The Three Stages of Consciousness

Consciousness, awareness, sentience…so many words describe this concept that spiritual teachers, scientists, and philosophers have pondered over the centuries. Consciousness can loosely be described as the state or quality of awareness, or being aware.

American physicist, Michio Kaku, has quantified consciousness with a theory that there are three levels of consciousness. He suggests consciousness is the number of feedback loops required to create a model of your position in space, with relation to other organisms and time.

He believes a thermostat has one unit of consciousness – it senses the temperature around it. A flower has around 10 units of consciousness – understands temperature, weather, humidity, gravity, etc.

Here he shares his three levels of consciousness.