Your perception of the world is filtered through many softening layers of habit and fabulation, even when reinforcing the story of being at odds with the way of things. If these layers are peeled away the result is a particularly dramatic intensification, terrifying and invigorating. However rare it might be, this naked perception belongs only to waking consciousness - it doesn't occur first in the unconscious and the get toned down. The filtering metaphor is inapt. There is an aspect of consciousness that is not passive, that can only be accessed through the waking state.

The essence or root of all phenomena is the seeing or knowing or experiencing of those phenomena, but the seeing, knowing, experiencing cannot be seen, known or experienced, hence the phenomena themselves are largely unknown, unexperienced etc., and so conceal their own mystery in their joyous blatancy. They are always pointing back towards what can never be pointed at as if this were the biggest joke possible.

The concept of consciousness, that is, as something positive, a determinable difference, of which you can say this is conscious, that is not, depends for context on a non-conscious base, an external world of mere objects, or on oneself as if seen from the outside, observably unconscious in behaviour in some way, or as vouched by someone else. This concept does not apply internally, as it were of the 'I' inquiring into its own awareness, without an imaginary doubling of the questioner. And yet this is the form in which the question most authentically arises.

Passions are fatiguing but desires, while not without a need to overcome resistances are invigorating due to their alignment with will. The sublimation of passions into the desires ('Where It was I will be') is not a matter of domesticating them so that they can be drawn under the yoke of volition, but rather a change in the understanding of volition. It is not a matter of control or of subjection to freedom, but a phenomenological component of what remains outside of control; a different way of going with things, which changes the very landscape of motives.

Desire aways contains an element of volition as if it is rooted in the ego, while passion, which is more common, more banal, easily overrides the ego, so that the ego seems rooted in passion, and hence enslaved to its momentary changes. Despite this, passion can be elicited, both by others and by one's self, through external lures ad triggers. This circular muddle makes a mockery of your intentions to disentangle from the dance.

Attention attending to attention which is the source of all of your ideas about mind and consciousness and attention itself, does not invoke a different kind of attention. Reflexive consciousness is just consciousness. There is no call to place awareness outside of awareness, as if it were an object, but rather to withdraw all such ideas, shapes, spaces, topologies from awareness.

Aware of being aware and of its momentary qualities is incidental to a certain estrangement and doubleness even when it is entirely spontaneous and ecstatic. It depends on a condition of mind that comes and goes. Sometimes there is just awareness without any echo or overflow. There is less difference between these two modes than you are tempted to think.