Thread: Are we all just aspects of each other?

Had a really long conversation with my girlfriend that was very close to this. We came to a similar conclusion that we are all part of this being or universal consciousness. This world is conscious manifestation and creation. I can go really deep into it, just not right now

Interesting take, Daredevilpwn.

But what if consciousness were more a condition of life? In other words, all living things must have some level of consciousness to survive (i.e., plants move toward the sun, mice run from cats, and we step out of the way of moving vehicles) and procreate. In other words, consciousness could simply be rooted by nature in the individual, and not have any real universal consistency.

It would then still be a powerful thing, but I think the all the omni's you list might then go by the wayside.

That said, I do believe that one product of consciousness, thought energy, might be the very thing that both connects our minds and offers us an opportunity to change our worlds.

Altogether an interesting theory, Daredevilpwn, thanks for sharing!

Originally Posted by Daredevilpwn

So if we are all aspects of each other wouldn't this explain most physic phenomena like reading minds....

This is how I experience it. I have an individual identity that is associated with my body and my thoughts, but also a higher or lower identity which isn't quite as individual, and which is partially shared with other people who have thoughts and destinies which are metaphorically related to mine. Its not simple as being the ocean vs a drop in the ocean, its more like a big complicated fractal. By changing the way I think of myself, I change what I experience of this. In a shared dream, often my perspective is that of my smaller self, being shown something by the larger self. Or it is as if I have the vantagepoint of the larger self, but its translated into a physical metaphor that makes more sense to me as an individual. For example, in one dream the first person perspective was the larger self, and the smaller self was represented as a pet fish. In other dreams I experience myself as being someone else, which I think is possible because that someone else is also a part of a larger self, at some level, that I am a part of. Sometimes I experience being one of two smaller individuals communicating in a dream, but usually its not like that. In all of these dreams the thoughts are a hybrid of my own thoughts and the other person's thoughts. A projection of the thought of the higher self I guess. Most of my dreams are like this. I guess all of them are like this in some sense. By the way, when I say 'higher self' I'm not implying infallibility. Some people think of the higher self as being infallible, but I think this implies vanity and usually a kind of paternalism on the part of their higher selves. The fruit is like the tree in this case, our gods aren't better than we are. But as we aspire to be better, this involves a change of our thought of identity, and may highlight the better aspects of the gods we are aware of.

Attached are two pictures, one of which I've posted before. Click on them to see them.

In the first one you see what looks like a ring with eight sections. Inside that is another dark brown, almost black ring with sixteen sections. It looks a little bit like a strand of twisted crepe paper or dna (http://www.truvicesurgical.com/images/dna_strands.jpg). In this view, its not really narrower at the narrow points, it just looks narrower because the thickness is perpendicular to the plane the picture is in. Maybe this is like birth and death.

If you look at the purple ring, which is easier to see because its larger, you see that the links or leaves of the chain aren't even connected, that they just look that way from a distance. The actual chain goes off to the side and changes colors. I think this is also like birth and death, in more than one way. Our children are a continuation of our own selves, but also they are not. Visions that we may have of past lives are in some sense ours, but also are not. Things go through cycles, and we have a lot of different cycles inside of us, we are spiritually related to things that seem very different from us. Hence the changing colors. I think a lot of people's "past life" visions aren't even real historic lives, they're alternative projections of some aspects of who they are. Those projections are real in the sense that this is like where our real lives come from, and they look different from our current lives because not quite the same aspects are being projected. If we have information about 'real' lives besides that, I'm not aware of it, but of course I'm not aware of a lot. Maybe it doesn't matter to me. I know something of what I want to become. Maybe knowing more about where I've been doesn't help with that. Maybe where I've been isn't even real now anyway. We change, while cleaning up the effects of the messes we made, and what we were is gone. Its still there in what we are, but it has been changed too much to be pulled out and reconstructed.

The second, sketched picture, shows something more like the structure of my vision that I've tried to show in the first picture. In the vision, it wasn't coiled around a circle like that, the geometry was more like the second picture, though that's not right either. I could not capture it in my mind afterwards. One possible reason for this is if it can't be embedded in an Euclidean space, though I'm not sure that's it. In any case, I'm posting this again now because the resemblance to your icon suggests we might be trying to describe the same thing. My thought was more like yours than what I've drawn here, but I left some of the lines out because I was trying to highlight the way the strands intersect. Also, although there were strands running in different directions, there was also a flow or direction to it, and if I show more lines it looks less directional and more static. And there was a fractal-like difference in scales, where there were many twists between each intersection point, but the effect is wrong when I try to draw it that way.

The picture on the left is the same fractal that I used in my icon, but a different part of it. With the icon I was trying to show how male and female aren't two different things, how they're both expressions of the same duality. This is sort of the meaning of the two dots in the chinese change symbol, but I think the fractal shows it better than the black and white color combination does. Male and female aren't merely opposite aspects of the same thing, they're both made of each other in the same proportion, but expressed differently.

This is very interesting shadwoofwind. Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this. My icon was actually created by a very talented friend of mine. I asked him to draw a picture that represents friendship and this was what he got. Although I didn't think this way till now, the glowing light in the center could be the universal force I talked about in my OP and the lines extended from it are all aspects of its self.

I can't say that I disagree with any of that. I think pretty much the same thing: Psychic phenomena is possible because we are all already connected. We are all already one, we're just all experiencing different, individual perspectives. There's nothing magical about it, it just is.

Originally Posted by Sageous

Interesting take, Daredevilpwn.

But what if consciousness were more a condition of life? In other words, all living things must have some level of consciousness to survive (i.e., plants move toward the sun, mice run from cats, and we step out of the way of moving vehicles) and procreate. In other words, consciousness could simply be rooted by nature in the individual, and not have any real universal consistency.

Maybe your right, but that is assuming that only living things have consciousness. For all we know forces like air or fire could have a consciousness, and if these forces do have a consciousness it doesn't mean it is self aware so it is not like we would truly know. I just thought of this. If this world is a dream then why is it stable? Well assuming that this consciousness is inside everyone and everything that exist it is no wonder why it is much more stable compared to a dream. Perhaps things such as inanimate objects help maintain this world by just being here in existence. Basically what I am trying to say is everything maintains its existence because everything has a consciousness and just by being there it maintains this world. I just thought of this and it explains why you can't just walk out the door and be in a different world, the place on the other side was already created and maintained by the objects in the other room whereas in a dream since the only conscious being is you, you must actively imagine and create what is beyond this door, or let you subconscious do it for you.

Originally Posted by Sageous

Altogether an interesting theory, Daredevilpwn, thanks for sharing.

No problem

I don't know, Daredevilpwn.

Though I have no real problem with "non-living" things possessing some level of consciousness, I'm not sure I can extend all this to say that therefore the world is a dream, and that some united consciousness is holding it all together; and us, by extension, in its spiritual thrall.

I think there are other plausible explanations for why the world is the same every time we walk out the door (though in reality it is not, but that's for another thread, I think)... Not that yours isn't fairly cool!

It seems to me that stability is a matter of self-reinforcing feedback. Logically here's an example: Flip-flop (electronics) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Note how the outputs are wired to the inputs. Other kinds of stability seem to me to be similar.

I'm not sure that consciousness makes much sense as a noun. 'I' can be conscious of something, and 'I' doesn't have to have a fixed association with a particular body, and isn't necessarily limited to being conscious of things 'externally' through light. But I don't see how it makes sense to associate 'I' with particular inanimate objects, or to disassociate it from all objects entirely. And I don't see why the relationship between I and a subject (be that subject 'I', an object, or anything else), which we describe using the words 'conscious of', might be a synonym for self-reinforcing feedback.

I guess what I'm saying is that I agree that being conscious is not an exclusive and localized property of of intelligent animals, but when I try to extend it to other kinds of objects or 'forces' that use of the word kind of breaks down for me, as if I'm trying to apply the word without thinking about what I mean by it. Not that I have this all figured out though.

Thats interesting. I had once with my friend a discussion that was exactly about this topic and we came to the conclusion, that we are all part of one consciousness, that there don't exist various consciousnesses but everybody is a little part of the one big consciousness... but that there is also no difference between you and me, because I'm you and you are I etc. ... would be too hard to explain all of it in english, but it was very close to your theory.

Originally Posted by Sageous

I don't know, Daredevilpwn.

Though I have no real problem with "non-living" things possessing some level of consciousness, I'm not sure I can extend all this to say that therefore the world is a dream, and that some united consciousness is holding it all together; and us, by extension, in its spiritual thrall.


I think there are other plausible explanations for why the world is the same every time we walk out the door (though in reality it is not, but that's for another thread, I think)... Not that yours isn't fairly cool!

Yeah, I can understand how it can be a huge leap for some to conclude the world is a dream. And you should make a thread about what you said in the parenthesis, would be interesting to see what your viewpoint on that is.

Originally Posted by Daredevilpwn

Yeah, I can understand how it can be a huge leap for some to conclude the world is a dream.

As I've pointed out elsewhere, a person's sensate experience of the world is literally a dream, because it is a cartoon representation of the world that takes place in that person's imagination. And its literally formed the same way that any other dream is, except that there's real time information from the senses built into it.

It seems that some people make this realization, or they feel it, and then just stop there with the conclusion that there isn't an objective physical reality outside of that dream. This is certainly a mistake. I think its also a mistake though to conclude that there are no other ways in which the objective physical reality is like a dream.

Originally Posted by shadowofwind

As I've pointed out elsewhere, a person's sensate experience of the world is literally a dream, because it is a cartoon representation of the world that takes place in that person's imagination. And its literally formed the same way that any other dream is, except that there's real time information from the senses built into it.

Not everyone accepts representationalist theories of perception. I don't. I prefer what I can an incorporationalist theory according to which the perceived is itself taken up into the experience of the perceiver. Representationalist theories are dualistic; incorporationalist theories are monistic. Incorporationalist theories are more elegant, they discourage the sort of skeptical conclusions dualist theories encourage, they're more powerful, and they don't produce infinite regresses of representations representing representations representing representations.... For all the same reasons I also prefer incorporationalist theories of memory and knowledge.

i've been thinking about this a bit lately too. i was looking at a tree for example. looking at it had a representation of what you are talking about. all the leaves are seperate individual leaves yet they are all a part of the same tree. it's a lot to ponder.

Originally Posted by rrrrocketrick

Not everyone accepts representationalist theories of perception. I don't. I prefer what I can an incorporationalist theory according to which the perceived is itself taken up into the experience of the perceiver. Representationalist theories are dualistic; incorporationalist theories are monistic. Incorporationalist theories are more elegant, they discourage the sort of skeptical conclusions dualist theories encourage, they're more powerful, and they don't produce infinite regresses of representations representing representations representing representations.... For all the same reasons I also prefer incorporationalist theories of memory and knowledge.

OK. I don't know anything about representationalist theories of perception, so you shouldn't read anything into my use of the word representation beyond what I said. I do know some demonstrable facts about electromagnetics, optics, and a few other things. If your "incorporationalist theories" accommodate those facts then probably we're describing and emphasizing different aspects of the same understanding. Otherwise, I've also encountered people who don't "accept" that the earth is in some significant sense an approximately spherical ball that rotates on its axis, despite rationally compelling evidence, and there's not much I can say to that sort of thing. (If the universe were rotating around the earth, instead of the earth spinning, there would be no way to explain the erratic path that a satellite in a polar orbit takes relative to the surface of the earth.)

I'm with you on being against dualism, in the sense that an absolute mind/body dualism, or purusha/prakriti, or whatever, doesn't make any sense. Obviously both sides of any duality are in some sense aspects of the same thing. That said, certain kinds of distinctions are built into the way that things work. For example, light has frequency, and wavelength, in a manner of speaking, but it doesn't have color, at least not that corresponds to the frequencies that we map color to. The color is assigned, mostly involuntarily, by the viewer, much how color can be used to represent temperatures or elevations on a geographical map. Is this a duality, saying that the color isn't in the perceived object? Or is it not a duality, because everything's connected somehow, however indirectly? In any case, my meaning was that a person's sensate experience is not a complete, fully accurate embodiment of one's surroundings, that there are all kinds of demonstrable simplifications and embellishments built into it. Though the experience itself is also a part of reality, it is almost literally a cartoon, just as a cartoon is a part of reality also.

I think its worth noting that reflecting on one's experience of "the moment" is important but not by itself adequate to answer these kinds of questions. For example, a person would never figure out the thing I said about color, unless their "momentary experience" includes paying close attention to how their color perception depends on context, or reading the results of physics lab experiments. Of course, those things are a part of our experience also, if we choose to try to understand such things.

Watch V.S. Ramachandran's Ted talk on Mirror Neurons. At one point he says the only thing separating our consciousness from each other is our skin. Something along those lines. It is an amazing sentence in the context of what he is talking about. Very insightful. Must watch.