Sir Charles Sherrington 1857 – 1952 Neurologist, Nobel Prize winner, President of the Royal Society

“How far is the one mind a collection of quasi-independent perceptual minds integrated physically in large measure by temporal concurrence of experience?”

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Simply enough put, there are as many kinds of consciousnesses as there are particles and these are combined in infinite fashions. Your consciousness is not one thing like a flashlight, that you possess. It is instead a literally endless conglomeration of points of consciousness, swarming together to form your validity – stamped, as it were, with your identity.                                                                                                   Seth:- The Nature of the Psyche – Jane Roberts

Update 4th May 2017

I spoke the following at the beginning of a session without any previous idea of how the session was going to start as generally the sessions have started with a question from Jean. Around two years later I had the urge to find a book to reread, I lit upon “Conversations with Seth” by Susan M. Watkins, when I reached page 87 I was absolutely astounded to find that the words I had spoken were virtually word for word as spoken by Seth, except that I had omitted some connecting sentences which referred to Seth.  It was as if “someone” was reading the book and using my voice to speak the words.  I was in a quiet passive state with my eyes closed and the following statement was made in a voice somewhat different to the usual in an academic tone but with the assurance of someone who knows their subject. Cryptomnesia? and if so why were the references to Seth omitted?

Just when you think you are starting to understand you are thrown another curve ball!

Each of you in this reality have decided upon emphasising certain characteristics and forgetting others. You have allowed, therefore, certain characteristics to come to the surface and you are aware of them and you use them and you think, these characteristics are myself. The ego is the king with a very precarious crown and you think you are what your ego is. It does not occur to you however that there are literally countless, countless, probable egos within yourself. Numberless activities, abilities, that could come to the forefront of your consciousness to be latched upon and used. You are unaware of these buried selves, these buried abilities, these buried creative functions and combinations and yet in other layers of reality these come to the forefront and you allow these their play and the characteristics that you think of now so securely as your own are buried. But while they are buried, they are not unaware they are in trance, and you can become aware of them. Within that self you know, are countless combinations of selves that you do not admit. In other layers of probable realities these selves have their say and live out their potential. They are sleeping within you in this reality but in those realities you are sleeping within them. The trees that you see outside the window you see simply as trees because you can see them only through the physical viewpoint and yet even these trees have potential abilities and potential combinations of consciousness that you do not perceive and that exist in other probable realities. Within you, for example, and for everyone in the room there is an unlimited amount of what you would call identity. Now, all you do when you have an identity and focus upon it is to grab out of your own bag of potentials a group of potentials, and say these are the ones I would settle upon for now and these I will call my identity and so I will use these and I will ignore anything else. But another portion of the self says “ah ha, these potentials are not used, they are freewheeling” and I will adapt these and these will be those potentials with which I will work. There are no potentials within you that are not being realised and no creative abilities that are not being used.

Now, development is a journey within creativity. You have at your command literally infinite amounts of energy. In your terms, you are, if you prefer, latent gods. You must learn to handle and use this energy. As mentioned earlier this evening, you will create, you cannot help creating any more than you can help breathing, and when you breathe no longer you will still create. You cannot escape your own creations. It is not death any of you have to worry about, it is your own creations and you cannot blame your own creations upon any god or any fact, or any predestination. If you want to speak in terms of god, then from that infinite gestalt you receive the energy to create. But because you have freewill you create what you choose and you learn through experience. If, however, one portion of your personality has not learned from the experience, other portions may well learn. I want you to understand, a few points along the lines of probabilities. First of all as I have said, you are not tied to a neurosis from a past life, but also I wanted you to know, that your present thoughts, feelings and emotions, not only affect you but affect your probable selves and yet no probable self is at the mercy of negative thoughts of yours.

Each consciousness has its own responsibility for those thoughts and emotions. The personality in its entirety includes, therefore, selves of which you are presently unaware. This does nothing to negate the validity and integrity of the self that you know. Divisions are illusions and when you wake up to yourself, to your true self, then you are aware of these other portions of your personality.  Theoretically you are working towards a time when the, you, that you now know, will be aware of the entire personality and accept it as your identity.

The whole personality is not like some super self in which you are lost, in which the identity that you know is gone. You must simply accept the fact, for now, until your experience begins to prove it more and more, that the inner identity is far more than you presently realise and the best way to work towards such realisation is to accept the self that you are now, as you are, to feel the movement of the spontaneous self.

Time is basically meaningless, so the question cannot be answered in the framework in which you asked it. Each personality to its self has continuous consciousness. Its consciousness is continuous and it knows who it is and it experiences no lapses.

END

Is every “personality” therefore just a blending of many forms of expression.

Every singularity is created from a plurality. The one is always created from the many. Physics will show you that all is built up from the smallest by a process of accretion. Each discrete entity is composed of multiple entities, you might say, whatever you care to examine can be broken down into its many parts and therefore it is the sum of its parts.

So do not think that personality is not the same. Why do we cling to the notion that the self, the soul, the higher consciousness etc. is a self-contained discrete entity when all that your senses perceive are composed of multiple entities, particles, if you wish?

Now, when we are speaking we are speaking as a confluence, a coherence of many minds/consciousnesses/whatever you perceive to be the intelligence or intelligences that are forming these words. And we are speaking these words through an organism that is again formed of many, many parts. Vocal cords powered by lungs kept going by the heart that pumps the blood, all of which composed of millions of cells mediated by a brain, composed of millions of cells as well but also comprising millions of neurons, millions per second of electrical charges moving across, what you term, the synapses between neurons.

All is multiple, so when you look at what you consider to be a person, a singular, it is a representation of a multiple. It only has a validity in terms of a multiple representation much as a government expressed as a singularity is representative of millions of people and you might say the president is the personality, or how the country is seen depending on how he presents himself and what he says. Then one [who] views, with no knowledge of the country, believes that he is speaking for his constituents, the word is correct, the constituent parts of the organism.

Now, how you perceive yourself takes on a different aspect when you consider that you do not have a separate, defined self as an inviolable spark of consciousness, you might say. Because we are aware that the instrument is speaking, moving, hearing, feeling the combined impressions of the multiple thoughts that comprise the consciousnesses that are presently focused upon the operation of this instrument, we are in the position of observing the combined thoughts of many as to what should happen next, actually happens. As we are observing we are not aware of the total number of thoughts that are being reflected in what we are observing because as thoughts, you might say,” lock on” in focus, we are not aware of the additional, let us put it this way, we are not aware of the additional in terms of saying, we now have a certain number. We are aware of a slight increase in intensity. If a lot, you might say, tune in, then we are aware of a greater increase in intensity. Just like your own communication channels, depending on the activity being conducted at the time, the focus that is being concentrated upon, thoughts from consciousness then join and leave according to the level of interest and we feel the intensity move up and down.

Now, as to self, there is generally a core of what you might call “die-hard supporters” who attend every game, who are there for every motion, every action and who want to experience every feeling. These are the ones that are attached. They are attached to…… let us say the personality that we are working through becomes attached to personalities that others are working through and therefore certain bonds are formed and certain consciousnesses stay focused upon their particular instrument/personality. This is where the principle, previously propounded by our friend Ludwig, of the many-to many, is more easily explained.

We passed the thought this morning that language, as has been said many times before, has an origin. That origin generally comes from some thinking about what one is trying to express. The word is coined, and if it fits, goes into common parlance. So we look at the word “some..one” . “Some” is a plurality, “one” is a singularity. Why are the two joined? “Some” in “One” maybe. Also In..divi..dual,  now the prefix “in” is used in “intuition”, tuition from within.” Inspiration”, inspiration by spirit. So, “in..divi..dual”, inside again is a “division”?, or”diversity”? Whatever, it means MANY. Then we have “dual”. Does this mean mind and body, as in dualism? The make-up of the word came from somewhere. What was it trying to express? The word is looked upon as a singularity whereas the make-up of the word implies at least two, probably many, and within!

So that is a thought, when you consider the principle, that “All That Is”, is comprised of many.

Now again, as we have said previously, you need not fear about losing your “self”, for the ones that are the “die-hards” we mentioned previously, tend to stick together, you might say, and are accomplished in projecting the personality, as you might expect, and therefore when the instrument is dropped there is no problem in recreating the personality in a different form, a different dimension. You may easily say, an astral body, an etheric body, a..projection of thought… as from a mental body you might say. But a projection of thought whereby thoughts which would come across as sound and vision if you wish, certainly mannerisms etc., speech mannerisms, depiction mannerisms would give an identifying signature enabling another of the same to recognise one interesting concept that one has known before.

So, each will still know the other, which means, ”the many will still know the many”.

Much as the “team” still recognises the other “team”, the government still recognises the other government, you can fill in any blanks to support the same hypothesis.

You consider yourself an individual.

You consider yourself an individual. An individual what? You would say an individual personality in an individual body which is separate from other individual personalities and individual bodies, because I see them apart from me and I cannot see any way in which we are physically joined. Yet upon examination you will admit that you are to a great extent mentally joined because your thoughts that you wish to turn into action, generally will require agreement from others, in order to construct the reality around you and the events in which you partake. Of course you will freely admit that you are inhaling atoms, molecules and larger amounts of consciousness, that you imbibe in one form or another, all of which have been parts of other groups of consciousness but, when it comes to talking about your personality, you find it difficult to believe that, just as your body is composed of myriad units of consciousness expressing themselves as atoms, molecules, parts of cells, cells, organs and ultimately the body, that the personality you think you are is likewise the product of myriad consciousnesses each of which is continually being altered by the experience of the “personalities” it focuses upon. As so many consciousnesses are involved in the operation of your physical body, the intelligence and organisation required is vastly in excess of that intelligence which you would grant yourself.

Now let us assume that what you consider to be yourself, your personality, is likewise composed of myriad units of consciousness, all wishing to view the television channel which is your life, the soap opera of you, all these consciousnesses have turned to your channel, this is an interactive channel and they can simply, by thoughts, decide which way you are going to go. So the mass of consciousness which is involved in your soap opera is reacting to the events within that life, shall we say, we change to the word life, and as each decision point approaches then the balance of thoughts that leans to one particular form of action then determines which action is then taken. In other words it requires a majority. Don’t let us argue about whether it is 51% or 75%, we take this as being the scales and so the majority, and this will have to be weighed with intensity as well, not just a simple majority but the intensity of emotion and feeling as to which action should be taken, will determine the next action. This is happening from moment to moment and as your life takes a turn in another direction then some of those consciousnesses will decide they are no longer interested in this channel and will switch channels to another personality, another life. Now remember this only requires focus, it does not require physical movements and the intake and expelling of atoms. It is merely switching from one channel to another by merely moving ones gaze from left to right. You will leave your involvement in that life and join in the involvement in another life.

Now I hope you are realising by now that you are capable of being involved in many lives at once simply by moving your focus and of course you can follow several lives at once. Some, you will decide, no, I am not going back there for a long, long time, because it simply isn’t doing anything which interests me. It was promising to start with but now it is taking a turn which I do not find appealing. Then in another life you’ll say, I will stay with this one until I get tired of it because in the balance of things it is quite interesting. It shows me a side which is not being shown by the other channels I am involved in.

Now each time you look into a channel, because there is no linear time involved, the whole of the events in that channel, that life, that personalities’ actions are presented to you in entirety, so you do not lose any continuity. You must realise that in simultaneous time, you might as well equate this to enormous speeds of comprehension, in that even though you may not have looked into that focus for what you would consider to be a portion of time, the minute you look, then to coin, to form another analogy, you get an instant update, just as you would on your computer. You are updated instantly. It is as if you have never left that life. You immediately have experienced everything that to your intents and purposes you would have said you had missed, like going to sleep, you would not say you have missed any of your life and yet you have slept for a third of it. Every night you will sleep and yet you will say this is my life and discount those times when you are asleep.

Your attention was taken by the recent article on bacteria capturing or eating electrons.

If we go back to what was expressed in our previous discourse that every singularity is composed of multiplicity then you can see that everything is an accretion. So if we take you back to your smallest particle, wave, energetic motion that you know of and then it is obvious that everything is simply a multiplicity of the same.

Is that wave not a singularity?

As far as we know the wave can also show up as a particle but like yourselves we are not aware of the source of the wave.  We do have our own philosophy as you do and our own investigations but perhaps we are not so wedded to the idea of our personality as you are because we understand that whatever we perceive arises from the thoughts of the multiplicity or the multiple. So we do not have the level of attachment and we are confident and happy in the fact that we exist in the light of what we perceive. It is an ever changing state, an ever changing panorama and why worry about who we are when we know we exist. It is more “I exist” and I am happy that I exist, instead of trying to think “Who am I”. We do not worry about the “I”. We can use the term but we know it is pointless to try and stand outside ourselves. It is impossible. How does a mirror see itself? The analogy is not the best but you get the idea.

So back to the subject matter. It is quite logical that as everything is built up from multiplicity then at some level as the smallest waves get together or the smallest particles get together as others join they can be seen to be “eating” Yes?.  As the accretions get larger and larger and the particles, the waves, the energy come and go it gives the impression of fuel being needed to power the organism. When you think of electricity passing through something you just have the conversion of that electricity into heat or light or electromagnetism that causes motion, but nothing is destroyed.

If we take a parallel with the consciousnesses/minds leaving and joining, a constant flow of minds leaving and joining, you have the same effect as electricity being passed through a machine or a light bulb. Now this isn’t a description of exactly what happens but for purposes of understanding as the machines get bigger they need larger amounts of electricity. So as the organisms get bigger they need a larger amount of “fuel”. As the organisms get larger in size the fuel has to be taken in in larger quantities, in more condensed quantities. So it is simpler to take in items that already have accreted. Can you imagine a large organism trying to process an infinite number of electrons in a stream? So it is easier for a hierarchy of accretions to be built up with the larger consuming the smaller or let us say, utilising the smaller or giving passage to the smaller.

The world is far simpler than you imagine. You tend to make it far more complex than it need be because you cannot see at the smallest levels.

We are composite beings?

There are plenty of places of being and not being. When you are just a point of awareness you are basically in a position of not being, because you do not belong. There is no “I” to identify with. “I”s arise from composite beings. Each time you focus on being part of a composite being you are effectively saying you identify with that composite being, you are part of the group. Now, as you move from one focus to another, each time you are becoming another “I”. Each time you are taking on the attributes and manifestations of the group and in each case you feel this is me, this is me in the present and each “other” which you would say is in the past, you are no longer. Yet you retain the memory, no matter how many focuses you have in the present, and you can have many lives at once, but in each case you are only the “I” that you focus upon, because it is only possible to be an “I” through collaboration and cooperation with others. So, “I”s arise from a grouping as we know them. When you look away from all your “I”s that you are participating in, then you just reduce yourself back to a point of awareness, because there is nothing to identify with. So, the sense of “I” disappears and then you have the sense of being part of the universal whole. Then if you feel that you are the universal whole, every part of the universal whole thinks it is the one. So this is where the notion arises that we are all god, because we are all part of god, until we decide we want to identify with something else, which is the “I”s.

So, once you contemplate this “theory”, if you wish to look at it that way, “truth” if you wish to look at it another way, then you will see that it is only truly useful to savour the “I” of which you are presently aware. By all means look for other “I”s in which you are focusing but be aware that to you these may seem like figments of the imagination, even as you find yourself, imagine yourself, to be another “I” as in when you feel that you are aware of a past life, past focus, but you always come back to who you are now, the present. So, the concept of forever becoming just means, the continually changing sense of “I”.

We like to say that the underlying is unchanging and that is true. What we don’t realise is that we feel that the whole is changing. We do not understand that we are part of an enormous composite which is continually changing and our sense of “I” arises from that. When we are able to observe, as in leaving the body, we find that we have to return to the body, otherwise our sense of “I” disappears, because that sense of “I” is no longer in the body. It finds itself in a different life in which it has a different sense of “I” and can only look back, a memory of its identification with a body, but now, of course, it has a separate identification. So, you might say that when you leave the body and look back at your body you already have a different, although probably unknowing, sense of who you really are. But then if you do not return to the body you find yourself in what is called the spirit world and you have another sense of “I”. Until you find the idea of another life, another focus, that you will have to, unknowingly maybe, enter together through association with others desirous of experiencing the idea of another sense of “I”.

So, what you call existence is a continual movement from one state of being to another state of being, from one sense of “I” to another sense of “I”. You always are but you are forever changing. But because of that ever changing, you forever feel the same because each “I” is an experience and on, what you might say, another level you are aware that it is all an experience.

What is the “self”?

You ask “what is the self”? Now Seth refers to himself as an “energy personality essence”. You notice that the first word is energy, the second word is personality, energy with personality that he is the essence of. Normally the essence is the distillation so one can infer from the use of these three words that the essence is the distillation of many personalities that have been experienced by the energy. So, we are saying are we that this is energy with a personality. Now, just for purposes of maybe understanding this in a slightly different manner, let us look at magnetism, electromagnetism. Now, when you have a piece of metal it does not have any attraction or repulsion, it is just a bar of metal with no seeming let us say desire, and yet, when you manipulate it in such a way that all the constituent electrical properties within that bar of iron form into coherence then you achieve a pole at each end. A pole that attracts and a pole that repels, in other words, opposites.

You can take those opposites as your love and hate or your light and dark and all the spectrum of feeling in between. Now, as you know, all particles seem to exhibit a degree of awareness and also to communicate with each other. In that case, as the atoms, molecules, whatever in the iron bar now have the property of attracting and repelling, would you grant them the quality of consciousness? Probably not, but how come the attraction or the repulsion and how like it is to your own conscious self that is in one degree or another attracted or repelled by the other electromagnetic bodies that you come into contact with. (Everything is composed of electromagnetic waves/particles) The point to note is that when the constituent parts are in a chaotic format then no attraction or repulsion arises. Yet when they are aligned coherently and all pull together one might say, then the attraction and repulsion arises and therefore is this when personality arises? Do we say attraction and repulsion, light and dark, opposites, are only perceived when in a reality such as the physical? Or do we say that they are inherent qualities of the particle that is behaving in a random manner?

That’s quite interesting that the like poles repel and the opposite poles attract. You would think that would be the other way around.

What’s in a name? It depends on who decided the qualities in the first place and how the actions were viewed.

You can see that coherence produces power. There was no power in the iron bar before you induced coherence but then it had the power to pull something else towards it or push something away from it, it displayed kinetic energy. So, power arose from coherence. In previous talks we have outlined how the power of intention of many, you might say “energy personality essences”, they come together and then are able to utilise the power of their intention to create form or, as we have been discussing, to manipulate an instrument. That instrument being the physical body and brain. They may also have created a mind as an intermediary to enable easier operation. We might as well refer to the brain as the hardware, the mind as the software and the “gestalt” consciousness or energy personality essences, a group, as the programmer, or programmers agreeing. You can see the parallels.

Power arises from coherence. We don’t know how many consciousnesses are necessary to carry out any particular creation of form or manipulation of energy. You can assume that varying groupings are necessary appropriate to the degree of power needing to be applied. So to send a thought probably requires a smaller amount of power than to move an arm. However if the arm is programmed correctly and the hardware then reacts correctly to the programme then perhaps the energy necessary to move the arm is, from the point of view of the programmer, quite small. Or from the point of view of the body it would be a magnitude of times greater.

The same principle can apply whatever you think of. Especially with regard to moving mass beliefs. One thought, one voice is a voice in the wilderness. Many thoughts, many voices come together and become a convincing force of conversion and once enough join in the new belief then it becomes accepted mainstream except for a few outliers who refuse to accept what they may call, a mass delusion.

Individuality and the totality.

So we come back to the intensity again. The intensity of thought and the thought not only amongst the instruments but amongst the consciousnesses who manipulate the instruments. Back to the consciousnesses that are part of the overall pool of consciousness who feel themselves separate, as above so below, and yet they know they are part of an interconnected and interdependent reality. But simply do not understand, any more than you understand, that you are part of one system. Because you have a feeling of individuality, you expect the totality to have an individuality. It may or it may not but when do you ever see the totality acting as one. When you as individuals do not act as one then why do you assume the totality is one? You invent this concept that it wishes to explore all aspects of its individuality but if you take the total all it can do is explore its different creations because all aspects are creations. All personalities are creations, all individualities are creations. So you have to say then that the totality is just exploring its possibilities. And where does that leave you? If the totality has always been, surely it has always known its own possibilities.

Again we come back to time and the impossibility of those in the time based system to comprehend a system in which there is no time.