Egregores with Mark Stavish

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run-time: 1:21:26

He's addressing the question, from the esoteric perspective, of what it means if group-think had it's own sort of embodiment. Seems like the concepts of egregore, or sort of a 'group spirit' is something like a thoughtform that takes on it's own awareness, it's own mission statement, and then in the quest to keep itself alive as a system that mission statement can outsize its scope or, in worse cases, an organization can grow for the sake of growth and become a net minus to society.

I personally don't know exactly what I believe on these things, I do think there's conscious juice in the airwaves of sorts but whether it's mostly as discrete as we are, whether it's in constant combination of multiple layers ranging from tight to loose association - it seems plausible that we'd run into it in very mundane ways all the time, probably mundane enough that our intuitions would suggests that it's 'spooky' per say. One of the more popular criticisms of the more interlaced/interlocked version of what I just mentioned came from Ned Block's analogy to a 'China mind' in refutation of Hillary Putnam's rather panpsychism-flavored take on functionalism. I'm not even sure how valid that is when people have been trying to say for years that the problem with panpsychism is the combination problem, then get out of sorts when someone suggests that there is no combination problem because the implications rattle their intuitions a bit.

Either which way I'm about halfway through, I've seen Mark speak and I'd say he's one of the better people to check in on if you have any curiosity on what the western mystery tradition's take on various topics is.

Even better interview in terms of the content that I'm listening to right now, and particularly he touches on the political implications of such conscious patterns in nature: