Consciousness (n.) is a very small slice of our existence. There is but little that comes to be 'known.' What is known remains inexact, what is mastered insecure. On the contrary, what 'is' is never of our making nor is it the product of our minds.
Consciousness (n.) is never self-contained, since throughout all its modes of expression it is always extending beyond itself towards something (argued husserl). But more important than even this is the fact that we are always extending beyond itself towards something 'as' something because our perception necessarily derives from our prior understanding of the totality of the world surrounding ourselves, which automatically determines 'how' things are disclosed to us, the nature of our perception.
Consciousness (n.) is not at work in our everyday way of coping because our everyday way of coping with the available can be carried on independently of the emergence of a thematically conscious subject with mental content,which must then be related to an object.
Consciousness (n.) is not inside, but outside. Far from being locked up within 'the cabinet of consciousness' we are always already outside of ourselves, outside in the world disclosed to us. This is the meaning of being there, of existence.
Consciousness (n.) misses the structure of our most basic mode of comportment. That is, we are not normally thematically conscious of our ongoing everyday activity, and where thematic self-referential consciousness does arise, it presupposes a nonthematic, non-self-referential mode of awareness.
Consciousness (n.) is not central to the human condition.
Consciousness (n.) is important, to be sure, particularly when something goes wrong, but man is first and foremost a coping being, already involved in the world.
Consciousness (n.) is not as central to human life as we suppose . Most of the time we are kind of moving in a medium, we're swimming in a medium that we take utterly for granted and are not conscious of and don't direct our attention to at all.
Consciousness (n.) only appears when something goes wrong, when there's a specific problem.
Consciousness (n.) is characterized by categorial intuition, indicating that every element of every scene that I witness is packed with deeper layers that we were not conscious of at first