What could be more ordinary in a day than a walk down the street. Points of interest, the eye drawn there and there - this is for you, something you know, or want to know, to know about, to taste, it connects with some thought you've had which in turn flickers and wakes, is aroused, a line of thoughts lights up, you are in it, something being brought back -  you have a home here, a place, your recognition, even if the feeling is a certain awkwardness, it is a habitual awkwardness and fits you like an old boot - all of this in a moment, new with each moment, little pings like the sounding of musical notes, complex and multilayered, with different flows going different ways with different speeds, but not going anywhere, moving like moiré patterns. A lot may be going on, but functionally it just supports a mood, a good enough mood that sees you through to the next part, the next thing to do. A pleasant enough life, nothing special, this occasion and countless others in this street or other streets which after a few days or a few years were your street and wore your face, or faces. So this is consciousness? That a world appears, that a world appears to a one, that a one appears to a world. A whole house around that one, ports left open, but can he respond?

If it was represented in music then these periods of wonder at the astonishing fact of presence would be strange oases in, but also out of, the flow of musical development. They don't answer any questions, or respond to any call, or lead to anywhere, and they have a tenor which is neither a positive nor a negative state, neither active nor passive, a subdued quality which reads perhaps as a kind of cosmic nostalgia in which desire and passion are disengaged, are put into neutral. If the unfolding drama, or dharma, has no place for them, then equally they give no place to it; emotions viewed from here seem deliberately chosen and unnecessary, not prompted by any genuine desires of yours but by a random selection out of all the desires that are in play, out of the great noisy process of the world, which is properly yours only in its entirety or not at all. The lie is the selection, and the illusion that you are that selection.

And you always come back to the one persistent inquiry: how can it be? How can it come about or appear as it does? What permits the use of words like appear, mind, world, consciousness, being, self? What is this? This this this? (It has not always been these words, but they are the words now.) What does it mean to go forward with words like these? Who or what is wondering? What is the difference between asking who or asking what? And so on. The questioner takes himself somewhat seriously, but he feels consumed by the questions, like the oil in a lamp, there is less of him each time, and when he is used up, there is only the wick to burn, and then what? For the questioner these questions emerge against the novelistic, they emerge from it and cancel it, and this is what makes them so extraordinarily beautiful. To consider the situation of this character as if his world is a novel, a constructed world. What ironies is he unwittingly submerged in? All those passionate feelings stirred up, like music so loud you can't think, but something drives them, enjoyment, the promise of enjoyment - how good it is to possess the promise of enjoyment, how many situations would you give just for the promise? And for what would you sacrifice all situations? Not such a big sacrifice, really, since you've only ever had them on loan.

The ability to shift back and forth between simple immersion and immersion-via-witnessing is what seems to define your status as free subject, it is not just the excess over experience in knowing that it is you who is experiencing, but the freedom to shift focus between these two modes. Actually there is far less of this freedom than you think, not only can't you maintain it as you move in and out of various states in the course of a day, but often you cannot tell if you are really witnessing or if you only just think you are, that is, have only added on some conventional feelings of self-consciousness, reduced it to shorthand. The problem is not that witnessing is weak but that it is mislocated onto the autobiographical self. This is an error but a productive one. Stream-of-consciousness as a literary technique arose out of a fusion of art forms in the late nineteenth century and over the course of the next hundred years diffused into literary and mainstream fiction and via TV and movies into everyday speech and modes of thought. Every new turn of phrase that spreads virally casts a fleeting beam of light across the face of that persistent illusion, the self who is both participant and witness, and consolidates its claim to existence. The urge to substantiate this claim, its very strength and persistence, the extraordinary satisfaction that arises from its fleeting victories and the black despair that attends its collapses, which happen so easily and so predictably, should alert us to its futility. It is based a category error that would be laughable if it were not so tragic.
 

Is there any warrant to inquire into the workings of illusion? Clearly there is, even though the frame of such and inquiry will necessarily be destroyed as it proceeds - that you are willing to take the risk of ending the dream distinguishes this from a dream - a mere disposition isn't much but it is not nothing. If there were unbridgeable and entirely empty gaps in consciousness you would not know they were there. It is not like a cut in a movie which might be designed not to be noticed but which you can see if look out for it - you see it in that case because you can put it up against your own continuity of expectation, but if the cut were in your own consciousness you'd have no concurrent duration by which to reference it. On the other hand if there were no gaps, if there was unbroken continuity, then the rapid changes of state and context required for getting through life would impose an intolerable burden, rather than, as seems to be the case, merely producing a sort of deferred strain to be dealt with in the next period of deep sleep and dreams. In computer jargon we can say that while forgetting has its associated complexities, it is a far more simple and less resource-hungry process than remembering. There is thus no continuity but considerable effort goes into having it seem as though there is, as if you are always there behind the changing face of events, a sort of free transcendental self. Such a self is no more than a self-understanding as flexible and transparent, a effect beautifully achieved via invisible cuts which succeed precisely because the consciousness is irremediably anything but flexible and transparent.

If you could explain where you are and how you got here that would be phenomenology, a model of the world according to the subject, and it would serve to confirm that you are such a subject. This kind of phenomenology does not exist except as a sort of impossible ideal, as is shown by the fact that your states cannot be explicated in a transparent way as the outcome of freely determined acts of a transcendent subject - an account modelled on perception or on the acquisition of new meanings in discourse, assuming that these could actually be as simple as they seem to be. States like boredom, insomnia, sexual arousal and strong emotion all prove this, if further proof is needed. Proposed phenomenological accounts of these are closer to poetry than philosophy, illuminating their object only in flashes and allusions. There may still be much to gain from a circular account that assumes what it proves and proves what it has already assumed, but it does not rescue the transcendental from its status as functional (or disfunctional) illusion and impossible ideal - does not realise it as working origin. The attempt to rescue failures of this kind simply opens the door to dei ex machina such as heteronomy, the unconscious, or indeed the existence of the other, and to ethics (as foundational). Instead the failure should open your eyes to the realisation that you are no sort of subject, much less the subject.

Thought is a spoilt child of the body. It is energetically expensive, often ruinously so, and generally ungrateful, and even when it chooses to honour its sole benefactor it generally does so in a patronising manner. If a pain arises then what can thought do but attempt to ignore it, to mount a distraction, it might hunt for a remedy, or pretend to, but its powers are limited when its object is not itself. Thought is a means for diverting attention, it performs before attention and absorbs it for a time, preventing the body from acting on its reflexive impulses. Attention unengaged is felt to be a hazard, expressed as ennui. You are bored, attention is diminished but continues, unable to refrain from playing its dim light over the empty stage; it experiences a hunger without a clear object - and this grows intolerable (to whom?) as it continues. Why should there be boredom, why is the empty state not one of rest? But boredom is far from empty, it seethes with undirected thoughts, with devilry. When thoughts are stimulated they are directed, the feeling of emptiness vanishes and there is pleasure, gaiety, innocence. Thought will do whatever it can to hold on to this feeling of fullness, but when it fails it grows bitter. Again, thought is needy, and when its needs are unmet it turns on itself, devours itself, turns sour with the effort. It insists on its marriage to attention, will do anything to deny it any other, any prior, beloved.

You can think about consciousness, have all sorts of interesting ideas about it, take sides in the debates, get quite zealous, but all without feeling the full weight of the fact that what is present here, that in which all these thoughts and feelings are, and the thinking and feeling of them, is consciousness itself, fully and unrestrictedly present. For you this is a mystery only because you can't grasp absolute openness, the absence of the least hindrance. What you are is the grinding mechanism, one thing against another thing, always either building tension or releasing it, subject against object, life against death, now against then, the real against the unreal ad nauseam - at least that's what you would be if there ever was such a mechanism, but since there isn't... what are you?

It seems as if some of us have minds that fashion identity in soliloquy while other do so in relation to a social network, more or less explicitly. These two types can never fully understand each other since communication serves a different purpose for each of them and so their every word and gesture means differently. Identity is crucial, but it plays different, often conflicting roles. Misunderstanding seems to be just as important a component of individuation as understanding. What then doesn't change in all this churning of mind and spirit? Why do you feel like the same person across every change of state and mood? Or is identity a judgment and not merely a feeling? But then a judgment of what? An obvious response might be that it applies to memory. Memories however are unreliable and contingent and only partially accessible; it seems as though they are shaped to support identity rather than forming the basis of it. Identity is constant and absolute - even when there are sub-personalities each has its own identity, which is precisely the problem - and so is closer in nature to a judgment, while memory does not judge, only testifies, subject to examination. Judgment is a process and so its results are products, while identity has the quality of always being prior. It belongs to the judging before it applies to the matter judged, or else it belongs to the judge - which in any case renders the judgment of identity redundant. We know it is true before we know why it is true and we know it with an unquestioned certainty. Identity is an hypostasis of the subject and so prior to the basic logical and causal structures required to frame a world. It remains a mystery in this sense. It is ever-present, it is both the cause and the object of individuation, but it lies far upstream of thought, or of any place where we can comfortably focus, or bring the weight of our existence to bear.

All you can say is that the appearance is of someone experiencing something and someone wondering what this is - this appearance, this experience, this someone - and how it is possible for such a thing to come about and be known as such. To think this way is the result of an exercise in detachment, of a skill that has been cultivated, and there is a corresponding identity and satisfaction associated with it, and a dialectic of differing from and then being reassumed by this identity - which is just what any identity is. The identity is a quest for something, not truth exactly since you would need a criterion of truth for that and also to know the truth of the criterion etc., but of as much lessening of error as is compatible with an identity like this one, which likes to live dangerously, or at least says it does. There is real curiosity, however, but still the work drives into impasse after impasse, which only create a certain exhilaration and further opportunities for refining itself. In recoiling from momentary frustration you catch a tiny glimpse of yourself and you look so strange, so unlikely, that for a moment, the identity having lost its dynamism and beginning to melt away, you are almost free.

When you think about the mind at this historical moment it is hard not to imagine it as a general purpose computer which builds internal representations of its environment and of itself, and which thus generates its own semantics by way of certain gödelian loops and twists, and which ultimately has no necessary connection to the whole wet mechanism of switches and gates that brings it about. Slow temporality would then be an interpretation within its semantic field of expected or intended events or behaviours of a distinguished part of the system, like the unhurried movement of distant landmarks seen from the window of a speeding train, and suggestive of an ultimate reference point, active or passive or some admixture of both as the occasion requires. The subject is what can bring about a semantic field and a semantic field is what can produce the sense of a subject. They are conjugate terms and to undo one is to do up the other. The problem is how to undo both at the same time, and it partakes of both the set-theoretic paradox and the koan. We live as if assured of their solutions, every assertion being the kicking of a rock to refute an error we have failed to perceive - it's not the rock that is imaginary but the kick. Impossible objects abound just beyond our apparent field of vision and the work of discrimination is to carefully disentangle them from inherited and inherent assurance and allow them to melt away in the light.

You could make the case that music is based on the interrelation of multiple temporalities, not rhythm and melody by themselves, say, but the dialogue between them, and even within each of these terms you could say there are multiple horizons defined by different-sized units: motifs, phrases, repetitions, variations and so on. You might extend this to a metaphor for the phenomenology of experience in which, say, the slower moving unity is functionally subject with respect to the faster one as object, or the other way around. In such a theorisation there is an elusive difference, be it the ontological difference, or a différance, but essentially unnameable, which is the prior of all the constitutive differences that make the greater world  - in this instance that between the act or event and the awareness of the act or event - and which shows up in various forms in various regions of experience and with various degrees of obviousness and opacity. Music presents a good case since despite a refined technical vocabulary, including that of the neuro-scientists, no-one can fully describe what is happening, but almost everyone can hear it. In fact it remains a complete mystery. Metaphors of this kind are however all fatally misleading, since in spite of all the many ways, through raised or lowered levels of consciousness, that you may become absorbed by the music, seemingly with little or no residue, it is not anything in the music itself, but what enable it to appear as such. In short the primal difference, however subtly thought, is still a kind of object, while the subject is the frame, or the ultimate frame of all frames. Of course this argument also works in contrapositive: if the frame could appear within itself then impossible objects would exist, objects whose nature was an irreducible reference to complete knowledge of the knower. But how do you know that such objects don't exist? How do you know that every single object isn't just that?

Experience is a flow but is also the totality embracing this flow so that there must be an element in it distinguished as stationary, and that is the subject. Thus the practical distinction of subject from object is one of temporality, of ways of inhabiting time or of being inhabited by time. The object is flowing relative to the stationary subject - the object is thus related to the subject, while the subject is not related to the object. This distinction, nevertheless, lies in appearance, the subject is not absolute but is a necessary property of experience. The subject is a kind of quasi-appearance, it belongs not in appearance but to the appearance of appearance where it assumes the place or function of unchangedness; this 'I' is the identical itself just behind the witness position in all experience, and as a concrete individual it brings together the sum of your experiences as if they are in a single book. To be known, or intimated in this way is to belong to a certain evidence, and the evidence itself, being appearance, rolls off, while what it is evidence of stands. It is very strange to have an idea of this element, to have a feeling of it, to be able to reach for metaphors for it, which cannot be experienced and yet is the only necessary and sufficient condition of experience - and yet it ought to be the least strange thing in the world. The strangeness speaks only for the long immaturity of thought.

There are no general states only particular ones, except that particular makes no sense in the absence of the general. The distinction of the two terms is meaningful from the perspective of the general, but try to imagine what this distinction would be from the alternate perspective, if there was such an alternative. Thinking which is the process of thoughts is directed to the world of meanings which is made out of generalities, but it is experience and hence particular. That is why nothing you come up with can have any effect, it lives in a world which cannot reach that of experience, which has no world, which just is in an unnameable way. Experience, you could say, is split between a primary experience and a secondary experience which is about the primary experience and about itself. Secondary experience is aboutness and cannot be limited. All experience, nonetheless, is primary and about nothing, because it has no aboutness or reference. The being of secondary experience is primary and is split from its reference which is secondariness. This is a split that can never be resolved, it is a gap or gulf within experience and corresponds to a sort of loss of innocence, to the fall, or what some have called castration. This is way of indicating that there is an enjoyment in primary experience which is blocked, withheld, unavailable in secondary experience. It is not sexual enjoyment, but the latter is a vivid metaphor for it because it is excessive and unspeakable and because it structures every facet of life without being able to grasped, named, understood, or even seen or heard.

This doesn't name or describe itself in any way but hosts enactments of identity which are tactical or topical and operate with very forgiving and loose requirements for consistency over time and context. The notion of self is of a higher order of identity which begins to precipitate out of the jumble of virtualities and appearances which are in large part a product of the outside, mirrored back to you from others, from events and histories, narratives and roles. There is an almost overwhelming flood of these almost undirected summonings that washes over you from birth. That they are effective, that they can even seem to summon a one is because an empty category of self is already in place. As if you know what you are looking for and that it must exists even though you have never quite found it, or at least you know the kind of thing it ought to be, and so you have gathered together a mosaic of failed solutions. What then is this category of the self? It is your originary being, you as you originate in yourself, it is the coincidence of a phenomenon with the arising of that phenomenon, or it is the inaccessible substance behind the arising, for which the arising is the appearance. That you exist means that you have an origin, one that is ever active since you exist afresh in each moment; and this origin cannot be external, cannot be of a nature heterogeneous to your subjectivity, to the thisness of your inwardness. There is nothing in mind which answers to such a definition or demand. You are most involved with, most taken up with the manas, the inner discursive voice. This never even pretends to be the self but only to speak for it; it draws its script out of an inner abyss and presumes to express the self. It plays the imaginary role of the self until it is gently pushed aside, it is the understudy always prepared to leave the stage but never actually doing so.

The romantic quest is to seek to fully enter the world of which poetry is the liminal awareness, and since this was also to some degree the theme of romantic poetry, the entire project was overdetermined - in hindsight glorious, but predictable from the outset. Liminality here is a certain kind of unearthly light, an inwardly generated light like that in some dreams, but not a light of the mind - the finer light by which the mind's light can be seen. What happens when the poetry is post-romantic? If it is about the presence of the present moment, or about language itself, then what is the liminality that makes it poetry, the adumbration of something other, the other kind of action or energy? You no longer see anything, there may be images but they don't draw your gaze to a farther object, they leave it in place; the frequency has been raised above the range of the subtle senses. Instead there is a peculiar elation, that remains, unanchored, not needing to be anchored, because not in space and a wild energy, so colourless, so silent, as to be easily mistaken for almost anything else.

In the context of a thoroughgoing mutation in consciousness, in the understanding that what is at stake is a break in continuity in respect of a dimension of being orthogonal to that in which self-understanding has disported since time immemorial - so that all categories such as, before and after, inside and outside, horizontal and vertical, mind and body, are no longer operative - failure is inevitable. As long as you are engaged, you cannot not be engaged in a project, and any project is by definition based on false premises, false expectations. But without taking such a risk there is nowhere to turn. It is impossible to judge where you are at any time, if you think you are going somewhere then you are going nowhere, but if you are going nowhere then you can't turn back. The question that cracks the egg could arise quite unobtrusively, could be the repetition of a well-worn doubt at exactly the right moment, the moment outside of time, which is every and any moment. The danger is as much that it turns into philosophy as literature, hence the fragmentary style and the clotted language; elements of these discourses remain but as part of a private idiom. There need be no consistency between the use and the reuse of the same term. It is spoken but not addressed. If it is not a report and not a prayer then to whom could it be addressed?

You are so tired that drawing attention away from the immediate situation is too much effort and quickly peters out. But what is the immediate situation? Beneath the grey pall of tiredness the mind remains fresh and active, it is just that these qualities are no longer at your disposal. Every thread of interest which normally serves to define you, those in which you fully participate because their reflections and echoes bring forth a privately social pleasure, every one of these now seems no more than an effort, the assuming of a mask, and it has fallen away. You are too tired to have an identity, and this is its own kind of pleasure but is also a great bore, just keeping minimally awake for nothing. In normal waking life an identity and its prerogatives seem to be a mere entitlement and your natural state, the bizarre and self-contradictory volatility of identity is irrelevant. When energy is abundant and is then used to give fire to identities with few cares, then the expenditure, the economics of the process, is unnoticed and even seems not to exist. You merely seem to be expressing your essence out of its self-sufficient over-flow. 

There is a temptation towards the literary which ought to be resisted. If this is to be the record of a sort of struggle towards awakening, or a struggle to be free of the illusion of a subject, then it is essential that it not invite being read as literature, whatever that might mean. (And how are you going to resist it? Isn't such a disavowal already a typical literary device? In how many novels does the narrator or a character distinguish the events from 'the sort of thing that happens in novels'?) The literary is a neutralisation of the authentic quest, and this is precisely the temptation: to substitute something else, equally or perhaps far more fascinating - if only you had the imagination. Why would the imposing of a literary frame mean a neutralisation? One reason is that it is a process of projection of all content into the dimension of interpretation, an essentially horizontal dimension, and thus it negates or reduces the vertical. The form of spirituality cognate to literature is that of a culture of endless interpretation, the weaving of webs, or perhaps a sort of ladder but in a carefully mapped space. The highest level of interpretation, the anagogic is excluded because it would terminate the process of re-interpretation. The latter is a social function, A interprets B for C; it negotiates the speakable, belonging in the koinonia or fellowship, and rendering everything in conformity with it so it may be handed over. This on the other hand traces an unrepeatable path and uncovers no general truths; its movement is blind. It may be readable as an unworthy instance of spiritual psychology. Such a study remaining clearly outside of its object.

Entrances and exits, joinings and separations, displacements and returns, the key events of life are where the symbolic and imaginary map is torn, folded or vanishes in a singularity, these are all occasions in which in one way or another the signifying act is broken, where there is a contamination or fusing of map and territory. The starkness of this is obscured by the fact that the map is remapped over and over again, but without such breakdowns there could be no maps at all, no living maps and hence no dead ones either. Thus all the meanings with which we lay out the overlapping worlds of our habitation emerge from these singular instances and are implicitly reflections and commentaries on them. The kind of relations that exist between the loci of meaning in such a system is not tree-like or rhizomatic since this suggests a privileged direction for the flow of intelligence, but resembles the net of Indra, or Leibniz's monadology, in that each contains the reflection of the whole structure including every other node and its reflections and so on forever. At most it can be said that some nodes lie closer to the experiences they represent than others, but conceptually such a structure is highly unstable, or chaotic and metastable. For example, why after all should here be such fraught connections between sexuality, individuation and ethics with resonances extending into every detail of culture as lived?  

The version of the world present to your understanding is entirely constituted by the symbolic and the imaginary, it is a kind of vast mathematics encompassing thoughts, feelings, ideals. It contains everything needed to simulate your world, to repeat it indefinitely, but such a simulation would have no significance in itself, at most only as an infinitesimal component of a sphere of possibility. What is missing from this we might call particularity, but it can have no name, since the act of naming something immediately translates it into the symbolic. Its effect, however, is felt at all times and your understanding is hopelessly obsessed with it, it is your pure individuality. Strange, that this which you are in the strongest sense is what you are least able to grasp, what you know least about. All the rest is gossip. This generally concerns itself with what are known as the facts of life in the larger sense; they are the symbolic landmarks which each of us must traverse but always in our own way so that the facts themselves lose their merely formal character, are not the architecture of life but its lived habitation, worn away in places, just so. This can only occur by way of countless particularities, different in their paths and degrees of realisation, but paradoxically one in their individuality while absolutely distinct from one another. Particularity or individuality as notions are related to the idea of conatus in Spinoza and various later thinkers; there is a recognition that the identity of things, that by which they enter into the world ,constitute the world, are able to be performed by the world - requires something in addition to their whatness; a thatness orthogonal to all whatness, to set it in motion, to be its ever-present origin and unattainable destination.

The experience may be quite ordinary but when it is conveyed with unexpected exactness by some well-chosen words we feel a tremendous pleasure at it. This has little to do with the intended experience, whether it was at the origin of the account or re-presentation or was created by it and exists only within it, the important thing is to see one reality through another. The representation need not be verbal, is not even confined to any one sense; pleasure for a wine lover comes through discerning other flavours and smells or generic memories in the taste and bouquet of a wine. The focus of the pleasure is on the representing event and not on the one represented although the quality and rarity of the latter contributes to the value of the former; the evocation of a childhood memory even or perhaps especially when it is a 'memory' of something that never happened but is merely typical, although specific, rates particularly highly. Schumann's Kinderszenen are a particularly good examples of this. The associated feeling of pleasure includes a sense of power but not a power that can be held on to and used, say to gain control over involuntary memory, but a power of realisation, the promise that you could return to the original experience and know it fully, or gain access to that more energetic realm where the experience is always present and subsists in its proper relations to all other experiences. These relations are impossible to think by any of our objective categories.

You cultivate habits in an experimental way using will like a steering apparatus requiring lighter and lighter touches and with the aim of entering a current so that your actions can dwindle to almost nothing and you will be carried by the momentum of events from which you do not need to distinguish yourself in any way. Perhaps it is a matter of being responsive to the subtlest of cues so that matters are see at such an incipient point of their development that only the tiniest corrections are needed now to be properly positioned to deal with them if and when they arrive. You learn to see the cues and you develop the faith to trust in them; but these are the same thing and represent a different way of inhabiting time. This is nothing more perhaps than the theory of learning life by experience, or the theory of optimising away the will. Of course it fails many times, but progress may be measured by the increasing inability to tell the difference between success and failure. From the outside it doubtless looks like la belle indifférence.

Desire satisfies the requirement for identity without solving it, rather it feeds it. When you want something you no longer need wonder who you are to want it, whether you are entitled to it or not, the desire seems to be self-founding. You cannot be alienated from your desire, only from the desirer within you who assumes it - Jekyll and Hyde, for example; the self can be split far more easily than desire which being conditioned by imagination is subject to non-contradiction, or non-synthesis. My wanting overrides everything else and the entire world is simplified in accordance with it; there is a cognitive component to desire which lags behind and never fully succeeds in aligning the world to it - it inherits the contradictions that desire thoughtlessly strews. Love, in the romantic sense is touted as a complete resolution of the problem of identity via a mutual election, but this is a sublimated form of desire, a wild but predictable concretisation of metaphors, and taken by itself is subject to all of the same shortcomings, opacity, dependence on imagination, non-contradiction. We are born without an identity but with a pure and open sense of self. As this is lost identity arises from the resulting insecurity and it expands and evolves over the course of the life until it is shredded and cast off as death approaches. Proximity to death produces a restoration of self, even if only momentary, and a corresponding reduction in the anxious need for an identity to fill its place. The course of life is a weaving in and out of a sense of self and a sense of identity, the two belonging to entirely different dimensions of being.

To think of what we nowadays call the culture, what might have once been called the spirit or the collective spirit, as something like a very large but essentially solitary mind or brain, in no doubt a grossly misleading metaphor but it does raise the question or questions of what does it do?, what exactly it is up to?, what does it want?; and in asking this it points up a certain almost startlingly obvious consistency across its very diverse manifestations. To put it simply, everything behaves as if such a mind does not know who it is and is on the endless futile quest to find out. What is a mind but just such a question? Whether it is through religion, art or science, or ethics - the proliferation of faiths, of modes of expression, of sinuous distinctions between modes of opinion, of desires and restraints, adoptions and surrenders of ideals - through splittings apart or comings together, the activity of the spirit is spiritual activity and that means action with reference to the ultimate criteria of identity. In another sense it is the striving to know and be known by God, as absolute and unshakeable guarantor of identity, or to become God in fulfilled self-knowing. Everybody seems to already understand this without having to be told, they enact their roles perfectly, they understand the general context and hence well-enough where everything fits in. Their art is always about it. They move with the uncanny synchrony of brain cells processing a thought, unaware of but trusting in the motive behind their motives.  One suspects that it was from the general ripening of such an insight, verging on pure tautology, that Hegel evolved his system.