Awareness and Consciousness

Let's continue with covering a 'biggie' here: The difference between awareness and consciousness.

Once again, totally no intention to come in any way, shape, or form to a sort of final judgment on the subject. Only openly sharing my subjective experience, with as number one preferred impact, that it stimulates as many as possible others to also share their subjective experience.

And, what has really helped me in coming to at least something of a rational understanding of how awareness and consciousness might not be the same yet very closely connected, is by comparing awareness to 'looking' and consciousness to 'seeing'.

Awareness then could be understood as a bit more 'raw' as a sensation than consciousness and without necessarily needing an object to be directed at yet, like how you can be looking out for something without already be looking at something. Consciousness then perhaps is a bit more 'polished' as a sensation and necessarily directed at an object, even a specific object, namely the subject. With consciousness in these terms comes a knowing of looking going on, like seeing that there must be an entity doing the looking. In this sense consciousness could be described as awareness of a subject being aware. 

However, when texts or talks are abóut either awareness or consciousness, they are almost automatically about awareness óf awareness, or about awareness óf consciousness. This is where the use of language to me becomes VERY challenging. It easily ends up in fruitlessly discussing what comes first, awareness or consciousness, which to me is very similar to discussing whether the chicken or the egg comes first.

The only clarity I can imagine around this, is to see awareness as closer to the direct experience of the act of paying attention, and to see consciousness as closer to the knowing that there is a subject that is aware and paying attention. At least like this I can come to a little bit of grips with how the term consciousness is also often used as being the fabric of the universe, more or less like the space in which experience takes place, which supposedly is you as well as me, whether we are aware of it or not...