What Is Consciousness?

What Is Consciousness? Why the World Is Finally Asking the Right Question

Something interesting is happening.

In 2025, the most searched topics on Google was a surge in what researchers are calling "meaning-seeking" queries. People typing things like "Tell me about…" and "Help me understand…" into their search bars at record rates 70% increase year over year (according to Google's own Year in Search report).

We are a species looking for something. And more apparently, what we're looking for is ourselves.

Consciousness: what it is, how it works & how to expand it, has become one of the most explored intersections of modern neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology. Scientists at Ruhr University Bochum have argued in peer-reviewed research that awareness may be far older and more widespread than we ever assumed. A controversial paper published in AIP Advances proposed the existence of "universal consciousness" reigniting debates once reserved for philosophy departments and now being taken seriously in theoretical physics.

The world is waking up. The question is: are you?

While here at Behold, we focus on tapping into higher consciousness through plant medicine tools, we also highly encourage the practice of daily awareness exercises and holistic modalities of understanding consciousness. True transformation is not only found in ceremony, but also in the small moments of presence in everyday life. As a gift to our community, we’re hosting a live workshop, “Mindfulness for Modern Life,” where mindfulness teacher and leadership trainer Gopi Krishnaswamy (author of The Monk in the Corner Office) will share simple, practical tools to help you move from overwhelm to clarity and steady presence in your daily routine.

This is our gift to our community and completely free.

Register for the session by clicking below.

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We Came from One Source

There's a perspective shared across ancient spiritual traditions and quantum physics that basically everything is connected and we came from one source. Then, as most scientists describe it, there was a big bang and we fragmented. Millions of atoms joined with other atoms, making matter that grew more and more complex. We, as sentient beings, are all one consciousness fragmented. All derived from the same womb of the same mother.

But we have forgotten this.

We have built ideologies around the common illusion of separateness. We have constructed nations, walls, classes, and systems to solidify our perception of division. And in doing so, we have turned away from the single most important truth there is: that if I hurt you, I hurt myself. That we are psychically related in ways that go far beyond what our ordinary minds can track.

The fallacy of separation doesn't just cause suffering philosophically. It causes war, exploitation, and the particular kind of loneliness that no amount of scrolling, achieving, or accumulating can touch.

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The Science of Raising Your Frequency

Dr. David Hawkins spent decades mapping human consciousness in his landmark work Power vs. Force, calibrating emotional and energetic states on a scale from 20 to 1,000. Shame sits at the bottom. Enlightenment at the top. Most of us, he found, operate somewhere in the middle cycling between fear, desire, anger, and occasional glimpses of courage and love.

What's striking about Hawkins' research is not just the scale itself, but what it implies about ripple effects.

One person vibrating at the level of genuine optimism and non-judgment can, according to this model, counterbalance the negativity of 90,000 people operating at the lower end of that scale. One person anchored in pure love and reverence for life: 750,000. One person living from a state of illumination: 10 million.

These numbers are extraordinary. But they point to something most of us have felt intuitively without having the framework to articulate: that consciousness is not a private experience. It moves. It ripples. It touches people you will never meet.

Multiple studies in 2025 demonstrated that psychedelic compounds can rapidly reorganize brain networks, temporarily dissolving rigid patterns of thought associated with depression, trauma, and addiction. And crucially, decades of research now suggest that altered states - whether reached through plant medicine, meditation, or breathwork - tend to produce a heightened sense of connection to other people, to nature, and to something larger than the individual self.

In other words: the path inward is also the path toward each other.

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The Layers We Build Over Ourselves

Here is what nobody tells you when you're hustling, achieving, surviving: the very systems designed to keep you productive are also suppressing your access to the most essential version of yourself.

We are over-distracted. Over-fed. Over-stressed. Our minds have been handed to us pre-shaped by algorithms, news cycles, and fear-based messaging. Our awareness sits buried under layers of conditioning and programming.

To raise consciousness is a privilege few engage with, not because they aren't worthy of it, but because the hamster wheel in the 3D world doesn't pause. Even when our material needs are met, many of us remain trapped in a scarcity mindset - always reaching for the next achievement, the next validation, the next reason to feel okay.

The irony is that the deepest peace, the most sustainable clarity, the most genuine sense of purpose - none of it lives out there. It never has.

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Going Inward: The Paths That Lead to the Same Place

People return to consciousness through a variety of methods that all arrive at the same destination. It is a very quiet, very still place. The noise of the material world falls away. When people have a taste of this, they cling to it - because it feels, finally, true.

You can reach this through meditation, breathwork, deep present-state connection with another person, nature, prayer...

And for a growing number of people from those navigating treatment-resistant depression, to high-performers questioning the meaning beneath their success, to those simply hungry for something more real than their ordinary lives can offer - plant medicine ceremonies have become one of the most profound doorways available.

Ayahuasca. Psilocybin. 5-MeO-DMT. These are not recreational substances. In the right setting, held by experienced facilitators, they are tools for "awakening" or for making conscious what has been kept unconscious, for releasing what no longer belongs to you, for returning to a version of yourself that predates the conditioning.

As Eckhart Tolle said: "Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness." The circumstances that break us open often turn out to be the exact medicine we needed.

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The Ego That Falls Away

There is a kind of dying that has nothing to do with the body.

When people go through deep consciousness work, whether through ceremony, intensive meditation, or other transformative experiences - they often describe the same thing: the self they thought they were begins to loosen its grip. The stories they've been telling about who they are, what happened to them, what they deserve - all of it becomes, briefly, negotiable.

This is ego death. The full release of everything you know in this world for a brief enough moment to allow room for new perspectives to form. What remains, once the layers fall away, is not emptiness (quite the opposite!). It's true presence. It is love.

The cosmic joke, as those who've been there describe it, is that this was always available. The treasure was always here. We were just buried under too much noise to find it.

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Why Now?

Look at the world right now. Conflict spreading across regions. Uncertainty that has moved from occasional background hum to constant foreground roar. A collective nervous system under more pressure than most generations have known.

And now, consciousness is trending. People are searching. Asking the deeper questions. Turning toward meaning rather than away from it.

The rising volume of searches related to mental health, social justice, purpose-driven business, and sustainable living hints at a parallel awakening of our collective consciousness - a grasping for deeper meaning and connection in an increasingly noisy and fragmented world.

We are not just tired. We are hungry. Hungry for something the next achievement, the next scroll, the next headline cannot give us.

This hunger is not a problem. It is a signal. And signals, when we learn to listen to them, always point somewhere worth going.

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Ready to Raise Yours?

At Behold Retreats, we hold space for people who feel that pull toward depth, toward healing, toward the truest version of themselves that the noise of ordinary life makes hard to find.

Our retreats in Costa Rica, Portugal, and Mexico offer carefully curated plant medicine experiences with expert facilitators, in settings designed to support genuine expansion.

If you feel called, we'd love to speak with you. Complimentary call for us to see if we are aligned and for you to ask all of your questions. Kindly view all retreat info and dates prior to our call and we look forward to connecting.

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Behold Retreats offers Ayahuasca, Psilocybin, and 5-MeO-DMT retreat experiences in Costa Rica, Portugal, and Mexico. All experiences are facilitated by trained professionals and tailored to each guest's unique journey.

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