In this video titled “How Can Matter Be Made of Consciousness“, there is a spiritual teacher calmly sitting before an audience answering their questions. The first question comes from a character in the audience who understands how his thoughts can be made of “consciousness”, but questions how external objects can be made of the same. His reasoning is that his internal conceptions are private and directly experienced by only him, but external objects and phenomena are experienced by others as well. This begs the question: how can his consciousness be creating other peoples’ experience?
In the first part he is correct: my thoughts are private to me. But the second reasoning is where he falls. My notion that there are other independent beings separately experiencing what I perceive is also my thought. I am only conceiving the idea that there are separate beings like me who are independently perceiving objects that I perceive. It is only my imagination that the person I see is independently experiencing the different objects in my physical environment alongside me. I only know one thing: I am experiencing it. I can only imagine that the other person is. That person’s equivalence to me is purely a matter of my imagination.
The whole idea that I am a person among other people with individual experiences outside my own is just an idea. I can readily acknowledge that my thoughts are private, but I must also recognize that my belief that other people are just like me are also private. Whether I call it “consciousness”, or “awareness”, or anything else, my conceptions and perceptions are made of the same thing.
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With this incantation, I pried back the curtain of ignorance and briefly my moment was clear and I believed. I could see who I am… that all these people are no different than the “thoughts in my head” which I so readily accept as my own and no one elses’. The idea of these people as equal beings is also a “thought in my head”, as close to me as any other thought. Why would my private thought or desire be any different than my private belief that these characters I call people are the same as me? They aren’t. Both are fundamentally the same thing: my thoughts and belief. My secondself forms.