A Fold in a Shared Field — In Plain Words

In Plain Words · United Wisdom
Andrey Zarinsh & Maria Evilkut

What if your “self” is a fold in a shared fabric that acquired a name, took out a mortgage, and decided it was now a separate roll?

In Enneads V.2.1, Plotinus describes the One as the source of everything, without being identical to any particular thing. This paraphrases a thought from Stephen MacKenna’s translation. It is not a report that an ancient philosopher discovered the cosmic textile industry.

What this article is about

One day an image came to me: an endless fabric rises into a fold and begins to feel. It develops a perspective, a memory, a name. It says “I.” A little later: “Mine.” Later still, it orders a gold plaque for its sovereign protrusion. Nobody has cut the fabric.

That image suggested a possibility: consciousness might be a shared foundation, with each individual life as a local manifestation. Then, in my imagination, the fabric moved and became a sea. What if we are its conscious waves? Each lives its own life from within, while belonging to the whole throughout. “Soul” could be a name for such a unique life.

Before the image appoints itself managing director of reality, we need some boundaries. This is the author’s philosophical hypothesis. Physics has not certified it; spiritual traditions have not signed a joint power of attorney. It raises questions: why does experience belong to someone, what sustains a person, what happens when life ends, could anything continue, and how should we treat the person beside us?

For the journey, imagine a fantastical Bureau of Cosmic Tailoring. Its chief is a giant golden lapel sticking out of an unbroken fabric. The lapel wears a red tie and demands to see its own hem’s passport. It is convinced it constitutes an entire suit. That conviction is what we will examine. Nobody is proposing to flatten people with an iron.

I. The fabric acquires a point of view

A fold differs from the fabric in shape, although it consists of the same fabric. Distinguishing something is different from treating it as entirely independent. The lapel is perfectly visible. Declaring the rest of the jacket foreign territory, however, belongs to the diplomacy of an imaginary tailoring plant.

Another version of the image is a drop drawn up from thick, transparent gel. It has an outline and remains connected to its base. An imaginary hand helps us picture the shape. It does not yet prove that the universe has an intentional creator. Picking up a metaphor does not automatically put God’s palm in your hand.

Now add experience. The fold feels tension, notices a neighbouring curve, retains the trace of a touch. From this position, some things are visible and others are not. Here something hurts; here something is remembered. “This is happening to me” becomes a meaningful statement. The Bureau has not even been built, but experience already has an address.

An ordinary morning helps explain this perspective. Before you have remembered your tasks, you feel light through your eyelids, the weight of the blanket, the position of your arm. Then your name, yesterday’s conversation, and the list of troubles return. Your biography arrives at a “here” that already exists, like a funeral band accidentally hired for a wake-up call.

In this hypothesis, the body helps create that “here.” A person is not an empty jug into which the cosmos pours consciousness up to a line. Through a particular organisation of living matter, the world becomes visible from here: with this memory, these habits, this attention and its limits.

When the conditions sustaining the form disappear, the perspective they support ends. That alone does not establish what happens to the proposed foundation. Within the image, the fabric might remain without this particular bend. A new manifestation might also be possible. Possibility, however, does not explain whether it would continue my own life.

A stationary fold is a poor image of constant change. It resembles an official who froze for his portrait and decided that this was now how life worked. We are going to need the sea.

II. The wave gets a passport

At the shore, you follow a wave. It rises, catches the light, grows, changes shape. You can still say, “That one.” Yet you cannot pull it out of the sea and put it on a shelf while keeping it a wave. Its separateness is a distinction within movement.

The wave is real: it rocks a boat, touches the shore, can knock someone over. Belonging to the sea does not make it imaginary. Our Bureau would love to issue such passports with a waterproof stamp. But a wave exists while it happens, not while its paperwork sits in a safe.

A childhood photograph presents a similar difficulty. The child feared different things, dreamed different dreams, had never met the people close to you today. You still say, “That’s me.” Recognisability survives change. The wave helps us imagine this, but does not yet settle what makes a person the same person.

Now imagine giving the wave the ability to feel. Movement acquires an inside: effort, encounters, fear, a history. “Something is happening to me” becomes “This is who I am,” and perhaps eventually “I exist entirely on my own.” At that last sentence, the Bureau opens its Department of Sovereign Splashes.

In this hypothesis, I use “soul” for the unique life itself, experienced from within: feeling, responding, loving, suffering, gathering what has happened. No extra tiny spectator inside is required. This is a proposed meaning of the word. It does not replace its religious meanings or prove immortality.

We are not declaring every splash of water or vibration conscious. We imagined a conscious wave, but still have to explain the conditions for experience. Foam does not automatically pass its soul exam.

A shared foundation does not make people identical, either. Each has a different path and different encounters. You cannot replace someone you love with a neighbour on the grounds that both belong to humanity. Love addresses this voice, this silence, these unexpected replies, and your history together. The sea does not offer interchangeable people at wholesale prices.

In this image, ego arises when the wave treats its current outline as the entirety of its existence. It must retain its height, superiority, recognition. Every change feels like death. The lapel orders a tomb for its former job title and climbs inside before it has even been fired.

There is another possibility: value life without demanding stillness; change without accusing yourself of betrayal; acknowledge another person’s reality even when they see things differently. When one wave subsides, the entire sea need not freeze. But the next wave does not thereby become the previous one. The question of personal continuation only becomes clearer.

III. Physics does not sew passports for souls

Quantum field theory lets us picture particles differently: as excitations of their corresponding fields. CERN explains the relationship between the Higgs boson and the Brout–Englert–Higgs field. The little independent ball turns out to be an inadequate picture.

There are multiple fields, however. Physics does not say that all particles are folds in a single conscious substance. The lapel tried to recruit the boson to its spiritual Bureau. The boson failed to attend, because the invitation was not a scientific argument.

Nor is the vacuum philosophical nothingness. In a simple account, it is the lowest-energy state of a field, with quantum properties. In David Tong’s course, the vacuum and particles are discussed within a physical theory. Under suitable conditions, particles can be created, but fields and laws are already involved. “From emptiness” does not mean “from the absolute absence of everything.”

The shift is useful for imagination: start with a foundation and ask how a distinguishable form arises. It prompted my conjecture about consciousness. Perhaps birth brings a particular perspective into being, while the possibility of experience belongs to a deeper organisation of reality.

Human thoughts do not have to be flying around everywhere in that proposed foundation. Without the conditions for a private perspective, there might be no name, biography, or observer resembling us. The cosmos is under no obligation to spend the night wondering whether it left the iron on.

But “field” here means a philosophically proposed common foundation. A physical claim would require defined quantities, laws of interaction with matter, and testable predictions. So far, we have no frequency of the soul, wavelength of personality, or instrument to measure them. The golden lapel sells a tape measure for greatness. That does not make it scientific equipment.

The image lets us ask how distinction can exist without complete separation. It has not yet measured an answer.

IV. Why your pain does not arrive by courier

A shared foundation alone does not explain a multitude of private inner worlds. If everything is one fabric, why doesn’t my tooth hurt you with the same immediacy? Sympathy is possible. A telepathic joint utility bill does not follow.

In Itay Shani’s 2015 paper, cosmopsychism proposes considering cosmic consciousness as the basis of individual consciousnesses. Instead of asking, “How do parts produce a conscious whole?” it reverses the question: “How does the conscious nature of the whole give rise to separate experiencing beings?”

A shared nature is different from a single whole. Two glasses can be made of the same kind of glass and remain two glasses. Similarities among consciousnesses do not yet establish a shared conscious subject. The fold hypothesis takes an additional step. It must answer for that step with arguments, not a decorative napkin.

After a hard day, someone says to a loved one, “You understand what it was like for me.” The other person may know the circumstances, guess the feelings, remember something similar. The first person’s pain does not move into them wholesale. There are still two histories of experience in the room. The Bureau calls this a wiring fault. For now, it is a fault in the Bureau’s explanation.

Thomas Nagel asks what it is like to be a bat: describing a creature’s structure and behaviour is not equivalent to possessing its perspective. David Chalmers distinguishes explaining functions from asking why they are accompanied by subjective experience.

The question’s unresolved status does not prove my hypothesis. Competing explanations remain. Cosmopsychism needs to show how a separate centre of experience arises and why its contents do not become publicly accessible.

The sea can even distract us: physical waves meet and influence one another. That is not yet an explanation of a private inner world. Why do I know my pain directly, while learning about yours through meeting you? The beautiful shared ocean has not paid this bill.

V. “Mine” does not yet mean “everything serves me”

A sense of a separate self is necessary for understanding who hurts, who needs help, who promised to come, and who is responsible for an action. That is not selfishness. Without such distinctions, the Bureau will send the painkillers to a chair because it is closer to the warehouse.

In chapter IX of The Principles of Psychology, William James describes the personal character of the stream of thought. My memories connect with my expectations; someone else’s thoughts do not enter my stream simply because we sit together. This approach deepens the difficulty for a unified consciousness rather than giving it a stamp of approval.

Shaun Gallagher distinguishes the minimal self from the narrative self. The first is the immediate “I see, I move, this happens to me.” The second is the story of who I am, who I was, and who I will be. Feeling your hand is different from telling the story “I’m someone who never gives up.” In life, the two are intertwined.

The narrative self can produce masterpieces: from five minutes of mistakes, it compiles the complete biography of an eternal failure, complete with marble bust. The bust costs more than fixing the mistake.

Even the sense that a body part belongs to you is not entirely fixed. Botvinick and Cohen’s 1998 study investigated the rubber-hand illusion: coordinated touches to a visible artificial hand and a hidden real hand can produce a feeling that the artificial hand belongs to the body. This narrow experiment in bodily perception does not discover an exit into a cosmic field. The rubber hand has not become Minister of Shared Consciousness.

The mistake begins with a stronger conclusion: “Since the experience is mine, everything must serve me.” A partner says, “I’d like to be alone today.” You can hear a statement about their condition. Or immediately declare yourself unwanted and demand proof to the contrary. The other person then becomes the customer support desk for your biography.

The fold is no longer content to exist: it must be higher. But a hypothesis of unity does not authorise forcibly flattening anyone. It is more useful to notice the shift from “This is happening to me” to “Everything must happen for my benefit.” To begin with, we can give the person beside us back their right to a separate story.

VI. The brain is involved, whatever the lapel says

If the form of experience depends on conditions, the body and brain are central to the question. Calling them a decorative slipcover for a ready-made observer would be too convenient. The Bureau loves such solutions: it takes out the engine and declares the car spiritually autonomous.

The same conversation feels different after a good sleep and after a sleepless night. The words are the same, but you have less attention, patience, and energy. This does not settle metaphysics. It shows why bodily conditions cannot be crossed out of experience. In the hypothesis, they shape available sensations, memory, and connections among events.

In a 2015 study, Schartner and colleagues examined EEG recordings from seven participants receiving propofol. Measures of complexity were lower in the state the researchers classified as loss of consciousness than during wakefulness. The small sample and particular protocol limit generalisation. The relationship between someone’s state and the organisation of brain activity can be studied concretely.

In 2013, Casali and colleagues proposed an index of the complexity of the brain’s response to magnetic stimulation. Observable responses are compared across different states. The instrument does not weigh a portion of cosmic consciousness or calculate how much soul remains before the next payment.

Seth and Bayne compare four influential approaches to consciousness and discuss meaningful testing. Oizumi, Albantakis, and Tononi’s integrated information theory connects experience with a system’s causal organisation. This is a separate programme, not another name for a shared field.

The question changes: not just “Where is consciousness stored?” but “What makes a particular experience possible?” Why do sensations form one world, memories connect, and your own pain differ from information about someone else’s? For a conscious wave, the conditions sustaining one life from within are crucial.

“The brain is a receiver” also needs explanation: what does it receive, how does it interact with the foundation, and what distinguishable predictions does it make? Drawing an antenna on a skull is easier than answering. For now, the antenna has merely transferred the mystery to Radio Supplies.

If the conditions of the form change, its manifestation changes. Which metaphysics best explains that dependence is a separate task. A successful image has not completed it.

VII. Related questions, separate answers

Different traditions reconsider the self-sufficiency of a separate “I.” It is useful to leave their answers different. The Cosmic Bureau wanted to assemble a common choir, but gave everyone the same lyrics and lost the meaning of every voice.

In the sixth part of the Chāndogya Upaniṣad, Uddālaka explains to Śvetaketu the relationship between clay objects and clay. Different names do not cancel their shared foundation. The formula tat tvam asi—“You are That”—is important for later Vedānta. A religious and philosophical text cannot be translated entirely into the language of a physical field. But the question of form and foundation does bring these images closer.

In Part I of Spinoza’s Ethics, particular things are modes of one substance; what exists is understood as existing in God. Such a God is not a person enlarged to the size of the universe. Nor does the system simply claim that the cosmos thinks exactly as I do, complete with sudden shame about a message sent eight years ago.

In the chapter on Adam in Ibn Arabi’s The Bezels of Wisdom, the world is likened to a mirror and the human being to its polishing. The subject is Divine self-disclosure. Its theological meaning is more definite than our fabric hypothesis. The mirror helps the conversation; it has not become one shared technical blueprint for every religion.

The Buddhist SN 22.59 offers important resistance. Form, feeling, perception, volitional formations, and consciousness are considered through anattā, “not-self”: they are not to be treated as a permanent self or its owner. This does not require an eternal universal Self behind them. You cannot enrol Buddhism in the Cosmopsychism Confirmation Department while ignoring what it says.

Plotinus’s One precedes Intellect. It is not an enormous version of our thinking that has finally lost track of all its passwords. The source is not identical to any particular thing: this aspect of the opening thought keeps the distinction alive.

These texts all help us ask about separateness, but travel by different routes. The fold enters a conversation with them. It does not inherit their entire authority like an heir who takes the family silver and throws in the dead general’s military achievements.

VIII. When the fold flattens out

Within the hypothesis, death means the end of the conditions for an individual experience. What happens to the proposed foundation remains open. Here, it is especially easy for a beautiful phrase to become more confident than its supporting reasons.

“Consciousness returned to the field.” But when does a wave return to the sea? It was the sea’s movement all along. The fabric does not take back something that never left it. A particular form ends. Others may remain.

“The field became calm” would also apply, at most, to this manifestation. One wave subsided; the whole sea did not become smooth. “Unmanifest” does not mean the former person is lying somewhere in the dark on a cosmic convalescent ward, waiting for the next admission. The absence of this perspective does not tell us what the proposed foundation experiences.

Discussing personal identity, Locke connects it with the continuation of consciousness directed towards one’s own past actions. Parfit explores cases where psychological continuity and strict identity diverge. Their arguments differ. Both help distinguish the survival of a foundation from the continuation of a particular person.

If “soul” here means this conscious wave, its further fate remains a mystery. A similar new wave does not automatically restore my memories, promises, or recognition of loved ones. Personal continuation needs a connection the metaphor has not yet shown. Two hopes differ: that the capacity for experience should extend beyond one life, and that my own story should continue.

The lapel tries to prove immortality by pointing to fabric in the warehouse. The argument resembles a theatre saying, “The actor has left, but the curtain is intact, so he’ll perform tomorrow.” The curtain has not supplied the missing connection.

In his letter to Menoeceus, Epicurus connects good and evil with sensation and proposes another way of looking at the fear of death. This is a philosophical argument, not proof of another birth. It does not cancel the grief of those who remain.

After a loss, the person’s favourite cup may still be on the table. You turn to say something and remember that you can no longer say it to them. You need this particular voice. A shared foundation, even if it exists, does not make someone else an automatic replacement. Here the Bureau’s jokes stop: the sea is a worthwhile image only while it helps us value a unique life rather than diminish the loss.

IX. A pause with nobody on observer duty

How long must we wait for another manifestation? The question already assumes there will be someone to wait, and that another manifestation will occur. Neither has yet been established.

An interval not experienced is different from the absence of time itself. After sleep or anaesthesia, someone may have no memory of its duration. Time has passed for clocks, doctors, and everyone around them. A memory gap alone does not even prove a complete absence of experience.

We can propose a timeless foundation. But ordinary sea waves arise one after another in time. The sea image does not prove that proposal. An additional hypothesis needs additional grounds; there are no free rides on somebody else’s metaphor.

In Book XI of the Confessions, Augustine reflects on memory, expectation, and the present, distinguishing human time from Divine eternity. This is a philosophical and theological discussion. In Book V, prose 6, Boethius distinguishes eternity from an endlessly long life. Continuing without end is different from not passing through moments in sequence.

Infinite clocks are still clocks. The Bureau advertises an eternal alarm clock outside time. It does not work, but the manual says this is its chief advantage.

If the foundation is timeless, we cannot simply make it “spend an infinite amount of time trying possibilities.” Trying them requires an order: first this one, then another. We could leave change to the world of conditions, where forms arise and disappear. The foundation need not experience the intervals.

If a new experience arises and there is nobody to experience time between manifestations, the interval will not be someone’s long wait. But the “if” remains. The absence of waiting does not create the next event. Even “immediately” needs care: it usually connects two events for one observer, and here neither that observer nor the second event has been established.

We are merely ceasing to picture the absence of experience as an endless night somebody must endure. The lapel has already sold tickets for that night, but the passenger, departure, and calendar exist only in its brochure.

X. Probability is not something you ladle out

“Infinity lies ahead, so I’m bound to appear again.” It sounds comforting. Mathematics would first like to see the conditions.

Suppose we draw a ball from a bag, replace it, and mix the contents. The probability of success on one trial is p, trials are independent, and the probability remains constant. The probability of at least one success in n trials is then:

1 − (1 − p)ⁿ.

For p > 0, as n increases without bound, the expression approaches one. The basis is the rules of independence presented, for example, in MIT’s probability course. This is a conditional model and a probabilistic conclusion. An appointment date for the event is not included.

We cannot silently assign all the bag’s conditions to the history of the universe. We do not know whether there are infinitely many suitable trials, whether the necessary states are accessible, whether a nonzero chance persists, or whether trials are independent. A long time does not mean something is possible. If there are no red balls in the bag, an eternal delivery service will not turn them red.

Nor is probability a stock of liquid that fills up to a “critical level” and releases consciousness. A manifestation may need some threshold of organisation. That is another question: which property changes, how is it measured, and why does it relate to experience? The lapel sells a Critical Probability Kettle. After boiling, all you get is soggy statistics.

It is more useful to ask about the conditions of a form: which connections are sustained, how experience becomes unified, and why some processes are experienced while others, presumably, are not. Here a philosophical image can pose a research question without impersonating its result.

The hand raising the fabric remains. Forms might arise through regularities, with chance, or perhaps with a direction we might call will. But the ability to feel does not yet mean an intention to create this particular life. That needs a separate argument.

The wave is more convenient in this respect: the sea’s movement is enough for the image, with no hand required above the surface. This does not prove the absence of a design. We simply have not settled the question of a creator through an artist’s accidental gesture.

XI. What an ordinary fold can do on Tuesday

Let us return from the field to the kitchen. There is a sharp message on the phone. Someone is waiting for an answer. The Cosmic Bureau opens its “Nobody Respects Me” file before finding out who the question was even addressed to.

The image suggests a small pause: the other person has an inner history, some of which is unavailable to me. I can clarify the situation before arguing with my own guess. That does not excuse rudeness or require putting up with it.

In Dōgen’s Genjōkōan, studying the self is connected with forgetting the self, in the context of Zen practice and loosening fixation on oneself. For everyday life, I read this as a possibility: sometimes stop measuring every event by “What does this say about me?” and notice the other person. Nobody has to disappear for someone else’s convenience.

Sympathy does not require proving a unified consciousness first. In Weng and colleagues’ study, after two weeks of compassion training, participants showed more altruistic behaviour in an experimental game than an active comparison group. This is a limited result from a specific design. It did not test cosmopsychism or promise universal transformation.

If the image helps, you can voluntarily choose one conversation and ask:

What is actually happening to me? Tiredness, fear, a particular hurt—or a ready-made story that “Nobody ever needs me”?
Which part of the other person’s story don’t I know yet? Can I safely ask about it without appointing myself clairvoyant?
What action takes both of us into account? Helping, asking a question, postponing the conversation, saying no, asking for support.

This is a suggestion, not a tested protocol. You can stop the exercise. If there is a threat, safety and help matter more. Individual boundaries, consent, and responsibility remain; a proposed unity gives nobody the right to control another life.

Someone grieving does not need an explanation that their pain is an illusion of separateness. Experience does not become trivial because of our metaphysics. A possible eternity does not replace a conversation we can still have today. Care can be specific: show up, listen, help with a task, respect a refusal.

At the end of our story, the lapel gives up its sovereign plaque. It does not disappear or lie down under an iron. It simply stops demanding that the entire suit serve its height. The neighbouring fold remains a neighbour, and the button is no longer a hostage to a worldview.

I like that possibility: live your uniqueness, change, love, care, refuse, and reconsider your certainties. Belonging to a whole, if there is one, does not require disappearing first. While a person is alive, what happens to them and between people matters.

I do not know whether consciousness works this way. The conjecture is clearer now: perhaps a separate self is a way in which the one becomes someone’s life. Perhaps we have not left the proposed foundation, but have learned to recognise ourselves by our outlines. This begins a conversation. It is not a lifetime passport issued by the Bureau.

Key thought

Boethius distinguishes a sequential life in time from eternity: what lives in time does not encompass all its moments at once. This paraphrases Book V, prose 6, using the English edition of I. T.’s translation, revised by H. F. Stewart. An infinitely long queue and no queue are different ideas.

Seven comparisons, with their differences intact

Question	What is compared	What remains different
How does a form relate to its foundation?	Clay in the Chāndogya, Spinoza’s modes, the fold and wave	A religious foundation, substance, and a hypothesis of consciousness are not identical.
How does the one allow the many?	Plotinus’s One, Ibn Arabi’s mirror, Shani’s cosmopsychism	Different metaphysics; for Plotinus, the One is above Intellect.
Why is experience someone’s?	James’s stream, Nagel’s perspective, Gallagher’s minimal self	Personal givenness proves neither a shared subject nor independent souls.
What sustains a state?	Schartner’s EEG, Casali’s index, Oizumi and colleagues’ theory	Brain organisation is studied; these methods do not measure a “cosmic field.”
What does loosening separateness mean?	“You are That,” anattā, Dōgen’s practice	The Vedāntic foundation and Buddhist not-self remain different.
What might continue?	Locke, Parfit, the soul as a conscious wave	A foundation, similar form, continuity, and personal identity are different questions.
Is eternity a lot of time?	Augustine, Boethius, the hypothesis’s timeless foundation	The absence of sequence is not infinite duration and does not prove another birth.

Sources and their roles

All 25 supports from the original article, and their limitations, are retained. Reports of reading primary sources refer to the preparation of the original; this version does not claim to have repeated a full audit. Where the original relied on an abstract or a particular passage, that scope has not been expanded.

Plotinus, The Six Enneads, V.1–2, translated by Stephen MacKenna. The One, Intellect, multiplicity; the original reports reading the relevant passages.
CERN, Where does the Higgs boson come from?. Particle and field: a physical explanation, not proof of cosmopsychism.
David Tong, Lectures on Quantum Field Theory. Vacuum and particles; access to the PDF during the original preparation was unstable. The course index and accessible passages were reported.
Itay Shani, Cosmopsychism: A Holistic Approach to the Metaphysics of Experience, 2015. The opening position as given in the publisher’s abstract, not the paper’s complete argument.
Thomas Nagel, What Is It Like to Be a Bat?, 1974. Subjective perspective; the original reports reading the university-hosted copy.
David Chalmers, Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness, 1995. Functions and subjective experience; the author’s version was used in the original.
William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. I, chapter IX, 1890. The personal stream of thought; the original preparation read the relevant section.
Shaun Gallagher, Philosophical conceptions of the self, 2000. Minimal and narrative self; originally the abstract, not the full text.
Matthew Botvinick, Jonathan Cohen, Rubber hands 'feel' touch that eyes see, 1998. Bodily self-attribution; originally the publisher’s abstract, without an account of quantitative effects.
Michael Schartner et al., Complexity of Multi-Dimensional Spontaneous EEG Decreases during Propofol Induced General Anaesthesia, 2015. Seven participants, EEG complexity; the original reports reading methods, results, and Figure 7.
Adenauer Casali et al., A theoretically based index of consciousness independent of sensory processing and behavior, 2013. Response complexity index; originally the abstract, not the complete protocol.
Anil Seth, Tim Bayne, Theories of consciousness, 2022. A review of four approaches; originally the available abstract and glossary.
Masafumi Oizumi, Larissa Albantakis, Giulio Tononi, Integrated Information Theory 3.0, 2014. A separate theoretical programme; originally the abstract and introductory framing.
Chāndogya Upaniṣad, VI, translated by Max Müller, 1879. Clay and tat tvam asi, VI.1.4/VI.8.7; originally these passages.
Spinoza, Ethics, Part I, translated by R. H. M. Elwes. Definitions III–V and proposition XV; substance and modes.
Ibn Arabi, Fusus al-Hikam, chapter on Adam, translated by Bulent Rauf with Rosemary Brass and Hugh Tollemache through an Ottoman text with commentary. Originally the accessible mirror passage.
SN 22.59, Pañcavaggi Sutta / Anatta-lakkhaṇa Sutta, translated by Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu, 1993. Not-self and the five aggregates; originally the complete text of this translation.
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II.XXVII. Identity and the continuation of consciousness; originally §§ 9–10 and surrounding context.
Derek Parfit, Personal Identity, 1971. Continuity and identity; the original reports reading the university-hosted copy.
Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus, translated by Robert Drew Hicks. Sensation and the fear of death; originally the letter’s text.
Augustine, Confessions, book XI, translated by E. B. Pusey. Time, memory, eternity; originally the relevant passages, including XI.14.
Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, V, prose 6, I. T.’s 1609 translation, revised by H. F. Stewart, 1918 edition. Eternity and duration; originally the English passage and a comparison with the Latin.
MIT OpenCourseWare, 18.05: Introduction to Probability and Statistics, Spring 2022. Independence conditions and discrete distributions; the formula is derived in the article, not automatically transferred to cosmology.
Dōgen, Genjōkōan / Actualizing the Fundamental Point, translated by Robert Aitken and Kazuaki Tanahashi, 2000 revision. Originally the collection’s first text and the context of studying the self; eight translations are not eight independent sources.
Helen Weng et al., Compassion training alters altruism and neural responses to suffering, 2013. Two-week training, active comparison, behavioural outcome: a limited experiment, not a test of unified consciousness.

Tags: consciousness, cosmopsychism, perspective, personhood, soul, ego, body, brain, quantum field theory, vacuum, metaphor, wave, Vedānta, anattā, Plotinus, Spinoza, Ibn Arabi, Dōgen, death, identity, time, eternity, probability, compassion, personal boundaries, United Wisdom.

About the authors

Andrey Zarinsh is an author and the founder of United Wisdom. He explores inner transformation, the unity of traditions, intercultural dialogue, and contemporary spiritual discipline. Instagram: @andrey.zarinsh.

Maria Evilkut is a co-author of United Wisdom. She tests ideas in the experience of relationships and observes how mutual understanding works between people and cultures. Instagram: @ilkutki.

Andrey Zarinsh & Maria Evilkut · United Wisdom · Laboratory of Unified Wisdom.