Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind

by Annaka Harris

Consciousness is experience itself, and it is therefore easy to miss the profound question staring us in the face in each moment: Why would any collection of matter in the universe be conscious?

The particles that compose your body were once the ingredients of countless stars in our universe’s past. They traveled for billions of years to land here—in this particular configuration that is you—and are now reading this book.

Interestingly, one of the reasons people who take psychedelics inhabit such altered states is that this class of drug can also interrupt binding processes. It seems likely that this, too, contributes to a suspension of the feeling of being a self, distinct and separate from the world. Pollan points out that “our sense of individuality and separateness hinges on a bounded self and a clear demarcation between subject and object. But all that may be a mental construction, a kind of illusion.”