For all its lightness consciousness confers a unique identity, it is choiceless choice apart from the 'there is' which is the mark of mental modeling. This is its peculiar 'otherwise than being'. This understanding of consciousness is neither dark nor light, and not a process, not in time, but colourless, inactive and timeless in the deepest sense. This is consciousness as closer to you than your eye or your nose, too close for space.

There is no clear distinction between consciousness and mind yet they are not interchangeable terms. To become conscious of something - what it is and what you are conscious of in regard to it are in the mind. Consciousness arises in the transition of an object between two parts of the mind - put simply between the object as unknown and the object as known. Consciousness knows nothing since it has no repository for knowledge. But everything in mind can become conscious and when this occurs it seems as though to be what it is is had to be always already conscious. Wherever consciousness looks it finds only consciousness, that it finds looking.

Anything you can conclude about the mind is based on a mental model, so nothing that suggests discriminating self from mind can be true. You might say that mind is just an appearance in consciousness because consciousness is the apparent window through which mind knows itself, and going on in this way you might also experience that consciousness can have no boundary, but again this assumes that consciousness is a thing apart from its mental model. In relation to mind consciousness is less presumptuous. It sees itself anamorphically thinning out to nothing, to unconsciousness, it sees itself rooted in mind like a plant - its tendrils going on into dark intimacy with hidden currents of energy and form. Perhaps the question should, what is the form of unity that pertains to the mind? A unity that has no analogy among appearances.

The mind models the mind, from particular to general and back again, and it models is attribute, consciousness, as a kind of perception, a perception of perception. This is practical but erroneous, and most likely the erroneousness is practical too. For example consciousness is not independent of its object, is not built on the subject-object duality, and so does not require anything like object constancy. Much of what is naively credited to consciousness are actually achievements of mind and it is the interest of mind's functioning that its processes be misunderstood. Mind makes models and has the ability to enter into those models and to push them to breaking point. A broken model, however, is a kind of success. It is impossible to model the mind's true agenda.

Is mind a formation within consciousness or is consciousness an attribute of mind? Does the ability to reverse the direction of an embodied metaphor belong to consciousness or to mind? It would seem to be an achievement of pure transparency, of light, and hence to belong to consciousness, whose figure is light, and yet it also is of the essence of intelligence, passing in a flash through a kind of unknowing, and hence to belong to mind, whose figure is a living darkness.

Thoughts press for emergence into consciousness, and what happens next? For the most part they are rubber stamped and then allowed to slowly decay, floating and fading in the background. The vector that they were attached to and which pushed them into the light is quickly broken down and presumably recycled - there is little conscious insight into the source of these thoughts. Occasionally there is a thought that attracts extra attention, being aware of being aware of it it is isolated and turned about. If a question arises in this way, perhaps from a group of vaguely related thoughts then they are submitted to mind which synthesises a new thought out of them, or creates an analogy that makes a new figure out of them, related to them. These results are accepted by consciousness just like other thoughts and go through the same process. This use of the mind as a sort of computer is so ordinary that it is thought of as another conscious process when it is largely not so. It is slightly magical and the process is only felt not known. The role of consciousness seems largely clerical. This can't be all there is to it.

There is so much apparent repetition, in experience, and echoes and mirroring in the noosphere that it is easy to conclude that your consciousness is invariant with displacement in time, or that time is homogenous with respect to consciousness. This idea feeds the idea of consciousness as functional process and so as of the same order as events understood according to physical theories. If however consciousness is ontologically related to time, in a way that is not immediately apparent n experience, then this is not so. Every moment is completely different from every other moment, repetition is never perfect, it is all once and once only.