Picture a lecture hall built for the hard problem of mind, the kind of room where physicists, neuroscientists, philosophers and contemplatives have spent decades arguing over what consciousness is at all. Then a speaker steps up and does something the room is not built for. She does not offer a theory of brain states. She says, in effect, that the thing everyone is trying to measure is not located in the one doing the measuring. "Hello. My name is Jac O'Keeffe," she begins, introducing herself as a spiritual teacher, a writer and a founding member of the Association for Spiritual Integrity. Her 2020 presentation at the University of Arizona's Science of Consciousness conference, titled "How to Approach Phenomenal Consciousness," is a twenty-minute attempt to describe a awareness that, in her account, is already present before any "me" arrives to claim it, and to ask whether the scientific paradigm can be widened far enough to take it seriously. This piece works through her central distinctions, the layers she sketches on the way down, and the question she leaves hanging for science.
Early on, O'Keeffe explains that she prefers a different label for the thing the conference title names. "Phenomenal consciousness I'm going to call primary consciousness," she says at about the 1:20 mark. "I think it's a better term for what I want to explain." The rename is doing real work. Her whole argument rests on a split between two kinds of awareness that most people never separate.
Secondary consciousness is the familiar one: "my capacity to be conscious," as she puts it, the personal awareness that belongs to a particular person with a particular history. It is indirect. It happens to me. Primary consciousness is the foundation under that. It is, in her words, "there fundamentally all the time, outside of time," and it is not an object I can pick up. The distinction is the hinge of the talk. If you hold it loosely, the rest sounds like mysticism. If you hold it precisely, it becomes a claim about where experience begins and where the self is layered on top of it.
This is where O'Keeffe's language turns almost procedural. Primary consciousness can be known, she argues, only when "the personal I, the subjective local lens of perception" is not running. At around the 1:36 mark she makes the point with unusual bluntness: "It actually doesn't exist. That lens of perception is not active and in effect, there is no 'I'."
She then adds a detail that many contemplative writers pass over. Afterwards, memory supplies the ownership. "Your memory will tell you afterwards that 'I experienced primary fundamental consciousness,'" she says, "but you know that it's memory only that adds in the ownership of the personal 'I' to it." The insight is not that the experience is fake. It is that the experience, when it happens, has no owner, and the story of ownership is assembled later.
That is why, for O'Keeffe, the desire to attain the state can defeat the state. In a passage near the 7:40 mark she observes that "the fact that 'I want to get it' is going to eclipse the perceiving of what is deeper than I." Wanting is itself a personal lens. The seeker who sits down determined to have a breakthrough has just reinstalled the machinery that the breakthrough requires to be switched off. Anyone who has tried to force a quiet mind will recognize the trap, even if they have never framed it this way.
O'Keeffe draws a line here that she clearly considers the most important in the talk: spirituality and religion are not the same kind of activity. "Primary consciousness is the work of spirituality. Secondary consciousness is the work of religion," she says around the 4:12 mark. "That difference is important."
Her reasoning is that spirituality is "experience-based," an unfolding that is closer to realizing than to learning. She reaches for an image most people will know: the eureka moment, a solution that arrives unbidden while you are walking on a beach and thinking about something else. The clouds part. "It's a direct experience," she says. "That's the truth underneath it." Religion, by contrast, in her account, "claims certain things to be true," and it is belief in those claims that is encouraged. "I don't know how they ever got mixed up," she says, "but they did."
Whatever one thinks of the sharpness of that division, it gives the talk a clear test. A teaching that asks you to believe is different from a teaching that asks you to look, and O'Keeffe is asking her audience to look.
The most provocative claim in the talk comes at about the 5:22 mark: "Existence is not fundamental." O'Keeffe is careful to say this is not a denial that the world is here. "We want to imagine that we are real and here and now, and we are," she says, "but we have to turn on the localized perceiving mechanism in order for that to be true." The sense of being someone who exists depends on the lens being active.
So she moves from "I exist" to something stranger. "Now we've gone from 'I exist' to existence itself as a pure concept," she says, one that "can be seen from the fundamental, pure, phenomenal primary consciousness." In her framing, existence is a belief we install so that the world can seem solid enough to function in. She says this directly when discussing collective beliefs: they "make them valid in order to make the world seem real so that I can function. That's all." They do not, she insists, make the beliefs true.
It is worth pausing on how she uses the word "valid." She is not calling the everyday world an illusion to be dismissed. She is saying that the world's reality is a working agreement, useful and necessary, and that it sits on top of something it does not explain.
The talk is addressed to a scientific audience, and O'Keeffe is candid about what she does not know. "How does the direct experience, the immediate experience, not the experiencer, but the immediate experience of primary consciousness become data?" she asks around the 8:13 mark. "I don't have the answer." What she does have is a diagnosis. The instruments that science uses to measure the external world, she argues, are "based in subject-object perception," and so they are the wrong tools for a awareness that is not an object.
She offers a division of labor rather than a conquest. Spirituality points. It offers techniques and teachings that loosen the grip of collectively held concepts like self, time and space. Science, she says, "offers data that proves or disproves." She suggests that science might test what contemplatives have described and sort the symbolic from the verifiable, separating "myth, superstition, hyperbolic" claims from what can actually be checked. She also acknowledges that the spiritual sector is not yet equipped to speak in that language. "I would also like science to," she says, "how do we turn this into language that's not so nebulous and how can it be turned into data? I know there's a way. We're just not there yet."
That is the cross-pollination the conference description refers to. It is not a merger of worldviews. It is a request that each side admit the limits of its instruments.
Much of the second half of the talk is a descent through layers, which O'Keeffe sketches as a kind of chart. She describes the path as one that, for most people, runs upward at first and sometimes backward, and she is explicit that the sequence is a pointer rather than a ladder you must climb in order. Roughly, the layers she moves through run like this.
First is the "human doing," the busy, self-referencing person who is always in motion. Beneath it is the "human being," a quieter layer where "there's what is." From there one can observe, with what she calls an observing capacity, and then drop into a mindfulness state in which the observer itself becomes visible. Deeper still is a timeline, which she says "shows up as an arc," and which can be stopped. Below the timeline she says the experience of time comes and goes, and that "every moment is now." Space and time, she argues, need to be decoupled at this depth, because "space breaks up at a deeper time."
Then comes what she calls knowingness. Near the 12:55 mark she says the knower and the knowledge collapse here: "there's just knowingness showing up," with "nothing to know." She names the layer pure awareness, which she describes as "a felt sense of spaciousness," and notes that "the experience of vastness is how the body registers this viewing point."
She is also honest that the map thins out at the bottom. "What happens deeper than that? Very few go deeper than that," she says around the 14:44 mark, adding that the traditions name the final ground differently, Absolute or Brahman among them. The identity with that ground dissolves, but she says this is "very rare." Her most striking line in this section concerns what cannot be grasped at all: "can't know itself. However, it is known. You can drop back there and it is known."
O'Keeffe's talk is short, dense and unfinished, and its value depends on whether you treat it as a claim to be verified or a set of distinctions to be tested in your own attention. The most useful move for a reader is to take the primary and secondary split and watch for it. Notice when a flash of clarity arrives without a "me" to claim it, and notice how quickly memory adds the ownership afterward. Notice, too, when wanting a particular insight is what keeps you from having it.
For the scientific side, the question she leaves open is the one the room was built to ask: what would it take to turn a direct, first-person awareness into data that others can check? She admits she does not know. The full presentation, along with her other work, is available at her website, www.jac-okeeffe.com, and the video itself is the best place to hear her pause, circle back and phrase the hard parts in her own words.
