Reflections inspired by Michael Pollan’s A World Appears
I’ve been reading Michael Pollan‘s latest book, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, and it has me reflecting on a question that has quietly followed psychology for more than a century.
Can psychology ever truly become a science?
That might sound like an odd question. After all, psychology has worked hard to establish itself as a scientific discipline. It conducts experiments, gathers data, builds theories, and publishes research. Many psychologists have spent decades refining methods designed to make the study of human behaviour more rigorous and objective.
Yet there seems to be one small problem.
The thing being studied is also the thing doing the studying.
Imagine trying to bite your own teeth.
Or trying to see your own eyes without a mirror.
Consciousness appears to be studying consciousness.
That is not a flaw in psychology. It may simply be the nature of the territory.
Traditionally, science has been remarkably successful because it studies objects. Scientists can observe stars, cells, chemicals, weather systems, and physical processes. The observer stands apart from the thing being observed.
Psychology enters a different terrain.
When we study thought, perception, emotion, awareness, meaning, and experience, the observer is no longer standing outside the experiment. The observer is inside it.
And that changes everything.
The more I reflect on this, the more it seems that psychology has been attempting to apply the tools of objective science to something that may be fundamentally subjective.
That doesn’t make psychology wrong.
It simply raises an interesting question.
Can consciousness itself ever be observed objectively when the observer is part of the system being observed?
Pollan appears fascinated by this question. Throughout his work, he repeatedly arrives at the edges of what can be measured and what can only be experienced. He follows the evidence wherever it leads, yet again and again finds himself standing before mystery.
Not ignorance.
Mystery.
There is a difference.
Ignorance says we don’t know yet.
Mystery says we may be encountering something that cannot be fully reduced to measurement.
This is where I find myself increasingly interested.
For decades, much of psychology has focused on content. What are people thinking? What beliefs do they hold? What memories do they carry? What experiences shaped them?
Useful questions, certainly.
But what if there is something even more fundamental?
What if the more interesting question is not what appears in consciousness, but what consciousness itself is?
That question begins to move us beyond psychology and toward philosophy, spirituality, neuroscience, and perhaps into territory that doesn’t yet have a name.
The Three Principles understanding points in an intriguing direction.
Rather than treating experience as something that happens to us from the outside, it suggests that our experience is created from the inside out through Mind, Consciousness, and Thought.
If that’s true, then every experience we have is as real as an experience.
Not necessarily real as an objective description of the world.
But absolutely real as an experience.
Experience is the truth of the principles in action.
Every feeling, every perception, every moment of joy, fear, confusion, clarity, certainty, or doubt reveals consciousness, bringing thought to life.
That doesn’t mean our conclusions are true.
It means our experience is genuinely being created.
The fact that two people can look at the same event and live in entirely different realities becomes less mysterious.
They’re not responding to the event.
They’re experiencing different worlds being generated from within.
Perhaps this is why attempts to understand consciousness often lead us into paradox.
The closer we get, the more the observer and the observed begin to blur together.
Maybe consciousness isn’t an object waiting to be dissected.
Maybe it is the very field within which all experience appears.
Perhaps that is why so many great thinkers eventually arrive at humility.
Not because they know less.
Because they see more.
The deeper we look, the more we discover that certainty becomes difficult and wonder becomes natural.
Psychology may continue refining its methods, and I hope it does. Science has contributed enormously to our understanding of human behaviour and suffering.
But there may always remain one impossible problem.
The scientist can never step completely outside consciousness to study it.
We are inside the mystery, looking at the mystery.
And perhaps that is exactly where we are meant to be.
Maybe the goal isn’t to solve consciousness.
Maybe it is to become curious enough to notice that consciousness is already revealing itself through every experience we have.
A world appears.
And then another.
And another.
One thought at a time.
Much Love,
What do you think?
If consciousness is the lens through which all experience appears, can it ever fully step outside itself to observe itself? Or is the mystery part of the design?
Hear Michael Pollan: A World Appears
Another video:
Iain McGilchrist – What is Consciousness: Data or Information
