Spensorium

Consciousness permeating all things is an idea gaining traction and has had its prevalence across disciplines.. arising in frameworks like panpsychism, animism, and the nondualism of Trika. They have their differences, yet share something essential — the world around us isn’t just made of stuff; it’s made of awareness, alive at every level. Once you begin to take that seriously/as a potential, even tentatively, you  open up space for reexamining things that modern culture often dismisses, i.e shamanism, ritual magic, and the ancient notion of correspondences. They start to seem less like pure superstition and woo and more like ways of engaging with an all pervading materia that has always been awake and in communication.

In panpsychism, the starting point is that consciousness isn’t something that randomly appears when neurons reach certain levels of complexity. Instead, it’s a fundamental property of the universe, as basic as mass or charge. Every particle, every field, has some incredibly basic “spark” of experience—even if it’s nothing like human awareness. Relatively complex formations of consciousness like ours are speculated to emerge when these proto/micro-conscious features come together in the ideal arrangements of.

Some ideas go further: instead of particles having little minds, consciousness is more akin to, or is, a field—a pervasive presence, like gravity or electromagnetism, that flows through everything, and amplifies under certain conditions. Like the background humming of reality, getting more pronounced or coherent in certain areas.

Pivot to – Integrated Information Theory, advocated by the neuroscientist Giulio Tononi and studied at such institutions like the “Center for Sleep and Consciousness at the University of Wisconsin Madison”. IIT proposes that consciousness exists anywhere in the universe where information is integrated in a particular way. According to the theory, the more tightly and irreducibly a system connects its parts, the more it experiences. A human brain scores very high on this scale. A digital clock, not so much. Even a crystal or a single-celled organism might possess a sliver of awareness, if its parts “talk to each other” in a meaningful way. This doesn’t mean your toaster is thinking about philosophy—but it does mean the universe may be saturated with experiential textures, even in places we once assumed were blank.

On a more speculative edge of neuroscience, some theorists, like Dr. Bernardo Kastrup at the Essentia Foundation..propose that the brain is not the producer of consciousness at all, but more like a filter or transceiver. This reverses the usual story. Rather than the brain generating awareness the way a lightbulb emits light, it might instead be narrowing and localizing a much vaster field of consciousness. In this model, the brain shapes what we can pay attention to, much like a radio dial tuning into a particular station. And just like a radio doesn’t produce music but selects it, the mind might be filtering the infinite to give us a usable stream of experience. If that’s true, then it becomes conceivable that a human mind, in the right state, might “tune into” things well outside its usual scope..perhaps even the history or essence of a stone, a tree, or a place.

This is where animism naturally enters; Animism is not so much a theory as it is a way of relating to the world, one rooted in direct experience. It doesn’t say everything has consciousness—it says everything is someone. A river isn’t a mechanism or a resource; it’s a being. The mountain watches. The forest listens. From an animist perspective, the world is full of presences that aren’t reducible to molecules or biological instincts. There’s intelligence behind the forms, and it’s possible to speak to that intelligence and to be heard.

And then, exploring this notion further, you reach the metaphysical core presented in Kashmir Shaivism. This tradition doesn’t merely say that consciousness is everywhere—it says that consciousness is the only thing that truly exists. All else..time, space, bodies, thoughts etc etc is a play of one awareness(lila). In this framework the world is not stacked from matter with consciousness frothing on top. Instead, everything you see, touch, fear, or love is consciousness appearing as something else. The mountain, the star, the cup in your hand—they are not “in” consciousness. They are consciousness, limited into form through a process of divine contraction.

Kashmir Shaivism maps this process of contraction through its system of 36 tattvas—layers of reality, starting from pure, undivided consciousness at the top, descending gradually into the most solid and limited material forms. Matter, in this tradition, is not separate from spirit. It’s the final condensation of the divine. A rock isn’t unconscious because it’s too far from God—it is God in a deeply contracted state, vibrating with the same energy as the galaxies and the gods, but bound by thick veils of separation. The human being, uniquely, holds both ends of the spectrum: the dense body and the capacity to know the highest Self. The goal is to recognize that all of it—the high and the low—is one continuous field of Shiva’s awareness.

Shamanic journeying, take for example, often involves entering altered states to speak with spirits/ancestors. If consciousness is everywhere..if the brain is a filter, not a generator, then it’s not so far-fetched that people might be tuning into disparate strata of being.

Goetia/ceremonial magic operate under the assumption the notion that specific forces or entities.. whether thoughtforms, spirits, or archetypal intelligences..can be contacted, invoked, and worked with. This is coherent from this view because you are interacting with specific vibrations of consciousness, each with its distinctive personality and signature. Use of sacred names, sigils, or circles isn’t theatrical..it’s symbolically precise and aligning your field with particular strata of the universal Shakti.

As well, ancient systems of correspondences, the foundation of much occult thought..the idea that certain herbs align with planets, metals with emotions, or days with divine beings isn’t mere poetic fancy. If everything originates from one undivided field of intelligence, then these resonances are real. A planet and a plant can vibrate in harmony not because one “influences” the other, but because both are expressions of the same pattern, refracted through different densities. The microcosm reflects the macrocosm because both are cut from the same infinite cloth.

When you draw all of this together—panpsychism’s distributed awareness, animism’s relational world, Shaivism’s nondual unfolding, and speculative neuroscience’s reevaluation of consciousness—it paints a different picture of reality. Matter is not mute. Spirit is not elsewhere. The rituals, symbols, and inner journeys of esoteric traditions are not backward errors.. they’re ways of remembering how to speak with a living universe.