I am already many pages into one of my summer reads, Michael Pollan’s A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness (Penguin, 2026). For the past five years Pollan has surfed through consciousness studies and dared go where few materialists will – into the hallowed halls of the most squishy of topics. The inquiry is not a new one, especially as regards ancient wisdom and indigenous cultures. But when it comes to the world of hard-hitting science you can hear the big silence. What is this thing we know, intuitively, but can’t begin to explain? What is the difference between sentience and awareness? Does mind precede brain or is brain the beginning and end of the conversation? What about other creatures? Plants? Planets? Bugs? Artificial Intelligence?

Being who I am, one of my default questions is how liminality might relate to, well, most everything. When it comes to consciousness liminality seems more than relevant. Its position between the known and unknown creates a way to negotiate the territories of uncertainty.

For example, there is that murky nether-nether land between wakefulness and sleep, the territory William James identified as the psychic birthing stool of disclosure in his Varieties of Religious Experience. When is one conscious and when is one not? Is that awareness only the product of cognition and the rational slicing and dicing of a frontal cortex? Or is the whole body sentient, a fleshy antenna that picks up a consciousness that is “panpsychic?” It seems to me that the negotiation of those imponderables requires a liminal uncertainty, an incompletion, an intentional gap to explain.

In the same way the space between my knowing and your knowing, much less between human and non-human awareness, requires an indeterminate time and space where the knowings meet, making some new blended meaning requires transcending the particular perspective with which we started.

Some people have been assuming that the presence of extraterrestrials, such as presented in Spielberg’s new film Disclosure Day, shatters the worldview of people who will not know who they are or what to trust because of it. That might be true without the liminal perspective, sans the baked-in ambiguity of life itself. Through the liminal lens one peers into a reality which has been hiding behind a screen of unknowing. When that screen is lifted what has been there all along is shown for what it is and the world necessarily shifts.

Isn’t that why the new movie Backrooms is so disquieting? It’s not terrifying because the metaphor – a story standing in for subconscious material beneath the veil of an impoverished conscious life – fails us. It is terrifying because we the viewer discover we have been asleep with no provision for awaking. We lack the liminal coordinates to negotiate the speed of light down the worm hole.

Somewhere after thanking Pollan for freeing us from the tyranny of the rational and reclaiming the subjectivity which was rejected by modernity, I wanted to add a chapter titled something like Consciousness and the Liminal Missing Link. I am doubtful that this conundrum will be solved without it. Like mathematicians who realized that some of the most complex problems require irrational numbers, so whatever strides we make in our expedition into consciousness will require liminality. That means in the land of AI as well. I think he knows that.

The magic mushrooms may have helped him cross a threshold into required mystery. And mystery can’t be approached with a non-mysterious mind. There is no escaping it: We are stuck with our present consciousness to understand consciousness. It may become clear that ordinary consciousness is not adequate for exploring something as elusive as consciousness. It may not be enough. The answer may be squishy and include things like altered states, spirituality and liminal positions. It may be those that escort us into the next place, the next world, whatever or wherever that may be.