What IS Consciousness?

For clarification when I say on this blog that I am going to talk about “Consciousness”, it is safe to assume that am usually referring to “Higher Consciousness” within the spiritual community. This is defined as the awareness of a higher self or even higher plane of existence. This is differentiated from innate behaviors which are instinctual to an animal. It’s really what theoretically separates our spiritual soul from our animal body. I will come back to this; first though let’s cover the basics.

Taking it a step backwards, I’ll briefly touch on what just the concept of consciousness itself really means. Consciousness refers to the state of being aware and perceiving your surroundings. It is even as simple as seeing a sunset, and having the ability to observe and experience the colors and beauty; versus the base instinct of that same sunset being a stimulus to head to shelter since the temperature is going to drop.  Scientifically, it is defined as something that activates different parts of your brain simultaneously; creating an overall subjective experience, such as perceiving a bouquet of flowers. With the bouquet, you are having several parts of your brain and senses activated, seeing the colors of the flowers, while also smelling the flowers and feeling the velvety petals. All of these smaller individual stimulations to yourself allow you to full appreciate the overall beauty and perceive the bouquet, and are able to explain what makes the bouquet beautiful or fragrant, you are participating in your own experience and how it works. This is consciousness. Conversely, in his article titled “What is Consciousness?” author Christof Koch describes when something is UNconscious, “that information is localized to the specific motor system involved.” In other words, an unconscious experience is based on actions or experiences that are done without thinking. Koch gives the example of typing fast, “Asked how you do it, you would not know, you have little conscious access to that information which also happens to be localized to the brain circuits linking your eyes to rapid finger movements.” By looking that these 2 examples, it gives you a better idea of how to recognize what are truly conscious versus unconscious actions, and therefore, are closer to being able to identify what consciousness really is.

Is that to say that animals do not have consciousness just because they cannot describe or explain what they are experiencing? No, not at all, I fully believe that animals DO have consciousness, and if we pay attention we can observe that consciousness. A great quick example that I believe many of us can relate to are our pets. I’ve had dogs in the past, and when it comes to food, they have preferences. They are aware and conscious of the fact that one thing tastes better than another. They even have had favorite foods that they identify and recall easily. What does this have to do with consciousness? Well, if they were NOT conscious, they would not differentiate between a food they enjoy and a food solely for sustenance. However, instead they experience the taste and joy of eating that favorite food or playing with that favorite toy. That in itself is consciousness and awareness in action.

Really though, it’s the how and why of consciousness which is incredibly difficult to truly define or nail down. It is so subjective and immeasurable, there is no way to physically prove that you are conscious…yet here you are!  How did it happen? What makes you conscious versus a blender? (Which some might argue IS actually conscious.) This is what is known as the “Hard Problem of Consciousness”. Why do aware, cognizant beings have consciousness and subjective experiences? What makes them different and able to experience physical and emotional pain? This is a question that many have struggled to truly answer. The difficulty lies in the fact that these ARE subjective experiences, and not experienced the same way for everyone. I may say that the sunset is orange with red detail; you may say that it is red with orange detail. We are both experiencing the same sunset differently. Furthermore, why are we even able to experience that sunset at all? Why does it give us emotion and fulfill us in anyway? You can see why this conversation suddenly becomes so dominantly philosophical. To help clarify a bit more, an example commonly given for an “easy problem” of consciousness is being able to differentiate between being awake or asleep. From a physiological point of view there are only two options, either awake or asleep, on or off. This is easier for experts to explain because they are based on a physical process…you are either physically conscious or unconscious. This leads many neuroscientists and biologists to simply state that this is a pointless rabbit hole to go down, and refuse to touch it; since scientists cannot find a physiological basis for consciousness (even though it is really based on a combination of physiological responses), they do not want to risk becoming TOO subjective and TOO philosophical in their research. That being said, there are a few scientific theories that do explore consciousness and attempt to explain it. I will be covering those in later posts.

Now, to bring this full circle! Just the concept of consciousness versus “Higher” consciousness, I believe is just an extension of the former. Once you are able to understand what the idea of consciousness is, and what it really means, it become easier to understand what “Higher” consciousness really is.  For most of us, the idea is one we are quite familiar with, since it is really one of the main focuses in the community. Many people in the modern spiritual movement strive to transcend normal consciousness and attain a higher understanding of what is truly occurring. At the end of the day, it’s realizing that there is a “higher” level of existence at play, and being able to tap into and experience that existence. Take for example, lucid dreaming, this could be seen as a higher level of consciousness. Why? Well, the moment that you switch from dreaming being something that is just happening to you, into something that you are truly experiencing and can control…it then becomes something conscious. Seems almost an oxymoron be spiritually conscious while physically unconscious! However, that in itself brings me to my original idea and final point for now. Higher consciousness is what separates our spiritual soul from our physical animal body. Once you achieve and can recognize higher consciousness as well as when/how to achieve it, you are then able to recognize yourself as infinite, no longer limited by your physical body and existence. Like astral travel (another part of higher consciousness), you don’t need your physicality to exist. Not to say that our physical bodies don’t provide some benefits, there are things that we can consciously experience here on the physical plane that we cannot experience on the spiritual plane…that’s why we are here isn’t it?

There are so many different perspectives to view it from and try to really gain an understanding of it. I plan to use this space to explore as many of those view points as possible. From the spiritual to the scientific to the philosophical, as I constantly say, the more perspectives that we at least open our minds to, the more likely it is that we will reach the correct conclusion. That is because I truly believe that a lot of the subjects are answered not by 1 specialty or set of research or another…but rather the answer lies in a mixture of the solutions. I can and do hold science in high esteem, but I do think that there is a piece that lies outside of science both here in this subject and in several others. I think that closing your mind to these possibilities risks locking you out of the true answer.

Link to the referenced article by Christof Koch: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-consciousness/