section_path: Spiritual approaches
section_name: Spiritual approaches
paragraph_text: Spiritual approaches
  
  To most philosophers, the word "consciousness" connotes the relationship between the mind and the world. To writers on spiritual or religious topics, it frequently connotes the relationship between the mind and God, or the relationship between the mind and deeper truths that are thought to be more fundamental than the physical world.
  
  The Canadian psychiatrist Richard Maurice Bucke, author of the 1901 book Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind, distinguished between three types of consciousness: 'Simple Consciousness', awareness of the body, possessed by many animals; 'Self Consciousness', awareness of being aware, possessed only by humans; and 'Cosmic Consciousness', awareness of the life and order of the universe, possessed only by humans who have attained "intellectual enlightenment or illumination".
  
  Another thorough account of the spiritual approach is Ken Wilber 's 1977 book The Spectrum of Consciousness, a comparison of western and eastern ways of thinking about the mind. Wilber described consciousness as a spectrum with ordinary awareness at one end, and more profound types of awareness at higher levels.
  
  Other examples include the various levels of spiritual consciousness presented by Prem Saran Satsangi and Stuart Hameroff.