The One Mind of Infinite Consciousness

In yesterday's question and answer session, you mentioned that our minds had an element of interconnection and I was wondering, do my thoughts, feelings, words come from me or from this kind of interconnection or from both? Your thoughts are unique to your mind, but your mind is connected. For instance, the next thought you have will probably depend on what I say to you and my next thought will depend on what you say to me. So our minds are influenced by our environment, but at the same time I can't read your thoughts and you can't read mine. So your thoughts are unique to your mind, but our minds are not sealed containers. When yesterday you spoke about the interconnection, which I'm imagining is up here, what goes on when our minds are interconnected? I'm imagining a thought coming down into my head and a thought going down into someone else's, but I don't know what's going on in this interconnection that you mentioned yesterday. Imagine a piece of white paper, which represents consciousness, infinite consciousness. Then cover it with lines, just draw lines all over it, which represents the vibrational movement of consciousness. Now draw lots of little perforated circles on the piece of white paper. The perforated circles just delineate a little portion of the white paper with all the lines on it. The perforated circles are like each of our minds. All there is to each of our finite minds is the white paper, infinite consciousness, but our mind is a bordered field, not a completely impervious field. That's why I say draw it with a dotted line. I would suggest that that dotted line is made out of sense perception, sense perception that makes us feel that we are localized and that there's a mind inside. But the bit inside the circle is only the activity of infinite consciousness, but it's inside our circle, inside our finite mind, but it's still only the activity of infinite consciousness. In fact, there aren't really any independently existing finite minds. There's only the one mind, if we can call it a mind, with a capital M. There's only the infinite consciousness with these circles. Each circle is each of our minds, but they're not really independent minds. They're just delineations within infinite consciousness, made of sense perception. When infinite consciousness puts on the VR headset of sense perception, seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling, suddenly it seems as if infinite consciousness is located inside this bundle of sense perceptions. We're looking out through the five windows of seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling. We now think consciousness is inside the little circle, and that what it sees is outside consciousness. The whole thing is consciousness. Our mind is just this little segment of infinite consciousness, bounded by our sense perceptions. And as this little part of infinite consciousness, which now seems to be a finite consciousness, because it's bounded, when this apparently finite consciousness looks out through the five windows of sense perception, it sees all the wavy lines. It still sees the activity of infinite consciousness. But it appears, when we look through the five windows of the senses, the activity of infinite consciousness out there appears to us as the world. It appears on the inside as thoughts and feelings. On the outside, it appears as the world. It's the same stuff. It's all the white paper with the wavy lines on it. But as soon as a finite mind appears in that white paper, then the field of infinite consciousness is divided into a subject, the circle, and the rest, the object. The inside, the circle, the activity of consciousness is experienced as mind, thoughts and feelings. Outside, it's experienced as matter. It's all the same stuff. It just looks like matter when the finite mind looks at it through the five windows of seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling. Surprise, surprise, infinite consciousness appears as sight, sounds, tastes, texts, and smells. There are no sights, sounds, tastes, texts, and smells out there. It's just that we look at reality, infinite consciousness, through the faculties of seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling. And reality appears to us in a corresponding with those faculties. A human mind consists of seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling. Surprise, surprise, the world appears as a collection of sights, sounds, tastes, textures, and smells. Not because they are really out there. It's just that our minds, our finite minds, the faculty of sense perception, confer their limitations, their qualities onto reality, and make reality appear in a way that is consistent with that. Sorry, I've come a little away from our minds being interconnected, but I'm trying to give you a model of infinite consciousness with lots of finite minds that are really all part of the same indivisible field, and that our minds are not sealed containers. They are just perforations. The circle, the borders of our mind are perforations, that everything's connected. Because it's all the one consciousness vibrating within itself, appearing to itself through the faculty of sense perception as the world. Therefore, if there was, say, an alien that didn't perceive things through taste and sound and those things, then they would perceive that infinite consciousness as something else. Absolutely right. Exactly. Exactly. Human beings, the human mind, is bordered by the faculty of sense perception, seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling. When the part of infinite consciousness is bound by the sense perceptions inside the little perforated circle, that now seems to be a finite consciousness, a finite mind. When that finite mind looks out through the boundary, through the windows of sense perception, it perceives reality, infinite consciousness, in a way that corresponds with its sense faculties. Now, if there was another kind of mind, as you say, an alien mind, whose mind was not configured in the forms of seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling, but was configured in the form of xing, ying, and zing, whatever that would be, then the little part of infinite consciousness that was bound by its sensory perceiving faculties would look out through the window of its perceiving faculties, xing, ying, and zing, and the universe would appear, sorry, reality would appear as x's, y's, and z's, instead of sight, sound, taste. Now, what that would be, we cannot even imagine, because everything we imagine is filtered through our thinking and perceiving faculties. So, for instance, when we look out at reality, reality appears to us in its most fundamental form in time and space. Time and space is the structure that reality appears to us in, not because time and space are inherent in reality. Time is just what thinking confers on reality, and space is just what perceiving confers on reality. So, reality appears to us as time and space, because we look at it through the lens of thinking and perceiving. But imagine an alien mind that didn't have the faculties of thinking and perceiving. They had different faculties, xing, ying, and zing. They wouldn't perceive reality in time and space. They'd have no knowledge of time or space. So then we might ask, well, what kind of a universe, how would reality appear to them? What kind of a universe would they experience? We can't imagine. Let me give you an example. Some of you will be familiar, I think it's in one of my books, the creature that lives on the surface of the lake, that only has the faculties, they have perceiving faculties like we do, they can only perceive in two dimensions, forwards, backwards, sideways. They don't have the capacity to see up and down. So imagine living on the surface of a lake. What your experience would be, you've got no knowledge of depth, height. All you can see is forwards and backwards and sideways. So when you swim up to the edge of the lake, and there's a weeping willow tree on the bank, and its branches are dipping down into the lake, you know nothing of trees and branches. You just see lines where the branch intersects the lake. Because you're on the surface of the lake, and you can only see, you just see a line, and the line's always getting bigger as the branch goes up and down in the wind. The line gets bigger and smaller because the branch is tapered. You just see all these lines getting bigger and smaller. And that's what you think that the universe consists of, these lines getting bigger. But then the fisherman that's in his rowing boat, alongside the two-dimensional creature, he sees a tree, and a lake, and the sky, and clouds. So each of them see reality in accordance with their perceiving faculties. And the two-dimensional creature, imagine trying to explain to the two-dimensional creature that there was a third dimension, that there was above and below. How would you describe above and below to the two-dimensional creature? It would be impossible because their language would be conditioned to their minds. Their language would be limited to their two-dimensional field of perception. There would be no language for describing above and below. Not even would they not have the words above and below, but they wouldn't have the, they couldn't imagine above and below. Just like if we were now trying to imagine, we know four dimensions, one dimension of time and three dimensions of space, but try to imagine now what a fifth dimension would look like. But what would a fifth dimension be? Can you imagine that? I can't. No. But a mind that was constructed, not like ours, in four dimensions, but a mind that was constructed in five dimensions, would have no difficulty, just like the fisherman has no difficulty seeing above and below, such a mind would have no difficulty perceiving the fifth dimension, whatever that might be. So yes, you're absolutely right, a different kind of mind, it would still be made of the consciousness, but the shape of its mind, instead of being a circle with perforated holes, it would be a square with perforated holes. It would be a different shape. It would still look out at the same activity of infinite consciousness, because that's all there is in reality, but it would perceive it in a completely different way. It's interesting that you said, imagine that there was an alien, because consider the possibility that that's exactly what aliens are, that they're different kinds of mind, that perceive reality in a different way. They don't have the same sense of time. So space travel is to them, it's just you think of being a place, you can be there. They don't have the same limitations of time and space that we do, because their minds may be constructed differently. However, it's possible that something about this mind, this alien mind, can be registered by our minds, that our minds are perceiving faculties. When it looks at that alien mind, when it comes across it, it's possible that it would appear in our world in a way that was consistent with our sense perceptions. So it might look like a strange object in the sky. Just because that this alien mind would appear to our mind, our mind would just capture a fraction of what that mind was. It would appear to it that our mind is some alien form. Our mind would then interpret this strange object in the sky as some other race from a different planet. That would be our minds trying to interpret what it saw in a way that was consistent with its own belief that time and space is absolute and so on. But the alien might not be from a different planet, it's from a different dimension. Their dimension intersects with our four dimensions and appears as a UFO or an angel. I was just going to say that could apply to other beings. Again, it's just a different kind of mind. Under normal circumstances, our impoverished perceiving faculties are not able to register. However, if as a result of meditation or contemplation or psychedelic substances, or if the configuration of our mind is temporarily altered and therefore expanded, our mind may temporarily have the capacity to register this other kind of mind. But it is not able to do so under normal circumstances. And it has a vision of an angel. There's no real angel with a gold halo and wings on. That's just the way that this other kind of mind is represented in the language of our sense perceptions. So when in those medieval paintings, we see paintings of angels, they may not, in fact, I think it's almost certain that they're not just fanciful creatures. These come from a period when the rational mind didn't dominate the human mind to the extent that it does now. So people's minds were more expanded, less linear, and were open to seeing things that perhaps we are not. So perhaps they were more, and also because of their practice and their devotion, because they're training their minds in the Christian tradition. Maybe these expanded minds were capable of seeing these. They're not angels. They're another kind of mind, energies. Why not? Think of infinite consciousness. What are the chances of its most sophisticated mind being in four dimensions? If you were infinite consciousness, is that all you'd go for? Just four measly dimensions and the capacities of thinking and seeing and hearing? Can you go for a bit more than that? Absolutely. Thank you.