You know that you are conscious but you have no idea what consciousness is. If you try to objectify it you only find the discarded shall of the previous moment. There was something inside that shell, but now it is empty, what was inside it is is what's now looking. To strive to coincide with that elusive inhabitant is to fall into a backwards regression. This is just a picture, an attempt at an analogy for the predicament in trying to know, and if it explains its failure it also suggests that the inquiry be redirected to the originating moment of consciousness, the face of time - because here time can no longer be strictly linear, a matter of before and after, but must express a dimensionality entirely in the present, an intensity - in which the conscious moment emerges. If consciousness were a phenomenon, as in the uncritical understanding of it as something like the unrolling of a cinematic image, then it ought to arise out of a nothing and be built up, like the way that when a movie frame is viewed in sufficiently slow motion it is seen to emerge out of an intervening moment of pure blackness, a momentary reset. Consciousness, on the contrary seems to emerge out of a fullness, an infinitely overdetermined fullness. Every definiteness in the completed conscious moment is an overlay, a restriction and limitation of original presence. It seems that it would be impossible for consciousness to have the peculiar quality that it has - subjective, insideness, living, selfness - if it came from a void of annihilation. Even if you go into it with the expectation of a blank void you end up with the same result. Analogical thinking breaks down, the emptiness is fullness and the fullness emptiness.