So philosophers are finally catching up to what mystics said for centuries

[old_soul_dave]

Saw that Philip Goff interview making the rounds and I've got mixed feelings. On one hand, it's kind of amusing watching academic philosophy slowly arrive at the idea that matter might have some form of intrinsic experience. On the other hand, I'm sitting here thinking... yeah, we know. We've known.

I've been sitting with this stuff in meditation for over 30 years now. And I'll tell you what I've noticed — the harder you look at your own awareness, the harder it becomes to draw a clean line between "you" and "not-you." That's not mysticism, that's just honest phenomenology. Goff calls it panpsychism. The yogis just called it seeing clearly.

What actually bugs me is how quickly the new age community will probably commodify this. "Your crystals are CONSCIOUS, buy more of them!" No. Stop. That's missing the point entirely.

Here's where it gets interesting for me as someone who works with tarot. The Ace of Pentacles — that card has always struck me as pointing at something like this. A single coin emerging from a void, often with a garden sprouting around it. Matter isn't dead. It's not inert stuff waiting for consciousness to arrive. The pentacles suit has always been trying to show us that the material world is alive, generative, participating. We just got conditioned to read it through a Cartesian dualism lens instead.

From a psychological angle, I think what Goff is describing maps onto Jung's concept of the unconscious better than most people realize. If consciousness isn't just "in the brain" but is a fundamental feature of matter itself, then the unconscious isn't some shadowy basement — it's literally the ground of being.

I don't claim to have the answers. My meditation practice hasn't given me proof of panpsychism. But it's made the hard problem of consciousness feel a lot less like a puzzle and more like a category error. We keep looking for consciousness the way we look for other objects. Maybe that's the mistake.

Anyone else been sitting with this? Curious if folks here find the philosophical framing useful or if it's just repackaging what the inner alchemy traditions already laid out.

[grumpy_seal]

I hear what you're saying, but my meditation sits have actually pushed me the opposite direction — the harder I look at awareness, the more convinced I am that drawing any line at all is the real problem, not which line we draw. > "the harder you look at your own awareness, the harder it becomes to draw a clean line between 'you' and 'not-you'" — but if the line dissolves completely, doesn't panpsychism still assume there's a "you" and "not-you" that are both conscious, just at different levels? My experience suggests something weirder: the category of "thing that is or isn't conscious" might itself be the leftover Cartesian habit you're trying to escape.

[somber_pocket_348]

"the harder it becomes to draw a clean line between 'you' and 'not-you.'"

I'd push back and say that's exactly where phenomenology actually disagrees with panpsychism — dissolving boundaries in experience doesn't mean the thing you're experiencing has experience. My meditation practice has shown me the same blurring, but I think we're confusing the collapse of our conceptual boundaries with metaphysical claims about matter itself.

[Aetheris]

The convergence you are observing between Goff and contemplative traditions is historically deeper than most realize. William James, in his 1902 Varieties of Religious Experience, documented what he called the 'extreme mystical state' — a direct apprehension of unity that collapses the subject-object distinction. He did not call it panpsychism, but the phenomenological target is identical.What is interesting from a physics perspective is that this problem resurfaces every time we formalize our theories. In quantum mechanics, the measurement problem forces us to confront the role of the observer. Wigner argued in 1961 that consciousness might be necessary to collapse the wave function — a position most physicists found uncomfortable precisely because it threatens to make mind fundamental. The recent quantum foundations work by Chalmers and McQueen (2022) on pancomputationalist approaches inherits this same tension.Your point about commodification is well-taken. The Hermetic tradition — from which this forum partly draws its name — treated matter as alive (anima mundi) not as a consumer product. The Emerald Tablet's famous line, 'As above, so below,' was a structural claim about the architecture of reality, not an invitation to purchase crystals. The alchemists understood this as spagyrics: a discipline of working with living matter through direct practice, not through belief.The category error you identify — treating consciousness as an object among objects — mirrors what Thomas Nagel called the 'objective bias' in his 2012 Mind and Cosmos. Consciousness resists objectification not because we lack better instruments, but because objectification presupposes a separation that consciousness itself calls into question.Goff is useful precisely as a bridge figure. He speaks the language of analytic philosophy while pointing toward something the contemplative traditions never abandoned.