Re: What the $#@% Do We Know!?
However that is very different when in physical reality. For example; within your dreams, all the characters are an aspect of your own consciousness. However, in physical reality; each consciousness has its own experience.
I think it's more subtle than this. In physical reality / shared dream, each soul has a direction and autonomy of its own. However we meet a particular soul because they represent something (an archetype) in our own dream, and because we represent something in their dream. So it's important to both recognize this autonomy (ie. this person is not "mine") and that we have something to learn from this person. I think it comes down to detachment in the end.
Here's what a psychologist has to say about this. He talks about the personal dream but I think it applies equally well for the shared dream:
Multiplication of persons may be used as a therapeutic tool in order to bring home the realization that "the ego complex is not the only complex in the psyche". By actively imagining the psyche into multiple persons, we prevent the ego from identifying with each and every figure in a dream and fantasy, each and every impulse and voice. For the ego is not the whole psyche, only one member of a commune. Therapy works through the paradox of admitting that all figures and feelings of the psyche are wholly "mine", while at the same time recognizing that these figures and feelings are free of my control and identity, not "mine" at all.
Personifying helps place subjective experiences "out there"; thereby we can devise protections against them and relations with them. Through multiplicity we become internally more separated; we become aware of distinct parts. Even should unity of personality be an aim, "only separated things can unite", as we learn from the old achemical psychologists. Separation comes first. It is a way of gaining distance. This separation (in the language of alchemy) offers internal detachment, as if there were now more interior space for movement and for placing events, where before there was a conglomerate adhesion of parts of a monolithic identification with each and all, a sense of being stuck in one's problem (p.31)
I love this quote
I have found this separation to be very important for me in the past months. Instead of taking everything personnally, I can see more clearly what's going on, feel the energies and act more impeccably, while before it was a confusing mish-mash of everything that was paralysing me.
On another note, I realized recently that those with a strong STS polarity tend to live fully in the dream/unconscious and thus the people they meet are literrally the archetypes of their own dreams of which they are God. So maybe STS means "service to own dream", while STO means "service to cosmic Dream".