The Question of Consciousness and Awareness
Few words are used with more confidence and less precision than consciousness and awareness. Across spirituality, neuroscience, psychology, self-help, and popular philosophy, these terms circulate as if their meaning were self-evident. They are invoked to explain suffering, intelligence, morality, awakening, and even the future of humanity. We are told that consciousness is rising, awareness is expanding, and that through greater awareness individuals and societies will transform. This confidence is striking, because there is no consensus—nor even clarity—about what these words actually refer to. Yet this lack of clarity does not weaken their authority; it strengthens it. Consciousness has become a shelter, a conceptual refuge where uncertainty, fear, and contradiction are absorbed and rebranded as depth.
In spiritual discourse, consciousness is presented as fundamental, universal, and primary. It is said to precede matter, generate experience, and exist independently of the brain. Awareness is described as a pure observing presence, distinct from thought, capable of witnessing sensations without identification. Enlightenment or awakening is framed as a shift into this awareness, a realization of one’s true nature as consciousness itself. In neuroscience and psychology, the vocabulary changes but the structure remains. Consciousness is defined as an emergent property of neural complexity, awareness as a cognitive function, attention as a mechanism of selective processing, and the subconscious as a reservoir of latent content. Despite their disagreements, both domains speak as if consciousness were a thing that can be located, accessed, expanded, refined, or observed. Both assume that someone—or something—stands in relation to it.
Before examining whether these claims are correct, a more basic question must be asked: what do we mean when we use the word consciousness at all? The word itself is rarely examined. Etymologically, “conscious” derives from the Latin conscire, meaning “to know together” or “to know with.” In ordinary usage, to be conscious is to know that something is happening. Consciousness, then, is assumed to be the capacity or state of knowing. This assumption is rarely challenged, yet it is foundational. If consciousness is knowing, then the inquiry must begin not with metaphysical speculation, but with a simple, destabilizing question: what is knowing, and what is it that claims to know?
This question is destabilizing because it immediately exposes a structural problem. Knowing, in the ordinary sense, implies direct contact with a fact. To know that fire burns, one does not consult memory or belief; the fact is immediate. But most of what is called knowing in human life is not of this kind. It is recognition. Recognition is the activation of memory in response to stimulus. A tree is “known” because it has been named, categorized, remembered. A face is “known” because it has been seen before. Recognition brings familiarity, and familiarity is mistaken for understanding. This confusion is so ingrained that it is rarely noticed. Yet the distinction is decisive. Recognition is repetition of the past; knowing is contact with what is present. The two are not the same, and confusing them is the root of much of what is called consciousness.
To understand why this confusion persists, one must look at the biological functioning of the brain. The brain is not an instrument of truth; it is an instrument of survival. It records, associates, predicts, and reacts. It registers intensity, danger, and repetition. It does not discriminate between what is real and what is imagined in the psychological sense. A nightmare produces real physiological fear. An imagined threat activates real stress responses. A symbolic image can trigger the same bodily reactions as an actual event. The brain records indiscriminately, because its function is not to know reality but to ensure continuity of the organism. Memory, therefore, is not knowledge; it is stored response.
Over time, these recordings accumulate. Experience becomes memory, memory becomes knowledge, and knowledge becomes the reference point from which reactions occur. Thought is the activation of this stored material. Thought is not free movement; it is conditioned movement. It operates through time, because memory is the past acting in the present. Language emerges as a tool within this process. Language allows naming, categorization, and communication, but it also fixes perception. Once something is named, it is no longer encountered; it is recognized. The word replaces the thing. This replacement is efficient, but it is also limiting. Language does not reveal reality; it stabilizes it. It freezes movement into concepts, and concepts into certainty.
This is where the discourse on consciousness becomes deeply deceptive. When people speak of being conscious or aware, they often mean that they recognize something. They are familiar with a sensation, a thought, an emotion, or a pattern. This familiarity creates a sense of presence, of “being here,” which is then interpreted as awareness. But familiarity is not awareness; it is memory confirming itself. The act of recognition feels immediate, but it is mediated by the past. Calling this knowing stretches the word beyond coherence.
At this point, many spiritual teachers intervene with a refinement. They distinguish between ordinary consciousness, which is entangled with thought, and a higher or purer awareness that observes thought without identification. This move appears sophisticated, but it preserves the same structural assumption: that there is an observer separate from what is observed. The observer may be renamed “pure awareness,” “the witness,” or “consciousness itself,” but the division remains. This division is never demonstrated; it is assumed. No one ever shows the observer. They speak from it, about it, and as it, but they never locate it as a fact. The observer is inferred because the language requires it.
A popular example illustrates this clearly. When a teacher claims that answers arise from consciousness rather than memory, the implication is that there exists a vast reservoir of intelligence that can be tapped into. Questions are said to draw responses from this field of consciousness. Yet there is no need to invoke such a field to explain what happens. A question triggers retrieval. Retrieval is a function of the brain’s recording capacity. The fact that answers were not verbally present a moment ago does not mean they were hidden in a metaphysical domain. It means they were latent configurations of memory awaiting activation. To rename this process “consciousness” is not insight; it is mystification. It replaces a functional explanation with a poetic placeholder.
Neuroscience, despite its empirical grounding, often commits a parallel error. When consciousness is described as an emergent property of neural networks, the language suggests that something new and unified arises from complexity. But emergence here functions as a conceptual escape hatch. It allows scientists to acknowledge complexity without confronting the absence of a center. Neural processes occur, sensations occur, reactions occur, but there is no evidence of a single entity that owns or oversees them. Yet the language of consciousness implies ownership. Someone is conscious. Someone is aware. The grammar demands a subject, and the subject is quietly assumed into existence.
This assumption is reinforced by feeling. Sensation and emotion are real. Pain hurts. Pleasure attracts. Fear contracts. These experiences are undeniable, and their intensity gives the impression of depth. Because they feel immediate, they are taken as proof of a central experiencer. But feeling does not imply an owner. A reflexive response to danger occurs without thought, without observer, without awareness in the conventional sense. A body jumps away from a moving car without deliberation. There is intelligence in that movement, but it is not conscious in the way consciousness is usually described. It is direct, non-mediated response. Calling it awareness adds nothing; it only imports confusion.
The confusion deepens when these processes are moralized or spiritualized. Awareness becomes a virtue. Consciousness becomes something to be raised. Attention becomes a practice. Entire hierarchies of development are constructed, ranking individuals according to supposed levels of awareness. This ranking is not accidental. It restores meaning, direction, and identity at a time when traditional religion and political ideology have lost credibility. Consciousness discourse becomes the new shelter. Where God once guaranteed order, awareness now promises transformation. Where salvation was once external, awakening is now internal. The structure remains the same; only the vocabulary changes.
What is striking is that those who speak most authoritatively about consciousness rarely question the movement from which they speak. They talk as if they stand outside the process they describe. Spiritual teachers speak of transcending ego while maintaining a clear identity as teacher, guide, or awakened being. Scientists speak of observing consciousness while assuming the neutrality of their own observing position. Popular thinkers speak of collective consciousness while functioning entirely within cultural, linguistic, and psychological conditioning. The possibility that their own statements are expressions of the same conditioned movement is rarely entertained. To do so would undermine authority, and authority is precisely what sustains these discourses.
The fundamental error underlying all of this is the belief that thought can know. Thought can measure, compare, recall, and project, but it cannot know in the sense of direct contact. Thought operates through symbols, memories, and time. Knowing, if it has any meaning beyond recognition, would require immediacy without mediation. Yet thought always mediates. When thought claims to observe itself, it creates an infinite regress. An observer observing the observer, and so on. This regress is not resolved by renaming the observer; it is obscured.
Language plays a central role in maintaining this illusion. Language divides, categorizes, and stabilizes. It is indispensable for practical functioning, but disastrous when mistaken for perception. When language names an inner process “consciousness,” it gives the impression of a unified thing where there is only movement. The name becomes a container into which sensations, thoughts, and feelings are poured. Once contained, they appear coherent. This coherence is seductive. It feels like understanding. It feels like awareness. But it is an artifact of naming.
None of this means that human experience is unreal, meaningless, or unimportant. It means that the explanations offered for it are deeply confused. Consciousness and awareness, as they are commonly used, do not clarify experience; they obscure it. They provide a sense of depth without requiring precision. They allow humanity to speak about transformation without facing the actual mechanisms of fear, memory, and conditioning. They offer hope without demanding contact with fact.
When this is seen—not intellectually accepted, but seen—the discourse collapses on its own. Not replaced by a better theory, a higher awareness, or a new practice, but by silence where false certainty once stood. What, if anything, emerges from that silence cannot be named without distortion. And that is precisely why it cannot be taught, marketed, or institutionalized. The moment it is, it becomes consciousness again—another shelter built from words.