Exploring Consciousness Without Superstition or Dismissal

When Questions Stop Being Theoretical

Something unexpected began happening after my life slowed down.

I did not set out to become mystical. I did not join an ashram, attend a retreat, or start chasing altered states. In fact, if anything, I have spent much of my life allergic to that sort of thing. I prefer clean arguments, testable ideas, and frameworks that hold up under scientific scrutiny.

But when the noise of my professional life quieted after a health scare and the unraveling of a long-built identity, certain questions began to surface. Not dramatic questions. Not What is the meaning of the universe? sort of questions but simpler ones.

These were not new questions. But they stopped being theoretical. When the scaffolding of identity becomes optional rather than necessary, inquiries that once seemed abstract become immediate.
Not urgent. Immediate.
Present, unavoidable, but without the drama of crisis.

What can we actually know?
What does it mean for something to be real if we cannot describe it precisely?
And why do so many conversations about consciousness collapse into either cold dismissal or mystical exaggeration?

These questions became more than theoretical when I began systematically documenting unusual experiences that arose during sustained contemplative practice. Experiences that traditional Indian contemplative frameworks describe in one vocabulary, while neuroscience describes in another. Neither explanation felt complete. Both seemed to point to something real.

This tension demanded a clearer framework.

As I pondered these questions, what began to emerge was an approach based on something I’ve elsewhere called rational mysticism — a term I introduced in an earlier essay. By that I mean an approach that takes contemplative experiences seriously as phenomena open to investigation, while refusing to inflate them into metaphysical claims. Mysticism because it acknowledges genuine mystery and the limits of description. Rational because it maintains epistemic rigor and resists supernatural explanation.

This essay uses that framework to explore consciousness at the edge of explanation.

The Problem with “Supernatural”

I began to notice a pattern.

Across very different traditions — Indian contemplative traditions, Jewish meditation, even modern neuroscience — people seemed to be circling similar territory. They did not agree on theology. They did not share cosmology. But they were describing something about the structure of experience itself.

Beneath the stream of thoughts, emotions, and sensations, something remains. Not a thing. Not an entity. More like the field in which experience unfolds.
Vedanta calls it witness consciousness.
Jewish meditation speaks of kavvanah, directed awareness itself.
Neuroscience observes measurable shifts in brain networks associated with self-referential processing during sustained attention.

Different vocabularies. Different explanatory frameworks. But a similar phenomenological observation: awareness can, under certain conditions, become aware of itself.

At first glance, one might wonder whether this points to something supernatural.

Over time, I came to see that the word “supernatural” is the problem.

Consider what we typically call supernatural.
Ghosts. Telepathy. Precognition.
Out-of-body experiences. Past-life memories.

What do these share? They are phenomena that, if real, would appear to violate our current understanding of how reality works. They are defined by their transgression of known natural law.

Notice the logical structure: we label something supernatural when it does not fit our models. Which means “supernatural” is not a property of the phenomenon itself. It is a statement about the relationship between our models and our observations.

This creates a strange situation.

If something genuinely occurs — if it is repeatable, investigable, part of the fabric of experience — then by definition it is natural. It may be rare, in the sense of uncommon. It may be poorly understood. It may require conditions we do not yet know how to reproduce reliably. But if it happens, it is part of how reality operates. At most, it means we do not yet understand it adequately.

Calling something supernatural is not an explanation.  It is abdication.

It signals that we have not yet integrated it into our models.
It licenses unfettered speculation in place of investigation.

History is full of such moments.

Lightning was once considered supernatural. So was illness. So was hypnosis. So was the placebo effect, until we developed models for how expectation influences physiology.

The phenomena did not change. Our understanding did.

Which suggests that unusual states of consciousness may not require metaphysical inflation. They may simply require better models — or the intellectual honesty to admit we do not yet have them.

This realization is strangely liberating.

It meant that unusual experiences, deep stillness, a sense of unity, even the quiet peace that came to me in a hospital hallway when I thought I might be dying, did not need to be elevated into metaphysics. They could be understood as uncommon modes of human experience. Not impossible. Simply infrequently cultivated.

Infrequently cultivated does not mean supernatural.
It may simply mean underdeveloped.

No one calls Andrés Segovia supernatural because most of us cannot play the guitar as he did. We understand that mastery takes decades of disciplined practice. The fact that few people reach that level does not make it magical. It makes it rare.

Perhaps the same is true of the mind.

Experience and Description

Another realization followed close behind.

Some things can be described with precision. We can write equations for gravity. We can map the structure of DNA. We can build models that predict eclipses years in advance.

But other things are different.

You can describe the chemistry of chocolate. You can analyze its molecular structure. You can measure sugar content and fat ratios. But none of that tells someone what chocolate tastes like. To know that, you have to actually taste it.

Description and experience are not the same thing.

This sounds obvious when we talk about chocolate. It becomes less obvious when we talk about consciousness.

We are very good at describing the brain. We can scan it, measure electrical activity, and track neural networks activating when someone solves a problem or feels fear. Those descriptions are valuable. They represent genuine progress.

But the description of brain activity is not the same as the experience of being afraid. It is not the same as the quiet clarity that can arise in deep meditation. It is not the same as the peace that sometimes appears when the scaffolding of identity falls away.

Someone might object: in principle, we could map every neural correlate. Every firing pattern, every neurotransmitter, every structural change. Eventually we may have a complete neural account of consciousness.

Perhaps. But even a complete neural map would still be a description. It would tell us which patterns correlate with which experiences. It would not be the experience itself.

This is not mysticism. It is a categorical distinction.

A complete map of Paris, down to every cobblestone, is not Paris. A complete musical score of a Beethoven symphony is not the experience of hearing it performed. The map and the territory are different kinds of things.

This does not mean neural descriptions are worthless. They are immensely valuable. But they answer a different question than “What is it like to be conscious?”

Philosophers refer to this as the explanatory gap. Neuroscientist Christof Koch¹, after decades studying the neural basis of consciousness, has put it plainly: we can correlate brain states with conscious states, but we do not yet understand why certain physical processes feel like something from the inside.

That does not make those experiences supernatural.
It may simply mean that not everything real can be fully compressed into a model.
It may remain fundamentally experiential, something that must be investigated through direct examination rather than fully captured in theory.

Recognizing this possibility is intellectually invigorating.

It means we do not have to choose between two extremes.
We do not have to dismiss unusual experiences as “just brain noise.”
We do not have to elevate them into cosmic revelation.

There is a third option.

We can admit that our models, though powerful, are incomplete.

What Gödel Taught Us About Limits

Even mathematics, perhaps the most precise language we possess, has discovered its own limits.

In 1931, Kurt Gödel² proved something that unsettled the mathematical world. He showed that in any formal system powerful enough to perform basic arithmetic, there will always be true statements that cannot be proven within that system.

Not because we are not clever enough. Not because we have not yet found the right axioms. But because of the logical structure of systems capable of self-reference.

At a high level, Gödel constructed a statement that, in effect, asserts its own unprovability within the system. If the system could prove it true, a contradiction would result. If the system could prove it false, a contradiction would also result. The only consistent conclusion is that the statement is true but unprovable within the system.

This is not a quirk of one particular framework. Any rule-based system complex enough to reason about numbers and about itself will eventually encounter limits.

The implications were profound. Mathematicians had hoped to discover a complete and consistent set of axioms from which all mathematical truths could be derived. Gödel showed this was impossible. Not merely difficult. Impossible. A system cannot fully capture its own truth.

That result did not destroy mathematics. It clarified its boundaries. It showed that incompleteness is structural, not simply a temporary gap waiting to be filled.

The Mind Studying Itself

Now consider consciousness.

In contemplative practice, consciousness turns its attention toward itself. The mind attempts to observe and understand its own operation. That is a form of self-reference.

If mathematics, our most rigorous formal system, encounters limits when it attempts to fully describe itself, why would we assume that consciousness would be exempt? Why would we assume that the mind can produce a complete account of its own workings?

Perhaps the explanatory gap is not simply a failure of neuroscience. Perhaps it reflects a more general feature of systems that attempt to fully account for themselves. That possibility does not make the gap mystical. It may simply mean that limits are built into certain kinds of inquiry.

But there is an additional complication.

When the mind studies itself, it is not a neutral instrument. It brings with it the entire weight of its own conditioning. Our thoughts, education, beliefs, fears, cultural frameworks, and prior conclusions all shape the lens through which we examine experience. The observer is not separate from the history of observation.

The mind is both the observer and the observed. It is also the product of countless prior influences. That alone may be enough to explain why complete self-description is difficult.

Mastery, Not Magic

As I read more widely, something else began to stand out.

Very different traditions, separated by geography and language, often approach these questions with surprising restraint. They treat such states not as miracles, but as capabilities.

Could uncommon states of mind be understood the way we understand elite skill — rare, refined, difficult to cultivate, but fundamentally human?

Consider Andrés Segovia (1893–1987), the Spanish guitarist who shaped the modern classical repertoire. When Segovia plays, he produces tones that seem impossible. How could human fingers move with such repeatable precision? How could one person draw that much music from six strings?

But no one believed he possessed magic. We understood that his mastery was developmental. He began young. He practiced relentlessly. Over decades, he refined his technique. His control of tone and timing was the result of disciplined attention.

His abilities were rare, vanishingly rare. Most musicians could not approach his level. But rare does not mean magical. It means sustained development of human capacity.

We have a framework for understanding Segovia. Mastery requires time, attention, and practice. The fact that few people reach that level does not make it otherworldly. It makes it uncommon.

Perhaps the same is true of certain states of awareness.

Uncommon does not mean supernatural. It may simply mean underdeveloped.

Disciplined Convergence Across Traditions

As I read more widely, something else began to stand out.

Very different traditions, separated by geography and language, often approach these questions with surprising restraint. They treat such states not as miracles, but as capabilities.

In Jewish Meditation³, Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan describes techniques with the precision of an engineer explaining a protocol. Concentrate on a phrase. Repeat it until conceptual meaning softens into sound. Observe what remains when linguistic content falls away. He is explicit that this is not about attaining supernatural states, but about examining the structure of consciousness itself.

Kaplan also describes how certain Hebrew letters can serve as objects of meditation, not primarily for their theological meaning, but for their effect on attention. The letter becomes a focal point that steadies awareness.

This parallels mantra practice in yogic traditions. A Sanskrit syllable is repeated until meaning recedes and only sound and attention remain. Different languages. Different symbols. The same underlying principle: sustained focus on a stable object can reveal aspects of consciousness that ordinary discursive thought obscures.

In both traditions, the sound or letter functions as a tool. Not a magical formula. A device for refining attention.

Whatever one thinks of the theology surrounding it, the method itself is not mystical in the sensational sense. It is deliberate.

Nisargadatta Maharaj⁴, a twentieth-century teacher often associated with the school of Non-dual Vedanta, Advaita Vedanta, was even more direct. When people asked him about God, miracles, or supernatural powers, he brushed the questions aside. His instruction was simple and almost clinical: remain with the basic sense of being, the simple “I am” prior to all stories about who you are.

In I Am That, when asked about psychic powers, he responds bluntly that they are of no importance. When asked about God, he redirects the inquiry: first find out who you are.

No metaphysics.
No cosmology.
No spectacle.
Just examination.

That struck me as remarkable.

In very different ways, both Kaplan and Nisargadatta Maharaj appear uninterested in the supernatural. They were not trying to prove that something magical exists. They were investigating experience with discipline.

This resonates deeply with me.

If serious contemplatives were not preoccupied with miracles, perhaps the real question is not whether something is supernatural, but whether it is examinable.

Could unusual states of mind be treated the way we treat mastery — refined, difficult to cultivate, but fundamentally human?

We have a framework for understanding Segovia. Mastery is developmental. It requires time, attention, and practice. The fact that few people reach that level does not make it mystical. It makes it rare.

Perhaps the same is true of certain states of awareness.

Rare does not mean supernatural. It may simply mean underdeveloped.

The False Choice

Over time, I began to see that many conversations about consciousness fall into a familiar pattern.

On one side is reductionism. Everything unusual is dismissed as “just neurons firing.” Deep stillness becomes brain chemistry. A sense of unity becomes network activity. Case closed.

A neuroscientist observing meditation on an fMRI might note the deactivation of the default mode network or changes in specific regions. Those measurements are valuable. But identifying neural correlates is not the same as explaining the experience itself.

On the other side is mystification. The same experiences are treated as evidence of hidden dimensions or cosmic forces. Ordinary language gives way to grand metaphysical claims.

A contemporary spiritual teacher might describe the same state as merging with a "universal field of consciousness". The vocabulary changes. The certainty does not.

Both positions move far too quickly.

The first assumes that what cannot yet be fully described is therefore trivial.
The second assumes that what cannot yet be fully described must therefore be transcendent.

The reductionist position conflates correlation with explanation. Neural activity can be measured. But identifying which regions are active during an experience is not the same as explaining why that activity feels like something from the inside.

It is like identifying all the chemicals in chocolate and believing you have therefore explained the taste. Or mapping every molecule in a mango and thinking you have conveyed what biting into a ripe mango feels like. The descriptions may be accurate. They are still incomplete.

The mystical position makes the opposite mistake. It treats the explanatory gap as proof of something beyond nature rather than evidence of the limits of our current models. The fact that neural descriptions do not capture subjective experience does not imply higher dimensions or quantum fields. It may simply mean our descriptive tools are still incomplete.

Both positions make premature leaps.
One dismisses what does not fit current models.
The other inflates mystery into metaphysics.

Both positions misunderstand the problem.
Both positions close inquiry prematurely.

Two Kinds of Knowing

What if unusual states of consciousness are simply uncommon expressions of a system we do not yet fully understand?

Not supernatural.
Not dismissible.
Just deeper than our current models.

This requires being more careful about what we mean by knowing.

There are at least two distinct kinds of knowledge, and confusing them leads to misplaced certainty.

The first is propositional knowledge: knowledge that something is the case and can be demonstrated, tested, and independently verified under consistent conditions. Water boils at 100°C at sea level.
The Earth orbits the Sun.
Neurons communicate through electrochemical signals.
This kind of knowledge can be written down, transmitted precisely, and confirmed by others.

The second is experiential knowledge: knowledge of what something is like.
You know what chocolate tastes like.
You know what it feels like to be afraid, relieved, or deeply at peace.
This knowledge is direct and immediate, but it resists precise articulation.
It cannot be transmitted by description alone.

Someone who has never tasted mango can study every chemical analysis of the mango and still not know what mango tastes like. That knowledge requires the actual experience of tasting a mango.

Consider color. Two people look at a ripe tomato and both say it is red. They agree on the wavelength of light reflected off the tomato. They agree on the classification. They can reliably identify red objects.

But is the subjective experience of redness identical for both?
Does your red feel like mine from the inside?

No amount of neural mapping resolves that question.
We can identify which neurons fire when each person sees red. We can verify similar processing patterns. But that tells us about correlation, not about the quality of experience itself.

This is not mysticism. It is simply a limit of third-person description when it comes to first-person experience.

Both kinds of knowledge are real. Both are valuable. But they answer different questions.

When someone reports an experience of profound stillness or unity, the question “What do you know?” becomes ambiguous.

Do they possess propositional knowledge: claims about reality that can be independently verified? That requires careful examination.

Do they possess experiential knowledge: direct acquaintance with a rare state of consciousness? Quite possibly.

The confusion arises when experiential knowledge is treated as if it automatically provides propositional conclusions. “I experienced profound unity” does not logically entail “all separation is illusion” or “consciousness is fundamental to reality.”
The experience is data. The metaphysical claim is interpretation.

This distinction allows us to take contemplative experience seriously without inflating it. Someone who has spent decades in disciplined practice may possess experiential knowledge most of us lack — knowledge of what sustained attention reveals. That does not automatically grant propositional authority about the ultimate structure of reality.

Just as Segovia’s experiential mastery of the guitar gave him knowledge few of us will ever have, but did not make him an authority on acoustical physics.

This reveals something peculiar about debates on consciousness.

Experience is inherently subjective. What it feels like to be you is directly accessible only to you. I cannot experience your fear, your peace, or your sense of unity. I can observe your behavior and listen to your reports, but I cannot embody your experience.

And yet debates about consciousness often become surprisingly heated.

The reductionist, who may never have engaged in sustained contemplative practice, declares that unusual experiences are “nothing but” neural activity, despite having no direct acquaintance with what is being described.

The mystic, who may have had profound subjective experiences, declares universal metaphysical truths — “all is one,” “consciousness is fundamental,” “separation is illusion” — extrapolating from personal experience to claims about reality as a whole.

Both positions overreach. Both assume that subjective experience, whether its absence or its presence, is sufficient to ground universal conclusions.

A more careful position is simpler. I can report my experience. You can report yours. We can look for patterns. We can investigate conditions that reliably produce certain states. We can remain curious about what these experiences might indicate.

But the move from “I experienced X” to “therefore reality is Y”is a leap requires extraordinary justification — justification that neither dismissive reductionism nor confident mysticism typically provides.

There is a quiet irony here. Each side accuses the other of insufficient rigor, while both often relax their own standards when moving from experience to metaphysics.

Investigation Before Ontology

At one point I found myself asking whether such states change our ontology — whether they alter the framework through which we understand reality.

It is a natural question. If deep meditative states reveal something genuine about consciousness, do they tell us what reality fundamentally is? Do they require us to revise our metaphysics?

And then, unexpectedly, the question itself began to feel misplaced.

Not wrong. Premature.

We were trying to settle metaphysical conclusions before completing the phenomenological work. It is like debating the nature of atoms before finishing the experiments that reveal their behavior.
Investigation comes first. Ontological conclusions, if any, come later.

What we have so far are observations: sustained attention can produce unusual states. These states feel qualitatively different from ordinary waking consciousness. Different traditions, using different methods, report structurally similar patterns.

That is data. Valuable data. But it is phenomenological data — descriptions of what appears under specific conditions.

Jumping from “I experienced X” to “therefore reality is Y” skips necessary steps. Under what precise conditions does the experience arise? How stable is it? How reproducible? What varies across individuals, and what remains constant? How does it relate to other documented states?

Perhaps we are too quick to demand final answers from experiences that may not lend themselves to finality.

Perhaps it is enough to admit that our descriptive tools have limits, while our capacity for experience exceeds what we can neatly articulate.

The map is not the territory.
But incomplete maps do not require abandoning cartography. They require continuing the work with rigor and restraint.

A Quiet Smile

This realization did not produce certainty.

It produced something else.

A quiet smile.

Not the smile of revelation.
Not the smile of ultimate truth.
More like the resolution of a long-standing tension.

The tension between dismissal and exaggeration.
Between explaining everything away and inflating everything into mystery.

There is no dramatic conclusion. Just a sense that inquiry can continue without being forced into either extreme.

It is possible to take contemplative practice seriously as disciplined investigation, without adopting metaphysical commitments. To recognize that figures like Nisargadatta Maharaj or Rabbi Kaplan may possess experiential knowledge worth examining, while remaining agnostic about their theological frameworks.

To admit that the explanatory gap is real without filling it with speculation.
To acknowledge structural limits to self-description without invoking the supernatural.

Curiosity, without urgency.
Exploration, without inflation.

Looking back, I am not sure what to call this period. It was not an awakening. It was not a breakthrough. It was sustained curiosity.

Ideas appeared. Some dissolved. Some sharpened.
Poorly framed questions fell away.

Letting go of certain categories — “supernatural” among them — makes the picture clearer.

The most surprising shift is tonal. There is no urgency to resolve everything. No pressure to arrive at a final position. Just the quiet satisfaction of examining carefully, without dismissal and without exaggeration.

Somewhere in the background there is a faint smile, the kind that appears when something feels oddly familiar, as if it had been present all along but obscured by noise. Not revelation. Something closer to recognition.

This framework — treating contemplative experience as investigable without premature metaphysical commitment — has practical implications. It suggests a way to examine unusual states systematically, holding insights from neuroscience and contemplative traditions in parallel, without requiring either to dominate.

A later essay will explore that investigation in detail. For now, what matters is the posture that makes such work possible.

Many of us encounter similar edges — moments when conventional explanations feel incomplete and mystical inflation feels unconvincing.

If you have found yourself there, you may recognize the terrain.

Perhaps the work is not to choose between certainty and superstition, but to remain curious at the boundary. To admit that our models are powerful and incomplete. To allow experience to be real without turning it into doctrine.

For now, that feels sufficient.

Footnotes:

¹ Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can’t Be Computed (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019)., Christof Koch, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (MIT Press, 2012).
² Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman, Gödel’s Proof (New York: New York University Press, 1958).For a broader cultural exploration, see Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979).
³ Aryeh Kaplan, Jewish Meditation: A Practical Guide (New York: Schocken Books, 1985).
⁴ Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That, trans. Maurice Frydman (1973).

With quiet thanks to Adam Bašić on Unsplash for the image.