These are clearly things we were never taught in school, for many reasons - chief among them was the illusion of deep separation and duality that we all chose to experience.
As I often say, that was then, this is now.
It is now time for us to choose to know who and what we really are, those of us who call ourselves Human Being. I can't think of anyone who does a better job of explaining it than Story Waters.
The full text of essay 1 is below, or you can read it on Story's "The One Self" website.
Within the human experience the One Self is experiencing itself as many separate Selves. It does this through forgetting its original wider state of consciousness and giving each individual their own unique focus. This grants everybody their own perceptual experience and thereby, their own sense of individuality.
~ Story Waters
ESSAY ONE
THE ONE AND THE MANY
by Story Waters at The One Self
There is more to what you are than meets the eye. There is more to human life than a random explosion of atoms. As well as your outward physical being, you also have a powerful, inward, non-physical existence - an inner experience of Self that we call consciousness.
Science does not address consciousness because it is limited to the study of measuring the world using physical devices and science has found no such tools with which to measure consciousness, or even begin to suggest how this non-physical experience arises within living organisms. Consciousness is science’s very own three wise monkeys. See no consciousness. Hear no consciousness. Speak no consciousness. Those interested in understanding their own inner experience are then only left with religion which has buried what useful information it may have once possessed under fear-based superstition.
Personally, I experience scientific thinking as rigid and brittle whereas I find religious thinking overly prone to both fancy and fear. One has its feet so firmly on the ground it is wearing concrete boots, whereas the other can devolve into superstitious nonsense. I respect the conclusions of science about the physical world, but I do not pretend that what it has taught us qualifies as an explanation for the experience of being human. For myself, it only offers a mechanical explanation for the laws that govern the physical half of our experience. [Emphasis mine, and I agree ~k]
The One Self Teachings present a view of reality that puts consciousness itself, rather than physicality, as the origin of our experience. This is something we already experience every night. When we dream we experience realities that usually appear to be every bit as solid as the waking world. Knowing this, I invite you through these essays to seriously consider the idea that what we call outward reality is in fact a dream.
Putting consciousness first, as our origin, allows us to connect the inner half of our experience with the outer half, thereby allowing for full discussion of being human. Unlike religion however, this is done without requiring your faith in the existence of anything outside of your own inner experience. These teachings will never ask you to ‘just believe’. By using these ideas in the exploration of your own consciousness you will come to directly experience what they are saying.
One of the most significant parts of the human experience is that it is shared with many other people. Just like you, every one of these lives is a dream. What allows this experience of reality to be shared is that it is all the dream of the same one Self. We are a single consciousness dreaming every aspect of what we experience as our external world.
To realize that your life is a dream can initially feel like you are being told that reality is as unreal and fleeting as our night-time dreams. However, seeing that reality is an illusion does not make it any less real. This is because it is not just the human experience that is a dream; everything that is experienced as external reality is a dream. The human experience is therefore no less real than anything else in existence.
What you are, outside of being human, is a consciousness that decided to experience being human. A part of this choice is to enter into the depth of individuality where you believe you have a limited life span (mortality). This necessitates forgetting the Self that is doing the dreaming in order to experience the Self that is dreamt of. This is how the One Self uses illusion to alter its experience of Self and thereby explore the infinite nature of being – the exploration of what it is to be.
At the heart of the human experience is individuality, and it is created through choosing to forget we are the dreamer – the One Self. The consciousness that I know my Self as, is the same consciousness that you know your Self as. But here, within the illusion of the human experience, we experience ourselves as separate individuals. The illusion of separation allows the differentiation of one thing into many. We are all the One Self choosing to enter into an experience of being many Selves. We are the One being the Many.
This process can be thought of as a prism splitting white light into a rainbow. Each point across the rainbow appears to be a unique color and yet they are only refracted (differentiated) manifestations of a single white light. The illusion of individuality is like the prism in that it allows the One Self to experience itself as many different Selves, even though these different Selves all come from within what the One Self already is. Nothing new has really been created, but an infinity of new experiences has been created within perception.
In doing this, the One Self ceases to experience itself as the only Self (in our example white light, which is made up of all the rainbow colors combined) and instead, additionally experiences itself as many unique individuals (a rainbow of uniquely colored lights). In this way the One Self has the ability to dream of itself in an infinite number of forms which are all able to experience themselves as unique.
This is the basic principle of how the One becomes the many. The only problem with this analogy is that it can give the impression that we are each merely a fragment of the One Self; as if it is shattered into pieces. This is not the case. The prism does not turn the white light into something else; instead it enables our perception to reveal that there are an infinite number of colors within it. In just the same way, the illusion does not create fragments of the one consciousness; instead it enables our perception to reveal an infinite number of aspects within it.
With this perception enabled we can focus our consciousness upon a particular color in a way that is not possible when viewing all the colors together. Therefore it is the whole consciousness focusing upon an aspect of itself. This is to understand that the illusion is not something separate from us which turns us into something different. The illusion is a self-created state of perception within us.
What is being spoken of here is demonstrated in holography where regardless of how many times you cut up the holographic image, every piece still contains the full information found within the whole. In the same way, we are not a subset of the One Self. We are all that it is, just within a self-chosen state of perceptual focus.
Though we experience ourselves as individuated, there is nothing that has actually separated us. Being an illusion, the separation is only perceptual. This is to say that we do not leave what we were when we become individuated, we just mask our perception of it.
So though we may forget we are the dreamer, this does not stop us being the dreamer. What shifts in the individuation process is not what we are, it is where our perception is focused. In entering an individuated reality we move our focus from being All That We Are (the dreamer of every color in existence) to a defined aspect of what we are (a particular color being dreamt of).
This perceptual shift could be thought of as putting on a pair of tinted glasses. When you do so, you experience reality in only shades of the tint. However, this does not mean that you no longer have full color vision. It simply means that you have chosen to focus that vision on a particular shade (a particular aspect) of itself. Your eyes continue to function normally behind the change of perception created by the tint.
This means that the same consciousness can use two different shades of tint to create two different experiences of the same world. What is seen through one tint would be different from the other, and yet it is the same eyes looking at the same thing. This is how the experience of your consciousness is different from the experience of my consciousness, even though we are the same consciousness. Every human on Earth is the same consciousness focused on different aspects of what it is by using billions of unique tints.
Key to understanding this is the realization that to perceive differently within the illusion is to have the experience of being a different Self. It is easy to assume that it is our outward definition that differentiates us but, when reality is seen to be a shared dream, then it is how we perceive that illusion that gives rise to what separates us. This is to say that our perception, not our definition, is what makes us different. We each create our experience of Self through our choice of focus of perception.
To better understand the differentiating nature of the illusion, imagine that you are all the players in a poker game. If you moved around the chairs of a card table playing each hand, then you would know where all the cards were and there would be little enjoyment in playing the game against yourself. However, if each chair only carried the memory of its own hand of cards, then it would be as if you were playing as many different people. This is how forgetting (making unconscious) is used to create the experience of different selves.
Our space-time reality is an adventure in consciousness and each of our bodies is like a chair in the card game. When we incarnate, we choose to limit our experience to that of our body. This is the taking on of individuality. But every player in the game, every human on Earth, is in fact the same player – the same consciousness. Through the creation of individuality, we are each the One Self exploring what it is by experiencing itself in new ways by creating realities to experience itself through.
Before concluding, I would like to briefly address some common misunderstandings. Many spiritual schools of thought see being human (the Many) as being subordinate to being the One. They either directly state or imply that we are human because of some mistake we once made. The existence of suffering is seen as proof of this. Why we would choose to experience something as painful as suffering is a question we will be exploring in depth. For now, let me answer by saying that every experience in this world is unique to this world and they all exist only in relation to each other. You can’t cut out one part of it like suffering and have the human experience.
We know what we are doing in entering into the human experience. From the wider state of consciousness, we do not see suffering as a mistake. However, this does not mean that we are not making choices to minimize the experience of suffering on Earth. Suffering ends with the realization of oneness (experienced as connection) because the human race is more than capable of taking good care of every person on the planet when it values them above possessing or controlling material things. In this way, the One Self Teachings point us to the transformation of suffering without seeing its creation as a mistake or seeing ourselves as being here against our will.
Another common misinterpretation is to become fearful that the realization of the One Self means your individuality will be somehow lost when you die and return to the wider state of consciousness. This is another big topic but, in short, what you are now can never be destroyed and is eternally available for you to experience. Each life suggests further lives, and you will enter those lives as evolutions of what you know as your Self. This is to see that we are always changing and evolving. Death is not an ending. It can be an exclamation mark that ends a chapter, but the story always continues.
One of the most powerful parts of the One Self Teachings is the realization that there is absolutely nothing to fear about death. In all ways that are meaningful to you, your individuality will continue after you die. Ultimately, this is the realization that when it comes to understanding the One and the Many, you cannot do this through the idea of linear time. Though we have looked at the process through the idea of how the One became the Many Selves, the One Self does not stop existing. The One and the Many both exist simultaneously. When this is understood, they are seen to be inseparable extensions of each other. We will explore this in the next essay when we begin to address the illusion of time.
The concept of all being One Consciousness may at first feel like there is something about your Self that is being taken away. A feeling, perhaps, that this represents the loss of something personal. The only truth to this feeling is when it comes to the parts of your Self that feel possessive, selfish, blaming, judgmental, superior or inferior. You will feel the loss of these qualities because you cannot feel these things when you know we are the same consciousness. The most useful of these qualities that you may initially miss (because of how we use it to not feel negative emotions), is the ability to disconnect from those in suffering.
To let in what has been said here is to change your experience of reality. That said, to continue believing you are separate is not in any way a mistake. We designed this reality to be separate. To awaken to our connection within the human experience is not something we are on a mission to do. It is however, an exciting evolution to remember the wider state of consciousness from within the human experience. This is for the mortal to realize it is immortal. It is for the limited to realize it is limitless. It is for the lost to feel found and for the alienated to feel connected. This is why I believe so many people at this time are ready to go through the dramatic process of waking up to the ultimate experience of connection – the One Self.
Endnote: What is being spoken of here is demonstrated in holography where no matter how many times you cut up the image every piece always contains the full information contained within the whole. In the same way we are not a subset of the One Self; we are all that it is, just within a self-chosen state of perceptual focus.
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