How individual self-consciousness masks universal consciousness, and why suffering is the key to clarity
by: Zaheer Merali
posted: Jul 04, 2025
There’s something different that happens in our understanding when we listen vs read.
It’s primal… you learned who you are via sound, well before you learned how to read. So, if you’re inclined this way, join me as I narrate my investigation to you.
Sit back, relax and enjoy the next 20 minutes in peace… with no obligation.
You've never seen your own face directly, only reflections.
Similarly, you've never experienced consciousness directly, only your acquired assumptions about it.
Right now, something is aware of these words. That same awareness was present in your dreams last night and remained when you disappeared entirely in deep sleep.
What if this awareness isn't yours, but what you are?
The question isn't whether this recognition is possible… it is.
The question is whether you're willing to look directly?
Picture this:
You're hurtling around Monaco's F1 track at nearly 300km/h, rain hammering your visor. Through the streaked, tinted glass, you glimpse fragments of the track: a blur of barriers, a hint of the racing line, the ghostly outline of another car.
Your entire reality is filtered through this obscured lens.
Yet somewhere beneath the distortion lies the actual circuit, unchanged, pristine, and always present.
This is consciousness as most of us experience it, but don’t know it. A layered, unnecessary tax on the joy of spontaneous living.
I spent a decade-plus investigating the nature of awareness and consciousness—spanning meditation retreats in Peru, plant rituals in Colombia, ancient texts from India and China, neuroscience and quantum mechanics research around the world.
The outcome of it was unlike anything I had heard before I started my journey. I want to share what I discovered, so you can explore this for yourself with some light to guide your way.
Consciousness is a paradox: It is singular, yet appears as multiplicity. Formless, yet it appears to need a form for its expression.
It operates in transparent layers, each one of total clarity, yet typically obscured by psychological habits that convince us we're seeing a clear picture… when we're actually peering through a heavily tinted lens.
Reality cannot be described by words, but an attempt to describe our human experience of it may sound something like this:
A universal awareness filtered through the acquired habits of individual perception, creating what we mistake for separate, personal consciousness.
Can the visor be cleared? Or the tint removed?
Let’s investigate this together.1
The Architecture of Awareness
The first step in clearing the visor is understanding what we're actually looking through.
Most scientific researchers approach awareness and consciousness like mechanics dissecting an engine: breaking it into components, mapping neural correlates, chasing the source of subjective experience.
But this approach misses something fundamental:
It isn't a thing to be found. It isn’t an experience to be had.It's the very medium in which experiencing and finding occurs.
Consider your experience right now. You're aware of reading these words, perhaps conscious of your breathing, maybe noticing sounds around you, or a memory floats into view.
But behind all of that is something even subtler: a constant, quiet witness to all these changing experiences. It doesn't come and go with thoughts or sensations.
It's the unchanging background against which all experience appears.
This witness remains constant across all states of consciousness:
In deep sleep, when the individual conscious self disappears entirely, something is still present… otherwise, you couldn't report having slept deeply.
In dreams, when logic dissolves and impossible scenarios feel completely real in the moment, the witness observes it all.
In waking life, it's the constant observer of your thoughts, emotions, and sensations.
Neuroscientists, like Dr. Judson Brewer's at Yale and Brown University, have found that experienced meditators demonstrate altered default mode network (DMN2) activity and show increased gamma wave activity (associated with heightened awareness) not just during meditation, but across all states including deep sleep.
This suggests that the witness consciousness isn't produced by the brain but may be fundamental to reality itself. What people call the "hard problem" of consciousness—a separate individual experiencer that needs to be explained—may actually be the wrong question entirely.3
So, as we go forward, keep these in mind:
Awareness is consciousness at rest. The still, unchanging presence that remains constant whether you're awake, dreaming, or in deep sleep. It's the clear mirror in which all experience appears, never touched or changed by what it reflects.
Consciousness is awareness in motion. The dynamic dance of thoughts, sensations, and perceptions that creates life as we experience it. It's the same essential awareness, now appearing to move, create, and express itself through the endless variety of human experience.
The Absolute is what remains beneath both the stillness and the movement. The unchanging witness that sits behind all states, all experiences, all identities. It's not something to have or something to become; it's what has always been, temporarily appearing to be personal and limited through the habit of individual identity.
Think of it this way: awareness is like the ocean in perfect stillness, consciousness is that same ocean in motion as waves, and you are the water itself: unchanged whether still or moving, always present in every form it takes.
The Fabrication of the Individual
The conventional view treats consciousness as emerging from complexity: neurons firing in patterns eventually producing subjective experience.
But what if we've got it backwards? What if consciousness is primary, and individual self-consciousness is a learned habit overlaid on universal consciousness?
Think about how a child develops self-consciousness, a sense of individual identity:
Initially, there's just experience: colours, sounds, sensations arising and passing without a central narrator. Gradually, through language and social conditioning, the child learns to say "I see red" rather than simply experiencing redness.
The "I" becomes a habit of thought, a learned way of organizing and owning experience.
Research on this sense of “I” provides compelling evidence for this view. It demonstrates that our sense of being a unified self is actually a sophisticated illusion created by the brain's information processing.
According to Dr. Thomas Metzinger, on what he calls the "phenomenal self-model":
”No such things as selves exist in the world: nobody ever had or was a self."
When this self-model is disrupted—through meditation, psychedelics, brain injuries or certain neurological conditions—people report experiencing "pure consciousness" without a sense of individual identity.
Not a void. Not dissociation.Just being, without someone being it.
This is revelatory. It shows that individual consciousness isn't fundamental.
It's an acquired overlay on something stable and universal.
The Three Transparent Layers
Now that we understand how the individual self gets constructed, let's examine the three states where consciousness appears to operate—and why most of us are asleep while awake, and awake while asleep.
Ancient wisdom traditions and modern neuroscience converge on a remarkable insight: consciousness appears to operate in three primary layers, each transparent in its natural state, but this clarity is typically obscured by psychological habits.
Layer One: Deep Sleep (Unlimited Awareness)
In deep sleep, individual consciousness dissolves entirely. There's no "you" present, no thoughts, no sensations, no time.
Yet something remains. Pure awareness without content: consciousness without the modification of individual experience.
Brain scans show that certain areas associated with self-referential processing go offline, yet the brain maintains complex homeostatic functions that require a form of knowing.
Layer Two: Dream State (Private Creative Consciousness)
Dreams reveal consciousness's extraordinary creative power. From nothing, it generates entire worlds complete with characters, narratives, and sensory experiences that feel completely real.
Neuroscientist Dr. Matthew Walker's research shows that REM sleep involves heightened activity in areas associated with creativity and meaning-making, suggesting that dreaming consciousness appears to operate like waking life, albeit with different filters.
Layer Three: Waking State (Shared)
In waking consciousness, awareness appears to become focused, personalized and attached to a persistent body-mind system. We experience ourselves as separate individuals navigating an external world.
This layer, through repetition and inattention, creates the illusion that personalized self-consciousness is all there is.
Each layer is naturally transparent, clear and unobscured.The problem isn't the layers themselves but the psychological habits that tint them, creating the illusion of separation and limitation.
Most of us are asleep while we’re awake.
And we’re awake when we’re deeply asleep.
The Tinting Mechanism
Each layer of consciousness is naturally transparent, so what creates the obscuration?
The answer lies in what cognitive scientists call "predictive processing": the brain's tendency to overlay past experiences onto present reality.
You don’t see the world as it is.You see your best learned guess of it.
Dr. Andy Clark's research on predictive brains reveals that what we experience as "reality" is actually the brain's best guess about what's happening, based on previous experiences. We don't perceive the world directly; we perceive our predictions about the world, updated by sensory input.
This creates what I call the "tinting effect”: pure awareness gets filtered through layers of expectation, memory, and conditioning.
Consider how you experience walking into a room. You don't consciously process every detail. Instead, your brain rapidly generates predictions:
"This is a kitchen. Kitchens have stoves and refrigerators.This is safe, familiar territory."
These predictions create a filter through which you experience the room. You might miss the unusual artwork on the wall or the subtle change in lighting because your predictive system has already categorized the experience.
This same mechanism operates at the deepest levels of consciousness.
We don't experience awareness directly; we experience our beliefs and predictions about what awareness should be like, based on years of conditioning about being a separate self.
The tint becomes so familiar that we mistake it for reality itself.
Suffering as the Instrument of Clarity
Understanding the tinting mechanism intellectually is one thing. But how does the recognition happen experientially? Paradoxically, it's often through what we try hardest to avoid.
Pain is often the first time we question the lens. When life breaks our frame—through grief, failure, betrayal—we feel disoriented. Scared. Isolated.
It’s the separation script running again. And we run away or try to numb it.
But, suffering isn't a bug in the system: it's a feature. It's the mechanism by which consciousness reveals its own tinting and points toward clarity.
When life flows smoothly, we rarely question our perceptions. The individual self feels real and substantial. But when suffering arises—whether physical pain, emotional distress, or existential anxiety—it creates cracks in our normal way of perceiving.
Suddenly, the familiar tint becomes visible, if we stay with it long enough for it to reveal itself.
Dr. Kristin Neff's research on self-compassion reveals that people who can observe their suffering without completely identifying with it show greater psychological resilience and clarity. They're able to see the difference between the experience of suffering and the one who observes it.
This points to a profound truth:
Suffering reveals the witness consciousness that remains unchanged regardless of what's being experienced.
Consider your own experience of intense pain or grief. In the midst of it, if you look carefully, you can notice that there's something present that isn't suffering—the awareness in which the suffering appears. This awareness doesn't suffer; it simply observes suffering arising and passing.
Recognizing this witness consciousness is the first step toward clearing the tinted lens.
Practical Tools for Clarity
Suffering may crack the lens, but you don't need to wait for life to break your frame. Here are three approaches I've developed for investigating consciousness directly.
1. On Waking: Effortless Witness Practice
Each morning upon waking, before getting out of bed, spend five minutes investigating your experience. Ask yourself:
“What was present in deep sleep? What observed the dreams?What is aware of being awake right now?"
Don't try to answer conceptually. Simply investigate the quality of awareness itself across all three states.
Don’t worry about how much time you have. Even brief mindfulness practices (5mins) can have a profound effect.
Your “learned identity” loves to procrastinate and defer an investigation into its non-existence.
2. All Day: Tint Recognition Exercise
Throughout the day, whenever you notice strong emotional reactions or fixed opinions, pause and ask:
"What am I assuming about this situation?What past experience is colouring my perception?"
Don’t worry about changing your response yet. This is about recognizing the filters through which you're experiencing reality.
Research on mindfulness and cognitive flexibility shows that people who regularly practice observing their mental habits develop greater ability to recognize when they're operating from assumption rather than direct perception.
3. On Demand: Suffering Inquiry
When experiencing physical or emotional discomfort, instead of immediately trying to fix or escape it, spend a few moments investigating:
"What is aware of this suffering?Is the awareness itself suffering, or is it observing suffering?"
This practice gradually reveals the witness consciousness that remains unchanged regardless of what's being experienced.
Investigating the nature of awareness will lead to profound shifts in your self-perception and reduced psychological reactivity.
The Zoom Lens Effect
These practices work by addressing a fundamental issue: why attention gets stuck at one layer of consciousness, preventing us from seeing the whole picture.
The answer lies in what I call the "zoom lens effect."
Just as a camera lens can focus on a close object while blurring the background, consciousness can become so focused on one layer that it loses awareness of the others.
Most of us live with attention zoomed in on the individual layer, completely absorbed in personal thoughts, emotions, and experiences. This creates what people call the "illusion of the separate self": the feeling that you're a isolated individual navigating an external world.
But consciousness is more like a zoom lens that can smoothly move between different focal lengths. You can zoom out to recognize the dream-like quality of experience, or zoom out further to touch the unlimited awareness that underlies all states. The key is learning to adjust the zoom consciously rather than being stuck at one setting.
Neuroscientists’ research on attention and awareness shows that experienced meditators can rapidly shift between different modes of attention: from focused concentration to open awareness to what they call "non-dual awareness" where the observer and observed merge into a single field of knowing.
This is freedom: not in what you see, but in how you look.
The Nesting Doll Revelation
Perhaps the most profound insight to draw from this investigation is that consciousness isn't layered like a cake, with distinct levels stacked on top of each other. It's more like nesting dolls, where each doll contains all the others while being contained by them.
Individual consciousness contains the capacity for dream-like creativity and unlimited awareness.
Dream consciousness contains both individual narrative and unlimited creative potential.
Universal consciousness contains and enables both individual and dream states while remaining fundamentally unchanged by them.
This changes everything. You don't need to escape the individual layer or transcend the dream layer. You need to recognize that you already contain all layers simultaneously.
The witness consciousness that observes your thoughts is the same awareness that observes dreams and remains present in deep sleep.
The Cleared Visor
This brings us back to where we started, but with a crucial difference in how we're looking.
Returning to our F1 driver speeding through Monaco in the rain: what happens when the visor finally clears? The track was always there, perfect and complete. The other cars were always in their precise positions. The racing line was always available.
The rain and tinted glass didn't change the fundamental reality… they only obscured it.
Similarly, when psychological habits are recognized and released, universal consciousness doesn't appear for the first time.
It's revealed as what was always present. The individual self doesn't disappear; it's seen as a temporary personalization of something limitless and eternal.
This isn't a mystical experience reserved for advanced practitioners. It's as natural as waking up from a dream and realizing you were dreaming.
The difference is that this awakening happens within the dream of individual consciousness, revealing it as a transparent layer within unlimited awareness.
The investigation concludes where it began: with the recognition that consciousness isn't a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived.
Each moment offers the opportunity to notice the tinting, to recognize the witness, and to discover that what you took to be a separate, limited self is actually infinite awareness appearing as individual experience.
The visor can be cleared. The track is always there. The question isn't whether this is possible… it's whether you're willing to see what was never actually hidden.
The witness is always present. The question is: are you ready to see through the tint?
Note on Sources: This investigation synthesizes research from multiple disciplines. Interpretations and connections between different areas of research reflect direct experience. Readers interested in the technical details should consult the original research papers.
References: Journal Articles
- Brewer, J.A., et al. (2011). Meditation experience is associated with differences in default mode network activity and connectivity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(50), 20254-20259. See also: Yale News, "Tuning out: How brains benefit from meditation."
- Metzinger, T. (2003). Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity. MIT Press. Metzinger argues that phenomenal selves are ongoing processes rather than things, and that individual identity is a construction of the brain's information processing systems.
- Walker, M. (2017). Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams. Scribner. Walker's research demonstrates connections between REM sleep and creative problem-solving, though some specific claims require further verification.
- Clark, A. (2016). Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind. Oxford University Press. Clark's work on predictive processing shows how the brain creates our experience of reality through predictive models.
- Neff, K. (2011). Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself. William Morrow. Neff's research demonstrates the psychological benefits of self-compassion and non-identificatory awareness.
- Davidson, R.J., et al. (2003). Alterations in brain and immune function produced by mindfulness meditation. Psychosomatic Medicine, 65(4), 564-570.
- Hasenkamp, W., et al. (2012). Mind wandering and attention during focused meditation: a fine-grained temporal analysis of fluctuating cognitive states. NeuroImage, 59(1), 750-760.
- Britton, W.B., et al. (2014). Awakening is not a metaphor: the effects of Buddhist meditation practices on basic wakefulness. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1307(1), 64-81.
- Bitbol, M., (2008). Is Consciousness Primary? Six arguments from epistemology, phenomenology, neuropsychology, and philosophy of quantum mechanics against the view that conscious experience derives from a material basis. NeuroQuantology, vol. 6, n°1, 53-72.
- Mashour, G.A., et al. (2020). Conscious Processing and the Global Neuronal Workspace Hypothesis. A review of 20 years of research on the four primary theories of consciousness: Global Neuronal Workspace (GNW), Integrated Information Theory (IIT), Recurrent Processing Theory (RPT), and Higher-Order Thought (HOT) theory. Neuron, 105, 776-798.
- Theise, N.D., and Kafatos, M.C., (2013). Complementarity in Biological Systems: A Complexity View. Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Vol. 18, No. 6, 11-20.
- Seth, A. K. (2015). The cybernetic brain: From interoception to awareness.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19(11), 641–643.
References: Books
- Bohm, D. (1980). Wholeness and the Implicate Order. Routledge.
- Chalmers, D. J. (1996). The Conscious Mind: In search of a fundamental theory. Oxford University Press.
- Clark, A. (2016). Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind. Oxford University Press.
- Dass, R. (1971). Be Here Now. Lama Foundation / Crown Publishing.
- Glattfelder, J. B. (2019). Information—Consciousness—Reality: How a New Understanding of the Universe Can Help Answer Age-Old Questions of Existence. Springer.
- Hayward, J., Varela, F. J., et al. (Eds.). (2017). The Monastery and the Microscope: Conversations with the Dalai Lama on Mind, Mindfulness, and the Nature of Reality. Yale University Press.
- Huxley, A. (1954). The Doors of Perception. Harper & Brothers.
- Jung, C. G. (1961). Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Vintage Books.
- Krishnamurti, J. (1996). Total Freedom: The essential Krishnamurti. HarperOne.
- Maharshi, R. (1990). Who Am I? The teachings of Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi. Sri Ramanasramam.
- Metzinger, T. (2009). The Ego Tunnel: The science of the mind and the myth of the self. Basic Books.
- Neff, K. (2011). Self-Compassion: The proven power of being kind to yourself. William Morrow.
- Niebauer, C. (2019). No Self, No Problem: How neuropsychology is catching up to Buddhism. Hierophant Publishing.
- Nisargadatta Maharaj. (1973). I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj. Acorn Press.
- Rubin, R. (2023). The Creative Act: A way of being. Penguin Press.
- Spira, R. (2017). The Nature of Consciousness: Essays on the unity of mind and matter. Sahaja Publications.
- Walker, M. (2017). Why We Sleep: Unlocking the power of sleep and dreams. Scribner.
The Hard Problem of Consciousness: The hard problem of consciousness refers to the challenge of explaining how conscious experience arises out of non-sentient matter. David Chalmers distinguished the "hard" and the "easy" problem of consciousness, arguing that progress on the "easy problem"—on pinpointing the physical/neural correlates of consciousness—will not necessarily involve progress on the hard problem—on explaining why consciousness emerges from physical processing.
Chalmers uses Thomas Nagel's definition of consciousness: "the feeling of what it is like to be something." Even when we have explained the performance of all the cognitive and behavioural functions in the vicinity of experience—perceptual discrimination, categorization, internal access, verbal report—there may still remain a further unanswered question: Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience?
However, this formulation may itself be based on a false premise. The "hard problem" assumes there's a separate individual experiencer that needs to be explained: a personalized layer of consciousness that somehow arises from non-conscious matter.
But what if this assumption is backwards? What if consciousness is primary, and the sense of being a separate individual experiencer is actually the manufactured layer? A learned habit that veils direct experience?
In this view, the hard problem dissolves because there's no separate "someone" having experiences. There's just experiencing itself, temporarily appearing to be personalized through psychological conditioning. The problem isn't explaining how consciousness emerges from matter, but rather how unlimited consciousness appears to become limited through the habit of individual identity.
Default Mode Network (DMN) Definition: The DMN is a system of connected brain areas that show increased activity when a person is not focused on what is happening around them and is active during self-directed thought and introspection. The DMN is particularly relevant because it's associated with self-referential thinking and maintaining individual identity: what I call "psychological tinting." The DMN is most active when ruminating on repeated thoughts and the area responsible for the ego or sense of self.
© 2025 Zaheer Merali.
Shared under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Learn More →
Contact Me →