Attention is a specialisation within consciousness such could only be of consciousness, but it is not identical with it. Consciousness is space like in that it embraces very many different things, many concurrent and interrelated dynamic contents that recede, layer beyond layer into the distance. There is no sense of a dimensional limitation in this. In relation to it, attention is like a rapidly moving spotlight which focalises now one part of the contents of this space and now another; it takes in ideas and sensations with equal ease and it alchemises strange blends of the two, it also raises metacognition (in us) and temporalises the content that it touches. You could say that consciousness is only weakly in time but that attention fuses time into linear series. Although every life form with any sort of nervous system has both attention and consciousness, plants, perhaps, having consciousness without attention. What is peculiar about the human type of consciousness is that as space it is radically curved, the curvature being felt as a field of force concentrated in certain regions, in certain complexes of content. The sense of self arises from this curvature; it is not any sort of content, but a strong distorting force associated with certain changeable contents. This is merely a descriptive metaphor that arises in consciousness despite the activity of attention, to which such a global view is quite foreign.