Open individualism

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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"."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"[T]here is no absolute duality between myself and someone else. My being encodes theirs, and theirs mine. Each plays north pole to the other's south. The value, then, is not relative to an individual agent. As far as peace of mind goes, my relation to your interests is the same as my relation to my own—or better: we both have an interest in our common interest. This is not, note, to say that I should be compassionate simply as a matter of self-interest (as, maybe, for Hobbes). undercuts the very nature of the distinction between self-interest and other-interest."

"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."

"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."

"A person can describe his actions and personality only as an almost random multitude of particulars, even though the most primal datum of consciousness is unity."

"I asked Gödel if he believed there is a single Mind behind all the various appearances and activities of the world. He replied that, yes, the Mind is the thing that is structured, but that the Mind exists independently of its individual properties. I then asked if he believed that the Mind is everywhere, as opposed to being localized in the brains of people. Gödel replied, "Of course. This is the basic mystic teaching.""

"The Truth is yourself, but not your mere bodily self. Your real self is higher than 'you' and 'me.' This visible 'you' which you fancy to be yourself Is limited in place, the real 'you' is not limited. Why, O pearl, linger you trembling in your shell? Esteem not yourself mere sugar-cane, but real sugar. This outward 'you' is foreign to your real 'you;' Cling to your real self, quit this dual self."

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

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"No self is of itself alone. It has a long chain of intellectual ancestors. The "I" is chained to ancestry by many factors [...] This is not mere allegory, but an eternal memory."

"Multiplicity is only apparent, in truth, there is only one mind."

"Consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in the singular. Not only has none of us ever experienced more than one consciousness, but there is also no trace of circumstantial evidence of this ever happening anywhere in the world. If I say that there cannot be more than one consciousness in the same mind, this seems a blunt tautology — we are quite unable to imagine the contrary."

"It is not possible that this unity of knowledge, feeling and choice which you call your own should have sprung into being from nothingness at a given moment not so long ago; rather this knowledge, feeling, and choice are essentially eternal and unchangeable and numerically one in all men, nay in all sensitive beings. But not in this sense — that you are a part, a piece, of an eternal, infinite being, an aspect or modification of it [...] For we should then have the same baffling question: which part, which aspect are you? what, objectively, differentiates it from the others? No, but, inconceiveable as it seems to ordinary reason, you — and all other conscious beings as such — are all in all. Hence, this life of yours [...] is, in a certain sense, the whole [...] This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in that sacred, mystic fo'rmula [...] Tat tvam asi — this is you. Or, again, in such words as 'I am in the east and in the west, I am below and above, I am this whole world.' Thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon Mother Earth, with certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you … For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end."

"The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist."

"Vedanta teaches that consciousness is singular, all happenings are played out in one universal consciousness and there is no multiplicity of selves."

"The only possible alternative is simply to keep to the immediate experience that consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown; that there is only one thing and that what seems to be a plurality is merely a series of different aspects of this one thing, produced by a deception (the Indian Maya); the same illusion is produced in a gallery of mirrors, and in the same way Gaurisankar and Mt Everest turned out to be the same peak seen from different valleys."

"In Kolak's view, what I call 'my' subjective experience and what you call 'your' subjective experience are indeed the subjective experience of one and the same consciousness. He uses Nozick's concept of philosophical explanation to show how each and every apparent boundary (i.e. personal identity begins and ends there) between us is best viewed as a border; moreover, he argues in each case that unless we so view it there are no continuously existing persons identical to themselves over time, leading to one of the empty individualist views. Thus, although he leaves room for either an open or empty individualist view, he argues in the end that open individualism is ultimately better because it provides the metaphysical foundations for global ethics."

"[T]he subtle implication—nowhere made explicit in Kolak's view, for he seems intent on leaving room even for his Empty Individualist critics—is that ultimately Open Individualism is not just the best explanation of who we are but, covertly, necessary."

"The conventional interpretation of reincarnation makes the mistake of assuming the existence of time, and yet this assumption is based on a valid intuition. We do not reincarnate in time, and yet each of our minds, and all the minds of those who have lived before us, is born from a single mind, of which it is an extension. We are literally each other. Each of us is the outer face, or the objectification, of the only mind there is, eternal, infinite consciousness. We are all mirrors of the same consciousness."

"[W]hat looks forth from another’s eyes, what feels itself in the writhing of a worm, what perhaps throbs with felt if dim emotion within an electron, is really that very thing which, when speaking through my lips, calls itself 'I'."

"The true I—thou relation for this philosophy comes with the recognition that the thou is oneself."

"For there is a sense in which we are not just contained within the Absolute, but the Absolute exists in each of us. For the essence of the Absolute is intense consciousness, and something of that intense consciousness is present in each of us. Thus the same spiritual essence is present in every person and ultimately in everything. That is why we should have a loving, or at the least a benevolent, attitude to others so far as we can, because we are not fundamentally separate beings. Immorality stems from thinking that our own experiences are real in a sense in which the experiences of others are not, from which it follows that they do not have that real goodness and badness which ours often do."

"If we make use of the philosopher's distinction between the pure ego and the empirical ego, then what follows from this argument is that there exists a multiplicity of empirical egos in the universe, but that there can be only one pure ego. Hence the mystic who has reached what seems at first to be his own private pure ego has in fact reached the pure ego of the universe, the pure cosmic ego."