Experiencing Pure Consciousness

You may be wondering what happens when you attune fully to your consciousness. As it happens, many people, particularly those with certain meditation or mindfulness practices, have experienced this phenomenon, and there is a great deal of alignment in their descriptions of the experience.

The most common description is of silence, boundlessness or pure presence. The journal Philosophies has a truly compelling article on this topic.¹⁸ There is no sensory input, no thought, no sense of self, and yet consciousness – awareness – remains. As someone who has practiced meditation for about a decade, I have been fortunate enough to experience this state a few times, and what I can tell you is that an objectively brief time spent in pure consciousness has a similar rejuvenating effect as a two week holiday in a very peaceful place. It was boundless but warm and welcoming. It was silent but rich with depth. There was no trace of worry, and an abundance of potentiality. It is one of the best sensations I have ever felt, and my words will necessarily fail to describe it. The experienced meditators in the journal article above suggest that this experience can be highly meaningful, or even profoundly transformative.

Electroencephalogram (EEG) studies of the brains of such meditators provide physiological evidence that something truly different is happening in their minds and bodies. In their seminal paper, “Pure consciousness: distinct phenomenological and physiological correlates of ‘consciousness itself’,” Frederick Travis and Jonathan Shear report that distinct EEG patterns, including increased gamma coherence and alpha synchrony – particularly in the frontal and parietal regions of the brain – are found during states of pure consciousness. Gamma coherence references a state in which various regions in the brain are firing in a stable, coordinated rhythm. This state is associated with increased insight and heightened cognitive function. You become, literally, smarter during this time. Alpha waves are dominant during calm, alert wakefulness, and synchrony among them also implies coordinated, stable activity across regions of the brain. It is a time of internal quiet and stable attention.

Taken together, these two states suggest a brain in a deeply alert and coherent state, but untethered to the ordinary noise of personal identity. Exactly the experience that these meditators report. In addition, there was a reduction in cortical activity in areas tied to self-referential thinking (i.e., a loss of the narrow version of self).¹⁹ These findings have been replicated numerous times in other studies – this phenomenon is quite real and quite powerful.

Philosophers and scientists have increasingly treated these kinds of findings as meaningful data to expand our understanding of the mind, and of our nature. In particular, these experiences of “Minimal Phenomenal Experience” (MPE, as this state is now referred to) and the physiological evidence that they’re real, challenge modern science’s attempt to explain consciousness. The conventional answer is that consciousness is an emergent property of our brains – by some mechanism that has not been found yet, consciousness is something that our bodies create spontaneously, and it is pretty much the sum of thoughts, sensations, narratives. But these experiences of pure consciousness should not really exist in that framework – there’s simply no place for them.

The robust findings around MPEs raise fascinating questions about the nature of consciousness – what actually is it? This book is offering a potential answer to that question, but it remains worth considering. These findings also invite us to think about the role of the self – if the self can dissolve, while awareness persists, what is the purpose and “best use” of the self?

We will move into a deeper exploration of the nature and consequences of consciousness and the self in the next chapter.