Philosophy

"To the one type, humanity is a non-ego; to the other, "myself once more.""

"That which knows all things and is known by none is the subject. It is accordingly the supporter of the world, the universal condition of all that appears, of all objects, and it is always presupposed; for whatever exists, exists for the subject. Everyone finds himself as this subject, yet only in so far as he knows, not in so far as he is object of knowledge."

"For just as in dreams, all the persons that appear to us are but the masked images of ourselves; so in the dream of our waking life, it is our own being which looks on us from out our neighbours' eyes, though this is not equally easy to discern. Nevertheless, tat tvam asi."

"The view of things [...] that all plurality is only apparent, that in the endless series of individuals, passing simultaneously and successively into and out of life, generation after generation, age after age, there is but one and the same entity really existing, which is present and identical in all alike; — this theory [...] may be carried back to the remotest antiquity. It is the alpha and omega of the oldest book in the world, the sacred Vedas, whose dogmatic part, or rather esoteric teaching, is found in the Upanishads. There, in almost every page this profound doctrine lies enshrined; with tireless repetition, in countless adaptations, by many varied parables and similes it is expounded and inculcated."

"Individuation is merely an appearance, born of Space and Time; the latter being nothing else than the forms under which the external world necessarily manifests itself to me, conditioned as they are by my brain's faculty of perception. Hence also the plurality and difference of individuals is but a phaenomenon, that is, exists only as my mental picture. My true inmost being subsists in every living thing, just as really, as directly as in my own consciousness it is evidenced only to myself. This is the higher knowledge: for that which there is in Sanskrit the standing formula, tat tvam asi, that art thou."

"We saw earlier that hatred and malice are conditioned by egoism and that these are based on cognition caught up in the principium individuationis [the principle of individuation]. We also found that seeing through that principium individuationis is the origin and essence both of justice and, when it goes further, of love and nobility at the very highest levels. By eradicating the distinction between one's own individual and that of others, this is the only thing that makes possible and explains perfect dispositional goodness that goes as far as the most disinterested love and the most generous self-sacrifice for the sake of others. But if this seeing through the principium individuationis, this immediate cognition of the identity of the will in all of its appearances, is present at a high degree of clarity, then it will at once show an even greater influence on the will. If the veil of maya, the principium individuationis, is lifted from a human being's eyes to such an extent that he no longer makes the egoistic distinction between his person and that of others, but rather takes as much interest in the sufferings of other individuals as he does in his own, and is not only exceedingly charitable but is actually prepared to sacrifice his own individual as soon as several others can be saved by doing so, then it clearly follows that such a human being, who recognizes himself, his innermost and true self in all beings, must also regard the endless suffering of all living things as his own, and take upon himself the pain of the whole world. No suffering is foreign to him anymore."

"The moral virtues, hence justice and philanthropy, if pure, spring, as I have shown, from the fact that the will-to-live, seeing through the principium individuationis, recognizes itself again in all its phenomena."

"My ethical sympathies lie with open individualism; but as it stands, I don’t see how a monopsychist theory of identity can be true. Open or closed individualism might (tenuously) be defensible if we were electrons (cf. One-electron universe - Wikipedia). However, sentient beings are qualitatively and numerically different. For example, the half-life of a typical protein in the brain is an estimated 12–14 days. Identity over time is a genetically adaptive fiction for the fleetingly unified subjects of experience generated by the CNS of animals evolved under pressure of natural selection (cf. Was Parfit correct we're not the same person that we were when we were born?). Even memory is a mode of present experience. Both open and closed individualism are false."

"We are all one among the Sisters of the Veil. Where one falls, another rises."

"It is a deep truth that all of a person's life [i.e., over time] is as much his life. If we are impressed by this truth—by the unity of each life—the boundaries between lives will seem to be deeper. This supports the claim that, in the moral calculus, these boundaries cannot be crossed. On the [Empty Individual] View, we are less impressed by this truth. We regard the unity of each life as, in its nature, less deep, and as a matter of degree. We may therefore think the boundaries between lives to be less like those between, say, the squares on a chess-board, dividing what is all pure white from what is all jet black. We may think these boundaries to be more like those between different countries they may then seem less morally important [...] If some unity is less deep, so is the corresponding disunity. The fact that we live different lives is the fact that we are not the same person. If the fact of personal identity is less deep, so is the fact of non-identity. There are not two different facts here, one of which is less deep on the [Extreme Separatist] View, while the other remains as deep. There is merely one fact, and this fact's denial. The separateness of persons is the denial that we are all the same person. If the fact of personal identity is less deep, so is this fact's denial."

"On the level of the body I am your servant. On the level of the soul I am your lover. On the level of the Self I am you."

"Our aversion to that colossal thought will grow less if we remember that the subject of the great dream of life is in a certain sense only one thing, the will-to-live, and that all plurality of phenomena is conditioned by time and space. It is the great dream that is dreamed by that one entity, but in such a way that all its persons dream it together."

"We aren't others if we be defined as our spatio-temporal characteristics, but we are others in our pure existence and in our function of consciousness itself. These are perfectly preserved in others, and this fact is a fundamental requisite for our own conscious experience in time."

"Strangers passing in the street By chance two separate glances meet And I am you and what I see is me"

"Ergo no single story can be told because there is never just one [...] for it is only the single observer who can create wholecloth reality from piecemeal particles—the singular consciousness in all its individual multiplicity transforms the multiplicity of the quantum flux."

"As an 'I am' you are the river, flowing between the banks of the body. But you are also the source and the ocean and the clouds in the sky. Wherever there is life and consciousness, you are. Smaller than the smallest, bigger than the biggest, you are, while all else appears."

"Look upon and treat others as you do your own hands, your own eyes, your very heart and soul—with infinite care and compassion—as suffering and enjoying members of the same Great Being with yourself. This is the spirit of the ideal universe—the spirit of your own being. It is this alone that can redeem this world, and give to it the peace and harmony for which it longs."

"Take the idea "I was born". You may take it to be true. It is not. You were not born, nor will you ever die. It is the idea that was born and shall die, not you. By identifying yourself with it you became mortal."

"Open Individualism thus at least on an initial analysis into the moral arena presents us with a scenario in which the one person who is everyone seems to be a far cry from anything like a perfect being. On the contrary. It is a Being that can be seen in some ways as being at least as sick—as mentally ill—as it is powerful and, in other ways, as it is wondrously benevolent. It is only intermittently conscious and that only in its lower, not higher, cognitive functions. In many ways it is like an unimaginably brilliant and precocious child with a variety of horrible disorders that even with all its intelligence it can barely begin to understand—from autisms and agnosias to paranoias and schizophrenias, coupled with extreme savantism."

"On the death of any living creature the spirit returns to the spiritual world, the body to the bodily world. In this however only the bodies are subject to change. The spiritual world is one single spirit who stands like unto a light behind the bodily world and who, when any single creature comes into being, shines through it as through a window. According to the kind and size of the window less or more light enters the world. The light itself however remains unchanged."

"Although Open Individualism can, as I have tried to show, be reasonably believed to be the truth about us, it is not the only reasonable view. Traditional Closed Individualism, as espoused by common sense is, as I have argued, not a reasonably believable view. Empty Individualism, on the other hand, especially as espoused by Buddha, Hume and Parfit, is a reasonably believable view."

"For millennia we have looked to each other in building unities outside ourselves. We have turned to each other or against each other but always outside ourselves, mending our walls, building bigger and better external unities: racial unity, social unity, national unity, religious unity, economic unity, political unity... external unities erected by individuals imposing order upon individuals from the outside. Rarely have we turned to ourselves, inwardly, looking not to impose but to expose unity from within. Perhaps this is because we believe looking inwardly draws us only further apart from each other and that for unity to emerge from within would be impossible. Unity must be imposed from the outside. Exposed from within only chaos would emerge. Looking inward we have looked not far enough and if and when we do we shall find common ground in the subject-in-itself, the I, a basis not for political, economic, religious, national, social, racial, or any sort of externally imposed unity, but an inner unity that makes such external impositions of unity superfluous. Open Individualism does not remove our dividing walls. It shows us how to build better lives."

"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."

"The person is merely the result of a misunderstanding. In reality, there is no such thing. Feelings, thoughts and actions race before the watcher in endless succession, leaving traces in the brain and creating an illusion of continuity. A reflection of the watcher in the mind creates the sense of "I" and the person acquires an apparently independent existence. In reality there is no person, only the watcher identifying himself with the "I" and the "mine"."

"Act toward others as you would act toward a part of your own self is, it seems to me, the plainest and truest and the most comprehensive and useful rule of conduct ever formulated on this earth. It is the expression of balanced egoism and altruism. It is the soul of sympathy and oneness. It may be called the Law of the Larger Self. It is the extension of the regard which we have for ourselves to those below, above, and around us. It is simply the law of the individual organism widened to apply to the Sentient Organism. It is the message which is destined in time to come to redeem this world from the primal curse of selfishness. It is the dream which has been dreamed by the great teachers of the past independently of each other, merely by observing the actions of men and thinking what rule if followed would cure the wrongs and sufferings of this world."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"One, who is eager to realize this highest truth spoken of in the Sruti, should rise above the fivefold form of desire: for a son, for wealth, for this world and the next, and are the outcome of a false reference to the Self of Varna (castes, colors, classes) and orders of life. These references are contradictory to right knowledge, and reasons are given by the Srutis regarding the prohibition of the acceptance of difference. For when the knowledge that the one non-dual Atman (Self) is beyond phenomenal existence is generated by the scriptures and reasoning, there cannot exist a knowledge side by side that is contradictory or contrary to it."

"I am other than name, form and action. My nature is ever free! I am Self, the supreme unconditioned Brahman. I am pure Awareness, always non-dual."

"The one all-highest Godhead Subsisting in each being And living when they perish— Who this has seen, is seeing. For he who has that highest God in all things found, That man will of himself upon himself inflict no wound."

"I think of consciousness as a point, an "eye," that moves about in a sort of mental space. All thoughts are already there in this multi-dimensional space, which we might as well call the Mindscape. Our bodies move about in the physical space called the Universe; our consciousnesses move about in the mental space called the Mindscape. Just as we all share the same Universe, we all share the same Mindscape. For just as you can physically occupy the same position in the Universe that anyone else does, you can, in principle, mentally occupy the same state of mind or position in the Mindscape that anyone else does. It is, of course, difficult to show someone exactly how to see things your way, but all of mankind's cultural heritage attests that this is not impossible."

"In this way I suggest to you the proof which a rigid analysis of the logic of our most commonplace thought would give for the doctrine that in the world there is but one Self, and that it is his world which we all alike are truly meaning, whether we talk of one another or of Cromwell's character or of the fixed stars or of the far-off aeons of the future."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"This is the secret of spiritual life: to think that I am the Atman and not the body, and that the whole of this universe with all its relations, with all its good and all its evil, is but as a series of paintings—scenes on a canvas—of which I am the witness."

"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."

"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."

"Part of the argument for Open Individualism is that an at least equally plausible response to fission is (contra Parfit) that identity is what matters in survival and that (contra Nozick) identity is an intrinsic relation such that (contra not only to both Parfit and Nozick but also contra their critics) a person can survive with identity because personal identity is not bound by individuating borders, such that a person is capable of existing simultaneously at more than one place at a time, independently experiencing each independently conscious point of view."

"We are all One. There are no "others." There is only One. That One is The Sentient World. The Self includes all that feels. "Others," so-called, have come from the same great womb as we have, have grown up in the same world conditions, and been freighted with like susceptibilities. Each of us is a cell in the gigantic Organism of Life. The parts come and go, but the Great Being is immortal."

"We are a way for the cosmos to know itself."