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Shortly after writing that post on "Consensus Reality", I bumped into references on the web to Charles Tart's "Consensus Trance" concept. Very much the same thing but with some mystical knobs on.
Watching my child grow and observing ourselves teaching him, I see clearly how the Consensus Reality is formed. My wife is teaching him the colours. Red. Orange. Yellow. Green. Blue. White. Black. She worries that he gets it wrong so often. I point out that she has taught him seven names. Yet the human eye can clearly distinguish the improvement in image quality in a 24 bit per pixel display versus a 16 bits per pixel display. Therefore obviously the human eye can distinguish significantly more than 65536 colours.
We adults have so bought into the "Consensus Reality", that we can look at any of this enormous range of colours and reduce it to a hideously oversimplified one of Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, White or Black. We now apply considerable time and pressure in forcing our child to buy into the same distorted and limited view.
Yet it is an important communication tool, eg. "Look in the blue box..." The trick is to not confuse reality with a communication tool.
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