Collective Consciousness and Love

I've been doing a little reading about collective consciousness in books and on the web , and I came across an interesting comment at the philosophyforums.com website in a forum about the matter by a user named swstephe:

"Socrates said that it was impossible for one person to love another person because it was impossible to truly know the other person and the actual subject would be inferior to the ideal. All that was really being loved was a projection of some idealized person onto the subject. I was interested in the psychological aspect. What is this ideal person we are projecting? Well given a rough generalization of goals and ideas, I decided that what a person really loves is not a particular person, but how that person would ideally relate to the observer. In other words, the only person anyone is capable of loving is themselves and what relates to themselves beneficially. They may post-justify their feelings in unselfish unbiased terms, however, but in the end everyone is a narcissist and love is purely a subjective illusion.

I see the ability to project ones own wishes and desires on others as being a deep psychological instinct. We use it as a way of dealing with other people, feeling empathy or sympathy in order to gauge another person's intentions. It is so automatic that we often feel empathy for objects that only vaguely analogous and non-living. The subject can't feel the feelings we are implying, we are actually projecting ourselves into their situation and trying to predict how we might feel."

and he continues .... "The concept of "god" may be just another form of projection of a certain aspect of a person psychologically. That the subject is a psychological projection of the potential for the ideal lover, who is an idealized form of the observer expanded in scope to the limits of imagination. As with any illusion, we have an instinctive need for external verification in order to be consistent. A schizophrenic patient will often seek people in authority to validate their illusions, becoming aggressive if their illusion is denied, and overjoyed if their illusion is confirmed. A religion is a way to find mutual external validation of the illusion. Some adherents may trade in the benefit of having external validation for having a specific relationship between the adherent and the deity toward a communal relationship between a group of adherents and a single validated deity."



read more at http://forums.philosophyforums.com/threads/collective-consciousness-30844.html