Contents of Consciousness is John Zdanowski's term for everything a person experiences, all that arises in consciousness and falls away, which his book maps as a two-by-two of Breath, Breeze, Thought, and Stories.
The term appears in the "A Map of Things Inside Your Head" section of Zen and the Art of [nothing]: "Consciousness is vast and unchanging - the 'naught.' Everything we experience is the Contents of Consciousness." The phrase separates consciousness itself, 📝the naught, from whatever appears in it, whether those inputs come "from the overlords in The Matrix, the indoctrination we receive through education, or from our activity in this world."
The map comes from meditation practice. Guided meditations ask the meditator "to notice various phenomena that arise in consciousness and then fall away," and by observing the methods meditation teachers use, the book arranges the contents of consciousness in a 2 x 2 in which "everything that passes through consciousness is represented by the four words" Breath, Breeze, Thought, and Stories. Breath and Thought are alike: each can be directed at will, yet each continues without attention. Breeze, "bringing it outside the body," stands for "all the wordless things in my environment that I feel and affect me," over which there is no control. Stories "work the same way," happening even when awareness is taken away from them.
A line down the middle of the two-by-two marks the line "between life on the planet before words on the left and after words on the right," which the book ties to the biblical line "In the beginning was the Word." The map belongs to the book's inquiry into stories, grounded in the premise that the stories we tell create the reality we see (📝Storyteller Consciousness), and leads toward the 📝Boot Sequence.
Despite 12 years of religious education, I didn't learn to meditate until I turned 50. Watching phenomena arise and fall away in guided meditations, and noticing how different teachers worked, is what gave me these four words.