What Is Consciousness? Are We More Than Our Physical Bodies?
Updated: Oct 18
We spend our entire lives experiencing consciousness, yet how much do we really understand about it?
We think. We feel. We remember. We dream. We recognise ourselves as individuals moving through a physical world.
But what exactly is the awareness behind all of that?
Is consciousness simply something produced by the brain? Or could there be aspects of our awareness that extend beyond what we ordinarily experience through our physical bodies?
These are questions that have fascinated philosophers, scientists, spiritual explorers and everyday people for centuries.
And they're questions that have become increasingly significant to me through my own experiences as a medium and my exploration of altered states of consciousness.
What Do We Mean by Consciousness?
At its simplest, consciousness refers to our awareness of ourselves and our experiences.
It's the ability to recognise that we exist, perceive our surroundings, experience thoughts and emotions, and have a sense of being someone.
Yet describing consciousness is considerably easier than explaining how it arises.
Neuroscience has made remarkable progress in understanding how different areas of the brain contribute to perception, memory, attention and awareness. Researchers can observe changes in brain activity associated with different conscious states.
But questions remain about why physical processes are accompanied by subjective experience, why there is something it feels like to be conscious.
This is sometimes referred to as the hard problem of consciousness.
While there are competing scientific and philosophical explanations, no single account has resolved every question.
And that leaves room for an interesting conversation.
Are We Limited to Our Physical Bodies?
For most of us, everyday awareness is closely associated with our physical senses.
We see through our eyes, hear through our ears and experience the world through our bodies.
But what happens when our ordinary awareness of the body changes?
People describe unusual experiences during meditation, deep trance, sleep, near-death events and other altered states.
Some report feeling detached from their bodies. Others describe a sense of expanded awareness, a loss of personal boundaries or experiences of being somewhere entirely different.
These accounts can be profoundly meaningful to the people experiencing them.
Their explanations, however, remain open to investigation and interpretation. An experience of being outside the body does not, by itself, establish that consciousness has physically separated from the brain.
For me, this question is particularly personal.
My Experiences Beyond Ordinary Awareness
Through my work with trance mediumship and my own exploration of consciousness, I've experienced states in which my awareness of my physical surroundings disappears completely.
When I enter a particularly deep trance, I can reach a point where I'm no longer aware of my body, the room around me or even my ordinary sense of physical existence.
I'm not sitting there consciously thinking about what is happening.
I'm simply experiencing.
During some of these states, I've had experiences that I understand as connecting with alternate versions of myself in other dimensions.
At times, I experience events through another person's eyes. At other times, I seem to become an invisible observer, watching events unfold while retaining the ability to see, hear and feel what is happening.
These experiences began spontaneously. Over time, I started exploring them more intentionally.
One particularly interesting aspect is that I often have little or no memory of what occurred once I return to ordinary waking awareness.
I've trained myself to speak aloud during these deep states, describing what I'm seeing, hearing and experiencing.
I record the sessions and listen to them afterwards.
Sometimes, listening back is the only way I discover what I've described.
On other occasions, fragments remain, rather like trying to remember a distant dream.
I don't present these experiences as scientific proof of other dimensions. They are my firsthand experiences and part of why I continue exploring what consciousness might be capable of.
What Is Connected Consciousness?
Another fascinating question is whether consciousness is entirely individual or whether there may be forms of connection between us that we don't yet fully understand.
We ordinarily think of ourselves as separate people, each with our own thoughts, memories and experiences.
Yet throughout history, people have reported experiences that challenge that sense of separation.
These include apparent telepathic connections, shared impressions, unusual intuitions and moments when people feel deeply connected to another person without ordinary communication.
Some spiritual traditions interpret these experiences through the idea of a shared or universal consciousness.
From a scientific perspective, claims of direct mind-to-mind communication without ordinary sensory channels remain unestablished.
But the experiences themselves continue to inspire questions and conversations.
In my own spiritual understanding, connected consciousness is central to how I experience mediumship and explore awareness beyond my everyday physical perspective.
I describe this as connecting through different frequencies of consciousness.
For me, the language of frequency expresses how these connections feel and how I understand them, rather than a frequency that I've measured scientifically.
Can Our Sense of Time and Identity Change?
Our everyday experience gives us a fairly consistent understanding of who we are.
We have memories of our past, awareness of the present and expectations about the future.
But during altered states, people's experiences of identity and time can change dramatically.
Some describe feeling as though they have lived another lifetime. Others report experiences in which time seems to disappear or unfold differently.
I've had experiences in which memories have arisen that don't belong to my current everyday life.
On one occasion, I experienced a fond memory of playing tennis, despite not playing tennis in my present life.
Within the experience, the memory felt entirely natural, as though it belonged to the life I was experiencing at that moment.
I understand these moments through my experiences of alternate selves, although I recognise that their underlying nature has not been scientifically established.
What interests me is how convincing and emotionally familiar an experience can feel while we're having it, even when it doesn't correspond to our ordinary waking memories.
The Experience of Being Everything and Nothing
There is another state I sometimes enter that I call the grey space.
It is difficult to describe because it doesn't resemble ordinary human experience.
In this state, I don't experience myself as a person travelling somewhere or observing another life.
Instead, I experience an absence of ordinary personal identity.
The closest words I have are that I am everything and nothing at the same time.
I experience myself as pure consciousness or energy, without the familiar boundaries of my physical existence.
There are also experiences involving what I can only describe as mathematical calculations, although explaining precisely what is happening is extraordinarily difficult.
Human language doesn't always seem adequate for describing these states.
I don't know how to objectively establish what the grey space represents. But as a personal experience, it has influenced how I think about identity, awareness and the possibility that our everyday sense of self is only one way of experiencing consciousness.
FROM THE TABLE
E85: Dimensional Experiences — Part 1
What happens when our experiences seem to take us beyond the familiar physical world?
In this episode of The Mediums Table Podcast, Shaman Brooke, Jeannette and Julie share their accounts of dimensional experiences, including out-of-body travel, shared consciousness and hidden realms.
Their stories invite us to consider whether our everyday awareness represents only a small part of what we might be capable of experiencing.
▶ WATCH ON YOUTUBE
What Can Extraordinary Experiences Teach Us?
I believe curiosity is essential when exploring consciousness.
We don't need to accept every extraordinary account as evidence of another reality.
Equally, we don't need to dismiss someone's experience simply because we cannot immediately explain it.
We can listen, ask questions, examine different perspectives and remain open to what further understanding might reveal.
Through The Mediums Table Podcast, I've had the opportunity to speak with people who describe remarkable experiences involving consciousness, altered awareness, dimensional encounters and unusual connections.
These conversations continually remind me how much there is still to explore.
And while my own experiences have led me to believe consciousness is far more expansive than our everyday awareness suggests, I also recognise the difference between personal conviction and established knowledge.
Personally, I've never felt the need to label or categorise every experience I have.
Some experiences simply don't fit into any category we currently understand. Others are so difficult to describe that even finding the right words can be a challenge.
I don't spend a great deal of time analysing everything that happens or trying to work out exactly what it was.
I have the experience, I acknowledge it, and I allow it to be what it is.
That doesn't mean I'm not curious. I love exploring consciousness and the possibilities of what we might be capable of. But I don't believe every experience needs an explanation, a name or a conclusion.
Sometimes, the experience itself is enough.
For me, the exploration is not about having every answer.
It's about being willing to ask questions that challenge what we think we know.
Are We More Than Our Physical Bodies?
That remains one of the great questions surrounding consciousness.
Science continues to investigate the relationship between the brain and subjective experience. Philosophy continues to examine the nature of awareness and identity.
Spiritual perspectives offer their own interpretations of what consciousness may represent.
And individuals continue to have experiences that profoundly shape their understanding of themselves and reality.
My own experiences have left me with a strong personal sense that consciousness is not as limited as we often assume.
But rather than asking you to adopt my understanding, I'd invite you to consider a question: What if the consciousness we experience in everyday life is only one part of a much larger picture?
Perhaps the most interesting part of exploring consciousness is recognising just how much we still have to learn.
Continue Exploring
In our next article, we'll explore extraordinary accounts of dimensional experiences, including my own encounters with what I understand as alternate versions of myself, and the fascinating questions these experiences raise about identity, awareness and reality.
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