Series: What Is Consciousness? Exploring Our True Nature

19 Aug

Part 1: The Mind as a Filter – Seeing Beyond the Lens of Separation

Series Note: ✨ This article is part of the series “What is Consciousness? Exploring Our True Nature.” Together, we explore how awareness itself is the essence of our being — the same reality traditions have called God, Source, or Oneness.

Naming the Word

“God.”

For some, that word inspires love, reverence, or devotion. For others, it carries the weight of dogma, fear, or centuries of institutional misuse.

Here, when I use the word “God,” I don’t mean a figure in the sky or a gatekeeper of morality. I mean the unchanging presence behind all change — the awareness in which every thought, feeling, and moment arises.

You may call it Source, Spirit, the Universe, Consciousness, the Beloved, Tao, Allah, or Ein Sof. Use the word that speaks to your heart. I will use many variations throughout these articles. The reality these words point to is one and the same.

In the Bahá’í Writings, life’s purpose is described as knowing and loving God. And in truth, to know God is to recognise what you already are. This recognition of the eternal isn’t distant or abstract; it is intimate, immediate, closer to you than your own breath. And yet, for most of us, it feels hidden. Why?

Because of the filter of the mind.

The Filter of the Mind

Think of a stained-glass window. Light pours through it, but depending on the colours and shapes, the light looks fragmented — red here, blue there, shadow in between. The window doesn’t change the light itself, only how it appears to us.

In much the same way, the mind acts as a filter. Pure Awareness — the “light of the soul” — shines through the lens of thoughts, memories, conditioning, and cultural narratives. Through that lens, wholeness appears divided: me vs. you, inside vs. outside, sacred vs. ordinary.

Most of us spend our lives staring at the coloured glass, confusing the patterns with reality. We chase after fragments, polish them, rearrange them, fight with them — and wonder why peace feels fleeting.

But just as the stained glass never alters the sun, the mind never touches Awareness itself. The light remains whole, steady, untouched.

As Rupert Spira writes:

“The mind doesn’t know awareness; it knows only its own activity. Awareness is what knows the mind.”
— Being Aware of Being Aware

The invitation of every true spiritual path is this: turn attention from the glass to the light itself.

Closer Than Your Life Vein

The Qur’an says:

“We have already created man and know what his soul whispers to him, and We are closer to him than [his] jugular vein.”
— Surah Qāf (50:16)

Closer than breath, closer than heartbeat, Awareness is the very space in which those sensations arise. You don’t have to travel anywhere to find it. You need only turn toward the simple fact of being.

The Sufi mystic Rumi put it in another way:

“I searched for God and found only myself. I searched for myself and found only God.”

A Simple Practice

Let’s try something together. Right now, pause.

Notice a thought that’s here — maybe “I’m reading this” or “I’m not sure I understand.”

Now ask yourself:

✨ What is it that knows this thought?

Don’t look for a concept, memory, or image. That’s still the mind’s activity. Instead, feel into the open, silent space in which the thought appears. That presence wasn’t created by you. It is what you are.

Why This Matters

When we identify only with the filter of the mind, life feels fractured, full of lack and conflict. But when we rest back as awareness itself, we see that every experience is simply a ripple in the ocean of being. Nothing is outside of it.

From this recognition, compassion arises naturally — because the same awareness that shines “in here” is also shining “over there.”

This is the beginning of knowing and loving that part of you that is immense, eternal, and so vast the finite mind can’t contain it. The mind can only offer a crack in the doorway — through the senses, through longing, through the questions that stir in the heart.

Once discovered, this isn’t an abstract belief but a lived reality: you are Divine Consciousness, embodied.

Next in the series: Part 2 — “I Am: The First and Last Truth.”