Phenomenology is the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. The central structure of an experience is its intentionality, its being directed toward something, as it is an experience of or about some object. An experience is directed toward an object by virtue of its content or meaning (which represents the object) together with appropriate enabling conditions.

Phenomenology is a way of thinking about ourselves. Instead of asking about what we really are, it focuses on phenomena. These are experiences that we get from the senses - what we see, taste, smell, touch, hear, and feel. Phenomenology does not ask if what we are seeing is actually there: for example it is not where we see an object (whether in real life, a dream or a hallucination) that is important, but it is the significance of the object that is important to the phenomenologist. It also does not ask if we are missing something, or if we have all the facts. Instead, phenomenologists (those who do phenomenology) believe we should look at the world just as it appears to us.'''

"Relativity teaches us the connection between
the different descriptions of one and the same reality."

 Albert Einstein



 Phenomenology as a method of inquiry is not limited to an approach to knowing, it is rather an intellectual engagement in interpretations and meaning making that is used to understand the lived world of human beings at a conscious level. The data collection and analysis takes place side by side to illumine the specific experience to identify the phenomena that is perceived by the actors in a particular situation. The outcomes of a phenomenological study broadens the mind, improves the ways of thinking to see a phenomenon, and it enables to see ahead and define researchers’ posture through intentional study of lived experiences. However, the subjectivity and personal knowledge in perceiving and interpreting it from the research participant’s point of view has been central in phenomenological studies.

In philodophy, phenomenology is the study of experience and how we experience. It studies structures of conscious experience as experienced from a subjective or first-person point of view, along with its "intentionality" (the way an experience is directed toward a certain object in the world). Experience, in a phenomenological sense, includes not only the relatively passive experiences of sensory perception, but also imagination, thought, emotion, desire, volition and action. In short, it includes everything that we live through or perform. 

In physics, phenomenology is the application of theoretical physics to experimental data by making quantitative predictions based upon known theories. It is related to the philosophical notion of the same name in that these predictions describe anticipated behaviors for the phenomena in reality. Phenomenology stands in contrast with experimentation in the scientific method, in which the goal of the experiment is to test a scientific hypothesis instead of making predictions. 

 Shamanism  is about doing phenomenology
with a tool kit that works.

Terence McKenna

The term “phenomenology” is often restricted to the characterization of sensory qualities of seeing, hearing, etc.: what it is like to have sensations of various kinds. However, our experience is normally much richer in content than mere sensation. Accordingly, phenomenology is given a much wider range, addressing the meaning things have in our experience, notably, the significance of objects, events, tools, the flow of time, the self, and others, as these things arise and are experienced in our “life-world”. 

Sometimes the term phenomenology is used to refer to the subjective character of one’s experiences or, as it is often describeded, their “what-it’s-likeness”. Used in this way, one may, for instance, focus on the what-it’s-likeness of a sharp pain one is currently experiencing and perhaps attempt to describe the subjective character of that pain (its phenomenology).

However, the term is also used as a label for a field of study, having a particular subject matter, methodology, and guiding aim. Generally speaking, then, moral phenomenology is a field of inquiry whose subject matter is moral experience in all its variety, whose aims are to provide accurate descriptions of such experience, guided by methods of first-person inquiry and to explore the significance of moral phenomenology for select issues in metaethics and normative ethics.