 Originally Posted by DarkestDarkness
Honestly, I didn't have any particular attraction to spiritual life when I was younger, and I'd say my concept of consciousness at those ages (up until the age of around 10) was narrow. My concept up until such an age, mostly revolved around the idea of being the only person with a consciousness, as if the world around me existed just as a construction for my mind. I guess this is not entirely false when we overlap it with the idea of illusions in the way you describe them, but anyway...
Yes, there's something about consciousness... that makes it hard to imagine there is two and more of it. But there is (or is there?).
I understand what you mean when you say it's not entirely false that you are the only consciousness but I disagree with the wording. You are the only consciousness you are directly aware of and all the people you experience are reconstructions by your brain. Yet, it is clear that these "illusions" are constructed based on real people with consciousness of their own. So, it's only true in the direct sense, but it really is false after scrutiny (which you also concluded. I'm just being picky here, haha). I know what you mean, I've had this feeling too. (edit: an I am about to go on and explain how I think your statement is not entirely false haha).
Do you know of the split brain experiment? I have come across it many times in my academic journey because I am educated in neuroscience so I'm not sure how known it is outside this field. I'm just briefly gonna say that it demonstrates consciousness can be split into two by splitting the two hemispheres (and this can be done without loss of consciousness). So, some people have had two consciousnesses per body. Other experiment of this nature even leaves us to wonder if there are not already more than one consciousness per body right now (overlapping).
This demonstration that dividing a conscious system can result in two continuous consciousness and theoretically can be rejoined without conflict... the idea that consciousness is divisible and even perhaps overlapping is very interesting. It for sure challenges the worldview that we have one indivisible soul. Now, I like one particular conclusion that is intuitive to me. I clearly don't know much of the factors and facts relating to this and I am probably making many fallacies to get there but here it is. Consciousness appears to be a boundless phenomenon (it cannot be counted) because connecting two conscious systems leads to one conscious system (1+1=1). It seems a phenomenon like gravity. Anything with mass has gravity, but it's not relevant at minimal mass. In this sense, I imagine everything has consciousness but it's not relevant until a certain system is formed (such as a sentient organism). When we see past the illusion of the self, I think we are meant to conclude "I am not this person, this person changes and everything that happens to it is spontaneous and results from causes that I don't understand or control" + "The feeling that I am this person is an illusion; I am the constant: I am the consciousness." If "I" am the consciousness, is it analogous to a planet saying "I am the gravitational pull of this planet" or "I am gravity." If I am only the consciousness of this person, OK then. But if I am consciousness, then "I" or "consciousness" is aware of all other sentient organisms (perhaps one day, even sentient artificial intelligence?) simultaneously. This seems possible to me since if I were to successfully connect my brain to your brain, we would experience the merging uniformly, though there might be more than one consciousness, the distinction would not be "me vs you" but a distinction between different neural network islands. What this means to me is that insofar as "I" am consciousness, "I" or "consciousness" is experiencing every sentient being at once, but separately due to the separateness of sentient systems. At every moment, we are only aware of what the system is aware of, so we forever have this illusion that we are such or such person. The personhoods surely change and will all surely die but the consciousness is an eternal property of the universe and will continue to dream forever, feeling fully that it is whichever organisms that it is aware of, and this is all seamless. Even when all sentient organisms perish, I imagine Consciousness won't experience any time between this end of sentience and a subsequent re-emergence of sentient organisms, whether it be separated by billions of millenniums (just like the phenomenon of gravity for that matter).
So this is something I am able to believe right now and play with the implications in my mind, but I know it is not a necessary conclusion from the facts and may even be senseless on its own anyway. But it's a fun idea.
 Originally Posted by DarkestDarkness
And I suppose for me, I always saw the way into such a place through things like mirrors; it's more of a philosophical point than one about actual physical reality, but I always wondered "why do I live in this world, and not in that one?". The world contained within mirrors, to me just looks so different. The exact same room and person standing there are just reflections, illusions I suppose, but everything about them feels different to me. It's a sense I can't really put into words. This same sense applies to a lot of things for me, like why are physics the way they are, why do I exist on this planet or this time, etc. This relates to what you were saying about colour for example. I imagine most people have some kind of thought processes similar to these too.
For sure, mirrors are probably the first obvious experience with illusions. The illusion seems so real, when we first see it, it doesn't look like a reflection at all but another world we could walk into. There is this trick where if a wall is all mirror, you can hide the bottom of the mirror up to eye level and the room will seem twice as big. We know it's just a reflection but it's not obvious. I also spent long periods of time looking into mirrors like you, fascinated by this illusion. As a kid, multiple walls of our bathroom were full mirrors so I could see many illusory worlds.
 Originally Posted by DarkestDarkness
Spiritual Well-being Bourg as you put it does indeed seem like a fine place to end up in.
Indeed, I'm sure there's many interesting things there even if the core of it all seems so simple. I still wonder what exactly the implications are.
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