I first read the phrase "consensus trance" in the book by Charles Tart titled, "Waking Up." It is a fairly accurate way of describing the way most people see and interact with the world. All humans are conditioned by their parents, friends, teachers, culture, etc. to see the world in a conventional way. Most people believe in things like time, space, causality, thingness, etc. and rarely question the basic assumptions underlying their ideas. They argue about politics or religion, but rarely question whether something like "thingness" is real or imagined. Many people know that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, but few realize that thingness is in the mind of the thinker. The concensus trance can be roughly described as, "I am a separate human being living on a planet with other human beings, animals, and plants located in a vast empty expanse of gas, dust, and stars called 'the universe'. I was born in the past and will die in the future. I have various needs, desires, hopes, and beliefs".
