We all woke up this morning and we had with it the amazing return of our conscious mind. We recovered minds with a complete sense of self and a complete sense of our own existence — yet we hardly ever pause to consider this wonder.

Damasio is drawing attention to the everyday miracle of consciousness: after sleep (a period in which awareness is altered or absent), the mind reconstitutes a unified point of view, a sense of personal identity, and the feeling of existing as a self in a world. The quote reframes this routine transition as something philosophically and scientifically astonishing—an achievement of the brain and body that is so reliable we overlook it. In line with Damasio’s broader work, it also implies that consciousness is not a detached “ghost in the machine,” but a biological process that must be actively generated and maintained, moment by moment, by living systems.