Thoughts are nothing like passing clouds; by the time you are aware of being aware of them they are already receding into the past, being lost over the horizon, and you can't recall how they started, so you might conclude that they just drifted by, but in one infinitesimal moment you were the thought, it sparked with a grain of your fire, a derivative of a sense of self taken only secondarily to be you. Thoughts surround this presumed hearth or heart in concentric rings, like the layers of an onion, and flicker like lightnings in charged air. But it's not a witnessing, it's a subtle participation, out of no centre but of an intelligence alien to every time or location, or meaning, pure unqualified act.