Consciousness

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Consciousness refers to your individual awareness of your unique thoughts, memories, feelings, sensations, and environment. Consciousness is the awareness or perception of an inward psychological or spiritual fact: intuitively perceived knowledge of something in one’s inner self.

“lf you could get rid of yourself
just once,

the secret of secrets would open to you.
The face of the unknown,
hidden beyond the universe

would appear on the mirror of your perception.”
Rumi

We’ve all looked into the mirror and been confounded by the strange combination of body and identity reflected back at us. We’ve all asked, as we stare into our own eyes, “Who am I?” and perhaps. “What am I?” How do we understand the eternal self, immanent in all beings, which is the essence of lifespirit itself?

Sometimes, in a fleeting moment, we receive an answer, a glimpse of our true identity, It is real but intangible, indefinable. Although we might attain a momentary peek, our consciousness remains a mystery. Our identity has its source in consciousness itself. That is the identity that we share with all others, and the medium through which we experience life. It is through consciousness that we experience the diving and higher states of awareness, thought and intellect. The divine itself is consciousness, however we experience it.

The major world religions have complex understandings of consciousness.

For example the Hindu tradition’s mysticism issues from its sustained contemplation of the absolute, which Hindus name Brahman. Through higher states of meditation, mystic seers contact Brahman, which then opens the way to inner awareness of’the self, or Atman, the immanent presence of the Brahman within all beings and every particle of reality. Atman is Brahman, and Brahman is Atman.

Taittiriya Upanishad from the ancient Hindu religion defines the nature of the Brahman. “Brahman is Consciousness,” it states, and consciousness is Brahman.

Brahman can also be translated as perception or intelligence.

Because consciousness is such a wide concept of connection, it has similar (some would say the same) properties as energy.

See also: Consciousness Beyond the Brain , Theory of Relativity

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