What is distinctive about the subject of experience is not self-reflection, or personal identity mediated through memory or some core feeling of self-ness, or an emergence out of intelligence, but the sense of freedom. This may be denied intellectually, or experienced mostly in a negation, but however tiny the flame it is what the living now consists of, and what makes any sort of meaning possible. Identity which grows more and more constricting with the years is only a negative imprint of this freedom which is the essence of the 'now'.

The sensory fields are structured by relations of near and far and insofar as we tend to understand awareness on analogy with sensory experience and its division into objects we think of it as centred on an absolute 'observer', or I-subject, but awareness itself is not the same as experience and its subject, or centre is purely hypothetical, at most a pragmatic habit. A centre is a feature of that strange resolution of awareness into the human experience of objectivities, but subjectively is nowhere to be found.

Considerations of consciousness mostly labour under a cognitive or intellectualistic bias, as if awareness is a precipitate of understanding, or even o processing of 'information'. Awareness however is at least as much about loving as knowing, and following this other thread leads to an entirely different resolution into primary functions. 'Eternity is in love with the productions of time' - the universe wanting to love itself, in the knowing of itself, but not as in seeking an object to love, but as a overflowing of a being in love. Even just to dwell on that phrase, 'being in love'.

If life and consciousness come out of the universe striving to become aware of itself, then what does consciousness strive for? To be more and more embodied and particular, that is, for the kind of thickness of experience that only an egoic self makes possible. Thus the extremes of suffering and joy, of jouissance, enjoyment in the broadest sense, as far as possible from 'enlightenment'. The latter is perhaps only a transient rebound effect after a salient peak in the former.

Experience is framed by its belonging to the personal self, but this self appears to be purely contingent, based on ever changing emotions and an unreliable history etc. When you pull back out of it you go to consciousness, which is particular but without identity, nameless and merely happening. In between these there is a sort of generalised identity, your identity, your life, but as an instance of identity, of life, like that of a character in fiction. It is clear that these three levels are intertwined and inseparable and are what is meant by personal experience. If this is only an effect of language then there is more to language than meets the eye.

Being is normally thought of as the underlying substance of an objective phenomenon, that which anchors it in objectivity. If you don't like the idea of 'substance' or hypokeimenon then it is the actuality that distinguishes this phenomenon from all else in the realm of possibility, it is not merely the choice, but the bringing forward or accomplishment of the choice. All of such notions belong to models of reality, that is to mental constructs designed to explain the mystery of what stands against awareness. The phenomenon at the core is the standing over against awareness but also in awareness. Put simply it is the phenomenon looking back at you as you look at it. The only thing that needs to be revealed is what awareness, this very awareness is, or rather, how it acts.

'The question comes down to whether the mind's world building primary imagination goes through all the way or whether at some fine resolution it ceases to be mind and coarsens into mechanism into an opaque machine code?' This is the koan at the end of the science, and to encounter it is to see that it can only have one answer, merely because the very question is posed.