Book Club: Friday April 22nd, 8 pm Paris Time, 2 pm New York time
Friends,
The next Book Club meeting is this Friday, April 22nd : 8pm Paris time, 2 pm New York time. Kathryn will be hosting.
For this week I've transcribed and condensed a section, starting at 1:58:09 from a recent interview of Rupert Spira and Bernardo Kastrup moderated by Simon Mundie on YouTube:
Simon: The other thing you introduced me to was the dissociative identity disorder…I want to tie this in with an objection to idealism…a very obvious one is that I can't read your thoughts and you can't read my thoughts, so I was wondering if you could relate that to the dissociative identity disorder, particularly the Harvard paper about a woman who couldn’t see…
Bernardo: …so there is this well-known psychiatric condition called dissociative identity disorder (DID) in which what was originally one center of awareness seemingly splits into multiple and separate centers of awareness which used to be called multiple personalities. DID is the new name for multiple personality disorder. Until the beginning of this century there were doubts whether this condition really existed because all we had was what patients reported…but since the advent of neuro imaging and the ability to image the brain activity, we know that the condition is real. One example is a study done in 2015 in Germany in which a woman with DID had multiple split off personalities, a couple of which claimed to be blind, and the others not, and the host was not blind and her visual system was intact…dissociation is literally capable of rendering you blind to what is right in front of your eyes even though your eyes are open and working, so of course it can render me incapable of reading your thoughts and the other way around.
Even if we are part of one universal mind, one universal consciousness, we know that one mind undergoing this empirically established phenomenon of dissociation can seemingly split into different centers of awareness that become blind to what's happening in the rest of that mental context, even though at the fundamental level it's all one mind and we know that that's the case because people with DID can be cured. The different identities can be reintegrated into one host personality which then remembers the memories of each other as the person's own integrated memories.
…So my hypothesis is that this is what's happening right now. There is only one universal consciousness and we are dreamed up avatars like in Rupert's metaphor. Keep in mind a dream is a dissociative state. You think you are your dream avatar and you are not doing the streets, the cars, and the houses around you in the dream…while in fact it is your mind doing the avatar, and the streets, the cars, the other houses and everything…it's one mind doing the whole thing, but in the dream state you become dissociated from yourself. You split into the part of mind doing the context of the dream and the part of mind doing the avatar, so that is an example of dissociation. We are dissociated authors of this universal mind and that's why we seem to be separate but the underlying subjectivity in all of us is not only identical, it's one. It's the same, just like it's the same underlying subjectivity doing the streets, the cars, and the houses in the dream avatar. [An example is cited of a Harvard researcher Barrett who studied the dreams of patients with DID and actually there was a woman with several dissociative avatars who had a dream in which one of the multiple identities clubbed the other over the head with a stick. It was a bit of a gruesome scene but it basically perfectly matches with Rupert’s we are one dream in God’s infinite consciousness.] DID is just an extreme form of dissociation. We all undergo dissociation—if you don't remember something that you do know you know—there you are, you are dissociated from yourself.
So you see in your own mind, one mind, you can have multiple distinct centers of awareness that not only don't see each other but can club each other over the head, so
that happens in the mind of a person. The hypothesis here as Rupert suggested, to take this one level up, is that this is what's happening in the mind of nature. We can see each other, interact with each other within the dream we call life and even club each other over the head.
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Hope to see you at the Book Club!