The often used expression 'pure consciousness' is perhaps meaningless without some further elaboration - how could consciousness be impure, as if it were adulterated by some foreign element that is not-consciousness? One way to do this might be to contrast it with 'applied consciousness' on the analogy of the two kinds of mathematics. Consciousness then as useful for living, the kind of consciousness studied by brain theorists or evolutionists and possibly also meditators and those interested in 'qualia', say, would be applied consciousness, this is what discloses the life-world and is in a sense co-extensive with that world, while pure consciousness would be consciousness that discloses only itself, the phenomenologically reduced or transcendental consciousness, studied perhaps by certain philosophers, at any rate forming a suspect field from the applied point of view, since it requires that there be some non-empirical givens revealed in consciousness which point to its own nature. For pure consciousness the 'meta-' distinction would need to be collapsed, but in such a way as to also be inwardly preserved. But isn't this collapse of the 'meta-' precisely the essence of consciousness? Only by concealing pure consciousness within itself can applied consciousness actually be what it is - just pure mathematics is hidden within applied mathematics. This is not the solution to any problem but an opening onto the real problem, or in other words while qualia might be the leading term for applied consciousness boundless astonishment plays the same role for the pure.