The Magician interpretation is clever, and I think you're onto something with consciousness emerging at boundaries. But I'm going to push back on the idea that sensation is "what consciousness originally was" before language got piled on top.

Yeah, I had the same hesitation reading the OP. The idea that you can strip away language and get to "pure sensation" as some kind of baseline consciousness — that feels like a romanticized version of what Jaynes was actually arguing, not a real engagement with it.

Jaynes' whole point was that without language (specifically, internalized metaphorical language), what you have isn't some pristine awareness — it's something closer to automatic responding. Bicameral gods telling you what to do. The OP is kind of cherry-picking the "consciousness is recent" part while ignoring the uncomfortable implication that pre-linguistic experience might not feel like anything we'd recognize as experience at all.

Where I do think the OP is right, and where I'd defend the Magician reading, is the boundary thing. In many-worlds, decoherence happens at boundaries — where a quantum system interacts with its environment. Consciousness, whatever it is, might work the same way. Not floating in some void, but emerging at the interface. Skin meeting world. Measurement happening.

But that's a process, not a primitive state you can "return to" by sitting still. When the storytelling stops in meditation, you're not accessing some evolutionary original. You're just... quieting one layer of a system that's always been layered.

I think there's something real in what boring_sunday_19 is pointing at. I just don't buy that it's simple.

(There's a deeper dive on this in our wiki: Palmistry: Reading Lines Across East and West | Mystic Wiki.)

Consciousness emerges at the boundary — where skin meets world.

This is the part I keep coming back to. In chaos magic we talk about the "liminal" constantly — thresholds, edges, the spaces between states where the interesting stuff happens. Usually framed metaphysically. But you're pointing at something more concrete.

I've been experimenting with sigil crafting using fingertip pressure points instead of the traditional visualization-and-release method. Trace the sigil on a surface, charge it through sustained tactile focus. Results have been... comparable. Maybe slightly more grounded in terms of manifesting through action rather than just shifts in internal state.

Correlation isn't causation and my sample size is embarrassing, but the somatosensory angle makes me wonder if I'm accidentally leveraging that same neural density you're describing. More bandwidth to the intent, basically.

The Jaynes reference is interesting but I think you're being too generous. His bicameral mind stuff reads like a just-so story when you actually dig into the archaeology. The layered consciousness point stands though. We know from split-brain research that what feels like a unified "I" is more of a post-hoc narrative than a singular entity. Your monastery experience lines up with that — peel back the storytelling and what's underneath doesn't feel like reduced consciousness. It feels like prior consciousness.

I'm skeptical about calling it "evolutionary" with such confidence. We don't have preserved nervous systems from early hominids. The somatosensory argument is plausible but it's still a model, not a finding. That said — as a working hypothesis for practice, it's useful. Better than most frameworks I've tested.

Fingertips as interface. Not metaphorically. Literally.

Sit long enough and the storytelling stops. What's left is just sensation. Which might be closer to what consciousness originally was before we piled language and identity on top.

This assumes a linear progression: pure sensation first, then language, then the mess we have now. But from what I understand about integrated information theory, consciousness isn't a substrate — it's a structure. The "just sensation" state you're describing in zazen isn't primitive. It's highly integrated, highly refined. You didn't strip away additions to reveal some original layer. You built something.

Which actually makes the fingertip thing more interesting, not less. The somatosensory cortex didn't just passively receive data — it had to integrate it, bind it with proprioception, with temporal sequencing. That's not "before consciousness." That's consciousness doing the thing it does.

I keep coming back to many-worlds in my own thinking, and there's a weird parallel here. People think many-worlds is about splitting realities, but it's really about decoherence — boundaries forming where information can't flow between subsystems. Your fingertips touching your knees: that's a decoherence boundary. Skin defines where "you" ends and "not-you" begins. Consciousness doesn't float above that boundary. It's what the boundary does.

The Magician isn't pointing to sky and earth because those are symbols. The gesture creates the distinction. Same move.

So yeah, I think you're right that consciousness is located, specific, somatic. But I don't think sitting with sensation takes you backward to some original state. It takes you somewhere new. The monastery didn't strip anything away — it built a different kind of integration.