Dear Rupert,
Thank you for your kind response and availability. In fact, a question did come up. The burden of separation feels heavy – more so now, living with this intellectual understanding. There’s emotional pain, usually in the form of causeless quiet sadness, sometimes heavier, sometimes lighter.
My seven-year-old son manifests feelings of meaninglessness and sadness as well. It’s regarding this coincidence that the question arose: We project the world we perceive, but what about the other minds that enter our projected world? Do minds attract each other to share or influence each other’s projections? Do we share objects in consciousness? Do we see the same clouds? I hope I make sense.
Thanks again for your clarity. Communication with you feels like a breath of fresh air.
With love,
Claudia
Dear Claudia,
I have a ten-year-old son who, like your son, is deeply connected to his mother and seems to take on her feelings, physical symptoms, and so on.
Know, at a relative level, that this goes also for your love for him, and that this love too goes deeply into the make of him, more deeply in fact than your fluctuating feelings. In fact, the love of truth that you have is the most precious thing you cangive him.
I have included a response below which addresses the issues you raised from a more absolute point of view. Both points of view are valid on the level on which they are spoken and both can be lived without conflict between them. In other words, we deal appropriately with all things at a relative level, whilst holding this deeper understanding in our hearts.
With love,
Rupert
Claudia: We project the world we perceive, but what about the other minds that enter our projected world?
Rupert: Other minds do not enter our projected world. The world is a perception. The mind is the current thought. A thought does not enter or appear in a perception.
All perceptions and thoughts ‘enter’ or ‘appear in’ consciousness. In fact, they do not enter or appear in consciousness. There is nothing outside of consciousness that could enter it. The substance of all appearances is only consciousness, and that is ever-present.
Do minds attract each other to share or influence each other’s projections?
There are no minds as such. That is, the mind which is considered to be a vast container of all out thoughts, memories, hopes, desires and fears is never experienced. Only the current thought or image is experienced.
Two thoughts never touch one another, share anything or influence each other in any way. The only ‘thing’ that two thoughts or perceptions have in common is the consciousness in which they appear and out of which they are made, just as the only thing that two documents share, is the screen on which they appear and out of which they are made.
Do we share objects in consciousness? Do we see the same clouds?
There is no ‘we’ who may or may not share objects such as clouds. There is no individual perceiver of each individual perception.
In order to share something, there must be two or more entities present to share the one apparent object. But there are, in our experience, never two ‘things’ or entities. There is only consciousness. In order to believe in sharing we have first to believe in separate entities. When the belief in separate entities is seen through, the belief in sharing is seen through.
In fact, love is precisely the experience that there are not two people sharing one thing but rather that there is only one consciousness. That is what love is. It is not shared. It is the dissolution of two apparent entities in the single substance out of which both apparent entities are made. It is the revelation of consciousness’s eternal knowing of its own being.
Normally we think that there is one sky seen by many people. In fact, there are many skies (that is, many perceptions) seen by one consciousness. Every thought, sensation or perception is entirely private. However, they all appear in the same consciousness.
Because we forget the presence of consciousness (by taking the shape of dualising thought) we project the ‘qualities’ that properly belong to consciousness alone (singularity, continuity, reality, immutability, and so on) and consider that they belong to our imagined world.
In this way, we come to think and, more importantly, feel that there is one world seen by many people. In fact, there are as many worlds as there are perceptions, and each world is created afresh every time a perception arises. These worlds are appearing and dissolving at every moment. There is no continuity or substance there.
The apparent continuity and substance of every perception properly belongs to consciousness. Our sense that we share the world is in fact a misinterpretation of the fact of our experience, which is that we share only consciousness.
However, there is no ‘we’, there are no entities, that share consciousness. There is just one consciousness, knowing, being and loving itself eternally, in which all apparent entities are imagined to be moving around, each with its own little parcel of consciousness, communicating and sharing with each other!
