basic conditions of communication...

Hi...

Are there studies or treatises on consciousness or mind in regard to the question if such a thing as a separate consciousness or mind is possible? Because if it is not possible, every attempt to communicate intersubjectively and interculturally would have to disregard the idea of exchange between bodies or separate identities and start with the idea of consciousness as a whole, with mind as one single - fundamentally the only - factor of our experience and reality. Is there any doubt that separate bodies or identities cannot communicate?

What if what we dream of or proclaim or live for, i.e. peace, understanding, unconditional love is not a state of Universal Consciousness, but rather what consciousness itself is? Then it would have to be, since you are conscious, that even though you pretend not to know who you are, that what you are is what Total Love or Truth or God is. No matter how much you protest, there would finally, simply be nothing else, wouldn't there?

These very provocative and socratic statements might shed some light on this "matter"...

"There is no conflict that does not entail the single, simple question, 'What am I?'

Yet who could ask this question except one who has refused to recognize himself? Only refusal to accept yourself could make the question seem to be sincere. The only thing that can be surely known by any living thing is what it is. From this one point of certainty, it looks on other things as certain as itself.

Uncertainty about what you must be is self-deception on a scale so vast, its magnitude can hardly be conceived. To be alive and not to know yourself is to believe that you are really dead. For what is life except to be yourself, and what but you can be alive instead? Who is the doubter? What is it he doubts? Whom does he question? Who can answer him?

He merely states that he is not himself, and therefore, being something else, becomes a questioner of what that something is. Yet he could never be alive at all unless he knew the answer. If he asks as if he does not know, it merely shows he does not want to be the thing he is. He has accepted it because he lives; has judged against it and denied its worth, and has decided that he does not know the only certainty by which he lives.

Thus he becomes uncertain of his life, for what it is has been denied by him. It is for this denial that you need Atonement. Your denial made no change in what you are. But you have split your mind into what knows and does not know the truth. You are yourself. There is no doubt of this. And yet you doubt it. But you do not ask what part of you can really doubt yourself. It cannot really be a part of you that asks this question. For it asks of one who knows the answer. Were it part of you, then certainty would be impossible.

Atonement remedies the strange idea that it is possible to doubt yourself, and be unsure of what you really are. This is the depth of madness. Yet it is the universal question of the world. What does this mean except the world is mad? Why share its madness in the sad belief that what is universal here is true?

Nothing the world believes is true. It is a place whose purpose is to be a home where those who claim they do not know themselves can come to question what it is they are. And they will come again until the time Atonement is accepted, and they learn it is impossible to doubt yourself, and not to be aware of what you are..." (from Lesson 139, A Course In Miracles)

Thank you,
Alban