Define the collective, independently of God

The collective is the highest-order value structure extracted from each individual and unified into a collective consciousness (not an experience, because experience can only occur at the individual level).

An individual has an experience of the world. He experiences birth, growing up, living a day-to-day life, and eventually winding his life down towards his death. Each of these experiences happens within his conscious experience and is his alone. No one else shares an individual’s experience of the world, nor could they even know what it is like to experience it the way an individual does. He is alone in his mind. Each person on this planet has an experience that is not shared by the others around them.

However, that experience is not experienced in a vacuum. An individual interacts with other individuals on a daily basis. Even though the experience is not shared with another individual, it is influenced by other individuals. The thoughts and experiences of one individual are often expressed outwardly and shared between individuals. This leads to a shared experience. Even though it cannot be the full or true experience as seen in an individual’s consciousness, a part of that conscious experience is shared among individuals.

When individuals share experiences, they begin to shape common experiences within groups. To be clear. The individual may still differ from day to day in the specific conscious experience they have of the world. However, when that experience is shared, trends in conscious experience begin to appear among groups who share it. So, at the individual level, we will see significant differences in day-to-day experience. In a group, we can draw connections among individuals and identify common trends.

Those trends are then extracted from the individual and applied directly to the group of individuals. Extraction itself is a process intrinsic to man but has no supernatural or external basis. It is simply the natural way of communication and cooperation between individuals. A survival mechanism. Man does not operate as an individual. He operates in groups, so he seeks out commonalities between himself and others that serve as a reason to belong. Those commonalities unite him with his group and allow them to have a shared experience of the world. Shared experiences serve as the transition from the individual to the group. The individual gravitates towards others who share values and interests. Those values and interests then become reasons to belong, are extracted from the individual, and become identifying factors of the group.

The shared trends in conscious experience among small groups tend towards smaller issues. Trends could be collective hobbies, interests, music preferences, and other low-impact conscious life choices. The smaller the conscious group, the smaller the impact on the shared conscious experience. Conscious experiences of groups do not stay small. As groups grow in size and scope, for example, going from an individual group of friends to an entire city, the impact of the group’s conscious experience begins to grow. We see much larger trends extracted from larger groups. Interests of an entire city begin to show. Small issues are not very important to a larger group. We begin to see the true values of the conscious experience extracted as the number of people in a group grows. For example, at a smaller level, we see hobbies and interests as key extracted trends, but at a larger level, we see the community’s core values extracted and smaller interests ignored. Smaller interests do not hold up in a collective and thus are not important.

A city does not focus on individual interests. No individual in the city would ever agree on which activities or hobbies to focus on, and nothing would ever get done. Instead, the city focuses on larger, value-based trends. We see trends in public safety, infrastructure, education, and other services that reflect the city’s values.

As we move to a larger scale, such as a county, state, or country, we see the extracted trends evolve from issues that could be addressed at the local or individual level to those that reflect the values of a broader collective. Those values, which reflect the collective, must be extracted from the individuals within that collective. The individual always remains at the heart of the values that exist within the collective. It is through interactions among individuals within local groups that the collective forms. The values of the individual are thus reflected, but not all of them. As we have followed the trend of value extraction from the local level through increasing group sizes, we see more and more individuals added to the collective, and thus more and more values to sort through to find the extraction. Just as we extracted trends from smaller groups, we extract trends from those smaller groups and apply them to each larger group.

However, the individual is not directly represented in this transition. Now, the values of the local groups as a whole are extracted and compared with those of other local groups. The trends among those local groups then become the values of the larger groups. This trend continues all the way up the curve until we reach the peak of the communal structure. In modern times, we live in a global community. However, the global community remains divided among countries that hold a wide range of values. So, in our case, we can say that America as a whole is a peak on the communal structure. So, when looking at the collective of America, we see the extraction of trends common to all the smaller local communities, united under one collective experience.