This process can be scary, especially to members of a culture who value their individuality, personal privacy, and overall stability. While, as we'll see, the development of the meta-being need not cost us any of these privileges, we don't have a way yet to understand how we can come together without dissappearing ourselves. This is where the experience of a developing child can inform our cultural transition.
When a baby is born, it experiences itself as one with its mother. It does not yet understand the concept of its own individuality. The nipple may as well be one of its own organs. There are no "others." Early humans can be likened to the infant. Primitive people experienced themselves as one with the earth, or even one with the tribe. The earth provided food and shelter to the hunter-gatherer, and his primitive, pre-theistic, "pagan"
