Does the Catholic Church teach there is only one person? I’ve stumbled upon a person who has made a few interesting claims. According to her, among others:



  Other people are only another physical form of yourself.


  There exists only one unposseded [by ego] and indivisible mind.


  In Truth, that is in the opposite of what we are presently in, we are one in Christ. We are thence one spirit of Christ and the body we don is temporary. So, as the apostles were saying, there is no female, slave, child… However the physical body must perceive something and perceives what it believes in. As in the beginning there was Adam and Eve as one. As there are branches in the vine but there is one vine.


  For anyone, who wishes to think reasonably and wisely, [the one unpossesed and indivisible mind] is the mind of Holy Spirit. For those who prefer to let themselves be possessed by a separate mind (located in the brain – egoistic ego), Holy Spirit is inaccessible and their thinking by the so-called brain is, euphemistically speaking, a dissimulation of thinking.



(The above quotations are literally the statements she has made, I only made effort to translate them into English, hopefully the translation is faithful to the original claims.)

This person, who maintains these assertions, claims to be a Christian, and a consequent and radical one. For me, such assertions rather looked as if they were rooted in New Age or Buddhism rather than Christianity, so I asked her which Church does she belong to. To my astonishment, she said she was a Catholic. She further maintains that the above assertions are a result of her own studies of truth, of the more accurate and more faithful reading of the Bible, of the praying experience of befriended Catholics, and also that these claims are, in part, kind of a revelation that is testified by miracles.

To my knowledge, according to (almost?) all major denominations of Christianity, God, creating humans and angels, has created many persons, distinct from Himself and distinct from each other. Claiming that all humans are in fact one person, who is God, and that any other perception is an illusion of the physical brain that is possessed by ego, seems to me to either be an outright heresy or, at best, some unwarranted religious syncretism, attempting to mix in foreign philosophical systems (New Age? Buddhism?) into Christianity. Claiming that all people are “one spirit of Christ” seems to me to border blasphemy.

Or, maybe, am I wrong? After all, I do not have any official documents issued by the Church to disprove this person’s claims.

Therefore, since she claimed to be a Catholic, may I ask:


Does the Catholic Church teach what she claimed?
Does the Catholic Church teach something opposite to what she claimed, and therefore by definition one cannot maintain such assertions and be a Catholic at the same time?
Does the Catholic Church not teach anything in this matter, and therefore every Catholic is free to believe whatever they choose?
No, in fact the Catholic Church teaches no such thing. One approach to seeing this is to understand the way the Church sees the body and soul:

The human person, created in the image of God, is a being at once corporeal and spiritual. ... The Church teaches that every spiritual soul is created immediately by God ... and also that it is immortal: it does not perish when it separates from the body at death, and it will be reunited with the body at the final Resurrection.

(Catechism of the Catholic Church paragraphs 362, 366)
This implies that every human being is a separate creation with an individual soul, so that &quot;Other people are only another physical form of yourself&quot; is in fact false. So, indeed, is the statement that &quot;The body we don is temporary&quot;. Our bodies, though they will die, will return at the Resurrection where they and the soul will be united eternally.
This doesn't say much directly about the mind. Aquinas, however, did deal with this. In his Summa Theologica, First Part, Question 76 Article 2, Aquinas asks &quot;Whether the intellectual principle is multiplied according to the number of bodies&quot;, that is, whether there is just one mind, or one mind for each body. His conclusion is:

If there is one intellect ... in no way is it possible to say that Socrates and Plato are otherwise than one understanding man. And if to this we add that to understand, which is the act of the intellect, is not affected by any organ other than the intellect itself; it will further follow that there is but one agent and one action: that is to say that all men are but one &quot;understander,&quot; and have but one act of understanding. ...
However, it would be possible to distinguish my intellectual action from yours by the distinction of the phantasms---that is to say, were there one phantasm of a stone in me, and another in you---if the phantasm itself, as it is one thing in me and another in you, were a form of the possible intellect; since the same agent according to divers forms produces divers actions. ... But the phantasm itself is not a form of the possible intellect; it is the intelligible species abstracted from the phantasm that is a form. Now in one intellect, from different phantasms of the same species, only one intelligible species is abstracted; as appears in one man, in whom there may be different phantasms of a stone; yet from all of them only one intelligible species of a stone is abstracted; by which the intellect of that one man, by one operation, understands the nature of a stone, notwithstanding the diversity of phantasms. Therefore, if there were one intellect for all men, the diversity of phantasms which are in this one and that one would not cause a diversity of intellectual operation in this man and that man. It follows, therefore, that it is altogether impossible and unreasonable to maintain that there exists one intellect for all men.

This is difficult; but essentially what he's saying is that if there were only one mind, then there would be only one &quot;understander&quot; and therefore only one way of understanding each thing. Everyone, then, would understand everything the same way. But this is obviously false. Therefore there is not &quot;only one unpossessed and indivisible mind&quot;.
What your friend seems to be embracing is not Catholicism, but something a bit like Buddhism and a bit like some form of gnosticism.