A Jigsaw Puzzle Of Awareness

Locke and later Hume, applied a similar pragmatic criticism to the notion of spiritual substance. I will only mention Locke’s treatment of our personal identity. He immediately reduces this notion to its pragmatic value in terms of experience. It means, he says so much ‘consciousness,’ namely the fact that at one moment of life we remember other moments and feel them all as parts of one and the same personal history. Rationalism had explained this practical continuity in our life by the unity of soul-substance.

But Locke says: suppose that God should take away the consciousness, should we be any the better for having still the soul-principle? Suppose he annexed the same consciousness to different souls, should we,, as we realize ourselves, be any the worst for that fact? In Locke’s day the soul was chiefly a thing to be rewarded or punished.

William James in his 1907 essay, Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered brings the mental juices to a simmer with Locke’s 17th century thoughts about consciousness and God. He believed that one was distinctly separate from the other and he also believed that the soul was a religious football that could be thrown between the goals of lightness and darkness. Those ideas are beginning to boil and unity is beginning to come to the surface.

Consciousness and God are in the same stream with the soul. That stream is filled with other aspects of consciousness that express life physically as well as non-physically. The soul is not confined to one physical individual; each personality carries traces of other consciousness so there is a world of consciousness, which is a jigsaw puzzle of awareness in which each identity no matter how large or small has a part.

The soul is not a unit that is definable. It is an undefined quality which cannot be broken down or built up or destroyed, but it can change affiliations and organizations as well as characteristics and still remain itself. Those remembered moments of life are the expression of counterparts that bleed through the psyche and manifest as reincarnational lives. The soul exists in all of those counterparts as a whole as well as part of a greater being.

Contrary to what Locke believed we are not instruments being played by some God sitting in judgment and then rewarding or punishing souls; we are the composer, the symphony, and the audience. We are classical musicians as well as rockers and rappers’ moving through the vibrations of consciousness, and our performance does not contradict the performance of any other form of consciousness.

Our symphony is not only based on physical expressions; it's based on the silence between the notes, which highlights as well as frames the notes. The soul and the psyche exist in more that one place at once just like an apple which can be found on a tree, on the ground or on a table. We are capable of endless notes and each note is capable of endless creative variations.