Monopsychism

Monopsychism is the belief that all humans share one and the same eternal consciousness, soul, mind or intellect. It is a recurring theme in many mystical traditions.

Monopsychism is a doctrine of Sabianism, Jewish Kabbalah, and Averroism, and is also a part of Rastafarian beliefs. A similar belief in some mystical Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions is that all human beings have different souls but once composed a single unified soul in Adam.

Aquinas

Thomas Aquinas disagreed with this belief and devoted most of his writing about Averroism to criticizing monopsychism. One of these works, essentially a commentary on Aristotle's On the soul, is De unitate intellectus contra Averroistas. Aquinas demonstrates how Averroes has misinterpreted Aristotle's argument, claiming that the correct interpretation is 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