#consciousness

Consciousness: noticing yourself and reality

At some point you notice it. You have been adapting without wanting to. You agreed while something in you was saying no. You exhausted yourself without knowing why — and then, in a quiet moment, what has been happening all along becomes clear. This is consciousness in its practical sense: not expansion at any price, but orientation.

On this platform, consciousness is not used as a rank, possession, or spiritual performance level. The point is not to have “more consciousness” than others or to stand on a higher plane. What matters here is more practical: something comes into the light. A pattern becomes visible. A bodily response becomes felt. An old fear receives a name. A decision reveals its cost. A relationship between inside and outside becomes recognizable.

A young word with an old root

The root reaches far back into the field of knowing, seeing, and recognizing. German Bewusstsein is connected to bewusst and wissen (DWDS: Bewusstsein). Historically, the German noun receives its philosophical force in the Enlightenment. In Christian Wolff's usage, “being conscious” becomes a mark of thinking: the subject recognizes that it thinks.

Something shifts here. Latin conscientia originally also carries the sense of shared knowing and conscience. In German Bewusstsein, this becomes more strongly an inner property of the subject: something located in me, tested in me, improved in me, or problematized in me. This is where the dedogmatic question begins: who decides what counts as conscious, unconscious, rightly conscious, or wrongly conscious?

Consciousness as a construction site

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the term is built into different systems. In Hegel, consciousness becomes part of historical becoming. In Marx, it is tied back to social conditions: it is not consciousness that determines being, but social being that determines consciousness (Marx, 1859). In psychiatry and psychology, consciousness becomes a boundary category: clear, clouded, split, unconscious, disturbed. In Freud, the unconscious becomes the effective underground that is not directly available to the conscious ego.

This can be useful, but it can also become dangerous. Once the problem is located in the consciousness of the individual, correction also seems to belong there. Then people are told: you are not aware of this. You have false consciousness. You have not reached higher consciousness. You are not clear. Each of these sentences can turn a person into the object of correction.

From a dedogmatic perspective, this is the decisive point: consciousness must not become a hierarchy. It must not be used to belittle, pathologize, or spiritually sort people. It should help a person orient themselves.

“Everything is consciousness”?

In spiritual contexts, one often encounters the sentence: everything is consciousness. Many seekers use it to point to a direct experience of unity, presence, or non-separate reality. This experience should not be dismissed here. On the contrary, it can be deeply clarifying. Linguistically, however, the sentence becomes difficult if consciousness is understood in the modern German and philosophical sense.

That term already carries the history of self-reference, thinking, knowing, psychological measurability, and inner correction. When it is charged cosmically, a modern concept of the subject can quietly be projected onto the whole: a young word for being-conscious-of-something suddenly becomes the supposed core of everything that is.

A dedogmatic approach can untangle this. Perhaps “everything is consciousness” does not mean consciousness in the narrow sense, but awareness, being, presence, living reality, or the open field in which experience appears. Then the more precise distinction is this: consciousness tends to say “I am aware of something.” Awareness points more toward experience happening before it is fully divided into I, object, knowledge, and control.

For seekers, this distinction is useful. They do not need to reject experiences of spaciousness, unity, or deep stillness. They simply do not need to press every experience into the term consciousness. Sometimes “consciousness” is the right word for self-observation. Sometimes “awareness” or “presence” is closer to the experience.

The open problem of experience

Modern philosophy and neuroscience have not solved the term either. David Chalmers distinguishes between easier functional questions and the “hard problem of consciousness”: why is there subjective experience at all, an inner feel of perception? (Chalmers, 1995). One can describe how the brain processes information. It remains harder to explain why it feels like something to see, to love, to fear, or to notice oneself.

For EyLC, this matters because consciousness is not only a neurological function word. It concerns lived experience. When you notice that you are angry, more happens than data processing. When you recognize that you have been adapting yourself for years, that is more than information. When you feel your body saying no while your mind is still negotiating yes, orientation appears.

Becoming aware and integrating the self

Becoming aware means: I notice what has already been active. A belief becomes visible. An emotion receives space. A suppressed desire is allowed to appear. A relationship pattern loses its invisibility. An inner part that has long been excluded becomes part of the whole again.

Self-integration goes one step further. It is not enough to know something. What has been recognized must arrive in the body, in behavior, in relationships, and in everyday life. Someone who notices that they constantly cross their own boundaries but changes nothing is informed, but not yet integrated. Someone who recognizes fear, can hold it, understand it, and translate it into clear action becomes more capable.

In this sense, consciousness is not “above,” but near. Not a level, but contact. Not possession, but becoming inwardly aware. It is the moment in which you know that you know, before someone outside tells you whether that knowing is valid.

A simple retranslation

Consciousness can be understood as orientation: in one's body, one's history, relationships, and the world. It is the contact between inside and outside. It is knowledge as it appears, before it is judged, managed, or corrected.

Working with consciousness on this platform therefore means perceiving more accurately, feeling more honestly, recognizing automatic patterns, and bringing split-off parts of the self back into a larger picture. Not in order to reach perfect consciousness, but to act more whole, clear, and free.