One view takes ordinary human waking consciousness as a thing-like event, a definite and ongoing happening which is also a high-level construct out of more basic parts, say primitive discrete awarenesses assembled into some kind of quasi-unity which mistakes its own nature, and each of the parts is a definite happening as well. This seems to be a kind of bleached and sterile consciousness, a laboratory purification, which may be more of an artifact of the way it is being studied than of anything else. In this view the complex symbolic and mythological underpinnings of empirical consciousness are contingent and inessential historical baggage. In these notions consciousness is Markovian in the sense of path-independence: it doesn't matter how you got to the condition of the present moment, everything only evolves forward from that. One alternative to this is that the ordinary waking consciousness is an an extremely constrained and reduced version of the intrinsic nature of consciousness - it's not built up from smaller parts but built down from an unimaginable vastness, and that the trace of this vastness is the extreme path-dependence of every subjective state in which the entire origin and history of consciousness is concealed. As consciousness allows more of itself to be revealed it thicken rather than thins. You cannot avoid passing through the realms of ghosts and gods - there is more truth in Dante than neuroscience.