Description

In 1995, the philosopher David Chalmers named a question that every tradition in this season had been circling.

The hard problem of consciousness: How do we explain the subjective, qualitative experience of reality—what it is like to see red, to feel pain, to be aware—in terms of physical processes? How does the firing of neurons become the felt experience of being alive?

Yet long before neuroscience posed this problem, mystics, philosophers, and alchemists had been asking: what is the light that illuminates everything we perceive? What is the consciousness that witnesses consciousness? This episode traces how the perennial philosophy circled the same question—how spirit or Self sees through the eyes of matter, how consciousness knows itself.

Visual Motif

Companion Essay

A thorough examination of the hard problem and how mystical traditions approached it is available on the PLUS ULTRA Substack.

Reading List

• The Conscious Mind David Chalmers — On the hard problem of consciousness
• Advaita Vedanta and Nonduality Francis Lucille — Eastern philosophy on consciousness
• The Phenomenology of Spirit G.W.F. Hegel — Introduction and Preface
• Brahma Sutras Adi Shankara — Commentary on consciousness and Self
• Being and Nothingness Jean-Paul Sartre — Consciousness and freedom

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