section_path: Philosophy of mind/Distinguishing consciousness from its contents
section_name: Distinguishing consciousness from its contents
paragraph_text: Distinguishing consciousness from its contents
  
  Sam Harris observes: "At the level of your experience, you are not a body of cells, organelles, and atoms; you are consciousness and its ever-changing contents". Seen in this way, consciousness is a subjectively experienced, ever-present field in which things (the contents of consciousness) come and go.
  
  Christopher Tricker argues that this field of consciousness is symbolized by the mythical bird that opens the Daoist classic the Zhuangzi. This bird's name is Of a Flock (peng 鵬), yet its back is countless thousands of miles across and its wings are like clouds arcing across the heavens. "Like Of a Flock, whose wings arc across the heavens, the wings of your consciousness span to the horizon. At the same time, the wings of every other being's consciousness span to the horizon. You are of a flock, one bird among kin."