber.
Angelo:Well, you know what I think there is something there to like. If you, if you project a little bit more of identity to even inert things, you take more of a sense of relationship and care with them. When we call the earth Mother Earth, we're linking it to our mother. We're linking it to where we came from and it's more personal. I don't want to hurt my mother.
Matt:Yeah. So you're personifying natural creation and that is a wonderful example. That may be the example too, because, in terms of, if we think of, oh god, I'm glad I have a microphone in front of me, I'm gonna say this.
Matt:So when we think of the object or the, the thing, as being used for its utility, right, we think of the earth that way, the way that we have extracted so much from the earth, and we think about the earth like what can we get out of the earth? You know, what can we get out of the resources that will, you know, help us in some way? Right, and we seem to be the only species that is able to move around and shift our environments in the ways that we are able to. We're able to build civilizations, we're able to populate the earth in this way. That is not, uh, that's not present in other creatures. We're supposed to be stewards of the earth right.
Matt:So when we think of the earth as having a personhood of its own, suddenly we can care more about it. You know, Suddenly we can care as if it's a living thing. In fact it really is, it's nature man, it's mama.
Angelo:It's mama living thing. In fact it really is. It's nature, man, it's mama.
Chris:It's mama.
Matt:Yeah, and that's so fascinating too. I create mythical art and I think quite often about mythical figures. What is it about Gaia? About Mother Earth that we all seem to collectively understand what we're talking about? When we say Mother Earth, we obviously mean the Earth. We obviously mean our planet, right.
Angelo:Mother's, where you come from.
Matt:That's it, that's it, you know. So it's having again a felt realization of that, a felt realization of the personhood of the vow.
Angelo:That was powerful man. I think that's a really great note to end on is just collectively recognizing the earth as the mother, the earth as the mother, and even this idea of personifying even inert things as a way to have a closer relationship with your reality, beautifully put well. Thank you all for listening in to our wonderful conversation about the collective consciousness, distributed cognition, collective unconscious, whatever you want to call it. Conversation about the collective consciousness, distributed cognition, collective unconscious, whatever you want to call it. Um, for those of you that made it this far, thank you so much for sticking with us and, uh, hope to see you next time.
