Awareness Without Edges - New Integrated Meditation Courses - Guided Meditation gift

Rethinking consciousness beyond neurons, and what meditation has to say about it.

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One of the biggest trip outs for me about the mind is that with ALL the science, we still can’t quite place where it is. So I thought we might dive into this, to loosen our concepts and also incorporate consciousness as a theme and braid them together. When we can expand our understanding of how we are perceiving the world, we can loosen out grip on our outdated ideas and begin to get into more flow.

Where Is the Mind?

For centuries, humans have wrestled with the question: what is the mind, and where does it live? Most of us grow up assuming the answer is obvious - our mind is “in the head,” somewhere behind the eyes, nested inside the brain. But when we look closer, science, philosophy, and experience all suggest that the picture is far less certain.

The Scientific Search

Modern neuroscience has mapped the brain with extraordinary detail. We know that memory relies on the hippocampus, that the prefrontal cortex is key for planning, that the amygdala lights up with fear. Put someone in an fMRI scanner and you can watch regions of the brain activate when they read, count, or recall a song.

But here’s the puzzle: none of these maps locate the mind itself. Brain scans show correlations between brain states and mental states - but correlation is not explanation. The fact that neurons fire when we feel joy, or recall a loved one’s face, does not tell us how those sparks of electricity turn into the felt warmth of love or the vivid image of their smile.

In scientific language, this is the “hard problem of consciousness.” We can explain mechanisms of perception and behaviour, but we cannot explain why experience is like anything at all. Why do electrical firings inside the skull translate into the taste of coffee, the ache of grief, or the wonder of a starlit sky?

The truth is that science has not - and perhaps cannot - pin down the “location” of mind. As the neuroscientist Christof Koch put it bluntly: “Consciousness is the greatest mystery in the universe.”

Materialism and Its Limits

The dominant worldview in science is still materialism: the idea that everything is physical, and mind emerges from matter. On this account, your thoughts and awareness are nothing more than the output of a three-pound lump of tissue. Yet this story has cracks. If matter is unconscious, how does it produce consciousness at all? If the brain is a machine made of lifeless atoms, why does it glow with awareness?

Materialism leaves us with unsatisfying options: that consciousness is an illusion; that it is “just another way of talking about” brain activity; or that it is a by-product, a shadow cast by neurons that does nothing of its own. None of these answers capture the vivid reality of being alive and aware.

Beyond the Skull: Extended Mind

This is where alternative perspectives open the door. Biologist Rupert Sheldrake challenges the assumption that mind is locked inside our heads. He suggests that minds are field-like - rooted in the brain, yes, but extending outward, just as a magnetic field extends beyond the magnet. Like gravity holding the moon in orbit, the mind is not sealed inside; it ripples into the world.

This idea has allies in philosophy. Andy Clark’s Supersizing the Mind and Alva Noë’s Out of Our Heads argue that consciousness is an interaction between brain, body, and environment. In Eastern wisdom traditions it has been long accepted and taught that the whole mind body and subtle energy fields hold the mind, our memories and our thoughts. Mind is not an object contained in the head, but a process unfolding in relationship with the world around us.

Non-Dual Awareness

Non-dual teacher Rupert Spira goes further still. In his view, consciousness is not something the brain produces at all. It is the ground of reality itself. Everything - sensations, perceptions, even the sense of having a body - appears within consciousness, much like a film plays upon a screen.

From this perspective, asking where the mind is located is like asking where the screen is located in the movie. The screen is not in the story; the story exists only because the screen is there. Likewise, the world and the brain appear within consciousness. Awareness itself has no edges, no borders.

This dissolves the assumption that consciousness is private or sealed away. Instead, it is borderless and shared - the field in which all life unfolds.

Science Without a Map

Does science confirm this? Not yet. Neuroscience can trace pathways, but it has never found the “thing” called mind. It finds mechanisms, not meaning. Even when studying meditation or altered states, researchers record brain patterns, but what those patterns are like from the inside is something only consciousness itself can know.

Some research nudges at the edges - studies of neuroplasticity showing how environment shapes the brain, ecological science revealing the cooperative “intelligence” of forests, parapsychology probing whether minds can connect at a distance. But the central fact remains: there is no proof that consciousness lives in the brain. The brain is necessary for our human experience, but it may not be sufficient to explain it.

Living The Question

For us, the significance is not only philosophical. When we loosen the grip of materialism, life feels more connected, more alive. If mind extends beyond the head, then awareness is not a solitary, private flicker, but part of a shared field. If consciousness is primary, as Spira suggests, then we are already woven into something vast and luminous.

This shift has real consequences. It allows us to take seriously the intelligence of nature, the possibility of awareness in other forms of life, and the subtle ways we sense and resonate with one another. It invites us to experience consciousness not as something we own, but as something we participate in - a field in which we are both rooted and free.

Science has not found the exact location of the mind. Perhaps it never will, because the question assumes a kind of geography that doesn’t apply. The mind may not be a place inside us at all, but the very space in which everything takes place.

This is the invitation of thinkers like Sheldrake and Spira: to step beyond the narrow confines of materialism and open to a more expansive vision. A vision where consciousness is not an accident of matter, but the very essence of reality itself.

Consciousness and Meditation

One of the most fascinating windows into consciousness comes from the study of meditation. Over the last few decades, neuroscience has turned its gaze toward contemplative traditions that, for centuries, have treated awareness itself as the central subject of inquiry.

When Tibetan monks, Zen practitioners, or long-term mindfulness meditators are scanned in brain imaging studies, what emerges is striking. Practices that quiet the thinking mind often correlate with profound changes in the brain’s default mode network (DMN) - the system linked with self-referential thought, mental chatter, and the sense of being a separate “I.” During deep meditation, activity in the DMN decreases, and meditators frequently report states of openness, spaciousness, or boundless awareness.

In other words, when the brain’s “selfing” machinery softens, experience shifts. The boundaries between “inside” and “outside” blur. Practitioners describe a sense of consciousness that is not limited to the body, but pervades everything. The subjective reports echo Sheldrake’s vision of mind as a field and Spira’s teaching of awareness as limitless and borderless.

Long-term practice doesn’t just create momentary states, it reshapes the brain itself. Research into neuroplasticity shows that consistent meditation increases cortical thickness in areas tied to attention and compassion, and reduces activity in regions associated with stress. In some studies, even a few weeks of mindfulness training led to measurable changes in brain structure.

But again, these findings don’t tell us where the mind is - they tell us how malleable the brain is in response to shifts of awareness. Meditation research reveals that consciousness can be trained, expanded, and clarified, but it stops short of explaining what consciousness is or where it resides.

From the contemplative perspective, that is precisely the point: consciousness is not a thing to be located, but the very condition in which location - and everything else - arises.

And some additions for our paying subscribers, a beautiful guided meditation for Expanding Consciousness and some intriguing journal prompts to expand your mind!