An excerpt from: Grayson, Henry (2004-03-08). Mindful Loving (p. 42). Gotham Books. Kindle Edition.
“Similarly, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger, in Mind and Matter, spoke of there being not millions of separate minds, but just one mind in the universe:
Consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in the singular. Not only has none of us ever experienced more than one consciousness, but there is no trace of circumstantial evidence of this ever happening anywhere in the world. . . . Mind is by its very nature a singulare tantum. . . . The overall number of minds is just one.
David Bohm recognized the error in the way we typically view the world and ourselves in it when he said, “Perhaps there is more sense in our non-sense, and more nonsense in our sense than we would dare to believe.” We might therefore conclude that our tribe’s commonly accepted concept of separateness is actually part of the “non-sense,” in what we usually call sense. (We will go into more depth about the relevance of new physics to healing our relationship problems later in this chapter.)
And the philosopher Aldous Huxley concluded from his studies of Western science and Eastern philosophy that “oneself as a separate ego enclosed in a bag of skin is an hallucination which accords neither with Western science nor with the experimental philosophy and religions of the East.”
Just the suggestion that we may not be separate selves makes most people quite anxious. But Albert Einstein had a profound awareness of our gross misunderstanding of who and what we are, and suggested a possible solution:
A human being is part of the whole that we call the universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical illusion of his consciousness. This illusion is a prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for only the few people nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living things and all of nature.
From: Grayson, Henry (2004-03-08). Mindful Loving (p. 42). Gotham Books. Kindle Edition.