Episode Details

Arnold Zuboff is a philosopher and the creator of Universalism, which is the idea that there is only one “I”, only one subject and that subject is the “I” in every conscious experience. Zuboff writes about this at length in his book entitled Finding Myself - Beyond the False Boundaries of Personal Identity.

In the same way that there is only one novel called “Moby Dick” yet there are multiple books which contain that novel as a physical instantiation of the tale by Herman Melville, Zuboff argues that although there are many beings which can instantiate the contents of a conscious experience, there is only one subject of experience only one I. He appeals to the immediacy of experience. There is only one “here”, there is only one “now”, even though we can look back on many “there”s and “then”s.

Douglas Harding had a similar point of view saying that the “I am” is “first person, singular, present tense”. One of the experiments of the Headless Way is called the “No-head Circle”. A group of friends gathers in a circle with arms around each other, facing inwards towards the center of the circle. Looking down, one sees all the separate feet, and legs. Following them up we see separate torsos. Follow them up even further though while still looking down, we see that the many separate bodies fade out and merge into the one singular first-person experience of looking down. The many bodies appear in the one consciousness.