A person consists of many parts also, many independent units of consciousness. If they are all blindly doing their own thing you get quite an insane mess. But if they are aligned and coordinated with each other you get a complete empowered person with vast resources.
The parts of a person are the conscious focus of attention, sub-conscious machinery, viewpoints, thoughts, memories, perceptions, the body, higher awareness levels, and more.
It might be a little unfamiliar to regard all of this as parts of oneself. It has been a common human belief that you are just one of the bees and the rest is outside your control. Well, try making sense of a swarm of bees by looking at only one bee. And the trouble with humans is that they change bees all the time. The most active part of the person changes constantly. The focus flips around between parts very frequently, even though the person might not consciously realize it.
We could probably say that what is more truly you is the unseen force that is binding all the pieces together. The space that it is all taking place in. The vibration that is common between all the elements.
I am bringing this up, because to advance one's consciousness one needs to deal with this somehow. If you think of yourself as just one thing, one continuous spiritual entity located in your head, then you are going to run into some brick walls sooner or later.
Consciousness is not all continuous and contiguous and in one piece. Well, at a high level it is actually, everything is in one piece, part of the same hologram. But to be able to fathom that at all you need to first fathom the multitude of different groupings of consciousness that you find here at this level.
The way most people think is a continual flipping of channels. Jumping around between large numbers of different units of thought. Dwelling on one memory, then another, activating one circuit then another, switching between one role after another, having one's attention jump around wildly.
Despite all of that people usually believe that their consciousness is continuous, that they are following some kind of sensible direction. That is mostly because they aren't able to step back and look neutrally at what they are really doing. And it is because our language tempts us to think that we really understand what we are talking about.
Because I have a name that I answer to, I might assume that it is always the same continuous person who answers to it. Because I consider myself as being conscious I might consider that it is the same consciousness all the time. None of that is true.
The reason we cling to these over-simplified ideas is in part that it is too scary to encompass all that one really is. What you really are will at first appear as an insane, scattered, confused mess, so the easy way out is to close one's eyes and pretend that one is just one little unit of consciousness who doesn't have to worry about any of it.
The way this relates to our work is that it provides a guideline for what we are aiming for. We are not trying to rid the one real person in her head of everything she doesn't like. We are trying to bring the whole person together. We are trying to locate all the pieces and get them first in contact with each other, and then working together in alignment.
We must be aware that we are not talking with the same part of the person all the time. She might change every session, or after every other question, or 10 times a second. It should not faze the facilitator that the client doesn't seem to agree with herself from moment to moment. It just means that she is fragmented and needs to be put more together.
It doesn't have to be a big problem either, in life, if one finds oneself confused, not knowing quite where one is going at the moment. One can trust that as a whole one has all the answers and all the resources one needs. One might not at the moment have everything wired up, but it is all there somewhere. If one can just get a few more of the pieces lined up and coordinated with each other, then one is a step closer to manifesting oneself as the whole person one really is.