What Is Consciousness?
Consciousness is the most intimate thing in your experience and, paradoxically, the thing that science understands the least. You know you are aware. You know what it feels like to be you, right now, reading these words. Yet no one can fully explain how that happens, where it comes from, or what it ultimately is.
This guide explores the question “what is consciousness?” from multiple angles: the scientific, philosophical and experiential perspectives. It is written for people who sense that the standard materialist explanation doesn’t account for the richness of their inner life, and who are drawn to inquire deeper. Whether you’re new to these ideas or have been exploring them for years, this is an invitation to look more closely at the very thing that makes your looking possible.
I have personally spent over two decades working at the intersection of consciousness, spirituality and deep psychological healing. The perspective offered here draws on that lived exploration, as well as the wider fields of contemplative inquiry and emerging scientific thought.
What Is Consciousness? Defining the Undefinable
Consciousness, in its simplest sense, is awareness. It is the quality of experience itself – the fact that there is someone or something that sees the colour blue, feels joy, tastes chocolate, and notices the silence between thoughts. The philosopher Thomas Nagel captured this precisely in his famous phrase: “There is something it is like to be a conscious entity.”
That simple observation turns out to be philosophically explosive. The “hard problem of consciousness”, a term coined by philosopher David Chalmers in the 1990s, names the central difficulty: Why does any physical process give rise to subjective experience at all? We can explain how the brain processes visual information, but we can’t explain why that processing feels like anything. The gap between brain activity and the felt quality of experience is the hard problem of consciousness, and it remains largely unsolved.
This isn’t a minor technical gap waiting to be filled by better neuroscience. It points to something fundamental. If consciousness is simply what the brain does, we should be able to explain it the way we explain digestion or circulation, but we can’t. The felt interiority of experience resists being reduced to purely physical terms.
This is why consciousness matters beyond philosophy. If we can’t account for experience within the current scientific framework, that framework must be incomplete. And if the framework is incomplete, our understanding of ourselves, of reality, and of what’s possible for human beings is nowhere near the whole truth.
The Scientific View of Consciousness
In mainstream science, the dominant view is that consciousness is produced by the brain. In this model, when neurons fire in sufficiently complex patterns, subjective experience arises as a by-product. Consciousness is what the brain does, in the same way that digestion is what the stomach does.
This view is known as materialism or physicalism, and it’s the working assumption of most neuroscientists, psychologists and cognitive scientists. It has produced enormous insights into brain function. We understand a great deal about how different areas of the brain process information, regulate emotions, and coordinate behaviour. Neuroscience has mapped the neural correlates of many conscious states, from visual perception to meditative absorption, yet the hard problem persists.
Knowing which neurons fire when someone sees red doesn’t explain why seeing red feels like anything at all. Neuroscience has catalogued the correlations of consciousness, without explaining consciousness itself. This isn’t a failure of neuroscientists; it is a genuine conceptual impasse.
Some researchers have proposed alternative theories. Integrated Information Theory, developed by neuroscientist Giulio Tononi, says that consciousness is identical to integrated information, and can in principle arise in any system that has it, not just brains. Global Workspace Theory, associated with Bernard Baars and Stanislas Dehaene, proposes that consciousness arises when information is broadcast widely across the brain’s global workspace. These are serious and interesting theories, but neither has resolved the hard problem. They describe the architecture of consciousness without explaining why the lights are on.
Eastern Wisdom Traditions on Consciousness
While Western science struggles to account for consciousness within a materialist framework, the Eastern wisdom traditions have placed consciousness at the very centre of their inquiry, not as a problem to be solved, but as the most fundamental reality to be recognised.
In the Advaita Vedanta tradition of India, consciousness is not produced by the brain or body – it is the ground of all being, within which all experience arises. The Sanskrit term Sat-Chit-Ananda, often translated as Being-Consciousness-Bliss, points to the nature of ultimate reality as pure, self-luminous awareness. Within this view, individual consciousness is not separate from universal consciousness – it’s like a wave on the ocean, temporarily appearing as distinct while remaining nothing other than the ocean itself.
Buddhism takes a similar but slightly different approach, stating that the nature of awareness is clear, open and without inherent solidity. The practices of mindfulness and dzogchen in particular invite the practitioner to recognise awareness not as a possession of the self, but as the very field in which the self arises and dissolves. The Tibetan term “rigpa”, which is often translated as pure awareness, points to this recognition.
In Taoism, the Tao is the underlying field of being from which all phenomena emerge, and to which they return. In this view, consciousness isn’t separate from the flow of reality – it is that flow, experienced from within.
What these traditions share, is the recognition that consciousness is primary, not secondary. It isn’t the end product of physical complexity but the very medium in which physical complexity appears. This isn’t mysticism for its own sake; it’s a coherent metaphysical perspective that some contemporary philosophers and physicists are beginning to take seriously.
Levels and States of Consciousness
To understand what consciousness is, it helps to understand that isn’t just one thing. We move through different states of consciousness every day: the alert focus of problem-solving, the blank dissolution of deep sleep, and the vivid narrative of dream sleep. These aren’t just different brain states – they’re genuinely different modes of experience, different ways of being conscious.
In addition to our normal daily states of consciousness, altered states of consciousness are available through meditation, breathwork, psychedelic substances, extreme physical exertion, grief, near-death experiences, and spontaneous mystical experiences. These altered states consistently point to dimensions of experience that fall outside our ordinary sense of being an individual, separate self. Meditators report states of expansive stillness in which the usual background noise of mental commentary falls quiet. Near-death experiencers describe a sense of vast, loving awareness that persists after the brain has apparently ceased to function. Psychedelic experiences often involve the temporary dissolution of the sense of being a separate individual, and a felt sense of unity with everything.
Philosopher and integral theorist Ken Wilber has mapped developmental levels of consciousness, that build on the work of earlier developmental psychologists such as Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg and Clare Graves. In this model, consciousness doesn’t just change states; it develops through distinct stages of increasing complexity, each with its own worldview, values and way of making meaning.
It’s important to remember that a map is not the territory itself. The stages and states described by a particular theory are useful pointers, not absolute truths. The deepest invitation is always to look directly at your own experience rather than try to locate yourself on someone else’s chart.
Consciousness and the Nature of Reality
Once we take seriously the possibility that consciousness isn’t simply produced by the brain, the deeper question of what consciousness is opens into something even more fundamental: what is the relationship between consciousness and physical reality? This is where philosophy, physics and spirituality begin to genuinely converge.
Materialism holds that matter is primary – that physical stuff gives rise to minds. Idealism, in contrast, holds that consciousness is primary – that what we call the physical world is simply an appearance within consciousness, not the other way around. Panpsychism occupies the middle ground, suggesting that consciousness is a fundamental feature of reality at every level, not something that mysteriously emerges only in complex brains.
Non-dualism, as taught in Advaita Vedanta and many other traditions, dissolves the distinction between consciousness and matter altogether. In this view, there is only one reality that’s neither purely mental nor purely physical, and these categorisations are merely approximations.
Quantum mechanics is often linked to consciousness. The “observer effect” refers to the fact that the act of measurement affects a quantum system by collapsing the wave function from a field of probabilities into a definite state. Some physicists have suggested this implies that consciousness plays a role in the constitution of physical reality, not just its observation.
The relationship between consciousness and physical reality remains one of the great unsolved questions, and that in itself is significant.
Your Own Consciousness as a Portal
The scientists, philosophers and mystics all point us towards the immediate, first-person investigation of consciousness itself. Not thinking about awareness, but experiencing awareness directly from the inside. This is a subtle but profound shift because most of our attention flows outwards, towards objects, tasks, people and stories. But the invitation is to turn attention back on itself, to notice not what we’re experiencing but the fact that we’re experiencing at all. What is the nature of that noticing? Is there an experiencer behind the experience, or is there simply open, aware presence, with no separate witness at the centre?
This kind of inquiry has been formalised in various traditions. The question Who am I? as taught by the Indian sage Ramana Maharshi isn’t a request for biographical information. It’s an invitation to trace the felt sense of “I” back to its source, to discover what remains when the contents of experience are no longer identified with. Non-dual teachers such as Rupert Spira point to the simple recognition that awareness is always already present, prior to any particular experience. It’s the unchanging background upon which all experiences appear.
You don’t need to be a philosopher or a meditator to begin this kind of inquiry. You can start right now, with a simple question: What is it that is aware of reading these words? Notice that the awareness itself is not a thought, emotion or sensation – it’s the open space within which all of these arise. That open space is what the traditions are pointing to when they speak of consciousness. And it’s not somewhere else – it’s what you already are.
Consciousness, Healing and Awakening
Understanding what consciousness is, isn’t merely an intellectual exercise. It has direct and practical implications for how we relate to our own suffering, our emotional wounds, and the possibility of deep inner transformation.
When we identify exclusively with the contents of consciousness, with our thoughts, emotions, sensations, memories and stories, we are in a contracted state: a narrowing of awareness into a limited, defended, conceptual sense of self (a.k.a. ego-self). This contraction is the ground of anxiety, depression, reactivity and the chronic sense that something’s fundamentally wrong. Most psychological suffering arises not from what we experience, but from our relationship to what we experience. And that relationship is determined by how much we are identified with, or free from, the conditioned structures of the ego.
Awakening, in this context, means the gradual recognition that you are not the contents of your consciousness but awareness itself. This doesn’t mean transcending the human experience – it means experiencing it from a more expansive field of pure awareness. Emotions still arise and pass through, and thoughts still come and go, but they do so within a spaciousness that doesn’t identify with them, cling to them, fear them or resist them. This is what makes genuine emotional healing possible, not suppression or transcendence of our feelings, but the capacity to be fully present with them, from the still, silent awareness that always is.
This is the thread that connects my work. Whether working with anxiety, trauma or spiritual emergence, the deepest healing happens not by fixing the self but by recognising what lies behind it. The exploration of consciousness isn’t separate from the journey of emotional healing or spiritual awakening; it is its very foundation of them both.
If you’re drawn to explore the relationship between consciousness and spiritual awakening more deeply, you may find the companion article The Spiritual Awakening Guide: Stages, Signs and What Comes Next a valuable next step. For the body’s role in this journey, The Complete Guide to Body-Based Healing offers a grounded, somatic perspective.
Related Blog Posts
The following articles explore topics closely connected to the themes in this guide, and offer practical, grounded perspectives to complement the ideas introduced here.
What is consciousness, and is it produced by the brain?
This is the central question in consciousness studies. The dominant view in mainstream neuroscience is that consciousness is produced by the brain, in the same way that digestion is produced by the stomach. In this view, conscious experience is the product of complex neural activity, but it can’t explain why or how inert matter gives rise to consciousness or subjective experience. For this reason, a growing number of scientists, philosophers and researchers are exploring alternative models in which consciousness is primary – not a product of matter, but the very field within which reality is rendered and experienced.
Can consciousness exist without a body?
What does it mean to expand your consciousness?
Is consciousness the same as awareness?
How does understanding consciousness help with anxiety and emotional healing?
Anxiety involves a contraction of awareness in response to a perceived threat. When we are anxious, our attention narrows, our body tightens, and our sense of self becomes restricted, fearful, hyper-alert and defended. Understanding consciousness experientially, offers a different relationship to anxiety – one in which anxious thoughts and feelings can be met with spacious presence rather than further fear and contraction. This isn’t a technique for suppressing anxiety; it’s a recognition of the ground in which anxiety arises and a natural loosening of the grip it has. Many people find that as their capacity for present-moment awareness deepens through meditation, somatic work and self-inquiry, anxiety becomes less overwhelming, not because their inner experience has changed or been fixed, but because their relationship to their inner experience has fundamentally changed.
Lee Bladon is an experienced transpersonal coach who specialises in guiding individuals through profound personal and spiritual development. With a deep understanding of consciousness, somatic approaches, nonduality and the integration of psychology and spirituality, Lee creates a safe, sacred space for clients to explore their authentic selves and discover their deeper purpose. Whether you’re navigating a major life transition, seeking greater meaning in life, or feeling called to connect with your deeper spiritual nature, Lee’s compassionate and intuitive approach can support your journey to awakening and wholeness. To learn more about Lee and how transpersonal coaching can transform your life, please click HERE.
