One Field, Many Views
On Shared Consciousness and the Privacy of Minds (The Nature of Consciousness #34)
The recognition that all minds are precipitated within the same field of consciousness raises a reasonable objection. If we are all localisations of the same consciousness, why can you not know my thoughts? Why does each of us seem enclosed in a private interior, sealed off from every other? I would suggest that each of our minds share the same consciousness in the way that all waves share the same ocean: each wave is a distinct movement, yet none of them exists apart from the water that is common to all. This week’s essay explores the relation between the one consciousness and the many finite minds that arise within it.
In this instalment we continue in Chapter 15, ‘The Shared Medium of Mind’, exploring page 146 through to the section break on page 148.*
(*The page numbers indicated here each week refer to the original publication of the physical book – they may vary slightly from more recent versions, owing to the publisher’s design modifications.)
The Indivisible Field and Its Forms
Film offers one of the most useful analogies for understanding the relation between infinite consciousness and the many finite minds that arise within it. When we watch a film, we see characters who appear to be separate beings, each with their own body, their own situation, their own apparent life. Yet none of these characters has any reality of its own. Each is a modulation of the screen, a temporary patterning of light upon the one continuous surface from which everything in the film appears.
But just as characters in a movie are modulations of the same indivisible screen, so our waking-state minds and the bodies that appear in them are energetic emanations from the same indivisible field of mind whose nature is infinite consciousness.
Infinite consciousness vibrates within itself, and one of the forms this vibration takes is perception. In the act of perception, a boundary is drawn around a segment of consciousness, and within that boundary a finite mind appears. The body, as we know it from the inside, is the constellation of sensations through which this finite mind feels itself; from the outside, looked at by another finite mind, the same localisation appears as a perceivable form. In neither case has anything new been added to consciousness. What has happened is a local activation, a focusing of the field upon itself.
