Monopsychism
Monopsychism is the belief that all humans share the same eternal consciousness, soul, mind and intellect. It is also a recurring feature in many mystical traditions.
Monopsychism is a doctrine of Sabianism, Jewish Kabbalah, and Averroism, and also forms a part of the Rastafarian belief system. This is similar to that of monotheism, which is a primary belief that all souls were once a unified soul in Adam. This is a main, shared feature of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas disagreed with this belief and devoted most of his writing to Averroism and criticized monopsychism. One of his works, a commentary on Aristotle's On the soul, is titled De unitate intellectus contra Averroistas.[1] In this commentary, Aquinas demonstrates how Averroes misinterpreted Aristotle's argument, claiming that the correct interpretation was that an individual's intellect cannot be independent of his or her physical body.
(...) intellect, can be separated, not indeed from body, as the Commentator (Averroes) perversely interprets, but from other parts of the soul (...)— Aquinas
See also
- Advaita Vedanta
- Collective unconscious
- Neoplatonism
- Open individualism
- Panpsychism
- Pantheism
- Unus mundus