The Elephant and the Blind: The Experience of Pure Consciousness: Philosophy, Science, and 500+ Experiential Reports

consciousness as such is something absolutely pristine. It is a wakeful, entirely silent, and uncontracted quality of clarity; it is the effortless experiential character of nonconceptually knowing itself—and it is also, as another of our participants said, “that which never speaks”

accessing pure awareness as “gently ‘sitting back’ into it” (#2619).

Perhaps pure awareness is something like a previously unnoticed baseline state of conscious experience, an inner surface on which we are always “floating,” even though our attention is almost always captured by something else, like the bright sun above us?