The Oneness of Mind

The conviction that consciousness is ultimately one is the strangest thing Schrödinger believed and the one he held most consistently, and it must be taken seriously rather than set aside as eccentricity. It grew from what he called the arithmetic paradox: the world, as each of us experiences it, is one world, a single unified field of awareness—each consciousness presents one integrated scene, not a committee of perceptions. Yet there are billions of such unified worlds. How can there be many ones? How can the singular, indivisible character of consciousness coexist with the plain fact of vast numbers of conscious beings? His resolution, drawn from the Vedanta philosophy he studied seriously for decades, was radical: the multiplicity of minds is in some sense an appearance, and consciousness is fundamentally singular—that there is, in the deepest analysis, one mind, of which individual consciousnesses are aspects rather than separate instances. He stated it as a provocation: the total number of