23 | Consciousness, Humans, and Empathy

Welcome to the Cow Behind the Barn: A podcast exploring humanity, the world, and the divine, as experienced and interpreted by an artist. I’m Kevin Caldwell, a co-finder of the Table Collective.

I am going to start by sharing an experience I had while I was drafting my notes for this Episode.

I have almost never made references to current issues, the podcast is not intended to be time-bound or contextual in that way. But in this case the topic of human consciousness and the social climate of America actually dovetail nicely. And they dovetail in the form of an experience I will share.

 

Consciousness at Work: Part 1

As I speak it is early 2025. Here in America, we are early in the second term of President Donald Trump. The past two months since his inauguration have been especially chaotic and confusing, a statement I think holds true regardless of where one places themselves on the political spectrum. 

Without going into details, I will say I am not a fan, but I only say it here because that is a necessary piece of information to understand the experience I had. 

In my daily time of meditation, as one element in my practice, I pause to extend compassion, to wish “good” in all its fullness for the President, in the President, and that good in all its fullness might be manifested through the President, for others. 

Here is what happened inside of me during my meditation, on the day I began writing the notes for what I am saying at this very moment.

First, I was aware as I often am that I did not feel compassion. Indeed, I felt anger, and to be honest, I felt condemnation. Not just for his actions, mind you, but I felt it towards him as a person. I am not proud of that feeling, but I need to be honest.

Next, as is my habit in such cases, I paused to try to “check” that feeling and to cultivate the intention in myself to counter it with compassion and the wishes for good I mentioned above: good for him, in him, and through him.

So far, what I am describing is pretty much my normal, daily experience. But then it changed in two ways.

The first change was that I began to allow myself to be aware of what it is in him that so bothered me: in his ways of speaking, in his actions and decisions, in what appears to be his attitude. As I did so, I had to allow myself to be aware that those things are not just in him, they are also in me.  

What I saw included defensiveness, the need to be right, the need to be affirmed and admired, the difficulty I have in admitting being wrong and making mistakes.

I had to admit that yes, the seeds of all of that are in me too. 

Then, the second difference is that I began to imagine a scene, spontaneously, without planning this. The scene was a press conference in which I was the President. Except it was not really me, I was not President Caldwell, I was President Trump. 

In the news conference I was asked a question by a reporter from a paper which tends to be highly critical of the President. And the question was rooted in a criticism of some action or another. I responded to the reporter as follows:

“That is a very good question, and I will need to look into that. I will look into that. And I promise to come back to you. And thank you for asking questions, thank you for doing your job.”

That is not the way President Trump responds (nor do most politicians of course) to critical questioning. Nor is it the way I always respond. 

What was happening?

I think in some way I was channeling or manifesting or aspiring for a different way. I was “being” that way. And by being that way, I think I was in some small way trying to change the energy. His, and mine,

I believe that such moments do matter and can impact things. It changed me, and while I can’t prove it, I believe it can change others too. Including the actual Donald Trump.

What if more of us did that sort of thing more often, for more situations, and for more people? Including for people whom we find it difficult to appreciate or like? If so, might it grow into a wind of larger and lasting change?

I think so.

Now, how does that dovetail with consciousness? I will come back to the experience in a bit, but first, let’s come at the topic from a very simple starting point.

 

Consciousness at Work: Part 2

I will start very empirically. Let’s think about the ways we use the word and see what that tells us:

“What really hurt was that you made a conscious decision to…”

“Had I been conscious of the fact that you were planning to do that, then I would never have…”

“He became unconscious and...” 

“If she remains unconscious you will need to make some decisions…”

Consciousness. We use the word all the time, so obviously, we know what it means. Right?

Well, it turns out that even in day-to-day language we occasionally reveal that we somehow know there is more to consciousness than we know. 

“I suppose subconsciously I was hoping…”

“Some part of me probably knew this wasn’t a good idea, but…”

It seems that we speak as if we know, and at the same time our speech reveals that we know there is more to consciousness than we know or understand.

I have reflected on consciousness in various poems and songs and will include one here, one which is processing some of the mysterious nature of consciousness. I admit the poem smuggles in the idea of the divine before I intend to explore that in the podcast, so for now feel free to ignore that part if you prefer. I share it because it raises questions about myself, and who I am, what it means to be a person, questions about what it means to be a “who.” The poem is called Questions.

It may sound stilted, and in part that is because I translated it from something I originally wrote in Urdu, one of the languages of much of the poetry of South Asia.

 

Questions

I say, “I am here before you!”

But who is this I whose voice says “am”?

I have been traveling long years in a direction that only leads me further and further away from myself.

Who am I?

 

We seem compulsive about our ideas about you, the maker, the source.

For the moment, I leave aside the ideas about you. Do any of us know our “selves”?

Every heart seems divorced from its heart.

Who are we?

 

Truly, then, only you are the one who is, truly.

Are you far? Near to us? Which, truly?

Are you present, or not present? Perhaps you are both, truly?

Who are you?

 

Am I, truly?

Are we, truly?

You are the only one who can truly say “am.”

Me? We? You? What is the meaning of these words, truly?

In the end, there is no clear answer except for this one:

You. You. You.

 

If so, then…

You are who?

In this case the question and the answer are the same.

 

You are who?

You are who.

 

Lots of questions! For now, back to trying to describe consciousness.

 

Consciousness at Work: Part 3

For the past several Episodes I have been exploring what consciousness is, where it comes from, what things have it, and how it works. I’ve described consciousness as a function of two ingredients: experience and awareness. What we refer to as consciousness, in my functional, descriptive model, varies based on the interplay or mixture of those two things. Empirically speaking, that is based on what my own observation suggests, the workings of consciousness may range from pure experience, with no awareness of that experience, all the way to experiencing, being aware, and being aware of being aware. 

In addition, I proposed another dimension of consciousness as well, but it is not one I came to empirically, but rather speculatively: the possibility that a subject, in addition to their own experience and awareness, might as a subject, a first person “I”, also experience the experiences, awareness, and awareness of being aware of other subjects. 

So far, I have spent the Episodes focusing on the things most of us would be least likely to assume have any type of consciousness. Rocks.  And so, I have talked about rocks, rocks, and rocks until I am sure people are getting tired of rocks! 

Well, the good news is that I am putting down the rocks, and picking up human beings! 

I hear a voice in my head, however. 

“Wait! Hold on a second. What about plants and animals and insects? Is the plan to leap from rocks to people and just jump over things like plants and animals?” 

Yes, actually.

I am doing so not because I came to the realization that if rocks were in any way conscious or connected with consciousness then it would follow that more complex forms of things and beings would be as well. There are logical flaws in such an approach.  The one does not necessarily imply the other. If A (rocks) and B (animals) are both C (things), and A (rocks) is also D (conscious), it does not in this automatically mean that B is also D.

But given what quantum physics and religion and philosophy led me to conclude about rocks, and sub-atomic particles, it does seem a fair presumption to make that plants and animals etc. would be conscious in the same way, at the least, as rocks.

And ultimately, I am not aiming to prove a case. Throughout the podcast I have been thinking out loud as I explore these things. As I say at the outset of each Episode, I am exploring all of this as an artist, meaning I try to see and interpret as an artist, but also meaning that I am working on the podcast as if it were an artistic creation. That means I don’t have it all figured out, and thus can’t argue a case even if I wanted to do so.

It means that along the way I am changing how I see things and coming to various revised or new conclusions. Conclusions which I realize are “for now” because things could change by next year, or next month, or by the Episode.

And so for now, I have come to conclude that rocks, or to be more precise the sub-atomic particles that in the aggregate make up a rock, are conscious in this sense:

If consciousness and reality are entangled, then it follows, for me at least, that everything in the cosmos might be conscious, or that at the very least, if the things in the universe are not conscious themselves, they are at least deeply connected with consciousness in ways that affect how they behave at the level of their sub-atomic particles. 

Including rocks, and for me, by extension, plants and animals and more. Everything.

And now, I come to ask, “what about human beings, and human consciousness?” 

In my descriptive model human beings exhibit three of the dimensions of consciousness I propose:

Human beings experience events and stimuli (first dimension), are aware of experiencing them (second dimension), and humans are aware that they are aware of experiencing these (third dimension). 

However, there are, as we all know, exceptions and variations.

 

Exceptions:

There are temporary exceptions to humans having all three, such as when we sleep or are under anesthesia or pass out. And there are more permanent exceptions, such as when a person is in a coma and does not recover. 

 

Variations:

There can be intentional variations, such as the decision to take certain drugs that alter what we experience, and the way we are aware. There can be variations we do not choose as well, such as dementia, and various forms of mental illness.

Then too, there are the exceptions and variations that are reported in many spiritual heritages and are attributed to altered states of mindfulness and consciousness in various meditative and contemplative practices.

We are clearly no longer in the land of rocks!

To further complicate all of this, there is a whole dictionary of vocabulary that comes to my mind when I begin to consider the sorts of things I can include in the very broad term I have employed in my description, namely, awareness.

When I pay attention to the fact that I have awareness of my experiences and the awareness that I am aware I begin to bring in many other aspects of consciousness. This is a random list, stream of consciousness, based on what I observe in my own mental processes: 

 

Memory:

When I am aware that I experience something and when I am aware that I am aware, I am doing so in the present moment, but I do so only very briefly. 

That cognitive event slides almost immediately into being almost entirely a memory, albeit a very recent and fresh one. 

Try it. Listen for a sound (that is an experience), and then be attentive to the fact that you are aware of hearing the sound, and aware of the fact you are aware. All of that happens in the past. There is less than a split second of “the present.” 

Memory is one of the major components of what it means to be conscious.

 

Imagination:

Imagination gets applied to a lot of different things of course. But as an example, when I engage my imagination to try to picture a future event, I am assembling the collection of experiences and “awarenesses” I have stored away in my memory (there is memory again). But I am assembling them into a new combination of colors, sights, sounds, feelings, tastes, etc., depending on what specific thing I am trying to picture. 

This is similar to creativity. I write songs. I know that when I do so, my imagination is pulling things together from past experiences, and from sounds and combinations of sounds which are in me, even though I may not be aware (and here comes our word) consciously.

Imagination draws from memory and recombines the storehouse. How? That brings me to another term.

 

Intuition:

We have all had the experience of just knowing that we know, or of something just popping into our minds out of nowhere, seemingly. We have all probably had the experience of just sensing that we needed to call someone, and when we do, finding that they really needed to talk and the timing was perfect (or, even that they were thinking of us too at that moment, which raises the question whether the intuitive flash was a merely individualistic thing or not…but that is a rabbit trail for another time).

 

Dreams and the subconscious:

I am not here jumping to Jung or Freud, I am just referencing the common human experience of this expression of consciousness, and the fact that it surfaces deep dimensions to our, whatever term we should apply for now, mind, soul, heart, psyche, etc.

 

Logic and deduction:

I tend to be most interested in things like imagination and intuition, I am an artist after all. But the human mind has an astonishing ability to, well, think. To apply logic and to use what we call reason. To deduce.

 

Problem solving:

In some ways this could be a particular way of combining some of the above. When we solve a problem, we employ imagination, deduction, intuition, etc. 

 

Emotions:

These are a constant and nearly universal aspect of our experience, and of our awareness. I say nearly universal, for there are clinical exceptions (people with no apparent emotional faculty at all, or minimal), and also, we as humans have an astonishing ability to block the awareness of certain emotions. But there is a constant hum of emotion within us. It forms some of the white noise, as it were, of our existence.

 

Perceptions:

I am using the term in a very specific way to describe the way we sometimes know something without being able to describe it. So, I don’t use the term here to refer to something like, “my perception of her or him really changed when they said such and such.” It may seem similar to intuition, but here I mean the experience of knowing something we cannot describe. 

Mystics and contemplatives refer to this, in many religious heritages, but it is not an exclusively religious “thing.” I’ve experienced it in my own creative work, and in the poetry and music of others. A song for example, in which the sounds and melody and lyrics and rhythm all combine in such a way that I “know” what it means but cannot describe it. That is what I mean by perception. 

 

Empathy and Compassion:

This enlists imagination and intuition, I think. When we intentionally or even at times when we seem to automatically feel what others are feeling, we are able to put ourselves inside their skin, as it were. This is another aspect of experience and awareness. It involves imagination, emotion, and maybe something more?

 

More?

As I thought more about this it came to me that empathy may be related in some way to my fourth dimension of consciousness, what I called multi-dimensional. Namely, the dimension in which a subject, such as myself, experiences what another subject, such as yourself, experiences as if it were my own subjective experience. That really is what empathy is describing, is it not? Now, my description of the multi-dimensional level of consciousness was intended to describe hypothetically a subject that possessed a type of consciousness in which there was such a level of entanglement with another subject, or subjects, that they experienced the experiences and awarenesses of that other subject not just empathetically, but I would say existentially, or even ontologically. They themselves experience the experiences of another subject in the first person as the (other) first person, not just “as if.” Empathy is still, in my way of thinking, an “as if,” but I am wondering now if this hints at something more, something suggestive of a consciousness that is more than a first-person singular. 

So, empathy as a function of consciousness seems to open out into something bigger perhaps than myself? This is not a new question in the podcast. Physics and philosophy and religions have raised the question along the way, and I have put it off with “we will get there.” Which is still what I want to say. 

But while I am here, I will share a poetic way of wondering about what my experience of empathy brought up, that is, the question of whether human consciousness is bigger. I don’t even mean bigger in reference to anything like “the divine” here. Just bigger.

This is a poem that began as notes scribbled on a card in a church pew during a dear friend’s memorial service recently.

 

Small as a Life

(on seeing an urn in a church)

 

How small is a life.

 

Small as ashes

Small as a jar

Small as a memory

Small as a collapsing star

Small as dark matter.

 

Small as a blaze and a bang

Small as a single point of soil and rain

Small as amoeba sliding into sunlight on a ball of mud and ash

Small as a world held in frames of blinking wondering moonlit eyes

Small as a soul seeing, touching, knowing, feeling, loving, remembering.

 

Small as a life.

 

So far all I have done is describe my own experiences of consciousness, how my mind operates, really.  But is my description in any way an accurate picture of what consciousness actually is? 

I can’t answer that. Not yet. 

To say more will require input from my usual stable of sources: religions, philosophy, and physics. Which, as you might guess, is where we are headed….

Next time.