This is a draft; not a completed post. And even when it is completed, it will still be very much a work-in-progress, as this is very conjectural stuff.

These are the definitions I am using for the things displayed in this image:

Attention – the current immediate focus/foci of awareness.

Awareness – the things within one’s field of perception that one is comprehending.

Perception – an interaction with some thing that causes the self to understand that that thing exists as a distinct piece of reality.

Thing – any part of the material and/or abstract world that we understand to be distinct from the rest of the world.

Abstractions – things having properties defined through interpretation of previous interpretations of sensory input.

The Tao – The one thing that we tend to divide into fragments that we think are distinct things. Also known as “everything.”

Self – the thing that is aware, that is perceiving. For us, it is an animal neural system doing that perceptive processing; creating an awareness cloud.

Ego – the attention cloud.

And somehow when discussing this, questions come up that are sometimes answered by this: