There is only cosmic consciousness. We, as well as all other living organisms, are but dissociated alters of cosmic consciousness, surrounded by its thoughts. The inanimate world we see around us is the extrinsic appearance of these thoughts.
An oxygen and two hydrogen atoms combine to form a water molecule: they become intrinsically altered in the process of forming covalent bonds with one another, but continue nonetheless to exist in the resulting molecule.
I submit that cosmic dissociation happens precisely at the level of living beings with unitary consciousness, such as you and me. You and I are alters of cosmic consciousness.
Hoffman uses the analogy of a computer desktop: although a computer file is represented in it as, for instance, a blue rectangle, this does not mean that the file itself has the qualities of being blue and rectangular. As a matter of fact, the actual file does not have those qualities at all: it is a pattern of open and closed microscopic switches in a silicon chip. In an analogous way, my hypothesis is that the qualities we experience on the screen of perception—colors, sounds, flavors, textures, etc.—are not the qualities experienced by the segment of cosmic consciousness that surrounds our alter, but their ‘desktop representation’ instead.
All alters are immersed, like islands of a single ocean, in the thoughts that constitute the concealed side of the inanimate cosmos.
There is only cosmic consciousness. We, as well as all other living organisms, are but dissociated alters of cosmic consciousness, surrounded by its thoughts. The inanimate world we see around us is the revealed appearance of these thoughts. The living organisms we share the world with are the revealed appearances of other dissociated alters.