If you suddenly found that you were having a lucid dream you would not immediately test out your relative super-powers but would instead stop whatever it was you were in the midst of doing and carefully examine the material texture of the world in which you found yourself. You would want to bring about the sharpest juxtaposition of the certainty that all of this was mind-generated with the quality of infinitely rich layers of texture that material objectivity must have in order to pass the tests of independent reality. You would not want to waste an opportunity to view the imaginative constitution of the world from the other side of the tapestry. There is no need to wait for a lucid dream to do this, you can 'bracket away' the absence of the certainty that you are dreaming and perform the same kind of scrutiny with ordinary waking reality. If it helps, why not accompany this with the thought '(this is) experiencing'. Such a thought seems the furthest 'upstream' you can go, it is certainly prior to any notion of the 'I' and to the so-called natural attitude, and best of all it is prior to itself.

Experiencing and consciousness are terms used interchangeably, do they have different connotations? Experiencing suggests that it is ongoing regardless of how it is taken to be, regardless of whether it seems to belong to someone or not, or of its quality, and which is at the least coterminous with life, while consciousness is something more or less present, an attribute of life and which must already be structured into a subject and object polarity, or a subject, object horizonal trinity. Consciousness has qualities but experiencing can have no qualities since it is these very qualities. Again experiencing is always fully present, while consciousness deigns to be objectified. These are really only differences in emphasis. If you say all experiencing takes place in consciousness is this less of a tautology than saying consciousness arises within experiencing? Consciousness seems to need a vehicle, which you call the mind, but if there is a vehicle for experiencing you might as well call it consciousness. The two are like those oddly portentous twins one sometimes encounters in dreams. Whatever it is, and it really has no name, is inherently and perhaps uncannily dual. In referring to it in any way you necessarily leave out exactly what is most important about it.

Most of the detritus that passes through your mind is not yours but is given to you by this time and this place in the ongoing unfolding of the culture to which you belong. What matters is that you embody it, and become in your limited way responsible for it. It requisitions your attention and your power to seemingly struggle against it, and all of this knowing energy being applied to push or to pull enriches it. The only part that is yours is the slow ebbing and flowing of a questioning that operates against the grain. It is in some way like the old gnostic sense of not belonging in this world, or a haunting nostalgia for something not remembered, only it makes no drama out of being a stranger. Rather it is about being perfectly at home in a strange land. Or again it is like rising up on your hands and knees and trying to shake off an intoxication. The smallest amount of leverage to do this is invaluable, and so much so that it has become a commodity in the very world from which it promises escape.

Even after you have admitted that subjective reality precedes material reality in the order of knowledge it remains an unwarranted leap to assume that it precedes it ontologically. Most of all it is unwarranted by common sense which, precisely by its consensual nature, accords a natural precedence to the material, or more precisely to what  qualifies as agreed upon non-subjective reality. Hence the cluster of various kinds of half-way house theories like panpsychism. All of these considerations seem to depend on a notion of the subjective which is already biased towards the objective, that is, on the sort of subjectivity for which there can be more than one ultimate 'I'. And in the same way the kind of objective reality that is posited in these notions is one that is strictly correlative to such an objective-subject. It is only in this kind of pre-scientific framework that something like the 'hard problem' can arise. Contrary to this, if the truly abyssal nature of genuine idealism is once grasped all such conflicts immediately disappear. It is rather like the obverse of the cogito: there cannot even be a doubt as to the 'existence' of the 'I', such a doubt cannot even be formulated. What can be concluded is that because objective reality manifestly exists, therefore all the unfolding mystery of material reality follows, including all the material correlates of objective consciousness.

 There is a positional horizon implicit in every experience. This used to be referred to as its condition of possibility, but that term treats it as if it were external, or something only to wondered about afterwards, in looking back on the experience. Instead it is integral to the experiencing as if it defined, or rather initially posited, the screen and the observer without which there could be no experience at all. And so, as it is it contains the existential depth of the experience, its shocking contrast to absolute nothingness, but it does not feel as if it does so. Most of the time experience feels ordinary and natural and as if the most obvious and unquestionable thing were its simple right to presence now. So it is as though an algebraic abstraction born out of habit has filled the place where the sense of this depth ought to be. Everything in your culture conspires to reassure you in regard to the promise contained in this abstraction - at some deferred moment it can be exchanged for its full value, and so you you can trade on it with a clear conscience. This substitution marks the place of the so-called 'I'-thought, as a currency for ongoing participation in the traffics of desire and knowledge. You shouldn't have to do anything about this beyond the gentle request that it deliver on its promise.

Anything you can discover or propose as an attribute of consciousness, whether innate or developed by practise cannot be what characterises it. Whether it is continuous or granular, reflexive or pre-reflecive, spatial or punctual etc., all of these correspond to possible experiences and as such are inessential. Consciousness is what experiences, or it would be if the phrase still made sense when pushed to its utmost limits, but that we are permitted to speak of it only reflects a very limited and localised result, an effect and not a cause. From your perspective it like a tiny aperture, empty and dark itself, through which illumination of functioning flows; for you being is what is perceived and that means that the perceiving has no being in itself. Your nature constrains you to understand being in this completely inverted way. You are ignorant to the precise degree that you believe that there can be more than one consciousness - it is that simple.

Falling asleep seems to happen in two stages, first your awareness of present reality blurs and dissolves so that you find yourself resuming an unfolding of internal images that were already going on and which you seemed to have already been witnessing. At this stage you are in a double awareness still retaining a minimal sense of your body in waking reality. No transition is felt because the stream of inner images fades up gently, but you can easily be jarred back into wakefulness by a body sense that a further surrender is not yet permitted. You are only the observer of these images which may in themselves be quite bizarre and illogical. The second stage is a letting go of the body and an immersion in the unfolding imaginary world after which point you are lost. So it seems that it is a dreaming process that ushers you into sleep, but you don't know whether this leads to full-blown dreaming as you only remember the dreams at the other emergent shore of sleep. It is the special affordances of waking life, memory and rational coherence that go first and rapidly - these are the parts that are exhausted and it is for their sake that the refreshment of sleep is needed. By the time you emerge they have been renewed and hence they enable you to piece together your last dreams. But for all that this process can be observed you still can't catch yourself at the very point of falling asleep. This point would be the switching of the track of attention but you cannot grasp attention outside of its objects even though you feel strongly that attention is not its objects.