Some models of experiencing imply that the more of intelligence there is in an individual the more that consciousness there will be, the experiencing itself taking on a richer character. On the other hand a recurrent insight into self is that it is the same in all sentient beings. Taking the two together entails that consciousness is not fundamental but is a property, perhaps a defining property of the individual 'self'. You could say that this latter is a simulation brought about by essential self. This places the ultimate value outside of consciousness and so goes against the entire system or will of the individual which is driven in all ways and modes towards apotheosis, the desire that drives desire. Desire is finite but seeks the infinite; its goal in no way resembles itself; the end of appropriation is complete surrender.

Narrative self doesn't do justice to the individual soul. It's more like a condition for appearance, will and counter-will, a life ruled by desires, mostly mimetic and their equally mimetic frustrations. Somehow those constraints give rise to something rather solid-seeming, and the idea that the relative centre is or ought to be the absolute centre, which is the Cartesian error in a nutshell. The anti-Cartesian error is something else again.

Self - gives the sense of large double-door behind you, normally closed so that you are your 'self', but when it opens you fall back and back far behind the little lighted clearing you are in now, into a vast and velvet dark space, so this was self all along. The narrative self certainly has rich turns and mysterious unfoldings, it is narrative after all, but it's not actually self, only self-ish, rather charmingly self-ish. Again the odd thing is how easily this intuition develops; you want to love self, or feel that self is love, but there is no way this can apply to the narrative self which has no real substance, but that pure self behind appearances, indifferent to metaphysics, but still behind appearances, literally behind them...

The question of whether there can be consciousness without self or self without consciousness, which is largely, but not altogether, a muddle of ill-defined terms can be clarified somewhat by asking a simpler question. Can there be self without you? The answer that immediately arises is, of course there can! It's not that you have or are a self, or even that 'a self' makes any sense as such, but more like that you are a participation in self, and a pretty flawed one at that. It is self-ness that is wonderful, that is the substance of all experiencing, whereas your self is more like a project, incomplete and probably never meant to be complete, but simply a transient way in which self-ness can be made to appear. In this sense self-ness is another way of saying consciousness, but one that happily presupposes something much more than can be reduced to an oddly paradoxical emergent of mind.

Feeling and knowing are the two complementary originals, but which comes first? Is it feeling, or pure appearance, which would make of this a bottom-up process, or is it knowing which would make it top-down? You cannot have a feeling without a knowing what you feel, and you cannot have a knowing without something to know. The nature of the process is that this must be indeterminate, that's what it means for it to be twisted on itself, which is your fundamental intuition about being a presencing, a Da-sein, a Da and a sein. The feeling however is shallow, each feeling appearing just as it is, little specks of quality, while the knowing is a bottomless abyss having no limit to how much it can open like an endless flowering revealing layer after layer. This is why, in spite of the wonderful groundedness in things it cannot be bottom-up - there's simply not enough momentum in that direction.

The conscious self whose centre is presence and whose periphery is narrative is the tip of an iceberg of hidden conscious life all of which is experienceable under the right circumstances, that is, experienceable from the inside, from within an identical subject of a different character. (It may be that there is also a 'cognitive unconscious' which cannot be experienced from the inside, but the knowing of it can, its objectivity being folded into a cognising subject.) So you can wonder how far down in this 'iceberg' the sense of self extends. Does it melt into a pure happening of impersonal consciousness at a level where distinctions are completely fluid? To think this way is to treat the surface self as something special, a break in form. This seems unlikely. Self then extends all the way down but its character changes in unexpected ways.

All these intricate theories are of self, are themselves 'ornaments of darkness'. But self seems a comparatively recent creation, not the original lure, that piece of filth for which you dove into desire, but an especially sweet and sticky supplement to it. There is so much complicity, that sidelong slide into gratification which never quite works out, so many 'special interests' to take care of.