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Great, can you explain that with the video game metaphor? Would really help me out in my understanding.
Here is Tom on World of Warcraft:
Reply to Josh by Tom: Josh, Ted’s comments were right on. Consciousness appears to be an open system designed to encourage success. Marginal players don’t get tossed out, they get helped. There are always new players entering the system. Capacity does not seem to be a problem. The system appears to be very patient, compassionate, loving, and supportive. Abject failure requires steady effort and dedication to negative evolution.
The words are confusing you because they are being used within different contexts and because you see yourself, relative to your "higher-self", as an independent being. Physical death is no more real than physical life -- neither one exists. Saying that you are immortal in the normal sense of that English word means that you survive physical death. That concept of immortality (surviving physical death) is nothing more than an erroneous little picture view lost in the habits of limited PMR thinking.
If there is no such thing as physical life, how can there be such a thing as physical death? Let me try to develop a more accurate, less limited perspective with some computer game metaphors. Like any metaphor, the fit is never perfect but I think it might lead you to a more useful perspective. Hopefully it will not scare you or depress you. If it does it will be because of a small PMR perspective becoming inadvertently twisted around self focused ego.
You, the Josh-guy you identify with as being you, is not an independent being. Josh-guy is just a character in a virtual reality simulator game that is animated by your consciousness. Very much like the lizard-man or wizard or barbarian you make up in World of Warcraft. Except in the PMR game you don't roll dice or pick from a list to determine a character's characteristics which define the abilities and limitations (decision space) with which you must work as your free will makes the choices that determine what that character does within the game. Instead you "birth" a character and let it develop and interact while you, as before, are at the helm making choices and generating intent for your character.
So, your individuated unit of consciousness (IUOC) is playing in the PMR virtual reality trainer and he picks a situation (perhaps as part of a plan with some friends who are also playing the game) and births a potential character onto the playing field (Virtual Earth) to suit whatever strategy he has in mind to raise his characters "level" as quickly as possible. He may or may not get exactly what he wants in a character because the birth algorithms within the games rule-set contain a lot of uncertainty which keeps the game more interesting and challenging since it inhibits players from stacking the deck in their favor by always dealing themselves pat hands. The Josh-guy character birthed in the VR (generated by the PMR rule-set) is really just a set of data and rules that must remain consistent with the causality defined by the PMR rule-set (i.e., the Josh-guy is a computer model -- a probability and statistics model -- just like lizard-man). It is the players consciousness (the IUOC player provides the free will and intent) that animates the Josh-guy character with motivation/intent and makes the choices available to the characters decision space (just like you do with lizard-man).
As the IUOC player makes choices in the present moment of game play from the array of future possibilities, he “collapses the probability wave function” to a specific result that becomes part of the historic database of the virtual PMR game. (See how the process fractal pattern repeats at each level?) The player has to “level up” his character through his characters experience so he can evolve that character to a larger decision space which gives the IUOC more choices and possibilities to work with.
The virtual Josh-guy character, generated by the computer in the mind of the IUOC, is limited to the virtual PMR game play viewpoint in which he was birthed and in which he experiences (just like lizardman). He calls his IUOC his soul or higher self because he thinks of himself as a real, independent being within PMR making decisions with his own personal consciousness that belongs just to him. Thus his higher self must be a “different” being (because everything that is not him must be different and independent of him from the PMR viewpoint).
Josh-guy believes that his independent consciousness will one day merge with the quite different (bigger, better) IUOCs consciousness because he cannot fathom that his consciousness is nothing other than the IUOCs playing a PMR experience game in a virtual reality trainer. When you play your Lizard–man in World of Warcraft (WOW), can you not parallel process and eat some Pizza and talk to your friends who are also playing WOW with you at the same time? If you are young enough, you can probably handle all that while pretending to do your homework.
Because you are doing these other things (and lizard man only gets some fraction of your attention) does that mean that the intents and choices you make when you are playing your lizard man character are somehow no longer precisely representative of you? Does it make sense that you are actually a whole lot wiser and more evolved and better at playing the PMR game than the way you play your lizard man? No. You always play lizard man pretty much to the best of your ability – his consciousness is, in fact, your consciousness. There are not two separate consciousnesses here (yours and a higher self) – just one consciousness trying to evolve its quality by playing a multiplayer virtual reality game as best he can and doing a little parallel processing on the side to meet the larger demands of existence (like eating pizza).
Could you have two computers going and be playing two characters at the same time? What if a friend came over who was really good at getting through a particular situation; would you get help? When your character slept, would you use your “dream spell” or OOBE spell to try to give him or her some insight or special experience that would help them level up sooner? Would you test him or her below the intellectual level to find out what is really under the hood (and to avoid the useless PMR ego based jibber jabber you would otherwise get) to determine what the best learning strategies might be? Well, you might if your own success depended on how much your character leveled up – i.e., if what you learned in the game leveled you up as well. After all that is what VR trainers are for. Do you see that your questions don’t make sense?
A character like Josh-guy is an imagined virtual being, a character in a chapter of a book generated by a rule-set that may or may not pop up again in subsequent chapters depending how useful he is to the story. In the real world there is only consciousness. The little man behind the curtain running the Josh-Guy character (providing the Joshguy’s character with consciousness and free will, is the real Josh – the character/personality (the suave debonair, cool guy) you are today in this particular chapter (experience packet) is just a creation of the VR trainer – a virtual wrapper for the IUOC to use in the trainer so that the IUOC can evolve more efficiently through the interactive experience of PMR. The only thing real and fundamental about Josh is Josh’s consciousness and that is effectively immortal. Josh, the personality, is a virtual being in an experience packet story that, if it happens to be productive, will be used over and over – a favorite persona. However other personas (male and female, grumpy and happy, bright and dull) are required at times to produce a more rounded experience base.
Obsessing over the immortality of some largely random, virtual personawrapper generated by the trainer’s rule-set for the consciousness to wear in one or more of ten thousand experience packets makes no sense. Do you obsess over the value of the wrappers your candy bars come in – do you save them all?
You need to identify with your consciousness, not your body, personality, sex, IQ, cool index, or quirky habits. Next time you birth a wrapper in which to learn, all that stuff will very likely be different – only the consciousness will be the same. The personality is not integral to the consciousness – it is in large part a function of your body – driven by your biochemistry and genetics and influenced by the experiences and interactions you just happened to have in this experience packet. The more you grow, the more your consciousness and personality become intertwined. Tom C (MBT Events resources forum 2.0)