Open individualism

"All things proceed from the universal governing mind, either by direct and primary intention, or by necessary consequence and connexion with things primarily intended."

"Frequently consider the connection of all things in the universe and their relation to one another. For in a manner all things are implicated with one another, and all in this way are friendly to one another; for one thing comes in order after another, and this is by virtue of the active movement and mutual conspiration and the unity of the substance."

"There is one light of the sun, though it is interrupted by walls, mountains, and other things infinite. There is one common substance, though it is distributed among countless bodies which have their several qualities. There is one soul, though it is distributed among infinite natures and individual circumscriptions [or individuals]. There is one intelligent soul, though it seems to be divided."

"When the bubble of ignorance bursts the self realizes its oneness with the indivisible Self."

"Perhaps we are the same person. Perhaps we have no limits; perhaps we flow into each other, stream through each other, boundlessly and magnificently. You bear terrible thoughts; it is almost painful to be near you. At the same time it is enticing. Do you know why?"

"He who experiences the unity of life sees his own Self in all beings, and all beings in his own Self, and looks on everything with an impartial eye; he who sees Me in everything and everything in Me, him shall I never forsake, nor shall he lose Me."

"It is manifest [...] that every soul and spirit hath a certain continuity with the spirit of the universe, so that it must be understood to exist and to be included not only there where it liveth and feeleth, but it is also by its essence and substance diffused throughout immensity [...] The power of each soul is itself somehow present afar in the universe [...] Naught is mixed, yet is there some presence. Anything we take in the universe, because it has in itself that which is All in All, includes in its own way the entire soul of the world, which is entirely in any part of it."

"The universal Intellect is the intimate, most real, peculiar and powerful part of the soul of the world. This is the single whole which filleth the whole, illumineth the universe and directeth nature to the production of natural things, as our intellect with the congruous production of natural kinds."

"The Self is the same self because that is what it is: what other self could it be? In our moments of awakening we are quite untheoretically aware of the identity of what wakes here and what woke then (from which experience, more theoretically, we may infer the possibility of transcending time). To wake up is to know ourselves, so far. By the same token it may well occur to us, in ratiocinative mood, that the Self in me is just the same as that in you; that only the One Self attends on parallel and successive states of mind and action, separating itself out as One in Many. What makes my self is no other than what makes yours, and the differences between us lie at the level of what that attends on, or how it is—as it were—refracted. That is indeed an inference that Averroistic interpreters of Aristotle (and non-dualist Vedantins) have preferred; there is one nous only, and that the divine mover. But at the level of particulars, the Self here and the Self over-there are differently reflected."

"By such sentences as "That thou art," our own Self is affirmed. Of that which is untrue and composed of the five elements—the Shruti (scripture) says, "Not this, not this.""

"Enlightenment came to me suddenly and unexpectedly one afternoon in March [1939] when I was walking up to the school notice board to see whether my name was on the list for tomorrow's football game. I was not on the list. And in a blinding flash of inner light I saw the answer to both my problems, the problem of war and the problem of injustice. The answer was amazingly simple. I called it Cosmic Unity. Cosmic Unity said: There is only one of us. We are all the same person. I am you and I am Winston Churchill and Hitler and Gandhi and everybody. There is no problem of injustice because your sufferings are also mine. There will be no problem of war as soon as you understand that in killing me you are only killing yourself."

"For some days I quietly worked out in my own mind the metaphysics of Cosmic Unity. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that it was the living truth. It was logically incontrovertible. It provided for the first time a firm foundation for ethics. It offered mankind the radical change of heart and mind that was out only hope of peace at a time of desperate danger. Only one small problem remained. I must find a way to convert the world to my way of thinking [...] After a few months I gave up trying to make converts. When some friend would come up to me and say cheerfully, "How's cosmajoonity doing today?" I would just answer, "Fine, thank you," and let it go at that."

"Sometimes we talked about the nature of the human soul and about the Cosmic Unity of all souls that I had believed in so firmly when I was fifteen years old. My mother did not like the phrase Cosmic Unity. It was too pretentious. She preferred to call it a world soul."

"A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe,' a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security."

"Buddhism and Advaita Vedānta agree that it is necessary to inhibit the identification with the 'I' and the clinging to what is 'mine' to achieve liberation. The theoretical interpretation of this process is where they disagree. Now it is my opinion that the notion of witness-consciousness allows for a more faithful description of what actually happens in this process than the idea of no-self (at least in its reductionist interpretation)."

"Buddhism invites us to reflect on our own being and holds that what we will find are all kinds of transient phenomena (the five skandhas), but nothing like a stable 'self'. With regard to each of the skandhas one should understand: 'this is not mine; this am not I; this is not the Self of me' (Sam˙yutta Nikaya XXII.59). This insight leads us to the liberation from the illusion of self. Yet the question is: If there is nothing but these transient phenomena that constitute our being (in other words: if this simply is what we are)—who is it then that is not identical to all this? Who is it who can say of her body, her thoughts, etc. 'this am not I'? This 'who' is, I wish to suggest, nothing but the experiencing consciousness in which all the passing phenomena have their manifestation and which Advaita Vedānta regards as our 'self'."

"The idea that the "I" is more than just the present experience but something that can, as one and the same, have various experiences and could have other experiences, without this sameness being reducible to anything else (e.g. to any inter-experiential relations), has its root in the fact that every experience in its mere being-experienced essentially already implies a synchronic and diachronic transcendence of "me" qua consciousness with regard to this experience, a transcendence in which the being-experienced of the experience itself consists."

"If we take the unintelligibility of an I-plurality seriously, I think we are left with the only choice of either returning to a reductionist view of the self, denying that there is any I as the abiding where or to-whom of experiential givenness and that I as one and the same exist as the experiencer of many different experiences and could as well have totally different experiences, this sameness not being constituted by any more fundamental facts—or embracing the non-multiplicity view. I am well aware that most people would choose otherwise—but for me, at least, the no-I view is much harder to believe than the one-I view."

"Human speech is inadequate to express the reality. The soul [atman] is unborn and indestructible. The personality perishes, must perish. Individuality is and is not even as each drop in the ocean is an individual and is not. It is not because apart from the ocean it has no existence. It is because the ocean has no existence, if the drop has not, i.e., has no individuality. They are beautifully interdependent."

"I am the mayfly metamorphosing on the surface of the river, and I am the bird which, when spring comes, arrives in time to eat the mayfly."

"When you've seen beyond yourself Then you may find peace of mind is waiting there And the time will come when you see we're all one And life flows on within you and without you"

"This force of nature, this will, continues to exist when "we" die, and in fact it does already exist in many other forms and ways. This force is active in me, as it is active in you and every other living creature. And to the extent that each of us ultimately is this force, this will to live, we always exist not only in this particular form, which we call our individual self, but also in everything else. When you look into the world with your eyes, perceive it with your senses, live in it with your body and your mind, then I look and perceive and live with you, because you are only another version of myself, just as I am only another version of yourself. Accordingly, when I die I will live on in you, and when you die, you will live on in me."

"Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration. That we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no such thing as death, life is only a dream and we're the imagination of ourselves... Here's Tom with the weather."

"[L]et's not lose track of the purpose of all this imagery, which is to suggest helpful ways of imagining what a human soul's essence is. If we map each tree (or nucleus) in the crystal lattice onto a particular human brain, then in the tight-binding model (which corresponds to the caged-bird metaphor), each brain would possess a unique soul, represented by the cloud of timid butterflies that hover around it and it alone. By contrast, if we think of a metal, then the cloud is spread out across the whole lattice — which is to say, shared equally among all the trees (or nuclei). No tree is privileged. In this image, then (which is close to Daniel Kolak's view in I Am You), each human soul floats among all human brains, and its identity is determined not by its location but by the undulating global pattern it forms."

"There's certainly a lot of things I don't understand. This light of yours, or whatever you like to call it, how does it decide that you are you and I am me?' 'That could be another illusion. Look, along one wall of our office we have one complete set of pigeon holes, all in their nice tidy sequence. Along another wall we have another set of pigeon holes. Two completely different sets. But there is only one light. It dances about in both sets of pigeon holes. Wherever it happens to be, there is the phenomenon of consciousness. One set of pigeon holes is what you call you, the other is what I call me. It would be possible to experience both and never know it. It would be possible to follow the little patch of light wherever it went. There could be only one consciousness, although there must certainly be more than one set of pigeon holes.' I found this a staggering idea. 'If you're right it would be possible to be a million people and never know it.'"

"'It would be possible to be much more than that. It would be possible to be every creature on every system of planets throughout the universe. My point is that for every so-called different creature, for every different person, you need a separate set of pigeon holes. But the consciousness could be the same. There could even be completely different universes. Go back to my decaying nucleus. Hook up a bomb which explodes according to whether you have decay of a nucleus or not. Make the bomb so big that it becomes a doomsday machine. Let it be capable - if exploded - of wiping out all life on the Earth. Let the whole thing go for a critical few seconds, you remember we were considering whether a nucleus would decay in a particular ten seconds? Do we all survive or don't we? 'My guess is that inevitably we appear to survive, because there is a division, the world divides into two, into two completely disparate stacks of pigeon holes. In one, a nucleus undergoes decay, explodes the bomb, and wipes us out. But the pigeon holes in that case never contain anything further about life on the Earth. So although those pigeon holes might be activated, there could never be any awareness that an explosion had taken place. In the other block, the Earth would be safe, our lives would continue - to put it in the usual phrase. Whenever the spotlight of consciousness hit those pigeon holes we should be aware of the Earth and we should decide the bomb had not exploded.'"

"All the Buddhas and all sentient beings are nothing but the One Mind, beside which nothing exists. This Mind, which is without beginning, is unborn and indestructible."

"The Perennial Philosophy is expressed most succinctly in the Sanskrit formula, tat tvam asi ('That thou art'); the Atman, or immanent eternal Self, is one with Brahman, the Absolute Principle of all existence; and the last end of every human being, is to discover the fact for himself, to find out who he really is."

"It is none other than He who progresses or journeys as you. There is nothing to be known but He; and since He is Being itself, He is therefore also the journeyer. There is no knower but He; so who are you? Know your true Reality. [...] He is the essential Self of all. But He conceals it by [the appearance of] otherness, which is "you.""

"In one sense the Reality is creatures; in another sense, It is not. [...] Whether you assert that It is undivided or divided, the Self is alone. The manifold [universe] exists and yet it does not exist. Therefore, know your Self, who you are, what is your identity. [...] Consider well in what way you are Haqq, and in what way Khalq, as being separate, other."

"I am no one in existence but myself, so — Whom do I treat as foe and whom do I treat as friend? Whom do I call to aid my heart, pierced by a penetrating arrow, When the archer is my eyelid, striking my heart without an arrow? Why defend my station? It matters little to me; what do I care? For I am in love with none other than myself, and my very separation is my union."

"Each individual of the human species contains the others entirely, without any lack, [their] own limitation being but accidental [...] For as far as the accidental conditions do not intervene, individuals are, then, like opposing mirrors, in which one fully reflects the other."

"How many times do I have to give you examples so that you understand my unity with you and you know that your extension into the visible realm and my concealment in the transcendental world are two principles of our single essence? There is no partner in me for you, no partner for you in me. What are you if not yourself? Because your name had its origin in my name, don't you see that of the different parts [that make up your whole] the first part is called a dot, the second part is called a dot, and the third part is called a dot? Likewise all your parts are dot by dot. Therefore I am you. What within you is your individuality but my own identity? This is your individuality by which you are who you are. If you said to yourself I, portraying my being, even I if I said He I would portray my own image. Then you would therefore know that I and He are two modes of expression of the same essence."

"If you wish to comprehend me, imagine yourself and all the letters, and the words small and big, and then say Dot. That, in its totality, is the essence of my self, and my self is the essence of all that. But your self is the totality of that essence. The totality of my essence and yours. However there is no you and no they. I am the whole. Yet there is no I and no you and no they and no one and no two and no three. There is nothing else but the one dot. In it there is no comprehension and no understanding for those like you. [Only] if you were to change from your clothes into my clothes you would know all that I know, and witness all that I witness, and hear all that I hear, and see all that I see."

"Although this existence may appear multiple By your lives! Nothing is in it except you."

"The indestructible is one thing; at one and the same time it is each individual, and it is something common to all; hence the uniquely indissoluble connection among mankind."

"I propose an idealist ontology that makes sense of reality in a more parsimonious and empirically rigorous manner than mainstream physicalism, bottom-up panpsychism, and cosmopsychism. The proposed ontology also offers more explanatory power than these three alternatives, in that it does not fall prey to the hard problem of consciousness, the combination problem, or the decombination problem, respectively. It can be summarized as follows: there is only cosmic consciousness. We, as well as all other living organisms, are but dissociated alters of cosmic consciousness, surrounded by its thoughts. The inanimate world we see around us is the extrinsic appearance of these thoughts. The living organisms we share the world with are the extrinsic appearances of other dissociated alters."

"The brain isn't the cause of experience for the same reason that lightning isn't the cause of atmospheric electric discharge, or that flames aren't the cause of combustion. Just as flames are but the image of the process of combustion, the body-brain system is but the image of localized experience in the stream of universal consciousness."

"You've proved that you exist," I said, "but in a dream everyone I meet is myself! Behind your face am I, dreaming I am you, encountering myself in a dream not as self but other. I don't know how or why but that's the only sober explanation. I am I and I am you, why not? If a mind can divide itself into subject and object—as it must to make experience possible—why not into subject and subject? That's what you proved. Not that you are Descartes. That I am more than one self!" [...] "I am here, I am I and I am there, I am you. I could of course be mistaken—you might be only an apparition, an empty mask—but you've given me sufficient reason to believe I am there behind your imaginary eyes, masked from myself. I am not one self in one world but many selves in many worlds, the universe within."

"I pondered the age-old questions, you know, why does God permit war? Why does God permit injustice? The problem of injustice seemed worse even than the problem of war. I thought about it and thought about it until one day it just hit me, the proverbial flash of inner light in which a solution appeared to me out of the blue. We are all the same person. It was so amazingly simple! There is only one of us. I am you and I am Christ and I am Hitler and I am everybody. There is no injustice in the world. Your suffering is my suffering. The problem of war will end when you realize that in killing me you are only killing yourself."

"His name was Ibn Rushd. You know him as Averroes. He passed his exams and went on to argue that the world is the living mind of God. What is true here in this dream and what you thought was true when you were twelve years old Averroes claimed is true of everyone everywhere. God is the dreamer. God is everyone. The identity of God and the world is mirrored in the world by the numerical identity of all conscious beings. All souls are one soul, the soul of God, who in order to make the world real must make a labyrinth which even God cannot solve, you see? The world and each life breath of consciousness within us becomes unknowable and unknown... and therefore real. [...] "The same things aren't known by all minds even though they are the same consciousness in action because the passive intellect differentiates us—you are over there seeing and thinking your perceptions and thoughts, I am over here seeing and thinking mine. The passive intellect is not immortal. It dies. The active intellect, consciousness is not only immortal but everywhere identical, the subject of each and every world, one being manifested in all of us—like an actor who unbeknownst to himself plays simultaneously all parts on the stage of the world."

"But if it were true that we are all the same person," I said, "wouldn't everybody already know it, believe it? Why would you or I or anyone else have to say it, argue for it? Why not let it come to everyone, not from one self to another, but on its own?" "As it would to a child, you mean—by direct revelation?" [...] "Look, why did you believe in that earlier dream that you were not—and could not be anyone other than Descartes? Why would you then have considered it as absurd to suppose that you are a young man living in the 20th century named Daniel Kolak? Because you did not then remember Kolak! You see what we have learned here?" [...] "Our method of self-knowledge is false. On the basis of who we think we are we think we know who we are not But how do we know we are not Socrates, Plato... Mersenne, Helen of Troy, or anyone and everyone else who has ever existed? We think we are not them because we don't remember having been them. As if memory were a metaphysical boundary between identity and nonidentity." [...] "Because we have not anyone else's memories we believe we are not them; we think we are correct, that we are no one else other than who we are. But even if we are correct and our beliefs are true it is for the wrong reason and that is what we cannot see, not ever, because we are intoxicated by our identification with memory, blinded by our own presence in the world." [...] "Each self is obscured from all the others by the subject as surely as the noonday sun obscures the moon and stars."

"In that lucid moment I realized, too, that I was a blank fact, as empty and certain as a tautology, no less necessary, full of everything: I am I. Even if I am not Descartes and all this, too, is but a dream dreamt by someone else, I am then that other someone, that one, I am not nothing: I am the hollow nothing, in everything, I am you."

"Perhaps I am already in the grave. Or perhaps I will meet myself momentarily in your mirror. But even if I see myself in your eyes still I know I will again as I must forget who I am."

"To distinguish it from the traditional, commonsense view of personal identity according to which we are each a separately existing person numerically identical to ourselves over time—i.e., that personal identity is closed under our known individuating and identifying borders, what I call The Closed Individual View of Personal Identity, or simply Closed Individualism for short—I call my view The Open Individual View of Personal Identity, or simply Open Individualism for short. I argue for Open Individualism by showing the grave conceptual difficulties in supposing that traditional Closed Individualism is true, difficulties which point collectively in one of two new directions: either there exist no continuously existing, self-identical persons over time in the sense ordinarily understood—the sort of view developed by philosophers as diverse as Buddha, Hume and most recently Derek Parfit, what I call The Empty Individual View of Personal Identity, or simply Empty Individualism for short—or else you are identical to everyone. As so often in life, either we get too much or not enough: everyone or no one. Contrary to popular belief, Closed Individualism is not even a coherent view; the two coherent views are Empty Individualism and Open Individualism. Of the two, Open Individualism is the better view. Open Individualism is the best explanation of who we are."

"The central thesis of I Am You—that we are all the same person—is apt to strike many readers as obviously false or even absurd. How could you be me and Hitler and Gandhi and Jesus and Buddha and Greta Garbo and everybody else in the past, present and future? In this book I explain how this is possible. Moreover, I show that this is the best explanation of who we are for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that it provides the metaphysical foundations for global ethics."

"Borders enclose and separate us. We assign to them tremendous significance. Along them we draw supposedly uncrossable boundaries within which we believe our individual identities begin and end, erecting the metaphysical dividing walls that enclose each one of us into numerically identical, numerically distinct, entities: persons. Do the borders between us merit the metaphysical significance ordinarily accorded to them? They do not. Our borders do not signify boundaries between persons. We are all the same person. "How many persons are there in the world?" To ask this question is to acknowledge our borders. To answer "one," as I do, is not to deny our borders but merely to deny their significance—to deny that our borders are absolute metaphysical boundaries."

"I claim that the borders between us are more like borders between oceans than like the borders between pebbles or lakes and though we can for practical and social purposes use them to draw boundaries between us, the boundaries we draw—on a deeper level—do not really matter, in the sense that they do not track any deep metaphysical truths about the nature of persons. The boundaries we draw along the borders between us exist only in our maps of ourselves, not in ourselves as we are: personal identity is not border-bound."

"To distinguish it both from Closed and Empty Individualism, according to both of which personal identity is closed under known individuating borders, I call my view the Open Individual View of Personal Identity or, more simply, Open Individualism. According to Open Individualism, then, personal identity is not closed under known borders of individuation and identification."

"Constantly regard the universe as one living being, having one substance and one soul; and observe how all things have reference to one perception, the perception of this one living being; and how all things act with one movement; and how all things are the cooperating causes of all things which exist; observe too the continuous spinning of the thread and the contexture of the web."