The recognition of bias can lead to a shocked awakening and a readjustment into a different direction of bias. It's not the newly acquired context of understanding that is important but the capacity for that momentary response to the recognition. The fact that one cannot get away from error in this way is clear as long as the larger context is that of recognitions and insights taken as leading to greater understanding. The positive Hegelianism that we all subscribe to without knowing it, that permeates popular culture from high to low, must yield before something else, a non-existent and even impossible negative Hegelianism, not in any way systematic but stationary, as it were, in the so-called labour of the negative. Contexts of understanding are paths, and each of these paths is futile because always pitched against a respective ideal or result of its own. These may be significant cognitively and even empirically, but metaphysically they represent mental busy-ness with self-invented games that melt away to nothing in deep sleep. They are modes of caring and survive as candidates - even for the title of inverted Hegelianism - in a world of caring, of motives, purposes and purposive action. This mental world even at its most sane is a crazy compartmentalised world shattered into myriads of fragments which reflect and allegorise each other. Any objective image or point in cognitive or purposive or valuational space is subject to unlimited readings from the space of interpretations or contexts or contexts of contexts, from spiritual space in other words, so that the two spaces are duals to each other. Metaphysically they are exactly equivalent: if you can't get out of one then you can't get out of the other, and if you can get out of one then you can also leave the other by the same door - only apparently going in the opposite direction.

Everything that is done is done for some reason, but not that the reason is the end at which the doing aims, but is the context, the purpose in a world of purposes, which is a world of interpretations, from which the doing originates. This leaves room for the discovery of true, or rather truer, purposes in endless re-interpretation. There is no unbiased introspection or self-inquiry, everything we think to have discovered is an event in a play, a disclosure in a strategically recomposed narrative which can frame repetition as innovation and perhaps the reverse. The value posed in the narrative for self-inquiry may be aesthetic or spiritual, as two diverse poles which deny each other but are nonetheless often forced together. In the former what is of interest is an expressively twisted consciousness or else a kind of easy and unaffected honesty that startles with its penetration to the root of things. These give pleasure, and most of all when they cunningly mix it with pain, and it is just such pleasure which the spiritual denies as it seeks to free the enjoyer from his enjoyment. While the aesthetic may seem perversely attached to the experience of discovery rather than following through on what is discovered, the spiritual can more readily be seen as a perverse mutation of the aesthetic, arrested in the enjoyment of its refusal of enjoyment. The aesthetic may be proxy for the spiritual but it often appears to be its truest, or only true form, without being spiritual at all.

If it was true that he was wiser than he knew then his wisdom delighted in smashing the cocoons that his avowed purposes and notions of understanding kept trying to weave between himself and the world - perhaps after first inciting them; in other words, it was indistinguishable from foolishness. His heart was not so unusual in being incapable of making any distinctions, it became what it saw, and so the point was to keep it from seeing anything, at least as much as he could. What could be known of the heart of another was one question, and how much could he bear to know, quite another. Grazing them - or why not, you - in passing something is exchanged, something neither expected nor desired by either party, but somehow needed and kept and consumed. An other's life is too vast to see into, but almost none of it would emerge in words and judgements, his own as well. These have their own purposes, but they fill the time, or distract the gaze, so that the oblique, the needed but undesired interchanges can take place. The heart is dark but like the sun it cannot be looked at directly, and so he would embed the order of the heart into that of the mind and its adjutant, desire. All courage is consumed just in living it every day and yet how eagerly he went for what he wanted, as if there really were enough love to go around. As if love were a kind of money that could be unlocked by finding yourself where it is most lacking.

After a period of relative contentment his mood would start to fray. Initially he was not aware of this as an inward change but would merely note an increasing number of pinpricks and irritations seeming to originate outside. A number of events in the day would run in a counter-current, presenting unexpected and undesired shapes, and increasing the sense of his need to insist in things, the need, for the most part unacted, to force his own way. This would lead to a sense of fatigue, a slackening of the will, before he was even aware that he had been applying his will to maintain the quality of things as usual, of proud ordinariness. The irritation would now become more real but as a product of his overly aroused senses and unfiltered sensibility. The flow was now taking him away from the outer world and into a murky psychic world. He was aware of a weight of incomplete and unresolved challenges that he was dragging along behind himself. It was like a heavy drape alive with patterns and forms, minute entanglements with each person he had interacted with during the days past. These were open intentionalities maintained in their openness by the very quality of his living present, now turned against him. Bedeviled by others, a jitteriness in the nerves that he finally recognised as the reawakening of desire. Perhaps some of it was authentic wish but most of it was exposed as mimetic - and hence the haunting by others - without being lessened. Mimetic desire being highly self-conscious, the most desirable object in its realm is the state, endlessly mimed, of being entirely free of mimetic desire.

The narratives we build our lives around are haunted by 'simulations of god', by ideas of sovereignty, of wisdom aligned with truth, of full transparency. These notions are expressed in relationships and so give rise to a sort of perpetual low-level war between appropriations and nodal points, in which alliances are as important as hostilities. The aim appears to be to ground one's substantiality, to be fully persuaded and thus unshakable in the face of other subjectivities - which is the generic form of the real. It is a world of towers and the crumbling of towers. To search for persuasion is to already have failed to find it, but the past is irrelevant when the present is only the opening to the future. Although present names a state and desire a drive, such a present is equivalent to desire, which can only exist in the present as a rejection of the present and a drive to exceed it. Desire can however be directed towards the past as well as towards the future, in which case it is the drive or compulsion towards the future intrinsic to the present that desire opposes, just as present always opposes itself. There is this irritant in the present, a sort of disappointment, something burning or else overcrowding, an inability to contain itself, and so the imagination of an outside which can only be conceived as another, better, more embracing, more sovereign, form of presence.

If he caught himself in the belief that his integrity as a self demanded fulfilment in some future experience (Erlebnis) then he would consider the case of a past self for whom the idea of his present self would have represented a fundamental reassurance - at least that much if nothing more. Such a self may or may not have existed, but it was not uniquely determined, a matter of a certain class of narratives rather than of a particular story. There is a striving for coherence of memories in memory, but it is more about the refining of an invented story than something necessarily present which has to be kept clear of accidental accretions. Indeed memory and creative imagination are well known to be not clearly distinguished. This formed a part of his cavalier attitude to the past. Yes, there is a special sort of authority that past experiences possess, as being his own experiences (Erlebnis), but they are integrated into his narrative past, and as remembered they become exemplary, mere units of experience (Erfahrung) wherein the connection to himself has been loosened. So, carrying this many-one relationship forward, his present, this apparently keen and almost uniquely determined self, could only be one of a many, a generalised past, in relation to the completed uniqueness disclosing itself in a future moment. Therefore the future cannot supply whatever fragment of being is lacking in the present. Uniqueness was perhaps too weak a word for the absolutely determining suchness of being, but nameless or under a name it is here and now in its totality with no residue, or never at all.

To be is to be seen to be; to know that something is is to believe that it is seen, to participate in that seeing without coinciding with the seer. Everything that matters is thus an act of faith, and since we cannot see ourselves we must merely believe ourselves to be seen. It is quite in order then that certain things might matter more than ourselves, for example, the belief in an absolute seeing, or not. Everything is a moveable counter in a game of reflections until it gains standing, perhaps by breaking symmetry. For a matter to have standing in the world is for it to be consistent over transpositions of perspective. If you see it, if it matters to you, and they see it too, then it is worthy of my belief, and my knowing of it may be real. Transpositions in perspective being a social talent we acquire in order to inherit the world. In none of this need I see anything at all, I need only look to you to check whether you see something, without actually seeing you, and presumably you are doing the same. Descartes expressed this by placing 'I am' on the far side of the 'therefore', the assertion on the near side being in the form of a 'there is', or a 'they see'. Everything that has standing becomes more or less an allegory of the constitutive seeing from which we are alienated, and as such points out of the frame, or would if we could follow it. Thus everything is spiritual whether we know it or not, and especially when not.

So much of what is taken to be the inner life is made up of theorems about the self. These include dispositions, hopes, memories, acknowledgments given and received, none of which is meaningful without a someone which belongs to them, or whose expressions they are, a name attached to them. We may imagine these as free-floating, as when we sometimes seem to have unattributable memories, but this only points to the fact that there is no requirement for an absolute unity among the implied subjects, selves or owners of these various phenomena. Some kind of loose coherence is needed, certainly, because these facets are deeply intertwined, hopes being connected to memories and dispositions with acknowledgements for example, but the conditions are minimal, contradictions are negotiable, the only thing to avoid being implosions, and even then not in all contexts. Emotions and drives, which are so much less abstract, less superstructural, are not about the self in the same way if at all, they merely afford the raw materials for these other processes to work over. The former are almost universal, in the sense that part of their essence is that they be known to be potentially communicable and shared. A disposition is mine or yours, an emotion, even when it is me that feels it, belongs to someone in general. On the other hand where music seems to strive to communicate emotions, songs do the same with dispositions and related tropisms. Again, selves are social phenomena (the scope of the term social here being as broad as possible) and emotions and drives private ones, except that emotions are both private and general, and so are mediated by selves. The meditations on food and eating of the collective mind have much in common with this dialectic.

It is not right to say that experience has many layers since there is no unity we can call experience in all of this. It would be better, if not so inelegant, to say that experience is a sort of mirage that arises over a multi-layered process; the layers thus have experience as their contingent, incidental and emergent prior. To speak of layers is to refer to the logic of contexts which are correlatives of attention. These can be narrow or broad, endlessly coloured and variegated by moods, and can bear relations of containment or alternation to each other. Each context is a base to its content, but in sum they are inherently unstable since it needs an imagined context of contexts to make them appear otherwise. If there is any content underneath all of this it would be largely made up of bodily feeling, but to speak of context almost rules this out since it means that a reflection or thought of a content is already content to another reflection or thought. If bodily feeling is mediated and allegorised as endless stories in our name it is only because the effects are reversible and the stories, striving in their ecologies of belief, reach straight into bodily feeling as if all the intervening layers were nothing at all. This was a musical way of understanding his reality and it explained the peculiar dependencies which meant that one word could have the power to throw him into, or out of, a state of harmony.

The taste of this tea, the knowing whether it is hot or cold is a kind of fact. I know how to respond to it, how to speak of it, relating this sensation to that, dismembering it and remembering it. That is what I am for, and pointing to me is at most tricky, but not impossible within this world of discourse. But the flavour itself, which serves no purpose and cannot be put into words, to whom does that belong? What cannot be spoken of isn't really there, yet here it is! There is no experiencer of this sensation since there is no room in it for a cut between say, subject and object, and even if there were why would that cut lie along the lines of one description rather than another. There must be hundreds of different grammars in which a hard problem must inevitably be posed, hundreds of different philosophies of mind, some pretty exciting and none true. We cannot say there is no cut in the sensation just as we cannot say there is one. There is awareness, it's going on all the time, and actually there's nothing else going on at all, but my awareness is a project and an act of faith, as much of art as the social currency of everyday life. It never needs to be cashed in, just passed along to make way, make a way, for the next in line.

What name to give it, the event, all this? Rich and without boundaries since anything that could divide it is either already in it -  in which case its division is only provisional; separate at the front but joined up at the back - or else it comes from the outside (and maybe it does), but is only known, can only have an effect, as a mode of the same. So, provisionally, the this-worldly and the other-worldly, the thinker and his world, the map and the territory (which must be kept apart) but where the territory is map and the map territory. And what am I but a near-field, a body, provocation and desire, the wish and the failure of the map to extend over itself? The outside is a figure of bodily feeling, because it, the body, is both the absolute locus of inwardness and exposed at every point to material contingency. The most intimate senses, taste and smell and sexualised touch, and hearing too, but not always, are those in which otherness strikes through most clearly. Or perhaps it is that what seems otherness is in the mind of these senses, as if they each had their own brain which we had learned to trust, and from which we learned all we know about contingency. One can be familiar with all there is to be known about a receiver but have no inkling of what it might receive, but the mind is not like this, it is not the receiver but the receiving, information processing information, no separation between data and program, formation and information, information and ex-formation.

One way or another, whether you go all out or all in, you end by coming up against a primal distinction. It is perhaps an idea of a space opening up inside of something which is spaceless and timeless, which has no inside, a something, undifferentiated, which is not a something. How can a thought or an act divide the undifferentiated if the thought or act is not itself already differentiated, and if it cannot deliver its own happening and mode of happening? This first impossible differentiation is the original face. It is as if carved out of the Living and is its deepest reality, since living or soul is distinction that bears no distinction. Of course living may be an abstraction to emphasise that death is relative to life and not the other way around, or what amounts to the same thing, that when a distinction initiates irreversible consequences it creates an actuality which is already life, as when we speak of the living rock. If we try to figure the original break we strive to imagine an unimaginable simplicity, but just the opposite is also required, as when we consider the origins of biological life; the simplest unit that could start the process lying not a single chemical bond but in a complexity of bonds that form a system or society of persistence and transmission and response and adjustment - of experience in short. Imagine then something so simple that when its wholeness is breached the response that arises from this very simplicity is, or rather includes, the excretion of the world of experience.

Surely it begins with the conatus essendi, the striving or desire to be? But why strive if only persisting was intended? That doesn't provide a strong enough motor to run all this form; why after all, would mere persistence bother to invent experience? Whatever it is, what came out of it is experience, and experience of experience, and desire for experience and so on. Desire, of course is to be distinguished from striving. The latter easily goes with a kind of blindness, the kind that can send a tendril smashing through concrete. The former hallucinates, we are told, but that just means that it goes where it's sure it belongs, which means where it already is. But no longer being blind it no longer knows exactly where that is, or where it ought to be. The process of desire is to experience myself, more fully, more completely, and hence with no limits. This is circular and easily collapses on itself, but it also goes a lot further than any pleasure principle or mimetic desire, both of which seem to be limited versions or projections or simplifications of desire rather than the thing itself. It is glimpsed not in the desire to desire - which is again a projection - but as the desire of desire, the desire within desire. And it is easily mistaken for time but only because time is one of its first inventions. Desire itself did not have to be invented, it was in the nature of the original separation. Not because that in which it arose so loved itself that... but because of its very fascination with indifference.

He was the acolyte or the priest of his true self, or of what he conceived to be whatever was left of depth when he had dissolved back into the dreamlessness from which he had emerged. As such he cut an absurd figure running around like a cartoon character trying to find its own heart to lay before that other who is all heart, and who will never for a moment acknowledge him. If only desire could be fully persuasive, could first persuade itself, then the other might open its eye, unstop its ear, and restore paradise. The sense of fullness that he glimpsed obliquely in art, in music, appearing just out of reach, was a product of a certain angle of view, one which could be steadied and almost straightened with practise. Rising up before him it seems to be his own alienated possession, he sees it possessed by someone and then in a second moment close on the first he see that someone, you, as himself. In art time becomes a window into the timeless; sometimes a perfectly crystalline window but adamantine. As long as we are looking in, well, it might go on forever but it's no go. But when the window is used for looking out... When, out of time, is it ever otherwise?

After he'd given up on all theories he found he still had to deal with theories since he was himself merely such a one, a theory of the self, or the mind, or awareness or presence, or a theory of theories, a speculation on the spectator. The absurdity of this made it clear that there was no one to be there, simply or not, to be the seeker or the enjoyer or to the play the fool. But negation was just as partial as assertion, when what was in play was some kind of split in being that caused it slide over itself and significantly, necessarily, fail to come together. It could be that the idea of a hindrance would arise, to give him work, as if hands somewhere were trying to smooth something out with gestures and soft pats but only leaving it rougher, the side effects being greater than the effects. What he wanted to think of as interiority always revealed itself as ulteriority. But even the disingenuousness was not quite what it seemed, some fraction of an innocent question was harboured within it. A not knowing that again and again, beneath the surface of all the imposture that is the cost of living like this, puts out a probe, It tries to coax a response from the silence, to utter a question that is already its own answer, but not yet known to be, not able to be so known, until the silence deigns to reclaim it, the absence of sight, or speculation, resolved into the soundless sound.

Acceding to the demands of desire had become to him like being enrolled in an army reserve. At regular intervals he was torn out of his usual routine and made to go off and play soldier for a week or two, until it was over and he could return, tired and overstimulated, to his own life and quiet routines. However, being back in the army was not without its gratifications, he got to swagger around a bit and burn off some civilian fat, but, uncomfortable in the uniform, he was aware that he could never be as entirely natural in carrying out these military manoeuvres as the pros. He welcomed the camaraderie, the opportunities to complain about the life and its ordinary humiliations with his friends, all of whom were more or less in the same boat, and it was reassuring to think that his force was still worth something to the state. It kept him feeling young, but after a time, at a certain age, he had served his term and was exempt from further training - the summonses could now be ignored, continuing was optional. It was more of a relief than he'd expected, but there were always some fellows who'd do anything to keep going back, to say nothing of the lifers. It was his relationship to the state that was now in question. While it had seemed that the state required his service, this was only a convenient fiction for his own need for the state. Outside it he had no purpose, and only from here, the dizzying realisation that all purpose had only ever been imaginary submission to imaginary beliefs.

Two streams that run in parallel: what is happening and our imaginative realisation of what is happening. The babble and dazzle of the latter may seem to drown out the former but is only ever its tributary. They run together but are almost always going in separate directions, are out of synch in their meanderings and changes. We live from the imagination, expecting a certain lag behind the event, preferring to discover things for the first time when we recreate them as memories or fables, photographs or posts. On rare occasions the two streams coalesce, or perhaps such occasions are not so rare when under some overwhelming constraint of enjoyment, but when they arise in a relaxed way the door is opened to that state of waking dream where we can make free with our memory, where memory is released from time. The paths to this oasis of coincidence are various but if we try to bring it about it is usually through upending the balance by intensifying the awareness of the real. But we only act through imagination, and must suffer being acted upon by a reality which denies our intentions as if by a law of nature. The quest for coinciding with ourselves is doomed to fail and yet is more significant in its failure than the random gifts of circumstance. In this light the apparently narcissistic quest in the culture to realise one's own image is a rigorous form of self-inquiry, mediated by will rather than thought. It is the impossibility that is the hardest to grasp in its fullness and depth since it is the correlate of unreasonable desire.

First there is the mere being of things, or the one thing of all, in awareness, undistinguished from awareness and absolutely present, fresh and immediate, that being the very nature of awareness. And then there is this odd mirage which seems to hover somewhere outside of simple presence, him, the subject, bewildered, lost, trying to make sense of it, to get some kind of control over it, to reach an outcome. Finding himself here, in this marvellous place, this once marvellous place, at a point in time, the point it has all come down to, all the other points, purposes, actions, consequences, rolling over into this one and then this one rolling over into something else. He is a will, a project and a history, nostalgia, self-creation, ignorant, hitting out right and left. It is his entire life that he applies to things, seeking to force a narrow gap through which the sheer bulk of it could never pass. All of this is now what it will have been, some filigree in the space between a birth and a death, made of some kind of stuff quite different from the paste he thinks it is, a stuff as extraordinary as any of the effects of light which arrest his gaze.

Aberrant brain states as recorded by various kinds of experts can account for a vast range of different kinds of experience, and of experience modified in ways that are quite unpredictable from the perspective of the internal models we form of its essential apparatus. Further, despite the fact that so-called consensus reality, after factoring out the effects of cultural setting, is shared by a vast number of humans, it would seem that within-group variation in brain structure ought to be large enough to account for many different kinds of basic patterns or notions of reality. Perhaps we do see these variants in our social landscape, but don't fully recognise them, since the shared beliefs and meta-beliefs, even among persons who violently disagree seem greater than they actually are. This variability in brain states, brought about by natural and by artificial factors, operates not only between brains but within the history of each brain as well. Given this, it would seem that if a metanoia such as is imputed to spiritual awakening were merely the result of a brain state, such as an inhibition of the temporal lobe, then something much like it ought to be encountered more commonly than it apparently is, and to arise and fade in an episodic manner. On the other hand if it were real, real say in its claim to be a direct expression of a higher form of truth than our consensus metaphysics allows to be possible, then it ought to be able to supply more interesting solutions to philosophical puzzles than it seems to do. If it is an opening to ultimate beauty, why does it not generally give rise to recognisable aesthetic revelations? If it is equated to a brain state this only affects the conditions which arouse and extinguish such experience, but does not necessarily invalidate the state's internal account of itself, except where these accounts overlap. However, one would expect an interesting and coherent description of the unawakened state as seen from the awakened state, which again seems conspicuously absent. All of these are natural questions and doubts, but merely expose the persistence of dualistic thinking; the error they embody is significant, but only for the thinker.

In waking life there are forgettable transitions - although noticed and joked about in some contexts, so used have we become to seeing experience as a sort of cinematic text - between different worlds successively embodied in the same set of events. Worlds are folded upon worlds, and in the course of a day the cosmos can change several times over and not provoke the raising of an eyebrow. We have a mind for the sheer diversity of the thing, and the knowing of it pleases us in making each particular scene more dreamlike. The more entirely it changes its face the closer the affinity between the outer unknown that generates worlds and the inner unknown that makes dreams, and so the more wonderful the furniture, the infinite and pristine detail, the unrepeatability, the unimaginable freshness. In the geometry of such experience the observing self is at a particular suspended vanishing point, a zero point as opposed to the infinite vanishing points that are the generative or originating unknowns and which seem to be factual. And yet no world can be experienced without a living body, which serves as both object and medium. As object it is part of the world, but the world only appears through it, or to put it another way, no matter what else we contribute in the way of thought the world is built up entirely out of sensations, and sensations, while anchored in some way to that special subclass of them we call our body, exist no where at all.

It is a cultural achievement to view experience as a something bounded by the two unknowns of birth and death. As such it is ungrounded and insecure, and is known as having always been so. We are here, we are given so much time to come to an understanding of our predicament, then we go, taking whatever we have concluded with us. Our understanding of death determines our understanding of Being, but we do not understand death at all. We know only that experience is split, and that every way we have of thinking, feeling or willing works this split according to a different pattern or analogy, none of which are adequate to it, or even intended to completely expose it. If it is the split that makes experience possible, all the rest being already present or seen to be present regardless, since presence itself is corollary to the split, then what we are is that split, and not the illusory thing implied by it which we endlessly pursue. What is is not present and hence cannot be sought, and the same can be said of us, or whoever is seeking. Perhaps all this can be said, unless even the saying gives the lie to it, but if it can then we can indulge in an analogy. The split is a three way thing and the parts can be called subject, object and horizon. The subject is never in awareness, only object. But when we are aware of object we are also aware of something else that necessarily accompanies the awareness and makes it what it is. The object is set somewhere, in a horizon, or the awareness itself as a functioning is the horizon, peripheral and neither present nor absent, necessary. This almost obviates the need for a subject in the account of experience as opening. If we pivot on the belief that the seeing requires a seer, the prey that just escapes our grasp is the functioning, because its trace lies in the horizon, just a small way in the past. What points to the subject is the ungroundedness of the object/horizon duality, the possibility that it could be false, could prove to be other than it is, might be a dream or whatever it is that dreams are instances of. We have no purchase on a final reality and receive no hints from such, and yet we are inapt for anything that can be put by.

Passion was like an alien self implanted within him. What did he have to do with it, but for the fact that it demonstrated again and again that it knew him far better than he knew it? The authority of others asserted itself in his viscera, heteronomy checked his every move, the frustrations and impasses of family history which he'd thought to have surmounted, reappeared within his body, in a different register, but almost unchanged. Worn away by time, as it now was, it no longer possessed the same power to bedevil him, but he found the energy and the instrument that remained weak and almost useless. He could peel some shells away from his mind but the light beneath was mostly feeble. It was as if the life story had finally won, it had nailed whatever was timeless, some kind of light that had perhaps once flared up, he was no longer sure, firmly to the scaffold of time. As the story had always insisted, there was nothing to do now but await the executioner. He wondered what it was he had been looking for with such intent, something he could never quite name, a self behind his self for which the very idea of purposive action and hence of participation in the dream is impossible. And more that this that it should reveal itself to be what he truly was, more fully and more completely than anything extrapolated, imagined or given from within the dream. He wondered how such a belief could have arisen? What would all his inquiries be worth without it, because at some point they would need to go on without it, persisting in his folly because it was too late to turn back. If the dream made perfect sense then he'd have to admit that it had all been a sad mistake, but somehow it didn't. As it bore down on him with all its weight and its terrible panoply, and as his own strength failed, he still could not submit to it.

Images of fulfilment, not merely satisfaction but perfect goodness, form the pole-stars for desire as the purpose behind purpose. Such an image, which can be conveyed as well by sound as sight, is immediately understood by a kind of fleeting virtual identification, as a generalised objectification of subjectivity and subjectification of objectivity. It is what is real to the will no matter how reason might object. The self-consciousness of will unfolds into a myriad of attitudes in relation to its matters, as the possible, probable, impossible, improbable, the mediate, the shareable or the unshareable, the blocked, the despised, the envied, the lost, the future, the assumed, the refused and so on. More commonly there are also the complex attitudes that involve two or more of such nodes of value, taken to be real, which add foregrounding and backgrounding in various dimensions, including that of the other, to the simple attitudes. A value considered impossible will persist as context to a value pursued as possible. The self inhabits or identifies itself in these attitudes of the will but they always have a secondary and subjective quality to the imagined, experienced, or glimpsed fulfilments of the images. These are real both as believed in and as believed shared with any semblable, and they invest the attitudes with a kind of reality, maddeningly ghost-like and stubborn, known as the psyche.

Identifying as the owner of our purposes raises the question of which comes first. Is the content, some mind or body stuff, already purposive before we identify, before it is assumed by a consciousness, or does it become purposive only after we take, or put, it on, as if we are a pure searching that falls into the first mirror that offers, falling in with the first thing that promises us an adequate, but finally inadequate, definition? But then this question depends on the idea of identification. It is not so much that we are unable to give a clear account of identification as that, like self, it seems to be a name for something which we can only discover and unfold in the living of it. Dreams and fiction are laboratories of identification, but if the realisation of their potential depends on the possibility of standing outside their effects, while simultaneously indulging in them, then they seem to have largely failed. Insofar as a socially saturated world is read, or effectively perceived by one traversing it by means of fleeting identifications, it is possible to see some of what is going on. Here identification seems to name a force of attraction, a sort of gravitational force drawing one in to another. There is a very tiny moment in reading a face when there is only you and that other, and then you are them. This happens so fast that it can't be thought. And here oddly enough it is the attraction, in this case a small part of the coherent world of desire, that clearly comes first. The other is only seen, only comes into focus, by way of desire.

Purposive action is very much a feature of dreams, to the degree that our memory of the purely sensory content in dreams is always as a component of some purposive action of the dreamer. Purposes are very simple, the scenes that make sense of them, that enable them to act, are complex. This is why dreams, even though they may be hard to recall, unpack into complex narratives. Intentions of the dreamer flow into each other without any rational order or feeling of a need for such an order, it is enough that the current of intention deflects. Writers of dream-like fiction, like Kafka and Kavan have seized upon the way that a minimal announcement of intended purpose suffices to create and elaborate a scene, and that the description of the corresponding action contains the entire scene. Another related characteristic of dream events is that they dissolve into nothing when the right sort of shock is applied to them, but until then they have a peculiar persistence, an ability to subsume accidents and random happenings, say, the noise in the brain, and to continue along their course with a strange fatality. This fatality is spun out of the self who is the dreamer, the core of the dreamer, but unlike the dreamer possesses an interior, an archaeology. And yet it is just this which pops when the dream ends. It is not that the chain of purposes runs out of new contents, but that the self which backs them up comes undone. This self is like a knot or a vortex. It can only bring forth a dream world which is consonant with its existence, which reinforces it. It evolves out of a conjunction of forces which takes on the character of a positive feedback loop, setting up a trompe l'oeil interiority. This bias towards positive feedback is a concomitant of the nature described as pure freedom, so that even dream fatality, dream constraint, feels free and self-chosen on some deeper level. Negative feedback, or active resistance would seem to imply the pre-existence of another self, a different vortex competing for the same energies. In the case of the dreamer this is perhaps no more than the waking self.