I don’t have a lot of faith that people have much reality on consciousness unless they’ve contemplated and integrated an extraordinary experience of the present moment. This is in no way a critique of them personally, nor is it in any way an indication of lack of intelligence.  Actually I think that many people who have actually had such an experience are very intelligent almost in response to that experience. I also think that many people who have had such an experience have only partially integrated it into their present cultural and psychological horizon, and so carry within themselves an amalgam of truths and untruths about it. The more one who has had the experience studies the world’s various Wisdom traditions the more I think they begin to refine and understand the essence and significance of it which is that it is about consciousness itself and its ability to make everything including one’s self new, utterly itself, transformed and deeper in the best and deepest sense of that word.