The Challenge
How might we help ourselves move from being intellectually open to the possibility of there being one single Reality, that is, one consciousness perceiving all minds, to the experience of feeling our connection to everyone; to experiencing our essential oneness with others; the experience of love.
Here are three thought experiments that can help us. The first two are transcribed from an interview between Bernardo Kastrup and Francis Lucille offered below with permission.
According to Bernardo, people have an enormous intuitive difficulty understanding the notion that I am you and you are me. These thought experiments may be helpful in that regard.
You could watch the discussion at full lentgh on YouTube (60 min).
Experiment 1
Bernado describes the following thought experiments beginning at (51:00):
“Everyone believes that they were their five-year-old self. Right? We don’t have a problem with that even though the five-year-old self had a different body, different thoughts, different views, opinions, disposition; everything was different.
We don’t have difficulty understanding that we are this thing now and we are also our five-year-old self because it is at different points in time. For the same reason that people believe that they were their five-year-old self, based on the exactly the same rational, it is entirely plausible that you are me and I am you right now.”
… Francis adds, “Just as the sense of self can span across time, it can span across minds, and across space, across places.”
The content of experience is vastly different at these two points in time but the awareness in whose behalf these experiences appear, has remained the same. This first experiment helps us make the distinction between the content of experience and the knower of content.
Experiment 2
In another thought experiment Kastrup says (21:44), “I am not a meditator. I have difficulty with that. I deal with the cards nature has handed me. So, instead of trying to introspect which I find very difficult, I come up with thought experiments.
“So, I had this thought experiment the other day… And the idea is to show that you are everyone else and everybody else is you, and show that it is self-evident.
“And it goes like this. Imagine you have a friend and the friend is sitting across the room from you and you are very different people with very different personalities and different memories, different lives and so on. But then your friend is wearing a camera and a speaker [microphone] on his head and the signals from the camera and the speaker go into a virtual reality headset that you are wearing. So, you know that you are you and not your friend but you can see the world now from the perspective of your friend. But you know what’s going on, you’re perceiving through the perspective of your friend but you still know you are you and not your friend. Right?
“Ok, the next step. Now there is a perfect telepathy apparatus, some new technology, and now you can not only perceive the world from the perspective of your friend but you can now access your friend’s memories. You can remember everything your friend remembers but you still know those are not your memories. Right. You are just wearing a virtual reality headset that conveys your friend’s perceptions and memories to you but you know you are not your friend.
“Now you have access to your friend’s thoughts and emotions, but you know it’s not you, it’s just like television but felt television. These are weird emotions; they are not yours; you know you are you because you remember the narrative of your life. You have context….. and now you go completely amnesic!
“Now try to figure out that you are not your friend! Of course you are your friend for the exact same reason that you are your past self, which was a completely different creature but you think it was you.”
“For exactly the same reasons, you must be everyone else! It is unavoidable!”
Notice too, that the ‘sense of me’ has not changed when he goes amnesic. He still experiences being ‘me’ even though the content of experience is different. The sense of me is universal. The ‘me’ feeling remains, only the content of experience has changed which it always does anyway.
Bernardo then says, “We mistake the excitation of consciousness, [the content of our experience], for our identity”. Much like a guitar string whose excitations can create many notes, but their reality is the guitar string. We think we are the notes and not the thing that creates the notes, that does the doing.
Bernardo went on to say that this understanding was intellectually obvious for a long time before becoming emotionally obvious. He thought the emotional understanding would never happen to him. He said, “I thought it would never happen because I don’t have that kind of disposition. But slowly, it caught me off guard. One day I woke up and like damn, it really happened. And now it is absolutely obvious to me.”
Experiment 3
My brother Mark Chaffee added this thought experiment drawing on the case of identical twins.
“If my twin has identical DNA from birth, why am I “me” rather than my twin? Physically, we are identical! So there is nothing about my physical body that makes me “me” and not somebody else, in this case my twin. It’s totally arbitrary! I (the witness) could have been any-body.”
The Shift
Bernardo has often said that we are experiencing Dissociative Identity Disorder, DID, much like we experience in our night dreams. There we forget that we are the dreamer and create a dream character that we believe to be ‘me’. That dream character is interacting with other dream characters not knowing what is going to happen next, yet when we awaken, we discover we were all the characters in the dream and we were creating the interactions and activities of all the characters. During the dream, we were experiencing DID, weren’t we? Could it be that One presence, which we are experiencing at this very moment as I, is the same I in all sentient beings? Could that ‘One I’ be making all choices?
Is it possible that the ‘I AM’ to which nearly all spiritual traditions point, is the source and substance of everything and everyone, and chooses to overlook itself, DID, to enjoy engaging in a world of its own making as if it were a separate entity? If this one Presence were creating it all without introducing DID, wouldn’t it be boring always knowing what people are thinking and what is going to happen next?
And isn’t it interesting that every night we also do the same sort of pretending, pretending not to know what people are thinking and what is going to happen next within our own dreams!
Perhaps the sense of self spans time and space, simply one single Presence…as Schopenhauer put it, “We are only that one eye [‘I’] of the world which looks out from all eyes.”
In the case of the twins, could it be that one twin has forgotten the other twin’s experiences in the same way that we have forgotten our night dreams and 99+% of all memories from our own life… the experience of the other twin is known but simply forgotten? Could that be true for all of us? Our immediate experience obfuscates the experiences we are having through others’ ‘eyes’.
Are we the universal Presence perceiving itself, Presence perceiving its own excitations?
Conducting Our Own Experiments
What is it like to be open to this possibility? Notice when we listen, open to the possibility that we are listening to another expression of ourself, something is different.
Try this. As you are about to interact with someone or even in the midst of an interaction, allow your attention to withdraw from the objects of your current perception and rest for a moment in the sense of ‘me’. The intimacy we feel with our own being, IS our intimacy with others. There is but One Life, One Love shining intimately within all beings and we are That! Howard Thurman expressed it like this. As we bring our attention inside, it is as if we come up under the other and know them as our self.
To know and feel myself as you, profoundly shifts the relationship. We would never intentionally harm another because we would only be harming ourself. That’s the very essence of ethics, isn’t it?
And through this experiential understanding, we know what it means to love our enemy!
As the belief and feeling of separation comes to an end, our leadership is transformed.
Activity (Proposal)
This week, see what it’s like being open to this extraordinary possibility. Try the inward experiment described above and see if you are able to feel the other as yourself? It’s the essence of love, isn’t it?
