The Playground of Consciousness
Part 3: The Dynamics of Creation
Dreams and Individuality
Meaningful perspectives
In order to achieve the most complete expansion, All That Is created units of individuality of all shapes and sizes. Logical consistency demands that every pattern is explored from every possible perspective. However, some perspectives will be more significant than others. Let us start with purely physical structures. What is it that differentiates a collection of billions of atoms scattered throughout the planet from the body of a human being, which is - after all - just another collection of billions of atoms? We find the answer when we look at this situation from the many-worlds perspective. For a random collection, it doesn’t matter much which atom is where. Its properties will not change much. With a human being, however, changing some genetic sequences may radically change the behavior of the whole organism. In order to maintain its unique properties, there has to be some structural consistency across the many worlds.
It follows that, even though every possible option is explored, the most significant contributions will come from patterns with some meaningful structure. Physical reality is such a structured entity which is from our point of view of enormous size. Within that, there are further individualized structures, from species to civilizations to single persons and animals to cells to molecules to elementary particles. The total pattern of physical reality is explored from each of these perspectives.
One important thing to note here is the obvious fact that the same pattern is explored from different perspectives simultaneously.
Expansion and the dream state
We will now take a closer look at the process of expansion. We start with a pattern with a boundary. We can expand beyond this boundary by letting this pattern resonate with some other patterns. By doing this, we excite new elements in our own pattern, and expand its boundaries. When we translate this into the patterns of our physical reality, the expansion corresponds to imagining new possibilities. But now we find ourselves in a position similar to All That Is - we cannot expand except by setting boundaries within those fields of possibilities. And so we chose one possibility for further exploration. A new boundary has been set.
From a larger perspective, things are slightly more complicated. There is no reason to choose one option over another, and so all possible options are explored. What we get is a kind of gestalt consciousness that simultaneously experiences the various options it had imagined.
As mentioned in the previous section, the same pattern is explored from many individualized points of view. There is therefore a different kind of gestalt of all the actors in the scenario that is being played out. We will have more to say later about the interactions between actors within and across scenarios and realities.
Now, imagine what is like for such a gestalt consciousness to imagine possibilities. The enormity of options that are available, and the immense creativity that is at work here.
I propose that dreams are the translation of this infinitely rich and continuous activity into terms that are meaningful for the individualized consciousness. The fundamental reality of dreams, then, is not some individual action within the brain of a sleeping person. Dreaming is not some individual activity that is isolated from everyone else.
Dreaming is a collective activity, to which each individual contributes quite actively and automatically. Every individualized consciousness, human beings, societies, animals, plants, electrons, they all experience this dream world from their own unique point of view.
Individuality
All That Is is the Universal Pattern, the pattern of all patterns. It is infinite and whole, and as such undifferentiated. In its unlimited-ness, it found something it can do something new and creative by looking at itself in different ways - experiencing itself not as this one enormous pattern, but as each of infinitely many smaller patterns. There are elements in our own experience (as sub-patterns of the Universal Patterns) that we can’t assign to All That Is as a whole. This has even been proven mathematically! In a remarkable piece of work by Cantor in the last century, he proved that the Universal Set, the set of all possible sets - in our terms the pattern of all patterns - was not actually a set.
Experience then is a journey through the infinite patterns of All That Is. Our individuality is defined by the unique boundaries of the patterns within our awareness. We will use the word entity for any such individualized consciousness. Expansion of awareness is easily achieved by setting up an appropriate resonance with a larger pattern. Contraction is achieved by temporarily limiting the range of experience to a certain subset of the pattern.
A journey implies some kind of sequence, and this is one element that can’t be assigned to All That Is as a whole. The dynamics of the cloud is to be found in the various patterns - including the sequences - of experience as produced by resonant interactions between patterns.
The same is true for expansion. Even though it is meaningful to speak of expansion of every part of All That Is, it is meaningless when we try to apply it to the whole.
This expansion is driven by this creative tension between the desire to stay within certain boundaries, and the desire to transcend them.
[Introduction](.) | [Experiments and Experience](experiments-and-experience) | [Expanding the Playground](expanding-the-playground) | [The Dynamics of Creation](the-dynamics-of-creation)