Where is your consciousness located?

[Toine]

Just wondering if anyone has an answer to this question:

Where (in your body) is your consciousness (and/or awareness) located?

[Adam]

Where are the neurons that set up your consciousness? Nobody knows...

On a personal level, though, I feel as though the center of my awareness is usually in my upper chest. Sometimes, it's a few inches above my head, and could even be a few feet above and behind me while I'm meditating. (now that's really raising the level of your consciousness, if you'll excuse the pun. )

[Erin Pavlina]

Interestingly, when I was in college taking a biological psychology class, my professor did his dissertation on the location of consciousness. However, he was unable to find it using physical means. I remember he seemed very disappointed about that.

In my reality, consciousness is something that inhabits your body, like a peanut in the shell. Remove the shell and you still have consciousness.

[AndyMartin]

I imagine consciousness like an energetic field that can be shifted, reshaped, resized, etc., and where it resides normally is probably a matter of habit more than anything else. Mine usually feels like it's in my head, but I shift it down to my heart when I'm tuning-in to intuition.

Carlos Castaneda claimed that the location of our awareness actually determines what information enters into our field perception and that the collective awareness of a shared world was the result of having this point of awareness conditioned to the same location, causing us to perceive the same channels of energy. Since he also thought that different planes of existence were coterminous with our world, he proposed that a big enough shift could actual cause you to physically change location or form. He claimed his final test from his teacher was to jump off a cliff and shift to another world before splattering on the ground below. Talk about a leap of faith!

I haven't had any experience to prove or disprove those conclusions, but I have tried shifting my awareness around during meditation, and I can sense differences, both physically and in terms of perceptions.

--Andy

[RandomGuy101]

Why does our consciousness have to reside inside our physical body?

[pi11]

I don't have a consciousness or a body.
Consciousness has made me and my body.

[AndyMartin]

Originally Posted by pi11

I don't have a consciousness or a body.
Consciousness has made me and my body.

Well put!

Hey Snitzel -- or be the same size/configuration as your body for that matter?

[Dave Kaminski]

Originally Posted by Erin Pavlina

Interestingly, when I was in college taking a biological psychology class, my professor did his dissertation on the location of consciousness. However, he was unable to find it using physical means. I remember he seemed very disappointed about that.

In my reality, consciousness is something that inhabits your body, like a peanut in the shell. Remove the shell and you still have consciousness.

Erin, what do you feel happens if you remove the peanut and keep the shell? Is this a viable question?

[taylor]

If you take away the peanut and leave the shell, what then is there to observe the shell existing? The peanut was the source of the shell to begin with. Can't have the shell without the peanut to give it existence. If that makes sense...

[Radical]

Consciousness could be argued as an attribute of the brain, since when someone takes drugs for example they become a totally different person and are much less conscious of their surroundings. If however consciousness was outside the brain, how would taking drugs be able to affect your consciousness?

If you say your consciousness is a spirit and totally seperate from your brain, then how is it that people who claim to have experienced astral projections and OBE's can remember the experience? Since memory is a property of the brain.

[RandomJohn]

I can come up with many plausible explanations. You could use a steering wheel analogy, where the car goes in the direction that is pointed by the steering wheel, but the steering wheel is only an interface to the driver. Damage to the steering column will affect the wheel's ability to direct the car. In the same way, you can think of the brain as an interface (and perhaps one of several) to the driver, but the brain does not have to be the driver.

Yes, it is true that victims of stroke or heart attack can experience brain damage which changes their ability to perceive information and process it. It can even appear that their personality is changed. However, did the stroke affect the source of consciousness, or an interface?

By the same token, how can someone who, though they have no love for the water, all of a sudden develop a love of swimming after recovering from the heart transplant of a champion swimmer who died tragically? Are we to discount this story and ones like it on the basis that it doesn't fit an assumption that consciousness is in the brain and seems to be backed up by equally odd stories of minor damage to the brain completely affecting what seems like a function of consciousness? Do psychoactive drugs not also affect the heart, liver, kidneys?

I don't think the question is so simple.

[Persol]

Well, let's try and argue what is left when we try to define consciousness as outside the body.

• By definition, it is not a body part
• It is not the brain
• It has no memory, as that is a function of the brain which is controlled by drugs (both natural and manmade)
• Other than through the brain, it has no demonstratable interface with 'reality'
• It is not your emotions, as they are chemical

What's that leave us? Well, I'm not sure. It is 'you', but minus everything that makes 'you' different than 'me'. This really leaves us with three options:
1) We are one 'I'
2) All of our 'I' are the same
3) Consciousness has no meaning without the body. It can be argued that 'metaphysical' events are still a product of the mind.

[Andreas]

Originally Posted by RandomJohn

By the same token, how can someone who, though they have no love for the water, all of a sudden develop a love of swimming after recovering from the heart transplant of a champion swimmer who died tragically? Are we to discount this story and ones like it on the basis that it doesn't fit an assumption that consciousness is in the brain and seems to be backed up by equally odd stories of minor damage to the brain completely affecting what seems like a function of consciousness? Do psychoactive drugs not also affect the heart, liver, kidneys?

I don't think the question is so simple.

I'd like to touch on this for a bit. I've heard similar stories. This implies that physical organs, ones previously part of a different person, can profoundly change ones behavior. Why do you think that is?

[RandomJohn]

Originally Posted by Andreas

I'd like to touch on this for a bit. I've heard similar stories. This implies that physical organs, ones previously part of a different person, can profoundly change ones behavior. Why do you think that is?

I think this is because somehow other organs are involved in memory as well. Perhaps memory is contained in the body as well as the brain (as Huna philosophy holds), or the brain is one of multiple interfaces to an immaterial memory.

[Radical]

It could be argued that consciousness can't be outside your body. Since consciousness is defined as an alert cognitive state in which you are aware of yourself and your situation. So if consciousness is outside your body, then you won't be in an alert cognitive state since that requires a fully functioning brain, and you also won't be aware of anything since that requires senses. So outside the body consciousness loses all meaning.

[Toine]

It’s there. We all know that, right? But we really don’t know where it is or what it is for that matter. Therefore it is no thing, but without it there is nothing.

[Nico Kempe]

Originally Posted by Dave Kaminski

Erin, what do you feel happens if you remove the peanut and keep the shell? Is this a viable question?

I just thought about an obviously simple, yet very deep answer:
an empty shell.

empty meaning both the peanut missing but mostly your body being no more than, say, a robot. Consciousness is you, it is all.
Err I'm confusing myself now, is (full) consciousness thesame as experiencing being? If so, then without consciousness you cannot be, which is weird to, because if there is a 'you', then you are your ego, and thus you are not fully conscious, and without consciousness you cannot be, which doesn't allow the ego to be, but the ego doesn't have a real consciousness, err?

[songwriter]

I guess everyone's consciousness is all the things one can percieve or so... When someone has no consciousness he can't percieve a thing...
Then everyone consciousness is everywhere. Now mine is in front of this text... now.. to the left.. now I'm back, hearing the thoughts in my head, etc.

The Universe would be my answer.

[David Hausladen]

Originally Posted by RandomJohn

Perhaps [...] the brain is one of multiple interfaces to an immaterial memory.

I had a weird thought related to this, and perhaps someone better versed in modern neuroscience can shoot it down easily...but consider the following analogy: Our immaterial memory is like the hard drive of a computer (long-term "storage" memory for those not familiar with computer hardware) while our physical memory is like the RAM (short-term "working" memory). In other words, what we have in our brain is just a small part of the total memory available to us, "cached" in our physical body to make it easily accessible to the brain for processing.

Just a thought. Don't quote me on it, it's probably wrong .

[Amit]

I've always believed that I, the conscious spirit, reside in the center of this forehead just above and behind the eyes. When I meditate or feel a strong awareness of who I am, or feel purely spirit conscious, I feel massive amounts of energy emanating from this central point on the forehead. But this spirit force also emanates beyond the body creating the beautiful auras that we have.

I have no clue if any of this is true but that's what I feel.

[Toine]

Cool stuff Nico! An empty shell! And you’re confused. Great! You are conscious of your confusion, right? Maybe your brain no longer understands. You see, my brain thinks it is limited, unable to grasp consciousness. We seem to identify more with our brain then our consciousness. At least I do. Isn’t it about becoming conscious about our consciousness using only our consciousness?

Or doesn’t this make any sense anymore? Wouldn't it make more sense if there wasn't an ego? What if your ego is but an illusion?

[Scott H Young]

If you believe in an objective reality than your consciousness would be in your brain although much of the neural processes you associate with conscious thought would be in the frontal part of the cortex.

If you believe in a subjective reality then the real question is where is your body within your consciousness?

[AndyMartin]

Originally Posted by Toine

You see, my brain thinks it is limited, unable to grasp consciousness. We seem to identify more with our brain then our consciousness. At least I do. Isn’t it about becoming conscious about our consciousness using only our consciousness?

That's a good point; it's also hard to untangle our ideas because they're going through levels of translation and incomprehension. That's part of what leads me to believe that we have an awareness that is higher than ego, intellect, emotion and body. But each of these is equally capable of acting as the guiding force, just with different results. I see it as a processing chain, perception moves up, intention moves down.

Becoming conscious is then about allowing this higher awarenss to serve as the junction point for perception and intention; letting the higher awareness drive instead of ego, intellect, emotion or body.

Originally Posted by Toine

Or doesn’t this make any sense anymore? Wouldn't it make more sense if there wasn't an ego? What if your ego is but an illusion?

I think in a sense that's accurate. I think ego is an echo; the reverberation of higher awareness against physical perception and body identification. It exists, but not on its own; yet at the same time is unavoidable.

--Andy