On
Consciousness
October
23, 2025
Just now I was looking online at someone’s list of the 12
most beautiful cities in Europe. I went through the list and said that I’ve
been in 8 of them. But then I thought: What does it mean to say that “I” have
been in 8 of them? That feels right, but it was an 11 year old Tom Sorenson who
was in Paris. The only one of them I’ve been in since 1975 is Edinburgh. I was
there about three months ago on a choir tour. So I ask: What does “I” mean? Who
am or what is “I”? I’m not sure even the philosophers or scientists have an
answer to that one, but it seems to me that “I” has to refer to a continuance
of consciousness. Yes, in a sense, there is also a continuance of physical
being. That 11 year old Tom Sorenson’s physical body has evolved into today’s
79 year old Tom Sorenson’s physical body though those two bodies sure don’t
look much alike. Tom Sorenson’s consciousness has changed a lot less if it has
changed at all. I think it is that consciousness that is the “I” when I say “I”.
OK, but what is consciousness? Online definitions mostly use
the word “awareness” or the phrase “being aware” of something. But what is it
that is “aware?” Is it merely a function of the brain? Certainly, the brain is
involved. A person can be unconscious and still be alive. Our brain takes us
through sleep as an altered type of consciousness, one both our bodies and our
minds seem to need though the reasons we need it aren’t at all clear.
Yet the brain is a physical object. It is an organ made up
of particular tissues that seem to function in particular ways. And it can stop
functioning normally while a person is still alive. Does an “I” cease to be
when a person is unconscious, say, in a coma? We wouldn’t say no. We’d think
the person in the coma is the same person who was there before going into a
coma. Now, perhaps a person in a coma is still conscious at some level. They
say such a person actually can hear people talk to them, they just can’t
respond. So though consciousness has changed, it hasn’t stopped, it hasn’t
disappeared.
How does the brain as a physical object produce consciousness?
After all, as far as we know, objects that are merely physical have no
consciousness. They aren’t “aware” in any sense at all. Yet animals are all
aware at some level, and plants may be too. How does consciousness-less matter
become conscious?
The only answer I can come up with to that question is:
Spirit. But what is “spirit?” MSN Copilot defines it as “the nonphysical part
of a person which is the seat of emotions and character; the soul,” and “those
qualities regarded as forming the definitive or typical elements in the
character of a person….” So according to these definitions, “spirit” is something
nonphysical in a person that somehow functions within the person or the “qualities”
that that functioning produces.
OK, but how can something that is “nonphysical” function?
How can it do anything? The only answer I can come up with to that question is
that “spirit” is an ultimate reality behind every physical thing that is. In
ways beyond our understanding, spirit gives rise to physicality while remaining
beyond physicality or at least distinct from it. Yet it functions in and
through physicality, or at least in and through animate physicality, to produce
consciousness. What’s “animate physicality?” Perhaps it is just something
physical that has been “animated” by the presence of spirit within it. We could
say, I think, that animate physicality is something physical brought to
consciousness by the presence of spirit.
Now, there are, of course, unanswerable questions about
spirit. We might be able, more or less, to describe it or to describe how we
experience it or describe what we think it does. Beyond that, however, we run
out of language for it. We cannot even begin to know where it comes from. Did
it have a beginning? Will it have an end? Did something, or some force, greater
than spirit create it? If not, where indeed does it come from? If so, what is
that greater something? Here, it seems to me, we’ve run into the limits of
human knowledge, which are the limits of human language. That our knowledge and
language have limits doesn’t mean there is nothing real beyond them. It just
means that we can never fully know or express in any fully adequate way what
the something beyond them is.
Which, perhaps, is why we call that something that subsists
beyond human knowledge and language “God.” “God” is indeed our primary word for
that which lies beyond human language and human knowledge but which we can
nonetheless experience if we are open to experiencing it. It’s not just our
primary word for that reality, it is a symbol of that transcendent reality. It
points beyond itself to that reality and connects us with that reality in an intimate
way, or at least it does those things if we are open to it doing them.
We have another word we use for the reality I’m trying to
write about here. That word is Spirit. We say that God is Spirit, and we mean
that God is at least an active yet ineffable reality among us. Yet God isn’t
just among us. God is within us. So what is consciousness? It is the presence
of Spirit, that is, of God in every conscious being. Or if not exactly God in
every conscious being, then it is a consequence of God acting on and perhaps in
every being.
Now, what I’ve said here amount to this: We don’t know and
probably can’t know how inanimate matter becomes conscious, that is, becomes
sensate. So we say it has to do with spirit, and spirit is essentially God. In
saying these things, we sort of answer my original question about what
consciousness is, and we sort of haven’t. We have moved the inquiry from the
human brain to God, but who is God? Why is there God? Where does God come from?
Those, my friends are simply unanswerable questions. Far too people who say
they believe in God understand this truth, but the final answer to every
question about God is: We don’t know, and more than that, we can’t know.
“Belief” in God is not about having knowledge. It is accepting that there is
something, however we may conceptualize that something, so far beyond us that
we just can’t know everything we’d like to know about it.
So if “belief” in God isn’t about knowledge, what is it
about? It is about trust. It is about trusting that a reality we can’t know but
can, if we’re open to it, experience, is in fact real. I call myself a man of
faith. Heck, I’m even a seminary trained and ordained Christian minister. But I
don’t claim to “know” who God really is. I don’t claim to be able to “know”
who God really is. Yet I have experienced a presence in my life that I can only
call “God.” So have billions upon billions of other people over the course of
human existence. I can’t know, but I can, and do, trust that this experience of
a reality beyond our ordinary physical reality is indeed real. I can, and do,
live trusting that this experience does not deceive me. That is what faith is.
That is where my consideration of consciousness has led me.
There is one line of thought that this analysis raises for
me that I want to mention here. It’s this: What is death? It is first of all
the cessation of the physical processes of a formerly living being. But is it
more than that? Humans have believed that it is more than that for millennia. Humans
who have spoken of something more after death have generally expressed their
belief that more by talking about “life after death.”
Here's how I’m thinking about it today. Death is
consciousness returning to consciousness. Because each person’s consciousness
arises from a far more universal consciousness that we call God, each person’s
consciousness is inextricably tied to that universal consciousness. To put the
same truth another way, each person’s spirit is inextricably tied to universal
spirit. And what is universal spirit but God? Because we are conscious beings,
we can know that we are inextricably tied to God. When we die, we return to
God.
Now, I don’t claim to know what that returning to universal
consciousness, or to spirit, or to God actually looks like. No one has ever
died, then come back to tell us what death was like.[1]
Does the consciousness that returns to consciousness retain our personal
identity? I trust so, and I’ve had one experience that tells me yes.[2]
I trust that powerful experience too. I just don’t claim to “know” anything
about life after death.[3]
We can, I think, have a purely human, and therefore purely conditional,
certainty about consciousness returning to consciousness when the body dies. That,
for me, is mostly what death is—consciousness returning to consciousness.
So what is consciousness? It is the awareness a physical
body has of itself and its surroundings (or at least what it takes to be its
surroundings). It arises not from physical matter (as most scientists would try
to prove that it does by talking about neurons and electrical impulses) but
from its intimate connection with infinite spirit, with God. Beyond that, it is
that part of a human being that continues throughout the person’s life. My
consciousness is why I can say I’ve been to Paris though I haven’t been there
for 67 years. That’s where all of my musings and ramblings here have led me. So
be it.
[1]
Jesus died and came back to life, or so we Christians confess. But though he
did talk to his disciples after his resurrection, he didn’t, as far as we know,
talk to them about life after death. As devout Jews, most of them probably didn’t
believe in any meaningful life after death anyway. I am also here dismissing “near
death experiences” precisely because they are “near death” experiences not
death experiences. If you’ve had one that is meaningful for you, great. I’m
just not prepared to draw any universal conclusions from those experiences.
[2]
Years ago, as I was a complete emotional wreck because I was on my way to have
a beloved dog (onto whom I had probably projected a lot of other grief) put
down, I experienced my late wife appearing to me for a second or two to say “It’s
all right. I’m here waiting for him.” Though this experience lasted but a
second or two, it was one of the most powerful experiences of my life. It happened
something like 14 years ago, and it feels like it happened yesterday.
[3] By
“to know” I mean to have absolute certainty about some reality, to have no
doubt about that reality. When I say we cannot know God, that’s what I mean. We
can never have absolute certainty about God, nor can we ever be free from doubt
about God. We can claim absolute certainty, and we can deny having doubt, about
God. A great many people do; but if they really believe it when they say it,
they are deceiving themselves or not being entirely honest.
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