does anyone else feel like there's only one consciousness experiencing everything?
okay so I went down a rabbit hole tonight and I can't stop thinking about this. there's this wild physics theory from the 1940s where a physicist named Wheeler proposed that there's only one electron in the entire universe, and it just travels forward and backward through time so fast that it appears to be everywhere at once. every electron you've ever learned about in chemistry class might literally be the same one, just... flickering through time. and I had this thought: what if consciousness works the same way? like what if there isn't your awareness and my awareness and a dog's awareness and a whale's awareness, what if there's just one consciousness, and it experiences every single life, one at a time (or all at once, outside of time)? you're not a person having a conscious experience. you're consciousness itself, trying on a human life for a while. and when this one ends, it moves to another, a child being born somewhere, an animal, whoever. all of it. every perspective that has ever existed or will exist. it would explain why awareness feels the same from the inside no matter who you are. why empathy is even possible. why loneliness feels so strange and wrong, because on some level we know separation is the illusion. apparently this maps almost exactly onto a Hindu philosophical tradition called Advaita Vedanta that's been saying this for thousands of years. and Schopenhauer basically got there too. and Alan Watts spent his whole career trying to explain it to Westerners. I'm not saying I believe it. I just can't find a reason to dismiss it either. if it's true, every person you've ever been annoyed at, every stranger on the subway, every person you wrote off, you were looking at yourself. you just didn't recognize you yet. anyway it's 2am and I'm a little down a rabbit hole, has anyone else thought about this or am I just sleep deprived