There's an intrinsic sense of identification between a soul and a character, and we tend to think of them as being one and the same because that is what we see. In the current paradigm we see people and assume that they all have a conscious first-person perception of the same reality that we do, which is the only reality in which that character exists and it is where his soul resides. But taking into account the STR and its associated definitions of souls and characters, this assumption must be questioned.

 

Is there only one soul per character? Is there only one character per soul? As we will see, the most likely answer to both these questions is: No, there are way more than one.

 

Here’s why:

 

Let’s start by assessing how many characters are there in the continuum. To do that we will restrict our focus to the area of the STR in which human life exists on earth. Beginning with our current coordinates, we have about seven billions of people alive right now on earth. (That is seven billion characters.) But if we consider all the history of men on earth from the beginning of our species until our extinction, we will have at least ten times more that number (Seventy billions). This is nothing compared to the real number of characters existing in the cube, because we are only considering one plane of reality: the one in which we are right now. If we consider all the other values of R, there will be billions and billions of other characters living in them. Imagine for example if your father had married his first girlfriend and had children with her, never getting to meet your mother, or if he met her but had children one year before, or after, or if just they had sex the day before or a different spermatozoon reached your mother’s ovum. Other people would exist instead of you in all those close realities. Now expand the concept to your grandparents and great-grandparents and all the people of the world. How many different characters would there be in the continuum? An incommensurable number, right? If there were one soul attached to each of them, we would have an identical number of souls in the continuum.

 

The problem with this assumption is that comparing the big areas of the cube that each character spawns (all the possibilities of life for a given character) with the minute single path that a soul would describe for this character, we would find that, if this were true, the main body of the continuum would be empty and never appreciated by anyone. This just doesn’t feel right. Why creating such a complex continuum of realities and filling it with billions of souls so that they can merely perceive an insignificant portion of it, only once, and then the game is over? It sounds to me like an enormous waste of energy, a lot of effort in vain. Everything would make more sense if we add a sixth dimension to the model: the dimension of objective time (time as seen from outside the cube). Visualize all these souls illuminating that small portion of cube once and then turning their lights off as they die. They have lived their short lives through the path of their choice. Now they are gone. The cube is empty, but it is still there, ready to be lived again. Now these souls can return to the cube, and be attached to different characters, or maybe even the same characters again. If this happens, they would chose different paths this time, and therefore discover other areas of the continuum. After their deaths they can come back again, and again, and fill the cube with the light of their consciousness. I see the STR continuum as an incredibly sophisticated work of art, which would be wasted if it is not perceived in full by conscious agents. Our purpose as free souls provided with the abilities to perceive this universe, judge what we experience, choose our paths and learn from our mistakes, is probably to act as the witnesses and protagonists that give life to the whole continuum of creation. Perhaps each time we return, we have something new to learn, as Buddhism suggests. Perhaps we are each time better trained to discover the most wonderful areas of this magnificent cube, still unexplored.