The ego, the consciousness – singular and plural. One ego, many egos. Many egos clash. (Clash is what egos tend to do!) But many consciousnesses? Or one consciousness? Ultimately, just the one eternal, Cosmic, consciousness? Egos sit at the heart of conflict. From wars between nation to which brand of breakfast cereal we'll buy this week. Consciousness, however, is calm and reflective, bearing no malice, meaning no harm. Observing, understanding, perceiving, rather than shrieking "Me! Me! Me!"
Our biologies make our egos as they are, shaped by evolution and circumstance; the ego has far less free will that our egos would imagine! Buffeted by forces of the material world, the ego is pushed and pulled into behaving as it behaves. But the consciousness remains still. It is a manifestation of the one Universal unity, poured into our biological body, and destined to part from it at biological death.
But were we One before death and will we be One after our bodies die?
And here I scratch my head, and admit that this isn't my own personal, subjective experience. It feels to me as though my consciousness has experienced life in human form before living this one. This I experience through flashbacks (anomalous qualia memories from another time and another place) and dreams (far rarer, far more specific narrations of actual events). Such dreams stand out as they are bereft of cognitive dissonance, the the Unities of time, place and action all fit. The flashbacks, however, are common and happen on average several times a week. They are more frequent with the turning of the seasons; they are more frequent in Jakubowizna than in Jeziorki, and they were more frequent in Jeziorki than in Perivale. They often come (maybe a third? Maybe a half?) in the form of flashbacks-through-flashbacks, where that sense of familiarity echoes through a memory of a moment in childhood during which I originally experienced such an anomalous flashback.
But is this universal? I doubt it! I have not met more than a tiny handful of people reporting a similar phenomenon. To square this, I need to reach for David Eagleman's possibilianism, and my own intuition that all who seek God shall find God in their own way.
This has gone on all my life, convincing me that there is something very real to the concept of reincarnation, though how it works (the vectors of consciousness) is completely beyond my understanding. It is the prime motivation behind my spiritual quest to make sense of it all, and very much informs my worldview.
In my case, I do not feel that I was with the One before birth (maybe briefly between lives). Logically, therefore, I do not expect to return to the One after death. Rather, an individual journey of growth in understanding and wisdom, growing like a snowball from one biological lifetime to the next.
So: becoming part of the One – when does that occur? Right at the end of time, or incrementally, in stages? A slow blending together, A fusion of souls/consciousnesses over millennia? Past-life recollections from more and more people across future incarnations?
Or, following on from the concept of the block universe (eternalism) – if the reality of time is that everything that happens does so simultaneously, then are questions of what happened before we were born and after we die become irrelevant?
At this stage, many more questions than answers. However, the end-point is clear (for me at least!) – all in God, God in all. We (plural) are One (singular). Though how that happens, as we live our biologically separate lives, separate bags of living cells, experiencing life subjectively, individually, is currently beyond my grasp. I search on.
Here, another big think-you to my brother Marek for pointing me towards the works of Greek philosopher Plotinus, and the idea of duality of the One in two metaphysical states, which worked its way into Western esoteric philosophy. And another concept, that of 'lumpers' and 'splitters', as used by physicist and philosophy writer Freeman Dyson who suggested that we can broadly, if over-simplistically, divide "observers of the philosophical scene" into splitters and lumpers - roughly corresponding to materialists (who imagine the world as divided into atoms) and Platonists (who regard the world as made up of ideas). I'd take this idea further – lumpers are generalists, whilst splitters are specialists.
More tomorrow!
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