The word “consciousness” is heavily overloaded. Here we will try to outline an experiential process intended to point you toward one very useful interpretation. To do so, we will need to use poetic language. Ignore the literal meaning of the words here, and allow them to be pointers to your own experience.

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Silence is the absence of sound. Now, pay attention to any particular sound in your environment, and recognize it as the presence of sound. “A sound” is some particular presence of sound.

Now close your eyes and notice a (relative) absence of light/color. Now look at something, and recognize it as the presence of color.

You can do the same thing with your other senses. Compare the presence of a feeling (like pressing your fingers together) with an absence of feeling (in that location, at least).

Now let us try to abstract away this fact of presence from its particulars (as sights, sounds, etc.).

The senses are all different modes of presence, but what they have in common is presence itself. Spend a minute and see if you can intuit what I might mean when I say that presence is the very “stuff” out of which all experiences are made. Presence, modulated in various ways, is the sole substance of your perceived world. Really take a moment and notice this.

It is also the sole substance of your thoughts, memories, emotions, etc. Every single thought you’ve ever thought, like every sound you’ve ever heard, is “made of presence.” When you’re not paying careful attention to your mind – which, as we saw before, is almost always – it is easy to overlook this insight. Even if you understand it intellectually (and especially if you don’t), it is worth seeing for yourself.

Slowly (perhaps over the course of years) you may discover that even your sense of identity is just a cluster of thoughts. You may already know this from neuroscience, but now you begin to experience it directly. The illusion of someone sitting inside your head, looking out at a world, starts to evaporate.

As this happens, you might start to reevaluate the belief that “I am conscious.” Who, pray tell, is conscious, if there’s nobody there?

And now, slowly, slowly, it occurs to you that “consciousness” is just another word for what we’ve here been calling “presence.” It’s not that there is some object called a sound, and a subject called I, and some abstract property called “consciousness” that magically links the two. Or rather, while that model of reality may be useful, it’s not your actual experience of the world – even though it has always seemed like it due to unexamined conceptualization. Instead, this shimmering show you call “life” or “reality” is entirely made of consciousness – merely experiencing or illuminating itself.

So now what do you do with a belief like “consciousness exists” or “consciousness does not exist?” You discover, directly, that those beliefs are made of the very “stuff” they are questioning. Even the concept of “exists” or “real” are made of it. It’s not that “consciousness exists,” it’s that “exists” is consciousness.

The sweater begins to unravel. A remarkable charade is exposed.

In each moment, the luminous fabric of consciousness weaves itself into a dazzling array of sensual delights, as well as a thicket of mutually reinforcing beliefs that together form your conception – and thence experience – of reality. Whether or not any of your beliefs are true, it is astonishing to discover how they form freshly in each moment.

You really must see it for yourself.

Remarkably, during this belief-building process, consciousness brilliantly hides itself from itself, taking on fiendishly clever forms such as “matter is all that really exists; consciousness is just a byproduct.” And like a snake eating its own tail… poof!, the sole substance of your reality seemingly vanishes into itself, becoming at best an afterthought.

But it’s always hiding in plain sight. It is what the Tibetans call “self-secret.” It’s not that some yogis in an ancient cave have been hiding it from you. It is everything. Yet somehow you are continually hiding it from yourself. This game of hide-and-seek is known as Awakening, and they say it can go on for as many cycles (lifetimes) as you wish.

So close you can’t see it

So deep you can’t fathom it

So simple you can’t believe it

So good you can’t accept it

– Tibetan Buddhist saying

It would be imprecise to conclude that consciousness is real while everything else isn’t. But, being the very fabric from which your beliefs are made, it is a good place to hunt for the thread that unravels it all.