Consensus Reality

As I start writing posts in my head before typing them out, I've several times realized that there was some groundwork that needed laying before getting that specific. For one thing, while I think I have a fair grasp of consensus reality, it's not always where I start from.

When I was a boy back in the 1950's, geologists believed the Earth was just a big rock whose surface had never changed. To my eye the west coast of Africa and the east coast of South America looked like puzzle parts pulled apart and I wondered how anyone could be so sure of what went on way back before people existed. Then in the 1960's "plate tectonics" was a phrase you'd see, and all of a sudden, what seemed obvious to any child's eye was hailed as a great scientific advance.  

Consensus reality is what's accepted by the majority of people as the way things really are, but that doesn't mean they're always right. When I started out as a Registered Music Therapist, the notion of music therapy was not generally accepted as a "real" therapy. To me it was like people not seeing the connection between South America and Africa.