I have used the words “souls” or “individuals” indistinctly so far, but there are some important precisions to be made at this point for a deeper understanding of the STR model. On the one hand we have all the characters of the continuum. These are people with appearance of consciousness who play certain roles along a wide range of realities in which they are active. These characters have a first name and last name, a certain physical appearance, a unique genetic code, even a defined personality. But these characters are not necessarily provided of actual consciousness in the realities in which they are perceived by others. Some of them can be empty characters, whereas others can have their full consciousness (souls) attached to them. Souls, on the other hand, are conscious agents connected to these characters through a process of identification. Their function is to consciously experience the STR across a single path of their choice. Souls are provided with free will, which they can use to define in what way they will live their character’s story.

Let’s say, for example, there’s a character called Mara Freedman. She was your fifth grade math teacher. You haven’t seen her ever since and have no idea of what’s been of her life. But back then, she did and said some things that you remember, and acted in a coherent way, with appearance of self-consciousness. Now that you know that you were only perceiving one particular value of the R-coordinate, in the midst of an enormous range of other possible values for her character, you must be wondering if her soul (her consciousness) was really there. Was she perceiving the same plane of reality than you, or another one, completely different, in which she was, for example, an architect instead of a school teacher and had never met you? Assuming that a soul can only choose to go over one single path amidst an enormous chain of decisions through time, able to shape a character’s life in completely diverse ways, it’s extremely unlikely that her R-position at that point was the same than yours. Her actual soul was probably in another reality. Maybe in one close to yours, maybe unimaginably far away, and the same can be reasonably deduced about all the other characters in your life. Regardless of where this soul was, you were perceiving the portion of her character pertaining to the STR coordinates you saw her in. This doesn’t mean that she was not the “real” Mara Freedman or that she had no consciousness at all. As I’ve said before, all of the possibilities in the continuum are equally real, no matter which souls perceive them. Moreover, plausibly all characters in all planes would have some kind of consciousness. I call this a “soft consciousness” in opposition to the “strong consciousness” associated to souls. This soft consciousness isn’t another thing than mental activity: An input, processing and output of information, reactions and emotions, through a nervous system. But it does not imply a self-aware first-person point of view. True awareness of one’s existence, and the first-person experience of living, is only reserved for souls and their strong consciousness process.

A good analogy to understand how soft consciousness works is what happens when you are dreaming. In your regular dreams, the characters which represents you experience events and react to them. They have thoughts, feelings, and emotions. But unless you are having a lucid dream, you are not conscious of being dreaming or capable to decide your actions inside the dream. You are not aware of the nature of your existence or in what kind of state of consciousness you are in. The dream just happens to you, and your character acts automatically, like a robot, without understanding what’s going on and without having a say about it. It doesn’t live: it is lived. Still, dream characters act congruently with the personality of the individual they are being dreamed by. We only construct the first person experience for that character after we wake up. Being able to experience lucid dreams can give you an experiential clue of how the difference between soft consciousness and strong consciousness feels like. In a lucid dream your character has its soul in it, while in a normal dream it doesn’t.

In real life, your own character’s existence spawns over a wide range of realities. Your parents could have chosen another name for you, or even given you out for adoption. You could have been born another day, in another way, in another place, but as long as it is your genetic composition, it’s still your character. After your birth, millions of little choices opened up to you, day after day, and there are realities in the continuum for all of them. In some extreme of the spectrum your character is maybe a murderer, whereas in the other end it may be a philanthropist. Everything that you could have possibly done exists in the continuum and even if you are not perceiving those realities, other people probably are. This means that your character is being constantly perceived by other souls in situations that you never consciously lived. Yet, if someone hurts you in one of those realities, and the path you chose is close enough to where that happens as to feel its echoes, that pain will influence your life.

It’s important to point out that given that it’s impossible to really know it for sure, we should always act considering that all entities with soft consciousness are still able to feel both physical and emotional pain, like in your nightmares, even when you are not conscious you can feel a strong fear. Besides, as they behave indistinguishably from a soul-carrying character, we can never know if their soul is really there. In my conception, carrying a soul can’t change an individual’s behavior from another person’s point of view. All the possible realities are already in the continuum, and where a soul is affects only the fact of which of those realities is being consciously perceived. All the realities of the continuum are susceptible of being perceived by conscious agents. Moreover, as I already suggested and will explain in more detail later, what happens in one plane of reality impacts what happens in all the realities sufficiently close to that coordinate too. And there is even one more important consideration to take into account: it is very likely that nearby souls attract each other to their path. I call this phenomenon “Soul Gravity”. By it, I mean that the path that a soul chooses to live exerts an attraction over the souls it crosses in its way. The closer a soul is to another one in the continuum, the strongest this attraction is: the other person will tend to perceive a similar reality to the one you are perceiving, and vice-versa. Imagine for example that you meet someone who has an addiction problem, and you help him overcome it. If this person’s soul were really far away from where you perceived it, for example in a point of the STR where he has never been addicted at all, he wouldn’t probably perceive it. But if his soul was near the space-time-reality coordinates where you interacted with him, your actions will have a great impact and will attract his soul in the direction of the reality in which he’s healed. This way, souls who are more aware of their power to influence over reality, can help people who are less aware to direct their lives in a better direction. It is very logical to suppose that if a baby is born in the reality in which a parent’s soul is, the soul of the baby will be born into that same plane of reality. As an implication, the parent’s soul gravity will have an enormous influence over the child’s perception, at least until the child is mature enough as to direct their path in their own, separate way.

For all these reasons, we should treat with empathy all the people that we get to interact with during our lives, no matter where their souls might or might not be.