Why Consciousness Is More Than Thinking About Thinking

I was reading an article in Psychology Today, which I took exception to regarding consciousness.

The author suggested that consciousness might emerge from “thinking about thinking”—from the mind’s ability to reflect upon its operations and craft narratives about the self. While compelling as a model of self-reflection, this confuses the activity with the ground. To equate consciousness with reflection is like saying the echo created the mountain.

Consciousness and Self-Reflection Are Not the Same

Consciousness is the presence of experience itself—the sheer fact that something is. Self-reflection is a particular movement within that presence: the mind turning back on itself, narrating, labeling, and interpreting. Infants are conscious long before they can tell stories about themselves. Animals feel warmth, hunger, fear, and affection without weaving these into autobiographies.

The act of saying “I am aware that I am aware” presupposes an underlying awareness. Without that prior field, there is no ground for reflection to arise. To collapse consciousness into self-reflection is to confuse the mirror with the reflection it holds.

Philosophical and Mystical Distinctions

Phenomenologists such as Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty made this distinction clear: consciousness is always “consciousness of something.” Before concepts or self-awareness, there is the given-ness of experience. Martin Heidegger even called it the “clearing” in which beings appear.

Mystical traditions go further. Meister Eckhart spoke of the “ground of the soul” that shines before thought. Ramana Maharshi pointed directly to pure awareness: “The self is self-luminous; it is consciousness itself.” Buddhism distinguishes bare awareness from the narrative-making mind, pointing meditators back to the immediacy of experience before interpretation.

These voices remind us: reflection is a wave on the ocean of consciousness, not the ocean itself.

Neuroscience and the Layers of Awareness

Joseph LeDoux, quoted in the Psychology Today article, calls the inner language “mentalese.” It allows us to reframe and integrate our experiences. However, it is costly: narrating ourselves requires a vast amount of neural energy. The brain economizes by relying on habits until flexibility or meaning-making is required. Consciousness, however, is not reducible to this economy—it is the condition in which all economies operate.

The Past Laid Over the Present

Instead of encountering each moment fresh, the mind overlays these templates, laying the past onto the present. This reduces the energetic cost of consciousness by collapsing the infinite possibilities of the now into a limited set of familiar relational patterns. In this sense, object relations serve as shortcuts, sparing us from having to confront reality in its raw intensity, but at the cost of narrowing what we actually perceive.

Consider a child whose early environment was marked by rejection or frustration. That inner object, stored as a living pattern, will unconsciously color later encounters: the teacher who criticizes, the partner who turns away, the boss who looks displeased. Each of these present events is metabolized less as what is happening now and more as what has already happened.

This efficiency is not consciousness itself. It is the psyche economizing, using memory as scaffolding. The price of this efficiency is that much of the freshness of presence gets buried under layers of projection and repetition.

The Energetic Cost of Projection vs. the Liberation of Presence

Projection and repetition may save the psyche energy in the short term, but paradoxically, they drain vitality in the long term. Meeting every moment through the haze of the past prevents direct contact with life’s immediacy. It dulls perception, reduces curiosity, and locks awareness into a closed loop. Like running old software on new hardware, the system functions but never at its full capacity.

Presence, on the other hand, is energetically liberating. To meet reality freshly—without preloaded templates—requires courage and openness, but it also restores vitality. The nervous system relaxes, the body softens, and awareness becomes more fluid. Energy once consumed by maintaining projections is released into aliveness. This is why contemplatives across traditions describe presence as luminous, vibrant, and spacious. It is not effortful. It is the opposite of effort: a relaxation into what is already here.

In this sense, object relations represent a kind of psychic compression—reducing the vast data of the present into recognizable shapes. Presence is the decompression—allowing life to expand back into its full, unmediated intensity. One economizes by narrowing; the other liberates by opening.

Voices of Psychology in Dialogue with the Mystics

W. R. D. Fairbairn described the psyche’s inner world as “populated” by these internal objects—echoes of our first caretakers that continue to structure our emotional life. Melanie Klein noted how the infant splits the “good breast” and “bad breast” as a way of managing overwhelming feelings, laying down patterns of perception that persist into adulthood. Donald Winnicott introduced the concepts of the “good enough mother” and the “transitional object,” illustrating how early holding environments enable the self to emerge without fragmenting.

Each of these insights points to the same truth: the psyche reduces the cost of living by repeating the past. But this repetition also constrains. The very strategies that once allowed survival become filters that dull the freshness of the now.

Here is where the dialogue with mysticism becomes illuminating. When Meister Eckhart speaks of the “ground of the soul,” when Rumi sings of “freshness at every breath,” when the Buddha calls for direct awareness beyond craving and aversion—they are pointing to an experience of life unmediated by inner objects.

Winnicott’s concept of the “good enough mother” enables the infant to develop a stable sense of self. The mystic’s invitation is to go further: to discover that beyond the self, there is a presence that does not require holding, because it is already whole. Klein saw how splitting fragments the psyche; mystics point to the healing that comes when the opposites dissolve into a deeper unity.

In this way, psychology and spirituality meet: both recognize the overlays of the past, but while psychology maps how they form, spirituality reveals the possibility of seeing through them.

The Invitation Beyond Narratives

If consciousness is not simply self-reflection—and if much of what we call “experience” is filtered through object relations—then what is left when we meet life directly? Is there a way to unburden the present from the overlays of the past, to encounter reality without leaning on these energy-saving patterns?

Mystics, philosophers, and contemplatives across time have insisted that there is. When object-relational filters soften, when the machinery of self-narration quiets, consciousness is revealed as something simple, radiant, immediate. It does not need to be manufactured; it shines when the overlays recede.

This is what the Diamond Approach® calls “presence,” what Buddhists call “bare attention,” what Eckhart called the “ground.” It is not exhausted by self-reflection, nor is it dependent on the mind’s habits of projection. It is the unmediated field in which all appears.

A Question to Sit With

So perhaps the more fruitful inquiry is not, “How does consciousness emerge from self-reflection?” but:

What is it in us that knows, even before we can speak of it, even before the past has been laid upon the present?

John Harper is a Diamond Approach® teacher, Enneagram guide, and a student of human development whose work bridges psychology, spirituality, and deep experiential inquiry. He is the author of The Enneagram World of the Child: Nurturing Resilience and Self-Compassion in Early Life and Good Vibrations: Primordial Sounds of Existence, available on Amazon.

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