In trying to understand consciousness he continually moved between two poles, two classes of metaphor. In one the the emphasis was on immersion in a world, it stressed that there could be no consciousness without embodiment. This version of consciousness was essentially dark, it started out from feeling and emerged into thought and reflectivity by acquiring more and more subtle distinctions within the  fields opened up by each new rarefaction of feeling. Consciousness here was like aviation spirit distilled out of crude oil. The whole thing rested on a core of pure, formless feeling, one that was inseparable blended with a will, something like the cellular will to live, and an inchoate urge to embrace everything, to comprehend, to be the god of its own existence - the latter being the motive for the development of intellect. The other class of metaphor was the opposite of this, here consciousness was more subtle than any spirit, odourless, pure light, and  experience, the very experience that raises the inquiry into consciousness is a structure, not of condensations - in this view consciousness cannot condense - but of contagious identifications with this pure and transcendent consciousness. In this view body and its mind are electrified by consciousness so that they seem to be its source, but it is in fact a dead material substrate which has taken on the illusion of being conscious - if it even exists in any sense at all. Neither pole made perfect sense, but each brought forward some aspect of the struggle for understanding on which he found himself engaged in spite of anything he thought possible or worthwhile. The urge would not let go, it resembled a bodily desire in its dumb insistence, and it seemed driven towards something that already belonged to him, had always been his by deepest right.