Walking the same streets for so many years, doing the same errands, putting in time in the same rooms, he kept seeing certain recurrent faces which he could observe over time as they grew old, and he would know by that that he too was growing old in the same way, was moving side by side with them in the same river. They seemed to grow into themselves, these faces, and to grow more damaged and more distant, descending ever deeper into their own caves. Unable to see himself directly he needed these reflections, as plain as the mug of any man in the street, so that he could see in regard to his own ventures, his own ambitions, that they were not directed for an assault on truth using cunning tools forged in the mind that shared in the ruthless clarity of those of science, but rather that they were a circling around a central phantasm. The process, it shocked him to discover, was the continual generation of copies of himself, a continuous stream of slowly mutating souls. There was no option of renouncing it, of backing out of this viral self-generation, since there was no will outside the what was re-created, breath by breath, in the process, and so at these intermittent moments of unveiling, which of course were no deviation but also recurred if more rarely, the only choice was the paradoxical one of resuming yet more strongly.

Being in the story but also retaining a perspective, which is the mode of functioning in a world, means that there are multiple points of view in play. This always the case, it is part of that excess of consciousness that assures us we are alive, and which we only reluctantly grant to those other points of view which are merely objects to us and which might we share (as common objects) with our closest interlocutors. These can be displaced on the pure axis of time, making them the viewpoints of ourselves in the past or in the future - polarities which seem to carry roughly equal weight - or else differing on a purely spatial axis which makes them the viewpoints of others, either of people in our immediate circle, where they might be our peers or others presumed to know more or know less than we do, or they are people we are forced to imagine who may be no less real, cultural figures or synthetic positions generated by the culture and posed as invariants in relation to contingent changes. It is insufficient to say that they all come together, simply constituting a living perspective, as if they are effortlessly synthesised like the visual fields of our two eyes, or the heterogeneous visual and auditory fields, no, these multiple points of view readily clash and putting them together is a positive task which may not succeed, rarely succeeds perfectly, and in fact the clashing itself, the disharmony of different streams in each of which we exist as some kind of elemental and partial persona conveys a sort of energy, a turbulence, which might be enough in itself since we only have to ride it. When the synthesis of perspectives does take place, opening an unexpected sense of space, or even breathing room, then it is what we call art and admire as truth, a second-degree perspective that lends order but introduces its own cardinal axes. To enter into this space is to come under the influence of ideas more powerful than our own merely contingent awareness, ideas which define the very contingency of our awareness, so that we are inclined to rate them at more than their true value. Experience shows us that they are as lacking in fundamental orientation as the constituents of the initial flux. What is needed, and we seem to see hints of this everywhere now is a third-degree perspective.

Much of the time he was caught up in one story or another, a story being a scheme in which discrete decision-points punctuate intervals in which everything is dictated by external causality, including his own actions, and where an evolving series of relationships determine the range of paths which he is free to embark upon, as if these are questions he can put and then wait and see what the answer will be, although most of the time it is only further questions that come. This kind of thing goes on and on in a dance of varied formations that almost perfectly repeat over and over again never quite exhausting a dismally small set of elements in permutation, his materials. He lives this thing with all his no longer young forces as it circles on itself and blindly resumes without ever counting the entrances and exits. Put down like this it is recognisable but there is no clue to what makes it so inescapable, so absorbing. He is simultaneously in it and out of it, he sees its horizon and by that is already some way beyond the horizon, but it is just this hint of transcendence, of being superior to the play, that provides the motive power that keeps him pushing for the apparent goals, giving life to the feelings generated by the raisings up and the tumblings down, his all too operatic personae, that are the inevitable, the algebraic, accommodations of the game.

Imagine two people arguing about whether all human relations are hierarchic. The one who refuses to acknowledge hierarchy still does so for hierarchic reasons, but they may not directly concern his relations with his interlocutor. A can take a position with B in order to consolidate the attitudes on which his relations to C depend, while B and C know nothing of each other. To be engaged in argument is weakly non-hierarchic since contention is supposedly on a common ground. When you win an argument you have asserted a certain kind of dominance, but while engaged in the argument you have staked your position. A position staked is not the same as the identical position presumed unchallenged, but a position is only a position by virtue of the challenges it can withstand. An equal hierarchical position of two people one of whom is rising and the other falling, generally speaking, are not the same. One ascending the ladder tends towards idealism, and the one descending towards realism; the first identifies with values larger than his own, while the latter experiences the implosion of values previously held. Someone might insist on their idealism in order to convince themselves or others that their position is rising, or to identify with a putatively rising tendency in a more general sphere. There are also many varieties of false realism, since realism has the somewhat contradictory attributes of being associated with loss of status and of being naturally more powerful than idealism in argument, at least by its presumption of resting on fewer assumptions. The tediousness of all 'outsider' positions; to combine the rectitude of the pessimist with the superciliousness of the optimist.

Dreams may be a side-effect of the brain's housekeeping but there must be some reason why a system so good at shielding consciousness from other necessary and ancillary labours should insist that it participate in this one. Whatever the manifest content of dreams they generally force you to feel things you were resisting feeling, things at the edge of range of acceptability for the waking synthesis. Simple defences against insecurity which work pretty well in the waking state lose their effectiveness in the dream state because of a small augmentation in the transparency of consciousness. The medium becomes too thin and suddenly it is impossible to build anything enduring enough to sustain an entire episode for a coherent protagonist. Instead the episode comes to be about the defence itself, or rather about a process, in some general sense, of which the defence is one instance. The plot may become absurdly twisted but the succession of moods, the ways in which actions incur certain feelings, is dictated from the heart of the proceedings in which the same mind plays prosecutor and defence. Each dream is a case, and hence that vaguely forensic atmosphere that pervades them. In the waking state a change of mood may be linked to the sudden activation of an accuser, but part of the quotidian defence is to see this encounter as an isolated event; in a dream the accuser is backed by an entire, but mostly invisible, system, one which has something shady and dishonest about it since it is in fact no other than ourself that lies behind it. It is as if in order for the brain to carry out its maintenance it must  turn the lights up even brighter, must increase the level of consciousness, and so in order to counter all the confusion this could cause it paralyses or depresses some other functions, such as memory - access to old memories as well as formation of new ones - and as much rational interconnectedness as possible.

There is a kinaesthetic component in self-awareness from which arises its quality of being located in a certain spot in the felt body. This spot is generally somewhere at the back; its being at the back coming before any sense of what it is the back of. It is inside the head while the world is all the way out there, and forwards is outwards. And within the head it is behind the eyes, yet only so far back. We can move the centre of awareness around inside the felt body but only to a limited degree. Growing calmer and consciously detached from our usual concerns it recedes back but only to remain within the boundaries of the subjective body. Our relaxing is an act of will and even our surrender of the capacity to intervene, as when we are awaiting sleep, is still a kind of will, and therefore is located in relation to a subtle musculature, an inner awareness of the energetic tensions that articulate this body. It is a body made up out of ideas and dispositions of action and intents, a sort of ministry of will, and while awareness in its purity does not fall under this category, it happens, in its perfect trustfulness, to be always linked to some act or process of thought, even just a shadow or image of will, which is enough to confine it within the cage of the body. This relationship of confinement is maintained even in dreams, for the most part, where the imagination is given free licence to reconceive the body as an entire world, as long as the essential containment is maintained. It is only in certain altered states that the correlation is broken, so that for example, you find yourself moving rapidly backwards in a far vaster space that begins behind your head. The feeling may be strange but awareness suffers no discontinuity or disorientation, rather a sense of relief, of a weight taken away, of an obtuse error, unworthy of the least nostalgia, suddenly abandoned.

The virtual 'I' is located a small distance behind the eyes and, being single, in the space between them. When you shut your eyes and go into subjective awareness it is as if a screen has been unrolled a little way in front of an observer who floats in a dark and empty space about the size of a small watermelon. You are that observer, but you are also another observer who observes him and is located off to one side, so that you can see his gaze helplessly bringing about and absorbed by the meanings with which he endows the shadows flitting on the screen. This second ironic gaze is always a sideways one because it sees both the naive gaze, which still defines the central axis, and its object, but it occupies the same intimate enclosure at the rear of the space of the entire event as if to remind us that it is never absent, that it is an integral part of every appearance. The various subject positions that constitute a theatre come to mind, of which the audience member and the figures on stage are only the latest parts, while at least equally essential are the projectionist, and the effects manager, and the ushers, and the others who may no longer even be present, the writer and the director, the theatre manager, impresario and even the ticket seller, or again in the cinema, the names that slide by in an enormous roll at the end of the credits and whose individual functions you can barely guess but of which you know that each one of them was immunised against the illusion to which you have just been surrendered by being privy to its creation out of quite heterogeneous materials. In drawing such analogies between technologies of appearance and consciousness the possibility remains open that the technologies were shaped by the latent analogy with consciousness as much as that our notion of consciousness was suggested by the structure of the technology. The camera is like an eye, and the mammalian eye is like the independently evolved eye of the squid.

So many offerings, different recognitions, qualities of spirit that you could almost map, like the great zodiac of life. None of them belongs to you but only among those you don't possess is there one you so feel the lack of that in every other it is the very measure of insufficiency, of the vital gap. You locate yourself not by all the good within your reach but by this lack, and it defines you, or would do so if you once could admit that while desire may have no intrinsic value gratification of desire has even less. But then one day you stumble on a state which is the perfect availability of this missing essence. Is this like coming home, or does it advance the screw of exile one more half-turn? The conception of life is on a different plane from the living, but tantalisingly close, so that we long to lose ourselves in the positive wealth of conceptions rather than face the dire poverty of realisation, collapsing in one stroke desire, distance, place and being, map and territory.

Through a side door, deduce the outline of it, but again not so much. What is heard more than what is seen, but you cannot imagine how little it matters. Put your finger down and press very softly, hear the velvety note pass like a distant bell, the blue prism quiver as if through water, and at the other end of it everything intact, just as it was. Now and in the moment of our now, so blooming. Can you get low enough under your life where this always is? Thoughts resign when their object appears, when wonders ever cease.

What is now, or in the interval of time just elapsed, without self-consciousness, seems to be just simple finite being, bounded snugly by its own experience, and to have been the perfect expression of the subject, exactly because of the absence of any thought of there being a subject or of its needing expression, the very absence of any demand for something more.  This adequation of life, which makes spiritual inquiry seem to be a slightly disreputable activity, something not in good faith when all is said and done, is the natural attitude of life in the world, and is what might later be rediscovered as suffering, a suffering so continuous as to have altogether dropped below awareness. This confidence in itself on behalf of life, the mind's habitual overwriting of insecurity, is active no matter what the experience through which it is expressed happens to be, however much this experience might itself enact a striving to reach beyond its limits, driven by pain and discontent, etc., etc., by crazy ideas of what needs to be different, or conversely by satisfaction, by sovereign approval of some peak mood. Being a self, however, is the capacity to apply the acquired skill to read and interpret other minds to one's own case. Do you look at yourself as if you were looking at another mind, or do you consider what an other mind would find on looking at you? It's unlikely that these opposing tendencies can be distinguished o prevented, but either way another perspective has always already shattered the pretence of simplicity. This is why there can be no such thing as unit of life, or an atom of satisfaction to be placed permanently on our account.

The temptation to reflect on the absence of reflection, to regain the reflective self, a self-evident good, at any cost. There are various discursive modalities that have their own version of truth, their own hard-headed and distinctive foundational rationality: artistic, scientistic, political, theistic, cynical, pseudo-Dionysian (in both senses), the middle voice, and so on. These have become  rather sophisticated from living so in the world, and each is aware of its own blind spots as something not only to avoid but to draw power from too. They self-deconstruct with ease and in their stride. The mind has endless excuses, and inexhaustible charm, and who after all is there to tell it otherwise? Excuses for what? Simply for going on, for not stopping.

The modality of pure experience (Erlebnis) is enjoyment and not belief. With belief we can infer a central detached and deliberating agent, some kind of ongoing measurement, comparison and evaluation and thus a certain ineradicable distance, a withholding of full assent, or even a giving of it but only on condition, and still provisionally - leaping out of a 'plane, but only after first checking the parachute. That there is such a distance is a truth of experience (Erfahrung), but it is a posterior truth, the sad discovery that nothing ever quite measures up to expectation. But if experience were faith then the distance would be a prior condition. As good Bayesian engines we would even be amenable to persuasion, which we are not, although that too is a truth of experience. In enjoyment there is no distance, and if distance is still claimed as a possibility this refers to a conscious discipline, an ataraxia, that is prompted by disappointment, and hence by the addition of a form of belief, namely the expectation about the duration of the enjoyment, that it will persist, or will soon end. How it is that the self or subject arises again and again with no separation from enjoyment, and in the very present of the enjoyment, whether positive or negative? This is the mystery that demands to be known, and in this demand, the mind is forbidden its usual strategy which would be to insert the finest of wedges between the self and its enjoyment, or between the enjoyment and its enjoyer.

The mind with its different identities seems to be cunningly assembled  - by way of a division of labour, interlocking dependencies and minimal effort, or maximal energetic efficiency, in each agent - in order that it can work successfully, that is, process the living in the interest of life. That it fails to do so in so many instances may be the result of a strategic response on the part of life to the intrinsic and absolute uncertainty of the demands of living; life's response to irreducible uncertainty being scattershot variability. In this pragmatically inclined way of thinking success is a measure of conformity to reality, and hence a measure of truth, on the understanding that since the reality is ever-changing there can be no a priori criterion of truth. All of this ignores the many uses of failure. Agents may be designed to fail under certain conditions so they can self-destruct and release their energies for other agents. Failure may be part of success, or even one of its rewards. Success justifies itself and needs no commentary and so our systems of value are designed to give meaning to failure. An intensified self-awareness is a natural consequence of failure because in this case the next step does not follow, so we are inclined to accord a high value to such awareness. But this somewhat Nietzschean perspective is too simplistic since awareness or consciousness, pushed far enough leads upstream of all conferring of value, upstream of the will which is merely another name for life. If we are living beings who put being in question, this is only because we can also put living in question. The difference is that the one kind of questioning is speculative and the other is experiential and a posteriori, demanding as its condition that we first fail, and gloriously so. 

What passes for a self is an inner personality, and it seems that there is not one but many of these, a sort of community that sincerely believes itself to be singular. The more thoughtful or responsible of these, answering to a managerial role and its duties, spend a lot of time wondering just how they could have done or said various things, how they could have missed seeing this and forgotten what they had resolved about that. They are puzzled as to how they could have been the character whose consequences they must now deal with when they remember only partially what that character felt like to be. It seems to them, that character being no other than themself, that their memory is faulty in not establishing more immediate lines of communication across time, so that when they come to act they will share, or at least be aware of, the perspective that they have when reflecting in the aftermath of action. A lot of talk is expended, and a lot of ink spilled, in the treatment of what ought perhaps be a politics or sociology of internal personae, of the part selves that make up our supposed self. The florid cases of multiple personality that we sometimes read about are only slightly more exaggerated versions of the condition that even the most integrated of us live. A lot depends on the kinds of relationships that prevail between these personages. As the multiple personality cases show us, they are generally aware of each other, even if they lack empathy or mutual memory and insight into internal states, and they are able to behave towards each other in various pro-social ways, making life easier or harder for their sequential stablemates. They can be helpful and harmonious in their internal relations and they can be bullies, and certainly both at the same time. What is striking is how little neurological or psychic investment is needed to maintain each one of these little selves. It is as if the activity of the mind is naturally expressed by overlapping patterns of circular ripples like the surface of a puddle in the rain.  

The truth is what survives being challenged by the truth, or less paradoxically, the truth that endures is the remainder of the truth that destroys. The truth, however, may be that no truth endures, but we are never in a position to say so. Metaphysically, which means here in the context of our most all-embracing and un-negotiable sense of reality - or the last reality tested by suffering, dispossession and death - truth admits time and succession, is forced to do so by the very time-bound nature of these limit experiences, and hence the mode of destruction which is supervention cannot be foreclosed. In time it is always possible for one reality to be followed by a different reality, far beyond all hope. Personal or psychological truth is destroyed in a different way since it is tied to a subject and grounded on a perspective. Its centrality is not the same as its truth, but it cannot maintain a claim upon truth - even that it has a truth to claim but which currently eludes it - if it loses its centrality. To overturn a truth claim by a subject it is enough to overturn the subject, which means his assumption of centrality, and the most effective way to do this is by another subject with another centre. So when I resolve to be true to myself, to endeavour to honestly admit my own motives, at least in the privacy of my mind, I immediately come against my own lack of any clear foundation, my ungroundedness and essential relativity, the internal register of the destructive Leninist interrogation, "Who, whom?"  

To believe it possible to change course is to misunderstand the journey-like quality of experience by taking the landscape as somehow fixed and our movement through it as a progress directed by an ever more enlightened, or simply more clued-in, navigator. The situation of life is the throwing out of a succession of these dream-like complete scenes, these stanzas with actor, motive, context, obstacle and goal all integrated, and the illusion of depth in which the subject defines his freedom an inveterate effect of structural parallax. Where there was work done, undeniably, because we always know when we have put in an effort, where new habits are installed crowding out old habits we believe that real change has been achieved, and if the change is less than we had hoped for we can't deny that all that work must have amounted to something. And it gives us something to talk about over coffee, sitting at a table by the side of the way, in a new place that has suddenly appeared and whose unaccountable fitness to our new self we don't seek to question. So while it is dismaying to discover that none of the old places has ever been left behind, that the worst of times, the most clueless, belongs as much to the unchanging quality of this thing, this upwelling out of nowhere, as the best, that we won't ever be once and for all some renovated self, it is also the only positive as well, since it points to the simple fact that there has never been anywhere to get to, that even the best of journeys was never the point, that we are always at exactly the same distance from the gateless gate, the unmotivated, unprompted, impossible collapse of time's lure.

The phenomena of addiction, and we all have our addictions however we discount them, demonstrate the paradox involved in identification with the will. From 'I want and the truth is in my desire' to 'I need and the need overcomes me no matter how much I fight against it' is there really such a great distance? You might say it is a matter of how each fits into the ecology of the self, the entire internal politics of autonomy and heteronomy, of the good and the bad, the avowed and the secret, the public and the private, but this only points to the fact of a fundamental duality in matters of the self as will. Say that there is a party of sincerity and a party of authenticity and that these two parties are inseparable, that they each need the other in order to define themselves, and that the position of the self is that of an office for which they compete. A symmetrical treatment like this doesn't quite capture the essence of the thing, since the authentic is the side of transgression and passion, and thus of the courting of a surrender of autonomy and selfhood, traditionally of the bad. This authentic bad, unlike the good, does not pretend to be able to stand on its own, and the best case it can make, and it often makes it very well, is that the good is limited, insipid, and somehow stuck in a superficial relation to reality. The goals of the good can only be truly achieved by a descent into the bad. The ideal of the pure good will is of an impossible poise, and if it lacks the innate wisdom to resist the seductions of the bad then it would be better to yield to them fully in order to expose them and be less susceptible to them in the next round - which is also impossible unless it call in divine aid. And so it goes in endless ramifications. One can be busy enough with these dramas to consume several lifetimes, without noticing that what it actually at stake has been subtly pushed behind an experiential mediation and lost sight of, so that it can never be approached any closer no matter how many rounds of the game are played.

Inquiry into the self, or even meditation in the un-technical sense, is a discursive operation, which means that while it calls on analytic and synthetic thought, it is organised around inner speech. This is where themes for development in attention are introduced and mediated or dismissed by means of other themes. Here the self naturally assumes the guise of the inner speaker, and with that all of his mannerisms, say a certain incorrigible naivety and a deference to a certain culturally and linguistically defined common sense - because certainly common sense for an Australian embraces different stagings of implicit meaning from that of a Russian or a French or a Chinese. But the internal speaker, the discursive 'I' is often taken by surprise by the self who acts, and this very surprise furnishes the reflective inner voice with many of his themes, which already implies that the one who acts is more the self than the one who speaks. The self in purposive action, whether the purposes concerned are fully conscious and approved or not, is a strongly inflected self, and so an inner constancy can be assumed which may not be apparent from the superficial inconsistency of one's acts. This points towards further and deeper layers suggestive of the notion of an authentic self, and lying in the direction of desire, or purpose beyond action. A certain culture or internal politics of desire may then be seen as the house of the most authentic self of all, and the experiences this leads to in the relative autonomy which it is granted opens into a an even deeper realm of self which are validated by events we may call self-shattering. At this point we have reached a sort of sacrificial ethic of the self, the self being what you give yourself for, what you die for, in a little or maybe not so little death. All of these versions of self are actually quite diverse and probably defy any transcendental synthesis, so that if they point to a paradoxical unity it is along the lines of that lyric from a Chris Smither song which announces, "I'm not the passenger, I am the ride." 

Trying to maintain attention while sleepy and reading or listening to music it is easy nod for a moment and fall into a very brief dream. These events of other consciousness are not really dreams but fragments of dreams, or pre-dreams, as if you have plunged into the midst of a story taking place in another scene and have not had time to orient yourself. It's not even clear if you were just there in that scene, or it was only the scene, because it is almost impossible to remember anything of it when you jerk back into your drowsy mind in the present, only that it was quite vivid, seemed quite natural, and had nothing to do with anything you can think of. If emerging from it seems a jump-cut, moving into it must have been seamless, since you can never catch the moment when the other scene takes over. At best you can catch yourself just before falling into it, on which you'll give you head a little shake and feel the effort of coming awake again. It is as if the blocking in of the situation is entirely effortless, and the first thing that happens is that the situation comes into focus, a situation consisting of a setting and some other characters already engaged in various activities. Presumable it is only after a further interval, which might be permitted to develop later when you are lying in bed but not now, that what we normally call a dream can crystallise out of these preliminaries, and when this happens your role thickens and takes on the motives and purposes of a character fitted with a self into which a familiar coordination of thoughts, feelings, memory and of distinctions such as of self and other, inside and out, earlier and later, can be located, which is your self. Only in the this later phase can it become a dream. What this shows is how much more goes into having a self, it is like the meaty flavour in a soup that comes from adding a few bones, without which you would have just had a thin, evocative but unsatisfying vegetable infusion.

A dog barks at something, but a cat's miaow directs attention to its desire. Humans, even with the least intentional gesture, assert or transmit something of themselves into the space surrounding them. It could be called mana, this spontaneous distortion of the ontological field around each person, a certain unspoken demand for attention which exerts a definite force, weak or strong, positive or negative. Above a certain intensity we would likely refer to it as charisma, but why not extend this term to the entire spectrum of force of personality, from the least, or even negative, to the greatest? Although it can operate silently this force is best understood through the modality of sound, since the effect survives in sound recordings and is particularly powerful in songs or the various forms of popular music such as hip-hop, where it is mundane enough that it can be technically manipulated and re-created. All of this class of sounds are inhabited, invested expressions of self as aural energy, and are quite different from the kind of energy aroused by the beauty in random environmental sounds like the lapping of water or the wind in trees, or even cars passing on a road. It is only human voices which can evoke this incantatory magic and threaten us with its power, although an echo of it remains in the sound of musical instruments, especially those which approximate the timbre of the voice. Imagine a mature adult first hearing a church organ or a violin! It is likely that our own thoughts, in so far as they are silently heard, share in this phenomenon of surplus intensity, and in this way come to seem to be expressions of varying selves, normally bracketed together as one. On the verge of sleep one can sometimes hear one's own thoughts as if in the voice of another, and presumably in dreams this potentially plural investment is taken to its natural conclusion.

I like to think that I'm serious about these things, but it is really an elaborate piece of play-acting and play watching, an entertainment centred around the notion of insights. If I am the investigator then a moment later with precisely the same earnestness I am the pursuer of some derisory half-dream thought that has flown in from nowhere. The point is this non-distinction in the personas of earnestness, which are embodied just as readily, believe in themselves just as innocently, and fail by just the same degree to impress the veritable subject, even as one dons the guise of a German professor, and the next a blase schoolgirl, or an arrogant mastermind, or a bitter failure, or an admiring fan, or a doubt-wracked priest. As phenomena the only difference between deep realisation and ephemeral presumption is an ecological one, akin to that between a rare flower and a weed, it lies in the alliances that foster or suppress them. But in spite of this the'I'-ness is always fully invested each new thought. The thought may itself be, or enact or function as, a holding back, but there is no holding back of the investment in the thought. The self has no agenda that it needs to protect. This is a state of affairs that can't be undone by altering some belief or meta-belief. The nature of the mind is to produce thoughts as the expressions of an 'I', which is an extraordinary complication if, as many believe, no such thing exists. Thought appears as if it consists of generalised utterances, and there are plausible explanations for this, so the 'I' may be no more than an effect of the virtual social context of deliberative mind. But even here there needs to be a distinction drawn between, merely tactical 'I's and strategic ones.

Each event that arises in the field attention, whether as the outcome of a prior volitional act or unexpectedly imposing itself, is accompanied by sense of ownership by the self, which is a distinctive and sharp modality more on the side of feeling than of thinking. It is easy to overlook the oddness of something so everyday as the fact that everything that comes up, by doing so as part of my experience, thus retraces the outline of my existence. It is not that the 'I think' is or can be added on to it that makes it mine, but the other way around; because it is mine I can reflect on it as significant for me, as a significance existing entirely within my sphere of meaning. The field of attention ought to be divided into a centre and a fringe, since when something is focal everything else arranges itself in concentric rings of receding impact all around it. Some things are peripherally attended to and can immediately become focal if the need arises, others are more distant and as if merely represented by a place-holder until changes in context might need to bring them forward. All that this means is that it is easy to disavow the way that everything must pass through the needle's eye of the 'I'. The modalities by which a thing can form part of my world are rich in versions of mediation and spatialisation so that it is natural to believe that something not in the focus of attention is still there, like the tree in the forest that no-one hears fall. This is of course precisely the transcendental illusion, and the deeply held conviction that there is something not mine is itself entirely mine.

The notion that consciousness arises when a system with a vast number of possible complex states converges upon one such state, a notion that is cognate to the observation that the neo-cortex is characterised by a wildly promiscuous network of interconnections between its subsystems, unlike other more specialised parts of the brain where efficient operations are facilitated by a rigid division of labour. Normally one would expect that such a density of interconnection would create a level of chaos that would deny the stability needed for any significant operations to be accomplished in any subsystem, but then when you consider that any such operation must be ready to be instantly modified, remade or destroyed, must be both significant and momentary, convergent and frictionless, this may make more sense. The pattern of interconnections brings about a vast multiplication of states through all the possible interactions, and not limited to pairwise, of subsystems. Like all such theories the attractions of this one mask the fact that the very thing it purports to explain is not at all explained, but merely repositioned in the terms of the theory, and with all its original mystery intact. What is curious is that the pattern of this theory is strikingly similar to the mysterious collapse of the wave function notion in classical quantum theory and to the multiverse theory as a solution to the cosmic fine-tuning problem. In all cases what is at stake is the selection, or choice, of one out of a vast or even infinite space of possibilities, and always on behalf of ordinary reality, of things as they are, or simply of what is. It is reminiscent of an earlier, suggestive, but apparently quite misleading identification between the structure of the atom and that of the solar system. These vague isomorphisms are doubtless equally misleading. In the case of the multiverse as resolving the stumbling block of the so-called anthropic principle, it would seem to have the theoretical consequence that the universe we find ourselves in ought to be highly typical of any universe able to contain sentient beings capable of evolving the intelligence required to wonder at being in such a universe. But if this is so, it makes the Fermi paradox much sharper than it already is. And, following the clue of the shared pattern, we may also wonder what the equivalent of this paradox is at the level of consciousness?  

As a protagonist, the hero of your own adventure, this all seems rather disappointing. One goes into the mind and takes a look around and it looks like the same barren place as it always has, after you've removed as much of the furniture as you could and quite a bit of the rest has worn away with the effects of time and negligence and your incessant tinkering and irregular scrutiny. But is the mind like a room, is that a useful metaphor, does it take you any further? Is it a place you want to stay in, is everything you need really here, like the room in Pascal's famous saying, it being a matter of learning to stay put? Or is the process of making it habitable only an intermediate step, and now you are to see where you can go to from here, so it is more like a base of exploration? The ambiguity is in whether the mind is the inhabitant or the dwelling, or if we admit that it is both, whether it can be both at the same time? The mind seeks to resolve its multitudes, its infinite adaptability into a single momentary figure of extreme particularity, to draw pure potentiality into the definiteness of experience. The potentiality cannot be directly experienced, it seems an abstraction but if it were not present and effective in some sense then the realisation of any experience, that it is only itself when it shines forth out of a background of all the other things the moment could have been but wasn't, would be meaningless, and so the distinctive modality of experience would be lost. We can call any such definite experience (erlebnis) a dwelling for the mind, but then also it is the experience which dwells momentarily in the mind, in its theatre, its space; the mind hosts the experience, the experience hosts the mind. Perhaps it is precisely because the mind first hosts itself, that its indefiniteness closes on its indefiniteness, that all of this is possible? In that case boredom would have its concealed treasure, would be no more than the belief in a centrifugal force.

If it all comes down to belief then logical categories are fundamental. That this depends on that, that this other is certain or provable, or necessary or apodictic in some sense, and that other is hypothetical and so on, such considerations would belong to the hidden scaffold of the world. The world in which I find myself and the 'Í' who finds himself in it are each phenomenal, which means that in themselves they are momentary appearances. The mode of appearance of the 'I' entails a mysterious endurance (this mysteriousness being itself phenomenal, although quite irreducible), as if it had an 'identity' that persists across the flux of appearances. Identity too may be no more than an inflexion of a phenomenon due to an associated family of appearances, those of memory. We know however that memory is unreliable and full of gaps, and is in service to belief, to the believability of the world it helps construct - again, phenomenal modalities. In waking life we have a full immersion in a world which integrates subjective and objective phenomena combined with a strong belief in the reality behind the latter, while in dreams we have something similar but with much weaker criteria for consistency. On awakening we experience the complete dissolution of dream worlds. But what we experience in dreams is imagination subjected to a need for coherence, however myopic, so that whatever strange event arises it is woven plausibly into the dream narrative at the expense of its coherence on a larger scale. In so far as we are peripherally aware of being engaged in creating the dream we also participate in the urge to keep the dream going, like a bubble of belief that we are trying to protect from bursting. This means that we must view the confidence inspired by our waking belief in a world consistently underwritten by an external persistent reality with a certain scepticism. The creative power of belief must by its nature be in excess of expectation.