otherwise

A nature found within all creatures
but not restricted to them;
outside all creatures,
but not excluded from them.
—The Cloud of Unknowing
A Sentient Unive rs e
Peter Ru s s e l l
What is consciousness? The word is not easy to define, partly
because we use it to cover a variety of meanings. We might say an
awake person has consciousness, whereas someone who is
asleep does not. Or, someone could be awake, but so absorbed in
their thoughts that they have little consciousness of the world
around them. We speak of having a political, social, or ecological
consciousness. And we may say that human beings have consciousness
while other creatures do not, meaning that humans
think and are self-aware.
The way in which I shall be using the word “consciousness” is not in
reference to a particular state of consciousness, or a particular way
of thinking, but to the faculty of consciousness—the capacity for
inner experience, whatever the nature or degree of the experience.
For every psychological term in English
there are four in Greek and forty in Sanskrit.
—A. K. Coomaraswamy
The faculty of consciousness
can be likened to the
light from a video projector.
The projector shines light on
to a screen, modifying the
light so as to produce any
one of an infinity of images.
These images are like the perceptions, sensations, dreams, memories,
thoughts, and feelings that we experience—what I call the “contents
of consciousness.” The light itself, without which no images
would be possible, corresponds to the faculty of consciousness. We
know all the images on the screen are composed of this light, but we
are not usually aware of the light itself; our attention is caught up in
the images that appear and the stories they tell. In much the same
way, we know we are conscious, but we are usually aware only of
the many different perceptions, thoughts, and feelings that appear in
the mind. We are seldom aware of consciousness itself.
Consciousness in All
The faculty of consciousness is not limited to human beings. A dog
may not be aware of all the things of which we are aware. It does
not think or reason as humans do, and it probably does not have the
same degree of self-awareness, but this does not mean that a dog
does not have its own inner world of experience.
You are Being Lied To
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