Fragmentation and the Conditions That Break Consciousness, Why higher awareness appears, and why it so often cannot stay

Artwork: By Bahar Acharjya, collage & pencil on paper, 2007.

© 2026 Bahar Acharjya. All rights reserved. No reproduction, copying, or use in any form—digital or physical—without prior written consent

This text is not a manifesto or a spiritual prescription. It is an inquiry grounded in lived experience, an attempt to name a pattern I have encountered repeatedly across intimacy, community, and creative life.

Many people today touch moments of clarity, love, or expanded awareness. They experience insight, presence, or a sense of coherence that feels deeply real. Yet just as often, these states do not last. They fade under the pressure of daily life, relationships, scarcity, or misalignment. Over time, this becomes so familiar that it is rarely questioned. The question that interests me is not why higher consciousness can be accessed, but why it so often cannot stay.

By consciousness, I mean the capacity for awareness and presence to remain embodied, regulated, and relational over time, rather than appearing only in fleeting or exceptional states. Higher consciousness, in this sense, is not an escape from human life. It is the possibility of inhabiting life more fully, of allowing perception, intimacy, creativity, and responsibility to operate at their highest potential as a stable condition. Fragmentation is the central obstacle to this possibility.

What fragmentation actually is

Fragmentation is often treated as a psychological issue, a lack of discipline, or a failure of spiritual maturity. But fragmentation is not primarily a failure of awareness. It is a failure of conditions.

By fragmentation, I mean the inability of consciousness to remain embodied and integrated within ordinary life. Awareness appears in moments, but it cannot settle. It withdraws not because it is unreachable, but because the structures meant to hold it are unstable. This is not abstract. It is observable.

Nervous-system stress and the loss of presence

One of the most consistent causes of fragmentation is nervous-system stress. When safety is unreliable, emotionally, relationally, or materially, the body remains in a state of vigilance. Attention contracts. Presence becomes intermittent.

Higher awareness cannot remain embodied where the organism is bracing for threat. This is not a matter of belief or intention; it is physiology.

Where the nervous system cannot rest, consciousness cannot stay.

Intimacy as a stress test

Intimacy reveals this dynamic with particular clarity. Closeness is often assumed to be inherently stabilizing, but it is not. Intimacy without coherence, without shared values, trust, and aligned direction, creates strain rather than depth.

Energy scatters. Awareness flickers. The body cannot relax into presence when it is compensating for misalignment. In such conditions, intimacy becomes destabilizing rather than regulating, and higher consciousness cannot remain.

Because of this, intimate relationships and communities are not separate domains. They are different scales of the same relational system. What fragments in close, bonded intimacy reliably fragments at the level of community.

Scarcity and survival patterns

Scarcity intensifies fragmentation. When people are preoccupied with survival, food, shelter, belonging, or long-term stability, the nervous system organizes around protection rather than presence.

Even in spiritually oriented environments, this dynamic persists. Expanded states may still arise, but they cannot remain embodied. Awareness becomes something that appears during moments of relief, not a baseline condition of life.

From a psychological perspective, this aligns with the work of Abraham Maslow, who observed that higher capacities of awareness and self-transcendence do not stabilize when basic needs for safety and security are unmet. This is not a moral limitation; it is a structural one.

Fragmentation at the level of community

I have observed this pattern not only through intimacy, but through close, sustained observation of communities that carry powerful spiritual visions. Despite sincerity and depth of aspiration, many struggle to embody what they speak about.

Uncertainty around resources and belonging creates chronic stress. Informal hierarchies emerge. Control replaces trust. Energy leaks through negotiation, comparison, and fragmentation of responsibility. Consciousness becomes language rather than lived reality.

This is not because people are unaware or unkind. It is because fragmentation is structural. When the conditions required to hold coherence are missing, systems revert to survival patterns.

Scale and the problem of expansion

Scale amplifies all of this. Systems that expand faster than coherence can be sustained fragmentarily. Vision multiplies while depth thins.

Without alignment at the level of nervous systems, values, intimacy, and resources, expansion produces instability rather than integration. Human potential cannot be embodied where the structures meant to hold it are incoherent.

Fragmentation, then, is not a moral failure. It is a signal. It indicates that awareness is being asked to operate beyond what the body, the relational field, or the material conditions can support.

The real problem

The problem is not that higher consciousness is inaccessible. The problem is that the conditions required to hold it are rarely present. Until coherence exists at the level of nervous systems, intimacy, values, and material reality, consciousness will continue to appear and disappear, no matter how elevated the language used to describe it.

The real question is not how far consciousness can expand, but how deeply it can settle. That question can only be answered where life is actually lived.

For a lived, relational account of what allows consciousness to remain embodied, see my article  “When Consciousness Can Stay.”

— Bahar Acharjya

 Artist and researcher

 2026

References & Context

• Abraham Maslow, A Theory of Human Motivation (1943) — foundational work on the relationship between safety, security, and higher psychological capacities.

  
  

• Contemporary research in nervous-system regulation and trauma theory (e.g., polyvagal theory) further supports the observation that sustained presence depends on physiological safety.

  
  

• Observations in this article are grounded in lived experience, long-term intimate relationships, and close observation of intentional communities rather than abstract theory alone.