The Same Light Behind Every Pair of Eyes

We move through life with our identies. Our belief systems and talents almost define us, but these arent our true essence. They are more like outfits we wear rather then the person underneath. Beneath the outfits is the interior self that quietly experiences. This "I" is the most consistent part of us, even as the body shifts and the memories rewrite themselves over time. That feeling of being you never changes. That continuity hints at something deeper than just pure consciousness and biology, but the question is what is it?

First we should consider how we encounter the people around us. We see their surface, their personality and their mannerisms/speech patterns. But behind all of these behaviours, they also experience the quiet awareness of being. Their inner world is also hidden and has the same qualitative rawness as our own. We all seem to share the basic internal awareness, so perhaps consciousness is not like separate lights inside of separate people, but more like one source of awareness shining through different perspectives, like sunlight radiating through many windows. This idea comes from numerous philosophies, such as Buddhism and Taoism, as well as from more Western phenomenology, with philosophers like Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. They believed that subjectivity is irreducible and that consciousness is always conscious of something. These ideas branched out to the main idea that consciousness is not an object in the world, it's a condition for any world to appear.

The self is very mysterious. We explain it as a brain generated phenomenon, but subjective experience has irreducibility, no scan can demonstrate the feeling of longing or the texture of curiosity. Nobody can quite explain the spark of recognition when someone "gets" you. Consciousness becomes the frame that we learn facts from. Understanding reality would therefore need something more than physical measurement. We might have to start being willing to treat the interior experience as fundamental instead of derivative.