The Basic Nature of Consciousness

As conscious beings, consciousness is our intimate (and only) perspective on any particular view of the cosmos. By understanding the nature of consciousness, and the implications that follow that understanding, our minds open to appreciate the true nature of reality, and what may lie at the root of everything.

I do not mean to say that there is a special enlightenment or salvation that’s on offer here. However with some perspective, we can look at life in an interesting way. Understanding this is in no way like gaining a new mental dimension or power, it’s just a recognition of the already-enlightenend state of being. You’re already there, as enlightenment, and only that, even when not recognized as such.¹

In order to better understand our own minds, an important aspect of consciousness that ought to be recognized is that everything we experience appears within mind, much like we know that our thoughts, dreams and imagination do. We don’t come into direct contact with the physical stuff that lies beyond our minds, so at most we perceive an ethereal representation of an outside world.

Some perceptions of the world may have a quality of seeming to be “outside”, whereas others like thoughts, seem “inside”. In truth, both are made of the same conscious substance, exist together in the same mind moment, and are just feelings and mental categories that appear within us. Our conscious experience is unified, and transcends locality. It’s not inside or outside of any physical object, nor within the realm of spacetime.

Consciousness also takes the form of many arbitrary shapes: If I open my eyes, what appears before me has changed. I look to the left, and the right, and my mind takes the shape of new experiences. If I move my hand, or look out the window, I can see the motion of complex objects. If you look at a compressed video of confetti on your phone, it looks like a blurry mess, but our conscious experience is not limited in that way. So whatever consciousness is, it can take form and appear as vast array of highly sophisticated phenomena.

Another aspect of the mind (or consciousness / awareness) worthy of note is that it’s not stained by experience, meaning that experiencing one phenomena doesn’t distort or color our experience of the next.² A coloring may occur when staring at a point on an image and then looking away, but this is an effect due to briefly tired neurons in your retina, not the nature of visual consciousness itself. So whatever consciousness is, it must be able to appear fresh in each moment of experience, according to the dictates of neural states in the brain.³

The sensation of seeing is luminous, the music we hear contains notes, and the smell or taste of food is aromatic and flavorful. In other words, there is something that it’s like to experience these phenomena. They’re here, now, and self-apparent, shining, self-aware. Colors combine into shapes, and those shapes connect up to build the sense of independent objects. This type of experience may be called “form”, but it’s more accurately thought of as divine light, due to its actual source.

Empty space also features prominently in visual experience. If we hold up two hands and try to get a sense of what it is like to experience a blank space between them, we begin to gain an intuition of it. The same is true of the space between your face and the rest of the world. All of that is empty, unless you’re in a fog, which is also a cool experience. That empty space before you extends back through and behind you. so consciousness takes the form of pure emptiness together with form, even in ordinary experience.

If we take a close look at conscious phenomena, it becomes clear that it does not happen to any little entity or person who also appears within consciousness, but that conscious phenomena are self-apparent, or self-aware within and as consciousness. The presence of phenomena is the same as the knowing of them. There is no ‘me’ in consciousness who reaches out to be aware of a phenomena over there. Ultimately, what we are is deeper than that, suffusing all experience and reality.

Ultimate reality is capable of appearing as everything that appears within it, including consciousness, otherwise consciousness would be unable to appear. The ethereal nature of consciousness therefore informs our understanding of reality: Reality must be at least that profound. Considered together with the complexity of quantum mechanics, general relativity and infinite spacetime in the connected physical realm, this ultimate reality is far greater in combination than any of them would be alone. They exist together as parts of a unified cosmos, which is in turn an expression of a mysterious non-objective reality that also lies beyond, and that serves as the deeper basis for both mind and matter.