There is a word missing from our language.
We have conscious – the simple state of being awake and aware.
We have consciousness – the broader condition of having an inner life.
But we have nothing for the active, ongoing process of turning awareness into deliberate choice, and deliberate choice into a life that actually reflects who you are trying to become. That gap in language points to a real gap in how we live.
That word (a gerund, coined by C. Benjamin) is consciousing – and once you have it, you will start noticing everywhere the difference between people who are doing it and people who are not.
Philosophers across very different traditions have circled this same gap for thousands of years, under different names. This article gives it one more – a name built for the particular shape of the problem now.
What consciousing is not
Before explaining what it is, it helps to clear away some confusions.
Consciousing is not mindfulness, though mindfulness can be part of it: Mindfulness – a practice with deep roots in Buddhist tradition – is about noticing the present moment without judgment. Consciousing is about doing something with what you notice. One is the ground; the other is what you build on it.
It is not self-improvement, though you may improve:Self-improvement usually starts with the assumption that something is wrong with you that needs fixing. Consciousing starts with the assumption that you are already in motion – and the question is whether that motion is yours or someone else’s.
It is not goal-setting: Goals are end-states. Consciousing is a process, which means it does not stop when a goal is reached.
The Taoists had a word for this kind of process: the Way, the Tao – a manner of moving through things rather than a place you arrive at and stand still in. The person who has conscious-ed their way to a promotion, a relationship, a qualification, or a recovery does not arrive and stop. They continue – because becoming is not a destination.
And it is not therapy, though therapy may be one of the places where consciousing happens: Therapy is a context. Consciousing is what occurs in that context when it is working.
The three layers of awareness
To understand consciousing, start with a simple observation about awareness itself. It operates at three levels, and most of us spend most of our time at only one of them.
Plato told a version of this structure twenty-four centuries ago, in his allegory of the cave. Prisoners sit watching shadows flicker on a wall, mistaking the shadows for the whole of reality. One is freed, turns around, and sees the fire and the objects casting the shadows – a far larger picture than the wall alone. Eventually he climbs out into the sunlight and sees the world as it actually is. Most retellings stop there, with the philosopher blinking in the light. Plato did not stop there. The philosopher goes back down into the cave, to act among the people still watching shadows. That return – not the climb, the return – is the part of the story we are interested in.
The first level is noticing. Something catches your attention – a feeling, a sound, a thought, a discomfort, a flash of irritation or delight. This is the most basic form of being conscious: something registers. Most of the time, we are only dimly doing even this. We are on automatic – moving through our days responding to stimuli we have not quite noticed we are responding to. This is the cave wall: shadows registering, without yet being traced to their source.
The second level is awareness. Here, you are not just noticing individual moments – you have a sustained sense of your own inner state, your relationships, your patterns, your history. You know that the irritation you feel on Sunday evenings has something to do with Monday mornings. You know that you tend to go quiet when you feel criticised. You have a map of yourself, even if it is incomplete. This is the turn toward the fire: a map of causes and patterns, even before you have stepped outside to test it against daylight.
The third level – the one this article is about – is active. At this level, awareness becomes something you do rather than something you have. You take what you have noticed about yourself, about your patterns, about what matters to you – and you use it to make deliberate choices about what comes next. You are not just aware of your life. You are consciously shaping it. This is the return to the cave – using what you have seen in the light to act differently among the shadows.
That active third level is consciousing.
Why it matters that it is a verb
Language shapes thought.
When something is described as a noun – a state, a condition, a thing you either have or do not have – we treat it accordingly. Consciousness, in the noun form, is something people debate whether animals or computers possess. It is something you either have enough of or you do not.
Lao Tzu opens the Tao Te Ching with almost exactly this warning, twenty-five centuries before grammar became a topic for psychologists: the moment you fix the Way in a name, you have already lost the thing itself, because the Way was never a position to hold – it was a movement to make. Naming consciousness as a noun makes the identical mistake. It tries to hold still something that only exists in motion.
Make it a verb – consciousing – and everything changes.
A verb implies agency. A verb implies that you can do more of it or less of it. A verb implies that it is possible to get better at it, to practise it, to notice when you have stopped doing it and start again.
This is precisely the shift the concept requires. Consciousing is not a state to be achieved. It is a practice to be sustained. And like all practices, it has better and worse days, more skilled and less skilled moments, conditions that make it easier and conditions that make it harder.
The question “am I conscious?” is essentially unanswerable in any practically useful sense. The question “am I consciousing?” is answerable right now, in this moment, about this decision, this relationship, this choice you are about to make.
The gap between knowing and doing
Most of us know more about ourselves than we act on.
You know that you procrastinate when you are anxious. You know that you say yes when you mean no. You know that you are better at giving advice than receiving it. You know that you have been meaning to have a particular conversation for three years and have not had it.
This gap – between what you know and what you do – is the central problem that consciousing addresses.
Psychologists call this the knowing-doing gap, and it is one of the most robust findings in human behaviour research. Knowledge does not automatically produce change. Information does not automatically produce action. Understanding why you do something does not automatically stop you doing it.
Zen teachers have an old image for this same gap: the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. You can study the finger for years – read about it, discuss it, point at it more precisely than anyone else in the room – and still never have looked up at the actual sky. Most of what passes for self-knowledge is an increasingly refined finger.
Consciousing is the process of crossing that gap. Not once, but continuously, because the gap keeps reopening. Life keeps presenting new situations where you know what you would choose if you were operating from your values, and yet something – habit, fear, social pressure, the sheer weight of how you have always done things – keeps pulling you toward the automatic response instead of the chosen one.
The person who is consciousing is not someone who has finally closed the gap permanently. They are someone who has accepted that crossing it is the work, and who has developed the capacity and the willingness to keep crossing it.
The three questions
There is a practical core to consciousing. At any significant decision point – and even at many insignificant ones – it comes down to three questions.
The first is: what might happen?
This is the risk question, but understood more broadly than usual. It is not just about what could go wrong. It is about genuinely projecting forward – imagining the consequences of acting and of not acting, for yourself and for others, in the near term and the longer term.
The Stoics built an entire practice around this question, deliberately rehearsing difficulty in advance so as not to be ambushed by it. People who avoid this question do not thereby avoid consequences; they simply encounter them unprepared.
The second is: who am I in this?
This is the identity question. Every significant choice is also a statement about who you are – or who you are becoming. When you ask this question seriously, you are not just asking “what should I do?” You are asking “what kind of person do I want to be, and does this choice move me toward or away from that?”
This question is harder than it sounds, because our self-image is often more flattering than our behaviour. Consciousing requires honesty here – not cruelty, but honesty. The gap between who you think you are and how you actually behave is one of the most useful diagnostic tools available to anyone trying to live more deliberately. It is the same question the Delphic oracle pressed on Socrates, in two words: know yourself. It has lost none of its difficulty in two and a half thousand years.
The third is: can I do this with the people around me?
This is the relational question. Almost nothing important happens alone. The choices we make are embedded in relationships – with partners, colleagues, friends, families, communities, institutions. The relational question asks whether the path you are considering is one you can walk with the people who matter, or whether it requires leaving them behind, or deceiving them, or asking them to be less than they are.
Aristotle thought it was barely coherent to ask who you are apart from this question. He called the human being a political animal – by which he meant something close to: you are only ever yourself in relation to others, and the question of who you are cannot be fully separated from the question of who you are with.
These three questions – risk, identity, relationship – are not a formula. They are a direction of attention. The person who habitually asks them, who has made the asking into something like a reflex, is practicing consciousing even when they would not use that word.
What stops us
If consciousing is this straightforward, why do so few people do it consistently?
Several things get in the way.
Speed. Modern life moves fast. The space between stimulus and response – the space where consciousing lives – keeps getting compressed. Notifications, demands, social expectations, the pace of information: all of these pressure us toward reaction rather than reflection. Consciousing requires pause, and pause is one of the most countercultural acts available to us.
Habit. The brain is an efficiency machine. It automates everything it can, because conscious processing is expensive. Most of what we do in a day is habit – which is mostly fine, because most of what we do in a day does not require deliberate attention.
The problem is when habit takes over in the moments that do require it. When you respond to your partner the way you have always responded to your partner, without noticing that the situation has changed. When you make a career decision by following the path of least resistance rather than the path of most meaning.
Buddhist psychology has a name for these automated grooves – saṅkhāra, the conditioned formations that run beneath conscious choice – and treats loosening their grip not as a side benefit of practice but as the central work of it.
Comfort. Consciousing often leads somewhere uncomfortable. The honest answer to “who am I in this?” is not always flattering. The honest answer to “can I do this with the people around me?” sometimes reveals that your relationships are not what you imagined. Choosing to live more deliberately means choosing to see more clearly – and more clearly sometimes means more painfully.
The story you tell about yourself. Every person carries a narrative about who they are and why they do what they do. These narratives are necessary – we cannot function without them – but they are also protective fictions. They explain away the gap between our values and our behaviour. They assign responsibility outward. They make our automatic responses feel chosen.
The Stoic philosopher Epictetus drew a sharp line between what happens to us and the judgments we form about what happens to us. The protective story is exactly this second thing dressed up as the first – an opinion mistaken for a fact, and defended as if it were one. Consciousing requires a willingness to notice when the story is doing this work, and to ask whether the story is still serving you.
What enables it
None of this means consciousing is reserved for exceptional people in exceptional circumstances. It is a capacity, and like all capacities, it develops with practice and support.
Stillness helps. Not the performative stillness of a silent retreat, but the ordinary stillness of a moment before you respond, a walk without a destination, a deliberate choice not to fill every silence. These create the conditions in which the three questions can be asked.
The Tao Te Ching makes this case with one of its best-loved images: a wheel is useful because of the empty space at its hub; a vessel is useful because of the hollow it holds; a room is useful because of the space within its walls. Stillness works on the same principle. It is not an absence of anything. It is the empty space that makes the rest usable.
Honest relationships help. The people who know us well enough and care about us enough to tell us true things – to say “that does not sound like you” or “you have said this before and not acted on it” – are extraordinarily valuable.
Consciousing is not only a private practice. It is sustained by human contact.
Curiosity about yourself helps more than judgment. The self-critical person often thinks they are taking themselves seriously, but harsh self-judgment tends to produce paralysis rather than change.
Zen calls a more useful quality shoshin, beginner’s mind – meeting your own patterns with the openness of someone encountering them for the first time, rather than the tired certainty of an expert who has already decided in advance what they will find. Curiosity, in this sense, is more generative than judgment. It creates space for something different to emerge.
Commitment to the gap. The most reliable way to maintain a consciousing practice is to stay interested in the distance between who you are and who you are choosing to be – not as a source of shame, but as a source of direction. The gap is not a problem. The gap is the work.
What it looks like in practice
There is an old Zen line about this: before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water; after enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.
The tasks do not change. What changes is whether you are actually present to them, or simply running them on autopilot – and from the outside, the difference is invisible.
Consciousing does not announce itself. It looks like pausing before sending an angry message. It looks like noticing that you have been agreeing with someone out of conflict avoidance rather than genuine conviction, and choosing to say so – carefully. It looks like asking yourself, in the middle of a difficult conversation, whether you are responding to what is actually being said or to what you have decided is being said.
It looks like a person who makes a mistake and, instead of defending themselves or collapsing into self-blame, stays curious: what happened there, and what would I do differently?
It looks like someone who changes their mind – genuinely changes their mind, because new information has reached them – and says so without embarrassment.
It looks like a life that, examined from the outside, shows evidence of deliberate shaping. Not a perfect life. Not a life without contradiction or regret. But a life in which the person living it has been present – really present – to the choices that constitute it.
Why now
There is something particularly urgent about this idea at this moment in history.
We are living through a period of genuine disruption: economic pressure, technological acceleration, and the erosion of institutions people once oriented by. The maps that worked for previous generations are less reliable, and the pace of change has outrun the speed at which habit and inherited wisdom can adapt.
Here is the concrete cost of skipping consciousing under these conditions: the three questions do not disappear when you stop asking them – they simply get answered by someone else.
Stop asking what might happen, and you do not avoid the risk – you meet it later, unprepared, with less room to manoeuvre.
Stop asking who you are in this, and the gap does not stay empty – whoever offers the most confident answer fills it instead: an algorithm tuned to hold your attention, a leader who trades certainty for loyalty, a crowd that rewards conformity over honesty.
Stop asking whether you can do this with the people around you, and your relationships do not hold still either – they drift, reshaped by inertia rather than by choice. Disruption does not leave a vacuum. It leaves an opening, and something always moves into it.
In these conditions, the capacity to remain a deliberate agent in your own life – to keep asking those three questions even when the environment is loud and disorienting – is not a luxury. It is what decides whose answers end up shaping your life: yours, or whoever was standing closest with a confident one.
None of this is new. Plato wrote about the difference between a life lived by reflection and a life lived by appetite. Lao Tzu wrote about the cost of forcing your way against the grain of things rather than moving with it. Zen built an entire discipline around closing the gap between knowing something and living it.
What is new is not the problem. What is new is the speed and scale of the forces now working against anyone trying to solve it.
This is not an argument for individual self-reliance in the face of structural problems that require collective solutions. Those structural problems are real and they require political and institutional responses. But the structural changes we need are also made by people – and those people will be more effective if they are conscious of what they are doing, why they are doing it, and who they are becoming in the process.
Beginning
Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living. Lao Tzu described the unexamined life as living against the grain of everything. Zen has a simpler word for it: asleep.
Three traditions, separated by language, geography, and centuries, arriving at the same diagnosis from different directions.
If there is a starting point for consciousing, it is probably the simplest and most difficult thing here: Notice the gap.
Noticing is harder alone than it sounds. We are too close to our own patterns to see them clearly – too invested in the story we already tell about who we are. This is where the second level of awareness, the map of yourself, tends to stay blurry without some outside help. Not someone telling you who you are. Just something that makes your own patterns – how you take in the world, how you connect with others, how you move from idea to action – visible enough to actually work with.
That is where BrainPrint helps. Not to do the consciousing for you – nothing can – but to sharpen the map enough that the third level, the active one, becomes a little easier to reach.
Everything else follows from being willing to keep looking.