Whirlpool

Rupert Spira borrows Bernardo Kastrup's metaphor of the whirlpool in a stream of water. If you go to a stream and you see a whirlpool, you can localize it. You can delineate its boundaries; you can point at it and say, “There is a whirlpool.” It is very concrete, very defined. There is no question about how palpable and material it is. At the same time, there is nothing to the whirlpool but water. It is just made of water and yet it localizes water in a sort of loopy trajectory that sort of limits and filters down, if you will, limits the water molecules to a specific circular trajectory. It doesn't allow those molecules to traverse the entire stream. Rupert Spira suggest that the same happens in the case of our individual minds - they are figments in consciousness, and yet represent a process through which consciousness localizes itself.