Oneself and Someone Else in the Same Instant

We rely on one rule so constantly that we rarely notice it. At any given moment, I am one person. I can remember being different, or picture becoming someone else, but now, in this instant, there is only one of me, and everyone else is somewhere outside.

Try suspending the rule for a moment. Not one self and then another, the way we wake from a dream and come back to ourselves. Not one self remembering the other. Both at once, each present to itself, neither erasing the other. The sentence is easy to write and hard to think. The question is whether that "either me or someone else" is a law of thought or only a habit.

Jane Roberts had a personal reason to ask. An American writer, she published, from the 1960s on, a long run of books she understood to have been dictated or written through her by other personalities, the best known of whom she called Seth. Decades later the question was taken up by Peter Skafish, whose 2011 doctoral dissertation in medical anthropology at Berkeley is titled From Another Psyche. In the opening lines of its abstract, Skafish names what he sees as the most pressing question her years of trance left her with: how could her experience "of being herself and another self in the same instant of time" be possible? Her name for it, he writes, was "other-consciousness."

Nothing here depends on deciding who or what Seth was. The question holds for a reader who gives Seth no credence at all, because the rule it presses on is one everybody uses.

What does matter is keeping track of who is speaking, since the voices overlap easily. There are Roberts's books, with Seth's voice inside them. There is Skafish, interpreting them. And there is the reading this note offers. Skafish plays openly with that overlap: he wrote the sixth chapter of his dissertation as if Seth were its author. In that voice, which is his and not Roberts's, he remarks that treating Seth as merely a fantasy of Jane's "would help more than hurt" the argument. The concept is what interests him, wherever it came from.

Both lines at once

The Seth material gives the idea a definite shape. In Session 692, dated 24 April 1974 and later part of The "Unknown" Reality, Seth says that without understanding or training you would have to "lose" your own consciousness in order to perceive this other one. The alternative takes a single sentence: "You would need another self, able to hold both lines of consciousness at once, lost in neither but maintaining footing in each."

This is not a change of shift, one personality stepping in as the other steps out. It asks for the opposite: neither line gives way. Two months earlier, in Session 683 of 18 February 1974, the thought is extended to everyone. "You are multipersons," Seth says. "You exist as one person, simultaneously." And: "your inner reality straddles their reality."

Skafish treats what looks like a contradiction as a claim about consciousness worth working out. His abstract states the stakes: our most basic sense of ourselves would shift "from apperception to a consciousness of oneself as both oneself and another." Apperception is the philosophers' word for the awareness of being me that runs beneath every experience, even an absent-minded one.

That does not mean trance switches ordinary awareness off. Skafish sets the idea against multiple personality and most cases of spirit possession, where personalities alternate and one dominates at a time, and judges that such states fall far short of a consciousness in which all of them are present together.

What dreams can do

To make a doubled self thinkable, Skafish calls on two French philosophers and gives each a different task. The first is Jean-Paul Sartre, whom he reads in the English translation The Psychology of the Imagination. In the passages Skafish quotes, Sartre separates perception from the mental image. A perceived thing has a definite place in space and time and cannot be itself and something else at once; the object of an image meets those conditions only imperfectly. "This is why in a dream, one person can be several persons at once."

Skafish takes two points from this. In the image, identity stops behaving as it does in perception; and the consciousness doing the imagining is still, fully, consciousness. That is where he places Roberts's own answer: other-consciousness comes about not through language but when the subject sees itself in the non-sensory mental images of dream and imagination.

The two things should be kept apart, though. A dream figure who stands for several people is a multiple image: we look at it, but that alone is not enough to show that the dreamer is more than one. A consciousness that lives itself as several distinct selves, each present to itself, is something else, because the multiplicity has moved from the object to the one looking. On Skafish's reading, Sartre describes the first and Roberts the second.

That gap is exactly what makes Skafish's move worth following. His argument is that once the subject appears to itself inside the image, the loosening of identity that dream figures enjoy can reach the self as well. The step is not automatic, and that is where his reading does its work.

The present, seen from the threshold

Roberts was more than a source of concepts. In Adventures in Consciousness, a 1975 book written in her own voice rather than Seth's, she describes a summer when she had set up a new studio. Next to it was a small kitchen, once a sun porch, made almost entirely of windows, inches from the leaves of a huge oak. It was July. She sat there for hours with her coffee, looking out.

Then something began to happen. She felt as if she and the leaves were changing places, and from a leaf's side she could see herself through the open windows, sitting at the table. "The dimensions of the present moment opened up," she writes: in any given instant the ordinary back yard, its trees and lawns and gardens, came into a new life that had been there all along.

Elsewhere in the same book, describing pages written in an altered state, she recalls being fully aware while part of her awareness was tuned, as she puts it, to one particular station. Her phrase for it could serve as a motto for this whole story: "It's like sitting at the threshold of yourself."

For Skafish, the simultaneity Roberts proposes raises a second problem, this time about time. If identity can be plural within one present, perhaps that present can be thought of as something less simple than a point on a line. This is not a forced conclusion; it is a possibility the texts suggest and Skafish develops. He reads Roberts's plural person as one in which different times, or instants of time, converge while remaining somehow apart.

This is where the second philosopher comes in. Skafish calls Gilles Deleuze the thinker with whom Roberts, without ever knowing it, had the greatest affinity. From Cinema 2 he takes the idea of a present that is already past at the moment it is present, or it would never pass, and of a past that does not follow the present but coexists with it.

Deleuze is also his opponent. Skafish attributes to him the view that the self, as it actually is, cannot fuse with its other potentials, and should not want to: what we might have been stays apart from what we are. Roberts, for Skafish, unsettles that separation. A subject that was at once itself and another, his abstract says, "would also be both what it actually is and what it otherwise only could have been."

The Seth texts give this an image. Chapter 17 of Seth, Dreams and Projections of Consciousness says that "warping outward from each act are a million openings," and that "any one moment in physical time then is a warp, opening into these other dimensions of actuality." The moment, the same sentence goes on, "can be used as a passageway or bridge." And: "The physical moment is transparent, though you give it a time-solidity."

One can read the back-yard scene as a lived version of that sentence: for a few hours Roberts is at the table and among the leaves, and the present widens instead of narrowing to a point. One can also read the question about time not as a second theme but as the same question, put to the instant rather than to the person. These are this note's readings. The texts make them possible; they do not prove them.

How far does Skafish go? His conclusion holds that Roberts's concepts, once read and understood, prove not only viable but sound enough to be explicated with precision. He adds at once that more work is needed before her other consciousness is fully realized as a concept, and he describes his sixth chapter as the beginnings of a new argument.

The strength of the dissertation is philosophical: it concerns what can be rigorously thought. It is not an empirical test of what Seth says about the world, and does not present itself as one. Skafish returned to Roberts, chiefly in conversation with Deleuze, in a 2016 article in Common Knowledge.

A dream, meanwhile, can show figures in which one person takes on the traits or identities of several people, and we pass through them without ceasing to be conscious. The question Roberts left, and Skafish took seriously, is whether one can get from that multiple image to a multiple consciousness while awake. And so whether "either me or someone else" was ever a law.