Consciousness and the capacity to address

Consciousness, as the term is used here, means the presence of subjective experience. There is something it feels like to see a color, hear a melody, suffer a loss, or hope for an answer. An account of the event from outside and the event as lived from within describe different aspects of the same situation.

Attention is related to consciousness, but the two words are not interchangeable. Attention gives some parts of experience greater prominence. You may be conscious of a room while attending mainly to the person speaking. You may notice, a moment later, a background sound that was not the center of your awareness.

Self awareness adds another capacity. You can recognize that you are listening, worrying, planning, or remembering. This is sometimes called awareness of your own mental activity. In practice, it allows you to notice a process while it is occurring, rather than discover its consequences afterward.

Philosopher David Chalmers famously distinguished explaining the functions associated with consciousness from explaining why those functions are accompanied by experience. His argument concerns a philosophical problem, not proof that consciousness is divine or independent of the body.¹ Contemporary research continues to test competing explanations of consciousness. A major collaborative study published in 2025 supported some predictions and challenged important predictions of two prominent theories.²

The existence of debate gives us a reason for intellectual care. It does not give permission to declare every spiritual account scientifically established. We can say that experience is intimately known from within and that its explanation remains contested. We cannot move from those statements directly to “consciousness creates every external event” or “my intention determines another person’s mind.”

The Godward Way does not need those claims. Its central question concerns what a conscious person can do with experience. You can notice anger without immediately speaking through it. You can recognize a fantasy without treating it as knowledge. You can direct your attention toward an addressee who is not the object that initially captured it.

Psychological work on decentering describes related capacities: becoming aware of inner events, identifying less completely with their content, and reacting less automatically to them.³ This offers a useful comparison with the observing phase of Catch and Offer. It does not establish the theological phase. Addressing God adds a commitment and an intention that psychological description alone does not contain.

The distinction is easy to miss because both phases can happen in a few seconds. “I notice resentment” describes an act of awareness. “Father, I bring this resentment to You” describes an act of prayer. The first makes the experience available for response. The second gives that response its Godward direction.

Consciousness in this framework is therefore more than a place through which experiences pass. It is the lived capacity through which a person receives, understands, and addresses what has arrived. The self does not merely witness movement. The self can participate in its direction.

This participation has limits. You cannot always choose which thought appears. You cannot command an emotion to disappear. Fatigue, illness, history, and circumstance affect what is available to your attention. The practice begins with the degree of freedom you actually have. Sometimes that degree is small: enough to recognize “I am overwhelmed” and make a short offering.

Small freedom is still meaningful. It is the difference between believing that every arriving thought must become your instruction and recognizing that it can be received another way. Even when you cannot stop an experience, you may be able to change your relationship to it.

The word “address” is important here. When you address someone, your attention has a direction and your words have a receiver. You can speak about God as an idea while remaining entirely within your own analysis. You can also turn toward God and speak from your actual situation. The second act is the beginning of relationship as this book understands it.

A person in distress may say, “I know all the arguments, but I cannot find You.” That sentence can already be an address. Certainty is not the only form consciousness can offer. Doubt, confusion, and the inability to pray eloquently can also be brought into prayer.

Consciousness does not have to become empty for this movement to occur. It needs enough recognition to know what is being brought and enough intention to know toward whom it is being offered. We will call this directed intention kavanah.