I never read or listen to anything with the word "consciousness". I developed this simple bull shit filter, we don't know shit about most things in neuroscience and leave alone consciousness.
Secondly, for no freaking reason, people who write on this bullshit eloquently , pick on non-human animals to look down on them.
Living in presence (a.k.a awareness) is something every living being does and if the fancy word for that is consciousness then every living being has that ability.
For a change, this is beautiful piece by Eric who brushed death and got to live:
The doctors had just delivered the news of a lesion nestled deep in my cerebellum. If it was cancer — and if I survived surgery — I might have three months to live. There was a sliver of hope it was something else. But the odds weren’t kind.
And yet, hours before surgery, with death still in the room, I didn’t feel fear. I felt something quieter. Stranger. I felt connected. To her eyes. To my breath. To the weight of my feet against the floor. To the wind brushing the window. Even to our cat, oblivious, licking her paws in perfect peace.
The world had never looked so alive. Every detail sharpened, sacred. Time no longer moved. It hovered. Held. The future dissolved. The past let go. All that remained was one long, luminous moment. And in that moment, I was tethered — to her hand, to the stars, to everything. I was, finally, conscious.
Upstairs, in a crib painted white, our 18-month-old daughter lay sleeping. Her body rose and fell beneath a cotton sleep sack, rhythmically, gently — life announcing itself in the smallest of gestures. I thought about her growing up without me.
Not in a morbid way but in the way you might watch a boat disappear at sea: helplessly, lovingly, full of prayers you’re not sure where to send. I wept quietly and without shame. I imagined her face at 5, at 15, at 40 — her smile not knowing its origin, her kindness not realizing its inheritance.
I wondered how I could leave her with a memory she could never possess. I hoped she would know how deeply I loved her. And in that moment — that unbearable, radiant moment — I was, for perhaps the first time ever, conscious.
Not in the neurological sense. Not in the academic or philosophical sense. But in the raw, elemental sense of being awake to the miracle and the absurdity of existence. Alive to the texture of being. Aware of the great impossibility of life and my small, flickering role within it.
I wouldn’t wish the circumstances on anyone. But I would give anything to return to that moment of clarity. That intimate, holy sliver of knowing.
That night, I met myself. That night, I met the world. That night, I was conscious.
[---]
Consciousness, I’ve come to believe, is not a function of neurons alone. It is also a function of care. Of love. Of the willingness to stand at the edge of death and choose, if given the chance, to return with open eyes. That, to me, is the miracle.
Not just that we think. But that we feel. That we can marvel. That we can sit in silence across from someone we love and feel time slow down and become something. That we can cry for the daughter we might never know and then — unbelievably — wake up the next morning and hold her in our arms.
I do not romanticize trauma. I would not trade my ordeal for insight. But I honor it for what it revealed. There is a kind of consciousness that lives not in thought but in presence. It asks nothing of us but awareness. It demands no degree, no ideology, no spiritual badge. Only that we pay attention. Only that we look — at our children, our lovers, our trees, our coffee, our clocks — and see them as if for the first time.
I have known what it is to die — or at least to brush against the veil. I have felt the cold clarity of the night before and the strange, staggering chaos of the morning after. And I have known the holy silence that comes not with answers but with awe. A silence so complete it rewires your sense of what it means to be here at all.
That silence still lives in me. In flashes. In fragments. In the rise and fall of my daughter’s breath as she sleeps. And now, in our second daughter, Isabel — born one year ago, luminous and new. She is, in some mysterious way, my continuation. My cell. My echo. My offering to the world. I watched her enter this life, watched her fill her lungs with the same air I once feared I’d never breathe again.
We tell our daughters that kindness is the most important thing in the world. But how can we be kind if we are not first awake? To be kind, we must first notice. To notice, we must care. And to care, we must be willing to be changed by what we see. This is the cost — and the gift — of consciousness.
And in those moments — holding her, listening to them breathe, feeling the fragility and fullness of it all — I am conscious again.
