Being in experiencing and being aware of being in experiencing are two different things and only contingently associated. All of your concepts about experience are located in relation to awareness of experience and take it as a kind of object. Nothing illuminates simple experience at all beyond is own disclosure and so it is also not clear what relation the awareness has to it, how it comes to be such awareness. The latter could be off in a world of its own with no relation at all to what it pretends to be examining.

Freedom is something other than what is needed to give moral weight to decisions, it has nothing to do with 'what if...' and other such moods and modalities. It is needed simply in order for the world to appear, and so is inescapable.

Thought is a kind of physical process, an echoing, re-echoing friction of whispering flows of information, of concepts forming and decaying. Among them, and holding a special place are those of consciousness and the self, but these in themselves are not products of this process or dependent on it. The opposite is true, thought can only exist because of consciousness, which it hinders and goads and ultimately serves.

Narrative, or the narrativisation of experiencing is only a particularly circumscribed way of realising its essential historicity, a kind of foreclosure, but with sudden gaps and openings. The latter is without rails or boundaries, is extensive, polyphonic, far and near, keyed callings from distant nearness and near distance. Art hints at this in various ways.

If mind and consciousness are distinguished, you could say that mind is ontic and consciousness ontological, in that what defines the latter is that in regard to it being is always at stake. Hence, not merely the temporality of protentions and retentions, or of prehensions etc., but the peculiar topology of historic and originary time are proper to consciousness, as well as the force of creative will. Qualia are quintessentially ontic, witness marks only the beginning of a turn towards to ontological. It also implies that there are undisclosed potentialities of consciousness, yet to be elicited by possible refinements of what serves as mind.

Will, not as desire, appetite, conatus but as creative future-directed urge towards some conceived goal and with the power to bend the immediate environment towards alignment with that goal - this is the sense of will, far from abstraction, that narrative and myths revolve around, human insofar as deeply embedded in the meaning of being alive.

The mind's directives to Being or to its own source, such as condition of possibility, background, containing space, who? etc. are necessarily flawed as they depend on already quite sophisticated model of happening. It only works in the negative in that it can be aware of how these fail, and of course it cannot make a thing out of this negativity either although it can spend a long time trying. This falling short has no ready description, is evident but at the same time, as a sort of directive, is the most delicate task possible. It must, as it were, always already be what you are.

Machines appearing to think as well or better than humans reinforces the idea that our thought is itself produced by mechanical operations, inputs and outputs, storage, processing etc. This paradigm completely erases any notion of Being that is not already a matter of beings, it is bootstrapped as it were from beings and nothing else. And yet for all of this the question of Being can still be formulated in language and hence remains a valid, if foreclosed, question. Attempting to fully cash out the notion of consciousness as arising inn this way one is forced to more and more recondite notions of some kind of 'true' situational awareness, of an immediacy which never quite fits into the system. There is a peculiar desire intrinsic to human thought to imagine systems that thoroughly exclude our very possibility. Is this the latest form of nihilism?

The feeling of the subject is the hidden knowledge of having been a witness/participant at the origin of everything.

It is taking into account the priority of the being-experiencing over the whatever-experienced, but so delicately as to not allow the ideas of mind or consciousness to obscure it. It is all that is and at the same time the most delicate of awarenesses and so must be held in a frame suitable to holding it. Such a frame must be your ordinary humanness, the intermediate point without any urge to leap either upwards or downwards, forward of back. Without will or any operation of will, stationary in thought and feeling.

One way is to imagine it as beginning is some simple primitive form, say an atom of sense certainty, and then evolving by progressive stages and challenges into this transcendence-haunted and self-reflective awareness of being and so necessarily on the way to something else yet more embracing and by virtue of its virtue. That is a saga of the creative will but it is perhaps more like the rising light revealing the true contours of a vast landscape which is revealed to be only the light itself, only the seeing itself.

The temporal horizons of consciousness are not the same as the width of the interval of time in which the 'now' is infused but are the multi-scaled senses of past and future in which the now takes itself as the central location. These horizons are less affected by mood and attunement although they do have some effect on cognition of music and of extended texts, they are in other words functions of 'working memory'. In dreams you probably encounter them at their functional minimum, the smallest lightening of time in which a sense of self can exist, even if just a flickering and discontinuous one. Below that, with no self, consciousness is no more than point qualia.

You don't exist in the letters or even words of experience, you only begin to be yourself in the paragraphs and are lost again in the chapters. And in these passages that are built to your size you can find also yourself on the outside as much as on the inside. Experience can open up to receive you or can tease you with an inaccessibility, an irritating shift in phase with which you cannot align. Mood being a complex vibrational pattern that can only arise in the present, so that lived time is not a neutral medium but is integral to its geometry. Nothing can be felt without this opening to the strange abyss of lived time.

The relative stability and independence of the sensory fields encourages the idea that they are complexes built up out of atomic elements, qualia as experiential pixels, but even the purest sensation is always simultaneously the situated awareness of that sensation and hence of its interpretation or frame in some larger context. Every element if there were such would be interchangeably part of both the scene and the framing. It is this back and forth chiasmus that produces the idea of a consciousness as an abstract medium for the ongoing event. Is there anything else to consciousness than this? What knowledge does it have of itself without any other object?

The more that the entire being of a thing is in the human realm the more it is historical in essence. We are historical through and through and everything we touch becomes so to some degree, but what we cherish most about things, especially in nature but also amongst made things is that they can give us access to that aspect of being that is pure presence without any deference to history - even to the very history that appears to have brought them forth and which is always an addition made by us. Even if we don't give rise to time it is only in us that there is becoming.

If the brain acts as the filter and limiter of consciousness - now understood in a larger sense - rather than its producer, what does this say for 'embodied theories of consciousness'? Body centred and vitalistic positions would seem to take a hit. And the pure being of things? The Vermeer view of the world?

Crystalline, with multiple facets internally shattered and showing the lines of stress. Then a sort of yellow resinous mass with corresponding stresses. This is how it appears, how it gives itself in this sickness persistent finding.

Consciousness is always interpretation, a relation to its other that can always be otherwise. As much as it is driven to unfold a system behind its world, it never quite believes in it, is always aware that the terms could be reversed. In this sense its essence is freedom.

The ramification of original insight into a world, into the world in its full complexity and detail is an extreme energetic and intelligible unfolding that takes place neither inside nor outside what is subsequently taken to be the experiencing mind. You cannot believe that 'your mind' is capable of such rapid and almost seamless world-building, the energy level is well outside your ordinary self understanding except at certain moments. It appears to be something wholly outside, but you can become aware that every level of outsideness corresponds precisely to a level of 'subjective' imagination.

Consciousness surrendering so trustingly to sleep shows again that it is a development or specialisation of will. But you now must understand will as expressed more fully in dreamless sleep than in desire and other manifestations of its restless agitation.

A world continually changing under the influence of forces and intentions, actions and reactions, great and small powers at level upon level. You can sense these forces of nature and of will at play without ever being able to isolate a single pure instance of cause and effect. Are you of the same nature as these forces, caught up in the same eternal becoming, or does your very sense of them, their bracing oceanic sublimity betray something of another origin?

Initially the worlds is your other and you are anxious to achieve a unique identity in its eyes. Then there is a turn about and you are the world's other, the measure of all things that pass away. In each case there is a kind of seduction at play, a stake and a lure. The same instinct for examination persists and the terms reverse and reverse again so that every seeming ulterior dissolves into mere timeless spaceless happening of not happening.

The foreground complex of experiencing seems to be strongly invested in certain metaphysical principles, by being ready to defend them as if its own integrity depended on these as its foundational structures etc. But this level of awareness has no ability in itself to think metaphysically so it must delegate such matters to the background awareness. It relies on this senior tranche without looking too closely into it. The background assumptions can change substantially without the change registering in the foreground, and so much so that all of its vaunted metaphysical assumptions can be dissolved without any apparent change in the relationship. The very shallowness of the foreground is its greatest blessing. One fine day you wake up and notice that there's nothing there behind behind your 'I's.

The idea that this experiencing is that of a consciousness belonging to a mind belonging to a self, and a self that must be expressed in or as some sort of reality, all of this cosmology, prevents the shocking realisation that there is nothing outside of this, treating it instead as if its meaning were idealism. The feeling of sublimity that overwhelms you on gazing into the night sky in bare country far from a city properly belongs to every moment of ordinary life. You know nothing, you are no one, how does this come to be?

The cogito ought to be reversed. Because I become aware that I am thinking and so, that my reality is thought, I can no longer take the 'I' in the way that it has been understood up to that moment, as say the 'thinker', as this familiar self etc., it is no longer even certain that the word, or verbal gesture that has been in use to designate self, has any meaning at all. And in the same way the 'am', the meaning of being that has been assumed, no longer refers to anything except its identity as a gesture. and 'thought' too, how many unquestioned assumptions are in play in that too? So, the cogito goes from latent certainty to radical doubt and not the other way around - the traditional direction being a deliberate and shallow misunderstanding to evade what is actually revealed.