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.