Getting Down to the Nitty-Gritty of Consciousness

Where experience begins before an observer appears

Descending Rather Than Explaining

Most discussions of consciousness move upward. They theorize, explain, or abstract. But the mystics who seem to have understood consciousness most intimately didn’t rise above it. They descended into it.

They didn’t ask what consciousness is. They stayed with where experience begins—before it stabilizes, before it organizes itself, before anyone can say “this is happening to me.” They lingered at the moment where something is arising, but has not yet become someone’s experience.

Unknowing as Precision

This movement is especially clear in the apophatic mystical traditions, where the descent into unknowing is not a failure of understanding but its fulfillment. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite described the approach to the divine through successive negations. Names fall away. Qualities dissolve. Concepts are relinquished. Even the act of knowing itself must be released. Whatever can be grasped or affirmed cannot be the ground.

That same movement finds a stark experiential expression in The Cloud of Unknowing. The cloud is not confusion or ignorance. It is the felt limit of thought. The author is explicit that what is sought is not reached through understanding or refined awareness, but through a resting beneath thought. Even subtle awareness becomes an obstacle if it is held onto.

Beyond Non-Conceptual Awareness

What these mystics are pointing toward is not non-conceptual awareness in the usual sense. Non-conceptual awareness still contains an observer. It is awareness without thought, without naming, without interpretation, but there remains a stance of being aware of. There is still orientation, however subtle.

They are pointing deeper than that.

Deep Sleep as Progressive Subtraction

This is where certain Buddhist teachings are often misunderstood, especially those that speak of deep sleep, deeper sleep, deeper still. Taken literally, they sound like metaphors for unconsciousness. But what is being described is not sleep in the everyday sense. It is progressive subtraction.

First, sensory engagement falls away. Then imagery and memory quiet. Then thought subsides. Then even the subtle stance of “I am aware” loosens. Each layer removes something we habitually mistake for consciousness itself.

What remains is not knowing. Knowing already belongs to the return.

Before Knower, Knowing, and Known

Knowing implies that something registers something. It implies a subject–object structure, however refined. In the depth these teachings gesture toward, that structure has not yet formed. There is no naming, no registering, no recognition—not even the recognition of absence.

Even non-conceptual awareness does not go far enough. Awareness may still be present, but there remains a standpoint, a faint orientation toward something.

What these traditions gesture toward lies prior to that.

Below non-conceptual awareness is a layer where awareness has not yet curved into an observer at all. Not an observer who knows, not an observer who does not know—simply no observer yet. Not because it vanished, but because it has not arisen.

This is the nitty gritty.

The Pre-Bifurcation Point

Phenomenologically, this is the pre-bifurcation point. The moment before experience differentiates into knower, knowing, and known. Before inside and outside. Before location. Before “there is awareness” becomes a meaningful statement.

That is why metaphors like darkness, cloud, silence, and sleep appear across traditions. They are not meant to suggest dullness or unconsciousness. They borrow the felt familiarity of rest, non-effort, and non-interference. The mind is no longer doing the work of positioning itself in relation to what appears. It has settled beneath even the stance of being aware.

Nothing in this depth announces itself. There is no experience of depth. There is no experience of nothingness. Experience, as such, has not yet begun. Only on return—when cognition resumes and the observer reconstitutes—does something register that there was a gap or that nothing was happening. That registration belongs to thought. It is retrospective.

A Parallel Descent in Physics

A similar descent can be traced, conceptually rather than phenomenologically, through a quiet lineage of quantum physicists. Not as a rebellion against science, but as a gradual loosening of the assumption that consciousness is secondary. Chronologically, this movement mirrors the same downward tracing that the mystics enacted directly.

It begins with Erwin Schrödinger, one of the founders of quantum mechanics. Influenced by Vedanta, Schrödinger questioned the multiplicity of consciousness outright. He argued that consciousness is singular and that individual minds are localized expressions rather than independent observers. Matter, in his view, already presupposed consciousness rather than producing it.

A generation later, Wolfgang Pauli pushed further inward. Through his long engagement with Carl Jung, Pauli became convinced that psyche and matter arise from a deeper shared ground. Observation was not something added to reality after the fact. It was intrinsic to how reality takes form.

With David Bohm, this intuition gained structural articulation. Bohm’s implicate order describes reality as an undivided whole from which both matter and mind unfold. Thought itself becomes a movement within that whole. There is no privileged observer standing outside the process.

Then John Archibald Wheeler reframed the issue as participation. His participatory universe suggests that reality does not fully exist prior to interaction. Yet this does not elevate the personal observer. It undermines it. What is fundamental is the participatory event itself.

Finally, Henry Stapp brings the question into contemporary quantum theory. He argues that conscious experience plays a causal role in physical processes. The implication is clear. Consciousness is not a late arrival in the universe.

The Late Arrival Called “Me”

Seen together, this is not physics becoming mystical. It is physics shedding assumptions. Across decades, the observer becomes thinner, less autonomous, less central—until what remains looks uncannily like what the contemplative traditions were pointing to all along: experience arising before anyone is there to claim it.

Human consciousness does not begin with someone having experiences. Experience begins, and someone crystallizes inside it.

Getting down to the nitty-gritty of consciousness is not about achieving a special state. It is about staying close enough to the arising of experience that the observer has not yet had time to appear.

What we usually call me is not the source of awareness.
It is one of its late arrivals.

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John Harper is a Diamond Approach® teacher, Enneagram guide, and lifelong student of human development whose work bridges psychology, spirituality, and deep experiential inquiry. His flagship project, The Inner Architecture Trilogy—Why Study Personality?, The Alchemy of Perception, The Enneagram as Living Process, explores the fundamental structures of consciousness from three interconnected dimensions: perception, process, and vibration.

He is also the author of Nurturing Essence: A Compass for Essential Parenting, The Enneagram World of the Child: Nurturing Resilience and Self-Compassion in Early Life, works that illuminate how essence shapes early psychological development. All titles are available on Amazon.