That's correct. We are progressing (regressing?) beyond scientific realism and the notion that we are all subjective minds apprehending a base shared reality to

That's correct. We are progressing (regressing?) beyond scientific realism and the notion that we are all subjective minds apprehending a base shared reality towards an essentially magical worldview in which reality is mediated by group consensual hallucination. To the extent that "the world" (or at least our apprehension of it) is contained within our mind, it is malleable and subject to manipulation by it in a Hermetic top-down sense of "as above, so below;" the exercise of mental willpower over physical reality. All that is required is to alter one's paradigm or interpretation of reality, and then subscribe as many other minds as possible into the new narrative model; this is what Robert Anton Wilson spoke of in Prometheus Rising when discussing the concept of "reality tunnels:" "Reality" is the temporary resultant of continuous struggles between rival gangs of programmers. When a paradigm shift occurs—when we go from seeing things one way to seeing them another way—the whole world is remade. All that we "know" is what registers on our brains, so what you perceive (your individual reality-tunnel) is made up of nothing but thoughts—as Sir Humphrey Davy noted when self- experimenting with nitrous oxide in 1819, and as Buddha noticed by sitting alone until all his social imprints atrophied and dropped away. This is ultimately the philosophy that postmodern ideologies that admit of transition between various identity categories is based on [0] and which is termed by modern mainstream social psychologists and academics as "intersubjectivity." A good overview is given by Cooper-White in the Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion: [1] Rejecting the notion that knowledge is purely empirical and cumulative, Gergen has argued that “truth” is always value laden and, therefore (drawing from critical theory), “reality” is not immutable, but always is understood via interpre- tation. More attention, then, should be given to the outcomes implied by any given assertion of reality, rather than to its “accuracy” as measured by its supposed correspondence to absolute truth. A modern-day shaman, or magician, then, is one who is able to engineer large-scale cognitive and narrative shifts, thereby manipulating the very fabric of reality. [0] https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1111/hypa.12327 https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1111/hypa.12327 [1] https://sci-hub.se/10.1007/978-1-4614-6086-2_9182 https://sci-hub.se/10.1007/978-1-4614-6086-2_9182