rather than saying "consciousness"

because i can't just add a quip sometimes

Everything is dark except for you & your flashlight. That’s not quite it. There are other beings: each of them has a flashlight too, but you can only see the light from your own flashlight. At least that’s what they tell you, in signs that they place into your flashlight’s beam. Strangely the word you have for ‘flashlight’, that all the others use, too, is “flashlight-that-everyone-has,-all-the-same-size-&-the-same-color,-flashlight”. Also, “flashlight-that-is-always-on-&-the-same-brightness-&-color-for-you-flashlight”.

You know what i think? This word is a serious impediment to understanding flashlights. If you ever paid the least bit of attention to your surroundings (much less, those mysterious beings that occasionally drift into your light-beam) & thought about what you experienced as you were experiencing it—not by trotting out the words you have learned—it would appear quite different. It would change. It would move. It would have multiple volitions.

Does a rabbit have a flashlight, does a robot? Because that, of course, is the only question worth asking :) :) :) .

Together we weave this world, every one of us. The question-framers & the ones that are only allowed to frame answers. There is an ontology beyond permission, & in the light of which, permission appears a squidly cloud that blocks out the real possibility of light. Nobody asked for your consent to a division of the world into permitters & permitted. And what do you become when you refuse this division? When you ask what it is that the squidly cloud is made to hide?

“Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries.” —Roethke