You can temporally parse thinking, the arising and drift of thoughts, their pullulation and dissolves, and perception, easily when it is non-visual and with some effort visual perception too - imagine first that you are on a boat out in a broad stretch of water under a cloud filled sky and then allow the ripples to congeal and colour into whatever is before you - but you can't parse consciousness or the totality of subjective experience. Sometimes, standing before certain large abstract paintings you might get an intimation of the unfolding event as if it is pushed right up in the foreground too close to grasp but you can't be sure of this. It's simply because there's nothing to put it up against. If you could, in spite of this, using timelessness or a different kind of time as the register, then you could know whether primary consciousness is impersonal and its quality of selfness something that gets added on in the first microsecond of the birth of time, or whether it is selfness all the way through, which might as well be impersonal for all the little it has to do with the thick and smeary version that you inescapably find yourself always already bathing in.