What is consciousness?

Our best current answer

Consciousness is the fact that there is something it feels like to be here: to see colour, feel pain, recognise a friend, or notice a thought. We can investigate the processes accompanying experience, and we can learn to observe experience more carefully. Neither approach has yet delivered a universally accepted explanation of why experience exists.

The evidence strongly connects ordinary human consciousness with the functioning brain and body. It also shows that outward behaviour can underestimate a person's awareness. Meditation and self-enquiry offer ways of changing our relationship to experience; their practical value can be investigated without first deciding whether the universe itself is conscious.

The strongest convergence is therefore between an embodied science of mind and disciplined attention to lived experience. A universal consciousness, a surviving soul and reincarnation remain philosophical or spiritual possibilities rather than conclusions established by that convergence. Materialism is not a completed explanation of experience; the incompleteness of materialism does not by itself establish an alternative.

Our judgement: conscious experience is real, its relationship with brain function is substantial, and its ultimate nature remains unresolved. Spiritual practice deserves an encounter on its own terms, while its claims about the wider universe require additional evidence.

Start with the experience we already have

A thought appears: I am failing. A moment later, we may notice that it is a thought rather than a complete description of our life. Nothing supernatural is required for that small shift. Yet it can change how we act.

Much of the spiritual material on Open Sky begins near this distinction. Ramana Maharshi's self-enquiry asks us to investigate the person we ordinarily take ourselves to be. In Who Am I?, attention turns towards the sense of “I”, rather than following each new thought. The text places this practice within a definite non-dual teaching: our deepest identity is the Self, beyond habitual identification with body and mind.[C1]

That is more than a relaxation technique. It is also more than a scientific finding. A reader can explore the practice, examine its effects and still ask whether its metaphysical interpretation follows. Becoming less identified with thoughts establishes a change in experience. It does not automatically establish what consciousness is made of, whether it exists before birth, or whether the stars are appearances within one mind.

Keeping those questions distinct makes the encounter more interesting. We can take the first-person investigation seriously without turning every insight into a conclusion about cosmology.

What the brain evidence establishes

Neuroscience approaches experience through observations that other investigators can inspect: reports, behaviour, electrical signals, imaging and changes following interventions. The aim is to identify which processes are necessary, sufficient or predictive for particular kinds of awareness.

A major 2025 study brought advocates of two competing theories into an adversarial collaboration. Integrated information theory and global neuronal workspace theory were tested against agreed predictions using several kinds of measurement. The results supported some predictions and challenged others. They did not announce a final winner.[C2]

This matters because the popular choice between “science has solved consciousness” and “science knows nothing about consciousness” misses the productive middle. There is a substantial research programme, competing explanations and evidence capable of embarrassing a preferred theory.

The success of brain-based prediction does not, by itself, decide the ultimate metaphysics. A physicalist understands brain activity as producing or realising consciousness. Other philosophies interpret the relationship differently. Any alternative still has to account for the detailed dependence between what a brain is doing and what a person can experience. Calling the brain a receiver restates a proposal; it does not yet supply the missing mechanism or a discriminating experiment.

The question becomes sharper when we ask: what observation would the receiver model predict that an adequate brain-based model would not? Without an answer, the two accounts may be interpretations of the same observations rather than equally tested scientific theories.

Awareness can be present when communication is absent

One of the most consequential findings concerns people who cannot show that they understand us.

A 2024 multicentre study examined patients with disorders of consciousness using functional MRI or EEG tasks. Among 241 participants who showed no observable response to commands, 60 demonstrated task-related responses on one or both testing approaches. This was a selected clinical sample, not an estimate for every unconscious patient. Nevertheless, it showed that bedside behaviour can miss evidence of command-following.[C3]

The ethical implication is immediate. Failure to communicate should not be treated casually as proof of an absent inner life. Better assessment can change how we understand and care for particular patients.

This finding is sometimes recruited as evidence that consciousness escapes the brain. The study does not establish that. Its crucial evidence is brain activity indicating a form of engagement that behaviour did not reveal. It expands our understanding of brain-supported awareness and exposes a limitation in our measurements.

That is a strong, humane discovery without requiring an additional metaphysical conclusion. It also teaches a wider lesson: our instruments and categories can fail before the phenomenon does.

What near-death experiences add

Reports from people resuscitated after cardiac arrest deserve careful attention. Some describe unusual clarity, encounters, altered time, life review or a sense of leaving the body. The experience and its lasting importance belong in the record. Establishing when and how it occurred is a separate task.

The AWARE-II study followed 567 in-hospital cardiac arrests. There were 53 survivors, of whom 28 completed interviews. Some reported memories or experiences associated with resuscitation. None identified the visual target used in the study; one identified an auditory stimulus. Brain monitoring in a subset also detected activity during prolonged resuscitation.[C4]

These observations justify continued research. They do not show that a mind functioned after irreversible brain death. Cardiac arrest with attempted resuscitation is not the same condition as irreversible loss of all brain function. The timing of remembered experience is also difficult to establish retrospectively.

An adequate investigation needs to preserve both the testimony and the timing problem. Prospectively recorded targets, physiological measurements and independently documented details can help. The strongest future case would connect a specific accurate perception to a demonstrable period and exclude ordinary routes of acquiring the information.

Until then, the material challenges simplistic accounts of what patients experience around resuscitation. It leaves survival beyond death open as a question rather than established as an answer.

Why meditation belongs in this discussion

Meditation changes the conditions under which we observe ourselves. Rather than asking the mind only to produce an answer, we examine how thoughts, emotions and the feeling of being a separate observer arise.

Research reviewed by the US National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health suggests benefits for some outcomes, including aspects of stress and anxiety, while highlighting uneven study quality and uncertainty about comparisons with other treatments. Meditation can also produce difficult experiences. Neither universal benefit nor universal harmlessness should be assumed.[C5]

This gives us a practical meeting point between contemplative traditions and research. We can ask whether a defined practice helps a defined group with a defined problem. We can measure changes while listening to participants describe what the changes mean.

A reduction in distress does not validate every doctrine of the tradition teaching the practice. Equally, uncertainty about cosmic consciousness does not cancel a participant's increased steadiness, compassion or ability to respond thoughtfully.

For Open Sky, the valuable overlap lies here: attention is trainable, experience is worth examining, and a person's relationship to suffering can change. Claims about particular energetic channels, paranormal powers or guaranteed spiritual attainment require their own evaluation.

Is consciousness fundamental?

Idealist philosophies propose that consciousness is basic and the physical world should be understood within it. Bernardo Kastrup, for example, develops an account in which individual minds are dissociated aspects of a wider consciousness. His 2017 paper presents a philosophical argument intended to explain familiar observations more economically than competing ontologies.[C6]

This is a substantive proposal. Its status should be described accurately: a philosophical model assessed through its reasoning, explanatory reach and relationship with evidence. Publication does not turn it into an experimental demonstration that all minds share one universal subject.

Other approaches treat consciousness as emerging from organised physical processes or as an aspect of nature more generally. Each faces difficulties. A useful chapter allows those difficulties to remain visible instead of presenting one familiar slogan as the last word.

There is also a difference between experiencing unity and establishing numerical identity between all experiencers. A powerful experience may feel like the disclosure of reality itself. That feeling is important evidence about the experience. Moving from it to a universal claim requires reasoning that other people can examine.

When spiritual language borrows from physics

Words such as energy, frequency and dimension move freely across the site. Sometimes they name measurable quantities. Sometimes they describe mood, vitality or a proposed level of spiritual development. The resemblance between the words can conceal different meanings.

Physics provides striking results of its own. Atomic-clock experiments can detect differences in the passage of time across tiny height differences, in agreement with general relativity.[C7] That does not independently confirm a channeled account of spiritual densities or thought-based travel. The bridge would require a model connecting the quantities and a prediction the experiment actually tests.

A musical metaphor can illuminate experience without becoming a physical mechanism. We need neither ban the metaphor nor confuse it with a measurement.

The same discipline applies to manifestation. Beliefs can affect attention, persistence, interpretation and relationships. Those are plausible routes by which a changed outlook changes a life. They do not establish that thoughts alone control external events, or that illness and misfortune reveal a person's deficient consciousness.

Where this leaves us

The most productive position combines curiosity with patience. Listen carefully to experiences. Study the conditions under which they occur. Ask what follows from them and what remains an interpretation.

For a reader, that can mean a modest experiment: observe thoughts for a few minutes each day, keep a record of the effects, and notice whether the practice improves how you treat yourself and others. Seek support if practice becomes destabilising. No cosmic conclusion is needed before that enquiry begins.

For research, it means better tests of covert awareness, clearer theories and prospective studies of unusual experiences. For philosophy, it means explaining why one account fits the full evidence better than its rivals.

We have good reasons to regard consciousness as central to human life. We have not yet earned a single final account of its place in the universe. The uncertainty is a reason to investigate with greater care, while taking the experiences and wellbeing of conscious beings seriously now.

Continue through Open Sky

Read the Spirit faculty for the spiritual frameworks, Yogananda for a particular account of practice and cosmology, and Time for the different meanings of cycles. These are further perspectives; agreement in vocabulary should not be counted as independent confirmation.

Sources and reading notes