What is Consciousness: Spiritual & Scientific Perspectives

You are conscious right now. You know that you are reading these words. You can feel the texture of whatever you are sitting on, hear the ambient sounds around you, and sense the subtle rhythm of your own breathing. This knowing, this immediate feeling of being present, is consciousness. And despite thousands of years of inquiry by philosophers, monks, scientists, and mystics, it remains the single most fascinating puzzle in human experience.

The meaning of consciousness touches everything we care about. It shapes how we understand the mind, the soul, free will, death, and the nature of reality itself. Whether you approach the question through a brain scanner or through seated meditation, you are engaging with the same mystery: what is this awareness, and where does it come from?

This guide walks through both sides of that question. You will find what neuroscience has discovered about the brain's role in generating conscious experience, what spiritual traditions across the world have taught for millennia, and practical ways to deepen your own awareness. If you have ever asked "what am I, really?" then this is territory worth exploring.

The Meaning of Consciousness: A Working Definition

Consciousness, at its simplest, is the capacity for experience. It is what makes the difference between a rock and a person. The rock exists but does not know it exists. You exist and you know it. That knowing is consciousness.

Philosophers break this down further. There is phenomenal consciousness, the raw feeling of experience (the redness of red, the sharpness of pain). Then there is access consciousness, the ability to use information from experience for reasoning, speaking, and decision-making. Both layers work together to create the rich inner world you inhabit every waking moment.

The meaning of consciousness also shifts depending on who you ask. A neuroscientist might define it as "the state of being aware of internal and external stimuli, mediated by specific neural networks." A Buddhist teacher might say it is "the luminous, knowing quality of mind that is present before any thought arises." A quantum physicist might wonder whether consciousness is somehow entangled with the fabric of the universe at the subatomic level.

None of these definitions are wrong. They are different lenses on the same diamond. The challenge, and the beauty, of studying consciousness is that it requires both rigorous external measurement and honest internal exploration. You cannot study consciousness without using consciousness to do the studying.

The Science of Consciousness: What the Brain Reveals

Modern neuroscience has made extraordinary progress mapping the physical side of conscious experience. Brain imaging technologies like fMRI, EEG, and magnetoencephalography allow researchers to watch the brain in real time as people see, think, feel, and dream. The findings are both illuminating and humbling.

Neural Correlates of Consciousness

Scientists have identified specific brain structures that seem necessary for conscious experience. The thalamus acts as a central relay station, routing sensory information to the cortex. The prefrontal cortex handles higher-order thinking, self-reflection, and decision-making. The claustrum, a thin sheet of neurons deep in the brain, may serve as a conductor that coordinates activity across different brain regions into a unified experience.

When any of these areas are damaged, consciousness changes dramatically. Lesions to the thalamus can produce coma. Damage to the prefrontal cortex alters personality and self-awareness. Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA's structure, spent his final years studying the claustrum and believed it might hold the key to understanding how the brain creates a single, seamless field of awareness.

Leading Scientific Theories

Each theory captures something real about consciousness, but none provides a complete explanation. IIT gives consciousness a mathematical framework. GWT explains how information becomes available to the whole brain. Orch OR bridges physics and biology. Yet the subjective dimension, the felt quality of experience, slips through every model like water through a net.

Brainwave States and Awareness

One of the most practical findings from consciousness research involves brainwave frequencies. Your brain produces electromagnetic oscillations that correspond to different states of consciousness.

Long-term meditators, including Tibetan Buddhist monks studied by Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin, show dramatically elevated gamma wave activity. Their brains literally vibrate at the frequency associated with the highest states of conscious awareness. This is one of the clearest bridges between the scientific and spiritual understanding of consciousness.

Spiritual Perspectives on Consciousness

While science studies consciousness from the outside in, spiritual traditions study it from the inside out. For thousands of years, contemplatives have used direct experience, refined through disciplined practice, to explore the nature of awareness. Their findings are remarkably consistent across cultures and centuries.

Hindu and Vedantic Views

The Upanishads, composed between 800 and 200 BCE, contain some of the oldest recorded explorations of consciousness. The central teaching is that individual consciousness (Atman) is identical to universal consciousness (Brahman). The famous phrase Tat Tvam Asi, "Thou Art That," points to the discovery that the awareness looking out of your eyes is the same awareness that pervades all of existence.

Vedanta describes four states of consciousness: waking (jagrat), dreaming (svapna), deep sleep (sushupti), and the transcendent fourth state (turiya). Turiya is not another state alongside the others but the unchanging awareness that witnesses all three. It is the screen on which the movie of waking, dreaming, and sleeping plays out. Practices like yoga nidra are specifically designed to access the threshold between sleep and turiya.

Buddhist Understanding

Buddhism approaches consciousness with extraordinary precision. The Abhidharma texts classify dozens of types of consciousness (vijnana), each associated with different sense doors and mental functions. Rather than treating consciousness as a single thing, Buddhism views it as a rapidly flowing stream of momentary awarenesses, arising and passing away hundreds of times per second.

The Buddhist teaching of sunyata (emptiness) applies directly to consciousness itself. Consciousness has no fixed, permanent essence. It is dependently originated, meaning it arises based on conditions. When you look for the "self" behind the experience, you find nothing solid, only the luminous, open quality of awareness itself. This insight, far from being nihilistic, is described as deeply liberating. Meditation techniques like vipassana systematically reveal this truth through direct observation.

Sufi and Islamic Mysticism

Sufi mystics describe consciousness as the divine breath that animates all creation. The poet Rumi wrote, "You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop." This captures the Sufi understanding that human consciousness is not separate from divine consciousness but a localized expression of it.

Sufi practice (dhikr, the remembrance of God) aims to polish the mirror of the heart until it reflects pure consciousness without distortion. The stages of the Sufi path (nafs) map the purification of awareness from ego-dominated consciousness to states of complete surrender and divine union.

Indigenous and Shamanic Traditions

Many indigenous cultures view consciousness as something shared between humans, animals, plants, rivers, and mountains. This is not metaphor but lived experience. Shamanic practices use drumming, plant medicines, fasting, and vision quests to shift consciousness beyond ordinary human perception and into direct communion with the consciousness of nature.

These traditions also recognize that consciousness persists beyond physical death. Ancestor communication, spirit journeys, and soul retrieval practices all operate on the assumption that awareness is not confined to the body and continues in other forms after the body ceases to function.

Levels of Consciousness: Maps for Inner Exploration

Both scientific and spiritual researchers have created frameworks for understanding the different levels or stages of consciousness. These maps are not the territory, but they provide useful orientation for anyone exploring inner space.

David Hawkins' Map of Consciousness

Psychiatrist David Hawkins developed a numerical scale of consciousness from 20 (shame) to 1000 (enlightenment). The critical threshold is 200, which Hawkins identified as the shift from force-based to power-based consciousness. Below 200, emotions like fear, anger, and pride dominate. Above 200, courage, acceptance, reason, love, and peace become available.

Ken Wilber's Integral Framework

Philosopher Ken Wilber maps consciousness through developmental stages, from pre-personal (instinctual, magical) through personal (rational, achievement-oriented) to transpersonal (integrative, mystical). His Integral Theory suggests that consciousness evolution follows predictable patterns, both individually and collectively, and that each stage includes and transcends the one before it.

Wilber's framework is particularly useful because it bridges psychological development and spiritual awakening. You do not need to abandon reason to access higher states of consciousness. Instead, reason becomes a stable foundation from which deeper awareness naturally emerges. This matches what many meditation teachers observe: people with strong critical thinking skills often make rapid progress in contemplative practice because they can distinguish genuine insight from wishful thinking.

The Vedantic Four States

The most elegant consciousness map comes from the Mandukya Upanishad, which describes just four states. Waking consciousness (vaishvanara) knows the external world. Dream consciousness (taijasa) creates internal worlds. Deep sleep consciousness (prajna) rests in undifferentiated awareness. And turiya, the fourth, is the silent witness that remains unchanged through all three. Spiritual practice, in this framework, is the process of recognizing turiya as your true nature rather than identifying exclusively with the waking state.

Consciousness and Meditation: The Practice of Awareness

If consciousness is the territory, meditation is the map-making tool. Every contemplative tradition uses some form of systematic attention training to explore and expand conscious awareness. And modern science has confirmed what meditators have reported for thousands of years: the practice works.

What Happens in the Brain During Meditation

When you sit down to meditate, measurable changes begin within minutes. Heart rate slows. Blood pressure drops. The default mode network, the brain region responsible for mind-wandering and self-referential thinking, quiets down. Meanwhile, areas responsible for attention, body awareness, and emotional regulation become more active.

Over weeks and months of regular practice, structural changes appear. A 2011 Harvard study by Sara Lazar found that eight weeks of mindfulness meditation increased cortical thickness in the hippocampus (learning and memory) and decreased volume in the amygdala (fear and stress). Long-term meditators show increased connectivity between brain regions, suggesting that meditation literally integrates the brain.

Meditation Styles and Consciousness States

Different meditation techniques target different dimensions of consciousness:

Focused attention meditation (samatha, concentration) stabilizes consciousness. By training the mind to rest on a single object, usually the breath, you develop the capacity to sustain awareness without distraction. This produces deep calm and access to jhana (absorption) states.

Open monitoring meditation (vipassana, mindfulness) investigates consciousness. Rather than focusing on one thing, you observe whatever arises in awareness, including thoughts, sensations, emotions, and sounds, without grasping or rejecting. This develops insight into the nature of mind and reveals the impermanent, constructed quality of ordinary experience.

Non-dual awareness meditation (dzogchen, advaita self-inquiry) rests as consciousness itself. Instead of watching experience, you recognize that you are the awareness in which experience appears. This is the most direct approach and the one most closely aligned with the highest teachings of both Eastern and Western mysticism.

Breathwork practices offer another powerful doorway into expanded consciousness. Techniques like holotropic breathing, Wim Hof breathing, and pranayama alter blood chemistry and brain oxygenation in ways that can produce profound shifts in awareness within minutes.

Cosmic Consciousness: When the Self Dissolves Into Everything

In 1901, Canadian psychiatrist Richard Maurice Bucke published Cosmic Consciousness, documenting cases of people who experienced sudden, overwhelming expansions of awareness. These experiences shared common features: a sense of the universe as a living presence, the conviction that the cosmos is fundamentally good, the loss of fear of death, and a feeling of intellectual illumination that goes far beyond ordinary understanding.

Bucke's subjects included historical figures like the Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, Walt Whitman, and William Blake. But he also documented ordinary people who spontaneously entered states of cosmic awareness, sometimes triggered by nature, music, childbirth, or near-death experiences.

Common Features of Cosmic Consciousness

People who report cosmic consciousness experiences consistently describe several features. The boundary between self and world dissolves. Time feels suspended or irrelevant. Everything appears luminous, as if lit from within. There is an overwhelming sense of love, not romantic love but a vast, impersonal compassion that includes everything. And perhaps most remarkably, the experience carries a sense of absolute certainty, a knowing that this expanded awareness is more real than ordinary waking consciousness, not less.

Abraham Maslow studied similar experiences and called them "peak experiences." He found that psychologically healthy people had them more frequently and that the experiences themselves promoted further psychological growth. This aligns with what spiritual awakening traditions have always taught: consciousness expansion is not a one-time event but an ongoing process of deepening.

The Neuroscience of Unity Experiences

Andrew Newberg at Thomas Jefferson University has spent decades scanning the brains of people during intense prayer, meditation, and mystical experiences. His research reveals a consistent pattern: during peak spiritual experiences, the posterior superior parietal lobe (which maintains the sense of self-other boundary) shows dramatically reduced activity. When this region quiets down, the brain can no longer construct the usual sense of a separate self, and the result is the experience of unity with everything.

This does not mean that unity experiences are "just brain activity." It means that the brain has a built-in mechanism for the kind of awareness that mystics describe. Whether you interpret this as the brain generating the experience or the brain getting out of the way so a deeper reality can shine through depends on your philosophical starting point. Both interpretations are compatible with the data.

The Hard Problem: Where Science and Mystery Meet

In 1995, philosopher David Chalmers crystallized the deepest puzzle in consciousness studies with a simple question: why does physical processing give rise to subjective experience? We can explain how the brain processes information, but we cannot explain why that processing feels like something from the inside.

This is the hard problem of consciousness. It is called "hard" not because the other problems are easy, but because it seems to be a fundamentally different kind of question. Understanding how neurons fire and communicate is an engineering problem, immensely complicated but solvable in principle. Understanding why those firings produce the rich inner world of experience seems to require a different kind of explanation altogether.

Materialist Approaches

Some philosophers (Daniel Dennett most prominently) argue that the hard problem is actually an illusion. Once we fully understand the brain's information processing, they claim, the "why" question will dissolve. Consciousness is what certain complex information processing looks like from the inside, and there is nothing more to explain.

Panpsychism: Consciousness All the Way Down

An increasingly popular alternative is panpsychism: the view that consciousness is a fundamental feature of reality, present in some form at every level of existence. Electrons have a vanishingly simple form of experience. Atoms have slightly more. Complex systems like brains have vastly more. On this view, the brain does not generate consciousness from non-conscious matter. Instead, it organizes and amplifies the consciousness that is already inherent in the physical world.

Philosopher Philip Goff and neuroscientist Christof Koch have both argued for versions of panpsychism. Koch's support is particularly significant because he spent decades as a strict materialist before the evidence from his own research (on Integrated Information Theory) led him toward the conclusion that consciousness may be a basic property of matter, like mass or charge.

How to Expand Your Consciousness: Practical Steps

Understanding the theory of consciousness is valuable, but the real transformation happens through practice. Here are concrete, research-supported methods for deepening your awareness. These draw from both scientific findings and contemplative traditions.

1. Establish a Daily Meditation Practice

Start with 10 minutes each morning. Sit comfortably, close your eyes, and bring your attention to the sensation of breathing. When thoughts arise (and they will), notice them without judgment and return to the breath. This simple practice, repeated daily, physically restructures your brain for greater awareness. After two weeks, increase to 15 or 20 minutes. If you are new to meditation, our beginner meditation guide provides detailed instructions.

2. Practice Self-Inquiry

The Indian sage Ramana Maharshi taught a single question as the fastest path to expanded consciousness: "Who am I?" This is not a philosophical exercise. It is a direct investigation into the nature of the one who is aware. When a thought arises, ask: "To whom does this thought appear?" The answer is always "to me." Then ask: "Who am I?" and look directly for the source of the "I" feeling. This practice, done sincerely, can open profound dimensions of awareness.

3. Engage in Mindful Movement

Walking meditation, yoga, tai chi, and qigong all use physical movement as a vehicle for consciousness expansion. The body becomes the anchor for present-moment awareness, and the practice of coordinating breath, movement, and attention integrates multiple dimensions of consciousness simultaneously.

4. Explore Sound and Vibration

Singing bowl meditation, shamanic drumming, and binaural beat technologies all use sound frequencies to entrain brainwaves toward specific states of consciousness. Theta-frequency sound (4-8 Hz) is particularly effective for accessing deep meditative awareness and the hypnagogic state between waking and sleep.

5. Spend Regular Time in Nature

Forest bathing (shinrin-yoku) research shows that time in natural environments reduces cortisol, increases parasympathetic nervous system activity, and promotes the kind of relaxed, open awareness that is the foundation of consciousness expansion. Aim for at least one hour per week in a natural setting, without devices, practicing open sensory awareness.

6. Keep a Consciousness Journal

Journaling for spiritual growth creates a written record of your inner exploration. Note shifts in awareness, unusual dreams, moments of unexpected clarity, feelings of connection, and any resistance you encounter. Review your journal monthly to track patterns and growth.

7. Study Multiple Wisdom Traditions

Reading across traditions prevents the narrowing that comes from following only one path. The Upanishads, the Tao Te Ching, the Gospel of Thomas, Rumi's poetry, and contemporary consciousness researchers like Bernardo Kastrup or Rupert Spira all offer different entry points into the same underlying reality. Cross-pollination generates insight that no single tradition provides alone.

Frequently Asked Questions