This is a particularly rich question for The Universal Human Questions, because “What is consciousness?” sits at the intersection of religion, philosophy, neuroscience, and the deepest questions about what it means to be human.
The Universal Human Questions
What Is Consciousness?
Among all the mysteries human beings encounter, few are more immediate and more difficult than consciousness. We experience the world through consciousness, yet consciousness itself is the one thing we cannot step outside of in order to examine objectively. We can study the brain, observe behavior, measure electrical activity, and describe the processes associated with thought and perception. Yet none of these observations quite answers the fundamental question: What is it that experiences all of this?
We know that we are conscious because we experience. We see colors, hear sounds, feel pain and pleasure, remember the past, imagine the future, recognize ourselves, and wonder about our own existence. We possess an interior world that is invisible to everyone else. Another person can observe my body and hear my words, but cannot directly experience my consciousness. Consciousness therefore presents a remarkable paradox. It is the most intimate fact of human existence and, at the same time, one of the least understood.
The question becomes even more profound when expressed in its simplest form. Is consciousness something the brain produces? Is it an expression of a deeper spiritual reality? Is there a soul or self that exists independently of the body? Is consciousness ultimately an illusion created by the mind? Or is consciousness itself fundamental to reality?
The great religious and philosophical traditions answer these questions in strikingly different ways. Yet beneath their differences is a common recognition that ordinary human awareness is not necessarily the whole of consciousness. Many traditions suggest that the way we ordinarily experience ourselves is incomplete and that a deeper understanding of consciousness can transform the way we live.
Christianity:
Consciousness as the Life of a Person Before God
Christianity generally understands human consciousness within the larger reality of the human person created by God. Human beings are not merely biological organisms. They are creatures who possess an interior life and who are capable of knowing, loving, choosing, remembering, reflecting, and responding to God.
The biblical understanding of the human person does not fit neatly into the modern distinction between body and mind. In the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, the human being is frequently understood as an integrated living person rather than as a physical body containing a separate consciousness. The biblical language of soul, spirit, heart, mind, and body overlaps in ways that resist the modern tendency to divide a person into separate components.
Christianity nevertheless came to develop a more explicit understanding of an inner spiritual dimension of human existence. Influenced in part by Greek philosophy, Christian thinkers such as Augustine understood the inner life as a place where human beings encounter themselves and, ultimately, God. Augustine famously turned inward in his search for truth, believing that the human interior could become a pathway toward divine reality.
Christian thought has therefore often regarded consciousness as more than awareness of the physical world. Human beings possess self-awareness, moral awareness, and the capacity to seek truth. They can ask not merely “What is happening?” but “What should I do?” and “What is good?” They can also ask why they exist and whether their lives have ultimate meaning.
Christianity traditionally connects this capacity with humanity’s creation in the image of God. The human capacity for reason, relationship, moral judgment, creativity, and love reflects something of the Creator.
At the same time, Christianity has generally rejected the idea that consciousness is simply the autonomous possession of an isolated individual. Human consciousness is relational. Human beings exist in relationship with God, with one another, and with creation.
The Christian story also introduces an important dimension that distinguishes it from many other traditions. Consciousness is ultimately understood in relation to resurrection. Christianity does not ordinarily teach that salvation consists of escaping consciousness or escaping embodiment. The Christian hope is resurrection and the restoration of embodied human life. The ultimate destiny of the human person is therefore not simply the survival of an immaterial consciousness but the renewal of the whole person.
Modern Christianity has increasingly engaged neuroscience and cognitive science, raising difficult questions about how consciousness relates to the brain. Many Christians see no necessary contradiction between the biological processes studied by science and belief in a spiritual dimension of human existence. The deeper Christian claim is not necessarily that consciousness operates independently of the brain, but that human personhood cannot be adequately described by reducing human beings to physical processes alone.
In this view, consciousness is part of the extraordinary mystery of being a person created by God, capable of knowing the world, knowing oneself, loving others, and ultimately turning toward the One who is the source of existence itself.
Judaism:
Consciousness as the Life of the Whole Person
Judaism approaches consciousness somewhat differently. Classical Judaism generally does not begin with the question of consciousness as an abstract philosophical substance. Its concern is the living human being standing within a covenantal relationship with God, other people, and the created world.
The Hebrew Scriptures use several words to describe dimensions of human existence, including nefesh, ruach, and neshamah. These terms are sometimes translated as soul or spirit, but their meanings do not correspond neatly to the modern idea of an immaterial consciousness inhabiting a physical body.
The nefesh, for example, can refer to the living being itself. This is important because the biblical understanding of the person is fundamentally embodied. A human being does not simply possess a body. A human being is a living embodied creature.
Judaism therefore tends to resist a sharp division between body and consciousness. Human awareness is embedded in relationships, memory, community, history, and covenant.
The Jewish understanding of consciousness is also profoundly moral. To be conscious is not merely to perceive. It is to become aware of responsibility. The human being is capable of recognizing the presence of God and hearing the divine command.
The central Jewish declaration, the Shema, calls Israel to hear and respond to God. Consciousness therefore becomes connected with attention. To be spiritually awake is to notice the presence of God and to respond appropriately to the world.
Jewish thought has also developed a rich tradition of reflection upon the inner life. Rabbinic literature, medieval Jewish philosophy, Hasidism, and Jewish mysticism all explore the relationship between the human mind, soul, divine presence, and the structure of reality.
In Jewish mysticism, particularly in Kabbalah, consciousness can become a way of approaching the mystery of God. Human awareness is not merely a private psychological phenomenon. It participates in a larger spiritual reality.
Yet Judaism generally retains a strong emphasis upon life in this world. The question “What is consciousness?” cannot be separated from the question “How should a conscious person live?” Awareness carries responsibility.
The Jewish answer might therefore be summarized as follows: consciousness is the mysterious capacity of the living human person to experience, understand, remember, choose, and respond to God and the world. It is not simply an isolated interior phenomenon. It is consciousness lived within relationship, history, covenant, and moral responsibility.
Islam:
Consciousness as the Human Capacity to Know and Remember God.
Islam approaches consciousness through the concepts of the human being as God’s creation and the capacity of human beings to know, remember, and respond to God.
The Qur’an presents human beings as possessing a distinctive spiritual dimension. God creates Adam and breathes into him of His spirit, while humanity is given capacities for knowledge, understanding, and moral responsibility.
Islamic thought distinguishes among several dimensions of human existence, including the ruh, or spirit, the nafs, often associated with the self or soul, and the qalb, traditionally understood as the heart. These concepts do not correspond exactly to modern psychological categories. They describe different dimensions of human interior life.
One of the most important Islamic concepts is dhikr, remembrance. Human beings easily become distracted by the material world and forget their relationship with God. Spiritual practice therefore involves remembering what is ultimately real.
From this perspective, consciousness is not merely the ability to think. It includes awareness of God.
Islamic spirituality consequently speaks about awakening the heart. The spiritually awakened person sees reality differently because ordinary perception has been transformed. The world is no longer simply a collection of objects. It becomes a creation filled with signs pointing toward its Creator.
Sufi traditions have taken this idea particularly deeply. Through prayer, remembrance, meditation, disciplined spiritual practice, and purification of the self, the seeker attempts to move beyond the ego’s preoccupation with itself. The goal is not the destruction of consciousness but its transformation.
The ordinary self becomes less dominant, while awareness of God becomes more central.
Islam therefore tends to answer the question of consciousness in terms of relationship and remembrance. Human consciousness is a gift from God and a means through which human beings can recognize truth and fulfill their responsibility as God’s creatures.
The question “What is consciousness?” consequently becomes inseparable from another question: “What should consciousness be conscious of?”
Buddhism:
Consciousness Without a Permanent Self
Buddhism offers perhaps the most radical challenge to the assumption that consciousness belongs to a permanent individual self.
The Buddha’s analysis begins with experience itself. Human beings experience sensations, perceptions, thoughts, emotions, desires, memories, and awareness. But when these components are examined carefully, Buddhism argues, no permanent and unchanging self can be found behind them.
Consciousness is therefore not necessarily something possessed by an eternal “I.”
In Buddhist teaching, consciousness is one of the five aggregates that constitute ordinary human experience. These aggregates include physical form, feeling, perception, mental formations, and consciousness. They arise and pass away in dependence upon conditions.
This does not mean that Buddhism denies consciousness. Quite the opposite. Buddhist practice involves exceptionally careful attention to consciousness.
What Buddhism questions is the assumption that there must be a permanent entity behind consciousness that says, “This is me.”
When one observes the mind through meditation, thoughts arise and disappear. Feelings arise and disappear. Memories arise and disappear. Sensations arise and disappear. Even one’s sense of personal identity changes over time.
The Buddhist insight is that the apparently solid self is constructed from constantly changing processes.
This teaching is closely connected with the doctrine of anatta, or no-self. The goal is not to discover a permanent consciousness hidden beneath the changing mind. The goal is to see clearly that the search for such a permanent self is itself part of the problem.
This insight has profound ethical implications. Much human suffering comes from attachment to “me,” “mine,” and “myself.” When the individual becomes less attached to the idea of an independent permanent self, craving and fear can diminish.
Buddhist meditation therefore becomes a laboratory for consciousness. Instead of asking abstractly what consciousness is, the practitioner watches consciousness directly.
In some Mahayana Buddhist traditions, the discussion becomes even more subtle. Schools such as Yogacara explored consciousness as the fundamental structure through which experience is constructed. Other traditions, including Zen, emphasize direct awareness prior to conceptual analysis.
Buddhism therefore gives an unusual answer to the universal question. Consciousness exists, but the permanent self we ordinarily imagine as the owner of consciousness does not. What we call “I” is a continually changing process.
The liberation Buddhism seeks comes not from discovering an eternal self but from awakening to the nature of experience itself.
Hinduism:
Consciousness as the Deepest Reality
Hindu traditions offer some of the most expansive claims about consciousness in the world’s religious thought.
Although Hinduism contains many different schools, several influential traditions understand consciousness as something far more fundamental than individual psychological awareness.
The Upanishads ask what remains when one looks beneath the changing experiences of ordinary life. The body changes. Thoughts change. Emotions change. Memories change. Yet there appears to be an awareness within which these changes occur.
The great philosophical traditions of Vedanta explored this question in extraordinary depth.
Advaita Vedanta, particularly associated with Shankara, argues that the deepest reality of the individual self, Atman, is ultimately identical with Brahman, the ultimate reality. Consciousness is not merely something that an individual possesses. At the deepest level, consciousness is fundamental.
The familiar experience “I am aware” is therefore not simply a psychological event. It points toward a deeper reality.
Advaita asks the seeker to distinguish between the changing contents of consciousness and consciousness itself. Thoughts come and go, but awareness remains. Emotions come and go, but awareness remains. The body changes, yet awareness is present throughout one’s experience of life.
The spiritual task is therefore one of recognition. The individual must awaken to the realization that the deepest self is not the limited ego but the underlying reality of consciousness itself.
Other Hindu traditions interpret this differently. Theistic schools may preserve a distinction between the individual soul and God. Yoga traditions emphasize disciplined transformation of consciousness. Bhakti traditions emphasize loving relationship with the divine.
Nevertheless, Hindu thought frequently places consciousness much closer to the foundation of reality than modern Western materialism does.
The contrast with Buddhism is particularly fascinating. Both traditions question the ordinary ego, but they do not necessarily arrive at the same conclusion. Advaita Vedanta can say that beneath the changing ego lies the ultimate reality of consciousness. Buddhism generally refuses to identify such an eternal consciousness as a permanent self.
The two traditions therefore ask almost the same question and reach radically different conclusions.
Taoism:
Consciousness as Participation in the Way
Taoism approaches consciousness less as an object to be analyzed and more as something that must be brought into harmony with the Tao.
The Tao is the underlying Way or process through which reality unfolds. Yet the Tao cannot be completely captured by concepts. The opening of the Tao Te Ching famously warns that the Tao that can be fully spoken is not the eternal Tao.
This has significant implications for consciousness.
Human beings tend to divide reality through language and thought. We classify things as good and bad, self and other, success and failure, gain and loss. These distinctions are useful, but Taoist thought warns that they can also separate us from the deeper unity of reality.
The ideal is therefore not to eliminate consciousness but to transform the way consciousness operates.
The concept of wu wei, often translated as effortless action or non-forcing, expresses this transformation. Instead of imposing our will upon reality, we learn to respond to reality appropriately.
The sage does not attempt to control everything. The sage becomes attentive to the movement of the Tao.
Taoism therefore places great value upon simplicity, receptivity, stillness, spontaneity, and freedom from excessive conceptualization.
In this respect, Taoism shares an important family resemblance with Buddhist and contemplative traditions. The ordinary mind is often restless, judgmental, and attached. A deeper awareness becomes quieter and more receptive.
But Taoism does not generally frame the goal as discovering a metaphysical self. Its emphasis is harmony with the Way of nature.
Consciousness becomes healthiest when it stops struggling against reality and learns to participate in it.
Indigenous Traditions:
Consciousness as Relationship
It is important to be cautious when speaking about “Indigenous traditions” because Indigenous peoples throughout the world possess enormously diverse spiritual systems. There is no single Indigenous philosophy of consciousness.
Nevertheless, many Indigenous traditions share perspectives that challenge the modern Western tendency to treat consciousness as an isolated property located inside an individual human mind.
In numerous Indigenous worldviews, human beings exist within an extensive network of relationships involving ancestors, animals, plants, land, waters, celestial bodies, and spiritual beings. The boundaries between human beings and the rest of creation may therefore be understood differently from those found in modern Western thought.
Consciousness can be understood less as an isolated interior possession and more as participation in a living relational world.
In some traditions, dreams are important sources of knowledge and communication. Ancestors remain present within communal memory and ritual. The land is not simply property or scenery. It can be understood as a living source of identity, responsibility, story, and spiritual relationship.
This can produce a very different understanding of what it means to be conscious.
Modern Western thought often begins with the individual: “I think, therefore I am.”
Many Indigenous traditions begin much closer to relationship: “I exist because I belong within a network of relationships.”
The distinction is important. Consciousness is not necessarily something that separates human beings from nature. It can be something that makes relationship possible.
This does not mean that Indigenous peoples traditionally held identical beliefs about consciousness, nor that all Indigenous traditions should be described as animistic. The traditions differ greatly.
But many Indigenous perspectives challenge the assumption that reality consists primarily of separate objects and independent individuals. They encourage an understanding of consciousness that is relational, ecological, ancestral, and communal.
Modern Philosophy:
From the Mind to the Hard Problem
Modern philosophy has approached consciousness from many directions, and there remains no universally accepted answer.
The modern Western discussion was profoundly influenced by René Descartes, who famously distinguished between mind and body. His statement, “I think, therefore I am,” made consciousness the foundation of philosophical certainty.
For Descartes, the fact that he could doubt everything except the fact that he was thinking established the existence of the thinking self.
This created the famous mind-body problem. If the mind is fundamentally different from physical matter, how can mind and body interact?
Subsequent philosophers have offered many answers.
Materialists and physicalists argue that consciousness ultimately arises from physical processes. On this view, there is no separate substance called mind. Conscious experience is what brains do.
Other philosophers have argued that consciousness cannot be reduced so easily. Thomas Nagel famously asked what it is like to be a bat. We can describe the bat’s brain, nervous system, behavior, and sensory capacities, but objective scientific descriptions may never capture what it actually feels like to be a bat.
This points toward what philosopher David Chalmers called the “hard problem” of consciousness.
Science can increasingly explain how the brain processes information. It can identify neural activity associated with perception, attention, memory, decision-making, and emotion. But why should any of these processes be accompanied by subjective experience at all?
Why does seeing red feel like something?
Why does pain hurt?
Why is there an inner experience rather than merely information processing?
These questions remain open.
Some philosophers argue that consciousness is an emergent property of sufficiently complex physical systems. Others explore forms of panpsychism, the possibility that consciousness or proto-conscious properties are fundamental features of reality. Still others argue that our ordinary concept of consciousness may itself need to be radically revised.
Contemporary philosophy therefore finds itself in an unusual position. Science has learned an enormous amount about the brain, yet the fundamental nature of subjective experience remains deeply mysterious.
Science and the Question of Consciousness
Modern neuroscience has transformed the discussion. We now know that consciousness is intimately associated with the brain. Damage to particular brain systems can alter memory, personality, perception, language, emotional responses, and the sense of self.
Anesthetics can eliminate conscious awareness. Brain injuries can change consciousness. Sleep changes the character of consciousness. Drugs can dramatically alter perception and self-awareness.
These discoveries demonstrate that conscious experience is profoundly dependent upon biological processes.
But dependence is not necessarily the same thing as explanation.
The fact that consciousness changes when the brain changes does not by itself settle the philosophical question of whether consciousness is nothing more than brain activity.
The scientific challenge is therefore both extraordinary and humbling. Science can increasingly explain the mechanisms associated with consciousness, but explaining the mechanisms may not be identical to explaining subjective experience itself.
The mystery remains.
The Universal Question Behind the Question
When the world’s great traditions are placed beside one another, an intriguing pattern emerges.
Christianity generally sees consciousness as part of the life of a person created by God and destined for relationship with God.
Judaism understands consciousness within the life of an embodied person who is called to remember God, respond to divine command, and live responsibly within community and creation.
Islam understands consciousness as a divine gift that enables human beings to know, remember, and respond to God, with spiritual practice seeking to awaken the heart.
Buddhism examines consciousness directly and concludes that it does not belong to a permanent, independent self.
Hinduism, particularly Advaita Vedanta, can regard consciousness itself as fundamental to reality and identify the deepest self with ultimate reality.
Taoism understands healthy consciousness as awareness that moves into harmony with the Tao rather than attempting to force reality according to the desires of the ego.
Many Indigenous traditions understand consciousness primarily through relationship, emphasizing participation in a living network of humans, ancestors, animals, land, and spiritual reality.
Modern philosophy remains divided between physicalist explanations of consciousness and theories that regard subjective experience as something that cannot yet be reduced to physical description.
These perspectives disagree profoundly. Yet they share something important.
Almost none of them treats ordinary human consciousness as entirely transparent to itself.
We think we know what consciousness is because we experience it every moment. But the closer we look, the stranger it becomes.
We are conscious beings who can become conscious of our own consciousness. We can observe our thoughts. We can question our memories. We can recognize that our sense of self changes. We can imagine worlds that do not exist. We can contemplate our own death. We can ask whether there is a God. We can wonder whether consciousness continues after death. We can even ask whether consciousness is fundamental to the universe itself.
That capacity for self-reflection may be one of the most remarkable features of human existence.
Consciousness and the Sense of Self
The question of consciousness eventually leads almost inevitably to the question of the self.
Who is the “I” that is conscious?
At first the answer seems obvious. I am the person looking out through these eyes. But reflection quickly complicates the matter.
My body is constantly changing. My memories are incomplete. My beliefs have changed. My personality has changed. My relationships have changed. The person I was twenty years ago is recognizably me, but also profoundly different.
What, then, makes me the same person?
Christianity and Judaism generally retain a strong concept of personal identity. The person who lives now is the person whom God knows and calls. Christianity’s belief in resurrection particularly depends upon continuity of personal identity.
Islam similarly understands the individual as morally responsible before God, preserving a strong sense of personal identity and accountability.
Buddhism challenges the premise itself, arguing that what we call the self is a changing collection of processes.
Advaita Vedanta goes in another direction, suggesting that the deepest self is not the changing personality but the underlying consciousness that witnesses all change.
Modern philosophy remains divided.
The question therefore becomes much larger than psychology. It touches the meaning of personal identity, moral responsibility, death, memory, and immortality.
Consciousness and Death
Perhaps nowhere does the mystery become more profound than at death.
When the brain ceases to function permanently, what happens to consciousness?
Materialism generally expects conscious experience to cease when brain function permanently ends.
Christianity, Judaism, and Islam have traditionally affirmed some form of continued existence and ultimate resurrection, although their understandings of the intermediate state and afterlife differ considerably.
Hindu traditions may understand individual consciousness in terms of reincarnation or liberation, depending upon the school.
Buddhism teaches rebirth but does not require an eternal individual soul moving from one body to another. The continuity is more like a causal process than the migration of a permanent self.
Some Indigenous traditions understand death through continuing relationships with ancestors and the spiritual world.
Modern philosophy cannot presently provide a definitive answer.
The question of death therefore reveals the limits of our knowledge. We know that consciousness is profoundly dependent upon the living brain. We do not know whether that dependence exhausts the nature of consciousness.
A Deeper Possibility
The traditions considered here can ultimately be arranged around several broad possibilities.
The first is that consciousness is produced by matter. The brain generates consciousness just as other biological organs perform their functions.
The second is that consciousness is a property of living beings that emerges from extraordinarily complex biological organization.
The third is that consciousness is fundamental to reality itself, with individual consciousness representing a localized expression of something more basic.
The fourth is that consciousness is relational, something that cannot be adequately understood apart from the relationships among persons, nature, community, and the larger reality in which life participates.
The fifth is that our ordinary understanding of consciousness is itself mistaken. What we experience as a permanent individual self may actually be a temporary construction arising from constantly changing processes.
None of these possibilities has been conclusively demonstrated.
And perhaps this is precisely why consciousness belongs among the Universal Human Questions.
It is not merely a question about the brain.
It is a question about what it means to exist.
What Does It Mean to Be Conscious?
Ultimately, asking “What is consciousness?” may be less important than asking what consciousness makes possible.
Because we are conscious, we can suffer and rejoice. We can love. We can remember. We can regret. We can forgive. We can create music and poetry. We can contemplate stars billions of light years away. We can mourn those who have died. We can imagine a future that does not yet exist.
Most remarkably, we can become aware that we are doing all of these things.
The great religious traditions have generally regarded this capacity as a summons rather than merely a biological fact. Christianity calls the person toward God and love. Judaism calls the person toward remembrance, covenant, justice, and responsibility. Islam calls the person toward remembrance of God and submission to what is ultimately true. Buddhism calls the person toward awakening from attachment and illusion. Hinduism calls the seeker toward recognition of the deepest reality of the self. Taoism calls the person toward harmony with the Way. Many Indigenous traditions call the person toward right relationship with the living world and the community of existence. Philosophy calls us toward intellectual honesty about what we know and what we do not know.
Perhaps the most important conclusion is therefore not that one tradition has solved the mystery.
It is that consciousness itself creates the possibility of asking the question.
The universe contains stars, planets, oceans, forests, animals, and human beings. Yet within at least one small corner of that universe, matter has become capable of asking what matter is. Life has become capable of asking what life means. Consciousness has become capable of asking what consciousness is.
That may be one of the deepest mysteries of all.
We are conscious.
We do not fully understand what consciousness is.
And yet through consciousness, we are able to wonder.