You think you know consciousness. You, me, the dog, maybe even that houseplant you haven't killed yet. But what the hell are we actually talking about? How does this 'consciousness' thing even show up? Is it some cosmic accident, a neat trick of evolution, or something far deeper? And can we learn anything useful from a tree, for Christ's sake?
These aren't new questions. Humanity's been wrestling with this riddle since we first grunted at the stars. Hell, probably before we even had language for it. Now, there's this buzz about "panpsychism." Sounds fancy, right? It's just the idea that everything - and I mean everything, down to your coffee mug ... has some flicker of consciousness. Not some woo-woo "spiritual essence," but because even a rock has properties: size, shape, temperature. These are ways of 'sensing' the world, however rudimentary. Think about that. Your desk isn't just sitting there being wooden. It's responding to pressure, temperature changes, vibrations. Is that awareness? Maybe not the kind that writes poetry or gets pissed off at traffic, but some basic form of it? The panpsychist says yes. And honestly, when you strip away all the academic jargon, it's not as crazy as it sounds at first. Let's cut through the bullshit and see how this panpsychist idea squares with what we think we know about consciousness.
Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now remains one of the most important spiritual books of our time. *(paid link)*
What the Hell Is Consciousness, Anyway?
Academics, scientists, and philosophers have been tying themselves in knots over this for centuries. Hell, millennia if you count the ancient Greeks. The problem? You can't stick consciousness under a microscope. You can't measure it. Can't weigh it. Can't dissect it like a frog in biology class. It's this slippery, subjective thing that seems to exist everywhere and nowhere at once. So, no consensus. Think about that - we're using consciousness to study consciousness, which is like trying to see your own eyeballs without a mirror. Are you with me? But despite all this academic head-scratching and intellectual masturbation, a few things generally pop up when smart people try to nail down what this thing actually is:
- It's personal. Your experience of the world is yours alone. I can't feel your pain, see your red, or taste your coffee. It's private, subjective, and utterly yours.
- It's whole. Your senses aren't a jumbled mess. They're woven into a single, unified 'field' of experience. You don't just see a dog and hear a bark; you experience 'a barking dog.'
- It's "what it's like." There's a subjective quality to being you, to experiencing anything. It's not just data processing; it's the feeling of processing that data.
Panpsychism: Everything's Conscious? Really?
Panpsychism claims all matter has some degree of consciousness. Sounds absurd, I know. But here's the kicker: nobody, not a single damn person, truly understands how consciousness arises. So, any theory trying to explain it is going to sound a bit out there at first. The main beef with panpsychism? It treats consciousness like a property, like mass or color. We usually think consciousness is special, reserved for living things, not some generic feature of the universe. It's supposed to be rare, a miracle, not just... there. But think about that for a second. Why should consciousness be this magical exception to everything else in nature? Every other property we know - charge, spin, gravity - exists across different scales and combinations. Yet we insist consciousness just pops into existence when matter gets complex enough? That's like saying wetness doesn't exist until you have exactly one trillion water molecules. Wild, right? Maybe the real absurdity is thinking consciousness appears out of nowhere rather than assuming it's been part of the game all along.
Why Qualify Anything?
One way to dodge the "everything's conscious" bullet is to say consciousness isn't a property at all. It's a relationship between a conscious subject and what it experiences. But that's just redefining the terms to avoid the problem, not solving it. Stay with me here. It's not panpsychism; it's a semantic sidestep. Look, you can call consciousness a "relation" or an "interaction" or whatever makes you feel better about rocks not having inner lives. But you're still stuck explaining where this magical relationship comes from and why it only shows up in certain configurations of matter. Are you with me? The hard problem doesn't disappear because you switched vocabulary. You've just moved the mystery from "what makes stuff conscious?" to "what makes this special relationship possible?" Same damn puzzle, different wrapping paper.
A better approach? Acknowledge consciousness is complex. It's not a simple quality like size. It's a sophisticated phenomenon, rooted in neural and cognitive processes unique to living organisms. Think about that. Your brain isn't just processing information ~ it's creating subjective experience from electrical impulses. That's not happening in a rock or a computer chip. It's not a universal attribute; it's a specific, evolved ability that took billions of years to develop. We're talking about something that emerged from chemical soup, evolved through countless generations, and somehow produces the feeling of being you. Wild, right? Explore more in our spiritual awakening guide.
I keep a singing bowl on my altar, the vibration alone is a form of prayer. *(paid link)*
I’ve sat with more than a few clients whose bodies screamed truths their minds were scared to say. One woman came in, shoulders locked like stone, breath shallow and quick. After guiding her through a shaking practice, I watched those walls crack, her breath deepening, until her body finally spilled the story her ego had buried. That’s when you see consciousness not just as thought, but as raw, somatic experience—alive and stubborn as hell. I remember the grip of my own dark nights, lying awake while my nervous system danced between freeze and panic. No mantra, no quick fix. Just breath. Slow, steady breath that grounded me when the mind wanted to run. Years under Amma’s gaze taught me one thing: you don’t talk your way out of this. You become present enough to feel it all—raw and unfiltered—until the ego folds and something else, something quieter, rises up.Is Consciousness Baked Into Everything?
Or maybe consciousness isn't something we discover, like gravity. Maybe it's something we create. When we observe the world and slap meaning onto our perceptions, we're basically imbuing it with consciousness. This is where panpsychism gets interesting: consciousness isn't something some things have; it's something all things have, implicitly. It's not added to the world; it's woven into its very fabric. We don't find it; we impose meaning, and in doing so, we reveal its omnipresence. Think about that for a second. Every rock, every tree, every goddamn particle spinning in space already contains the seeds of awareness. We're not creating consciousness from nothing ~ we're just the universe's way of recognizing what was already there. Like a mirror suddenly realizing it's been reflecting light all along. The act of observing doesn't birth consciousness; it just makes the invisible visible, the implicit explicit.
Consciousness as an Adaptation: The Survival Angle
Another angle: consciousness is a survival tool. It's an adaptation, giving living things an edge. This view says consciousness isn't universal; it's specific to life. It's a product of natural selection, honed to help organisms work through the world and stay alive. Think about it ~ you need to know where the food is, where the predators lurk, who's friend or foe. Raw awareness becomes this incredibly precise instrument for reading the environment. A deer that can't sense danger gets eaten. A human who can't read social cues gets ostracized. Consciousness isn't some cosmic gift floating around waiting to be discovered. It's earned. Brutally practical. Every twitch of awareness has been tested against reality for millions of years, and the useless bits got weeded out. What we're left with is this finely tuned machine for staying alive and passing on genes.
But panpsychism throws a wrench in that. It suggests consciousness isn't just an evolved trick; it's fundamental to reality itself, extending far beyond biology. This isn't just about living things; it's about the very fabric of existence. We're talking about consciousness as a basic feature of matter ~ like mass or charge. Think about that. Every electron, every quark, every grain of sand potentially carrying some microscopic spark of awareness. It's not that rocks think like humans, obviously. But maybe they participate in some primitive form of experience we can barely imagine. This completely flips our understanding of what it means to be conscious in a universe that might be conscious all the way down. Paul explores this deeply in The Electric Rose.
I keep palo santo in every room, it is one of my favorite tools for shifting energy. *(paid link)*
Consciousness as Fundamental: The Fabric of Reality
Let's go deeper. What if consciousness isn't just for living things? What if it's a fundamental aspect of the universe's underlying nature? This isn't about discovery; it's about creation. We don't find consciousness; we bring it forth by giving meaning to our observations. Think about that for a second. Every time you look at a sunset and feel something, you're not discovering beauty that was already there waiting for you. You're creating it. The photons hitting your retina don't carry meaning ~ you do that work. This isn't panpsychism in the sense that a rock is 'self-aware,' but that the potential for meaning, and thus a degree of consciousness, exists wherever meaning can be made. The rock doesn't think, but when you stub your toe on it and curse, consciousness emerges from that interaction. Wild, right? It's not in the rock or in you separately. It's in the space between.
Can You Be Conscious Without Being Self-Aware?
Most people equate consciousness with self-awareness ... that ability to experience yourself as a distinct entity. That's a complex, high-level cognitive function, generally attributed only to advanced life forms. Think about it ~ we assume consciousness requires a sophisticated brain, language skills, maybe even the ability to contemplate your own mortality. It's a widely accepted view: consciousness is a specific, complex ability, not a basic one. But here's where it gets interesting. What if we've been thinking about this backwards? What if consciousness isn't this fancy human achievement, but something way more fundamental? Like, what if the capacity to experience ~ even in the most basic way ~ is woven into the fabric of reality itself? I know that sounds crazy, but stay with me here.
Panpsychism, however, flips this on its head. It suggests self-awareness is just a higher manifestation of consciousness, which exists in everything, to varying degrees. Think about that for a second. Your coffee cup might have a sliver of experience. Your smartphone could be dimly aware in ways we can't even imagine. The self-aware human is just a more elaborate expression of a fundamental quality ~ like the difference between a campfire and a nuclear reactor. Both involve combustion, but one's got a hell of a lot more going on. We're not special because we invented consciousness. We're just really damn good at organizing it into complex patterns that can think about themselves thinking.
Still Chasing the Ghost in the Machine
After all this talk, it might feel like we're no closer to an answer. And you'd be right. Nobody truly knows how consciousness arises or what it at its core is. We're making educated guesses in the dark. Think about that. Here we are, conscious beings trying to figure out consciousness itself ~ it's like trying to see your own eyeballs without a mirror. The scientists have their theories, the philosophers their arguments, the mystics their experiences. But when it comes down to it? We're all just throwing darts at a board we can't even see clearly. Maybe that's okay. Maybe the mystery is part of what makes us human. Are you with me? Sometimes the most honest thing you can say about the deepest questions is simply: "I don't fucking know."
Panpsychism, for all its radical claims, offers a compelling alternative: consciousness isn't some emergent property of complex brains; it's an intrinsic feature of reality itself. Think about that. If this view holds water, then every electron, every photon, every goddamn grain of sand carries some primitive spark of awareness. We're not talking about rocks having deep thoughts ~ we're talking about the universe being at its core experiential all the way down. Wild, right? We should be cautious with our conclusions. The history of science is littered with brilliant ideas that turned out to be dead wrong. But it's also packed with insights that seemed insane until they weren't. Whatever your stance, remember this: we're still grappling with a striking mystery. The hard problem of consciousness ~ how subjective experience arises from objective matter ~ remains unsolved. Keep an open mind, keep questioning, and know that the truth is often far stranger than you imagine. Hell, it's probably stranger than you can imagine. You are a part of this grand mystery, and your journey of understanding is a vital piece of it. Every time you wonder what it's like to be you, you're touching the same deep question that drives physicists and philosophers to distraction. You might also find insight in The Spiritual Meaning of Loneliness: A Call to Wholeness.
Turmeric is nature's most powerful anti-inflammatory, I take it daily. *(paid link)*
Meet Paul Wagner
Paul Wagner is an Intuitive Life & Business Coach, clairvoyant reader, and five-time EMMY Award-winning writer. He created "THE PERSONALITY CARDS," a powerful Oracle-Tarot deck that's helpful in life, love, and relationships. Paul studied with Lakota elders in the Pecos Wilderness, who nurtured his empathic abilities and taught him the sacred rituals. Those nights under the stars changed everything. The elders didn't just teach techniques ~ they showed him how consciousness moves through all things, how awareness itself is the fabric connecting every rock, tree, and heartbeat. He has lived at ashrams with enlightened masters, including Amma, the Hugging Saint, for whom he's delivered keynotes at Her worldwide events. Living with awakened beings teaches you something you can't get from books: the direct experience that individual consciousness is just one wave in an infinite ocean. You might also find insight in Your Personality Is Not Who You Are.
Paul tours the world lecturing on spiritual liberation. He lovingly offers intuitive readings, inspirational coaching, and illuminating courses to help others with self-discovery, decision-making, healing, and forgiveness. Look, I get it ~ this sounds like every other spiritual teacher's bio you've read. But here's the thing: after decades of doing this work, I've learned that real transformation happens in the mess, not in the polished moments. The breakdowns. The confusion. The "what the hell am I doing with my life?" conversations. That's where I meet people. I know, I know. Book a session with Paul: HERE. If this hits home, consider an intuitive reading with Paul.