Try to imagine the smallest corpuscle of experience, an atom of 'what it feels like' say, that emerges out of some complex event built up out of elements to which any 'feeling like' is utterly irrelevant; thus you are trying to understand what it could mean to say that experience is an emergent property of matter. At some point this ought to have happened for your own embodiment as it grew from a fertilised cell. Do you remember? Not at all, but the question makes sense. What was before the before? It seems that it would 'feel' like a waking up, that is, that the awareness pre-existed the event but was in an absorbed state; the waking up being a break in the absorption. Also, to be aware is to be a self; you are not just aware of something, but of yourself as well. Or if this is too much, then say that the awareness would have to be somewhere, to have its own space, a blank screen big enough to swallow all worlds. The simplest feeling is a feeling of something for something, it has structure, it can't just be a one-dimensional intensity. The dimmest awareness would be unable to clarify the object as little as the subject, no doubt, but both components would have to be present. The atom of experience flashes on and then almost immediately blinks out. And then there would come another such event. Can we say that the second event has the same subject as the first one, or a different one? But what you just called 'absorption' is surely the first glimmer of consciousness that you are aiming at. A state like deep sleep, a state of pure feeling where subject and object are not separate. You feel only yourself, only the feeling, there is no light, no power, no movement, no distinction, no time. Now imagine this attenuated down until it is next to nothing, and then nothing at all. But as long as the bare possibility of it re-emerging is there then it is a space, a waiting, a witnessing without a witness.