For every thing that is there must already be a place or a context in which it is, in which the alternative is or is not can be rooted. So, if consciousness develops of the complexity in some non-conscious structures, then, before it is reognised and acknowledged by a self and since such a self is only some further refinement of the content of consciousness enabling it to reflect itself, there would be a stage of unreflected, unowned, merely happening, consciousness, such as we might imagine in an ant or an even simpler creature. That the thing is means that there is a place where it is, but in the case of a consciousness, even without a self, that place or space would still be a self, being the exclusive condition of its being at all.

The concept that goes by the name consciousness is perhaps a natural on for Eastern religions with their technics of meditation but in the West it only emerges out of soul around Descartes with the attempt to extend the categories of natural science to experience, and hence to postulate a mind stuff, or abstract and essentially impersonal general quality of experience-ness. The problem of consciousness then arises in reconciling this abstract quality with other more unequivocal generalities of substance, time, space motion, impenetrability, change etc. Perhaps the true 'hard problem' is with that aspect of soul that has been suppressed, its personal-ness. Now it is believed that this can be transcended through 'ego-death' or some such event, but even then, a having-been remains, as well as the fact the even such an event only has any sense within someone's personal experience.

Feeling, thought and will are not in themselves conscious, rather they elicit cnsciousness to varying degrees, ad in a sense, they serve consciousness somewhat blindly so that it can in return maintain them in their peculiar ongoing relations. That is why these faculties are without much insight into themselves - thoughts do not know where they come from, feelings are always being surprised by their own turnings, and will being the least conscious of all does its work in spite of the interference of the other two. The division of experience into these parts is not an intrinsic slicing-up, but an artefact of the level of understanding that has been gained.

If there were to be a true theory of consciousness what would it look like, what sorts of things could it make possible, how could it be validated? Would it produce a complete mathematical schema of a conscious state? Would it show how such a state was brought about and how it dissolved? Or would it merely add qualia colourings to a description of mental states? Would it necessarily entail the solution to all conundrums of metaphysics without itself depending on metaphysical assumptions about time and being? Or could it only be validated internally, like a key that unlocked and unfolded all of experience into self-transparency? What of the boundaries, what of the prior states, what nature could it ascribe to them?

Fictions, even the simplest, are engaging because they evoke, in some fashion, an image or simulation of the subjective state of their protagonists. This extends to the way in which we do not coincide with our own subjective states, the way that experience is always subject to a parallax with respect to the experiencing. The play on this, which opens further than one might have expected, is what makes for the more interesting kind of fiction. The fictional evocation of this parallax of consciousness is, however, entirely different from its reality in a subject appreciating the effects of such an evocation. In the one case it is representable, has a point of origin indirectly pointed towards in the other it does not and cannot because there is simply no such point - parallax without an eye.

If you make a distinction between self, or pure consciousness and mind or 'applied' consciousness, then you see that while there is no limit to the forms in which consciousness reveals itself to itself, none of these encroach upon the fundamentally unitary and unmanifested nature of pure consciousness. The analogy is made with light which only appears when it strikes something it an object or a retina, and a similar analogy could be made with electricity which brings about so many diverse actions and manifestations but is, apart from what it does, devoid of any nature. There are derived theories however, explaining the nature of light or of electricity in terms of the action of yet more fundamental elements. In the same way, pure consciousness, may be the action, the 'mind' of a somewhat yet more unitary and unrevealed.

Every gesture or practice you do on behalf of life is also made inversely on behalf of death. Life and death are inseparable, but the light of life next to that of death is dazzlingly bright and renders the other invisible and unknowing.