Waking consciousness is a two track affair, call it foreground and background, or attention and awareness. They go at different speeds, the foreground is slow, the background incredibly fast. Whatever you think or experience you are already there, have already anticipated it in a sort of high witnessing awareness that seems as if it is located above and behind your ordinary mind, like a convex mirror with the whole field squeezed up inside it. The two work in tandem, but the relation and the balance between them can change quite radically. If only one of them is real it is the background, is there anything you think you know that hasn't been drawn off in fragments from that other? The witnessing consciousness is of a different nature; it doesn't have two tracks, it doesn't require reflection to be a self, doesn't depend on intention or attention, it makes no sense on any model. You'd like to merge back into it, forget the other, but it doesn't permit this move, however inevitable it may be.