On consciousness and the world

I was lying on a ledge of earth deep in the bush above a great crevasse, across from a waterfall, and I was very aware of myself and the boundaries of myself, my cheek against the earth, the sounds of birds and leaves, the warmth of the earth under my body, and I thought about how exactly the same this all would be if I were still the child I had been once, even if my body would have been smaller and more supple, and I had a sudden understanding of what Tim Parks was writing about in a book called Out of my Head, about Riccardo Manzotti's theory that consciousness does not take place in our heads at all, but beyond the self, in what he calls the "spread mind".  For Manzotti, there is no separate awareness of an apple taking place in the head - the apple itself is where the experience is.  I read this book thinking it was another example of how philosophical rigour always seems to lead into absurdity, or depends on using words in ways no one else uses them, and argued with it the whole way through - in my head, of course, where all my words are, and where I do my thinking, and where my consciousness resides.  For Manzotti, the head isn't even where I would remember that sense of the world I had, the experience of myself in the world, that constituted my consciousness when I was on that ledge.  A memory still exists in the same place as it did, on that ledge, no matter what time I am accessing it from (I think this was the argument).  And for a moment, there on the ledge, what had seemed impossible to understand just seemed so obvious it hardly needed to be thought.  Of course I had no separate consciousness in my head apart from the world where the experiencing of the world was taking place.  I was just in the world, and who I was, was the edges of myself in contact with the world where it all was going on.  It was the world creating the I, not the I creating the world.   Funny how connected this made me feel, though, not only with the world but with my younger self, the child I used to be.