Juxtaposing the states of passionate arousal and calm equanimity tells us only that they are inconsistent and that they seem as if to belong to two different selves. What is more interesting would be to observe the transition between them in the same self. Something along the following lines. Desires are endlessly propagandised as expressions of the self, their connection is assumed to be unmediated. It is not enough that desires endlessly upwell and mutate slowly if at all, that they only increase in intensity after each temporary lull following gratification, but they must also be managed, or husbanded (wived?) in time and space, both personal and social. This includes the passions which here are taken to be excesses of desire and the immediate corollaries of such excesses, their excessive justifications. Desire, to be fully respected as truth-bearer, cannot be bounded and so excess of desire, desire which breaks with the energetic circuits of the self, is expected and becomes the justification for further management, as much as possible to be treated as exemplary, or heroic. All of this and its ramifications covers most of the culture, but a place remains for challenging the link between desire and the self, or indeed between desire and a self. This is where such notions as a death-drive might be invoked or more simply the alienation from desire. What is it you want? No, What is it that wants this thing in you? It is not madness at stake here but damnation. There is a crucial choice to be made, and it has long been made, but you don't yet know which way you will go. Desire is now experienced not as an aspect of freedom but of necessity, but paradoxically you find there is more freedom, of a perverse kind, in necessity than there ever was in freedom.

Strong feelings are similar to intoxication, they impose a distorting field on perception, judgment and will. Normal functioning is still available but distanced and squeezed, as if seen via a squint, and the subject of such functioning, the home self, is seen as less natural, more of a historic compromise grown into an institution but with shallow roots. How little it takes to push the mind into states of passion, envy, desire, hatred, guilt and all their concomitants. At a certain intensity their origination in childhood is clear although the precise details are cloudy; faint memories being stirred up of how it felt at one time to encounter such a storm of feelings, how shocking to first discover that some one, that you, could very well be in the place to which you had now been transported. As if in the warm and humid half-light of inseparation, of what in retrospect would seem like utter dependence and trust, a pure difference erupted, out of an elsewhere that you vaguely knew about and that others were supposed to deal with, you watched it with drowsy contemplation, a piece that didn't fit, that jarred with the whole weave of things, tangles, clashes, war, overflow, until you suddenly found it was you that was that was that. The moment of this discovery is the shadow of presencing, and so a face of presencing always turned away, and historicised by what's known as your life.

Space and time are conditions of experience and have no reality beyond that, they are internal parameters of the experiencing mechanism and do not reveal anything about the meaning or essence of that Experience. This was pretty much the Kantian position, and that of Bradleyan Idealism, and in a different form it seems to be something like the position of modern physics. We can adopt it as the first step in a critique of separation; in appearance a relation between two entities has a lesser degree of reality than the entities themselves, being added on to them, while in reality it is the other way around: what we call the relation is what is real and the reality of the supposed entities is exhausted by their role in making that relation appear. Relation is thus not relation, since there are no relata, but pure significance, outside of time. The arguments for or against such a position are of less interest than the way it helps to point out those aspects of experience which call forth the concepts of space and time, in particular the odd way in which we seem to be both inside and outside of these. If the observation that 'you cannot step into the same river twice' expresses a central realisation about time, then we must note the stepping into, the step taken from presumably dry land. All of this to now apply to experience in time as self-realisation, self-actualisation, or what has been called soul-making, which includes suffering and spiritual growth. This is what it is precisely because you cannot stand outside of it all, there is no dry land, every power you have and can call upon is fully mobilised, every residue is consumed. It is your entire understanding which moves in a dimension that you cannot grasp in any other way. And this is why the creative productions thrown off in this movement are irreducible, why they cannot be reached, or be imagined to be reached by any other path. It is the soul as living time, its significance being that it has no significance but is only significance.

You know how it is with you only by reference to how it appears to be with others. To have your standards entirely within yourself, not to depend on what you imagine of how others see you, is something you take pride in, ignoring the fact that the pride which consolidates and stabilises this stance as well as the standards of measurement on which it is based are fragile appropriations of the view from the other. That there is a way it is with you, that there is a stance you can take up, can work to retain or to discard, is to be in a kind of dynamic flow, to be in time, and in the times, in the worlding of the world. Nobody ever gets free of this, it is what must be given to be somebody (but given to whom?) in order to gain access to all the opportunities of this state, including the opportunity to strive to get free of it... or even just to grumble about it. To be a state is to have a politics, some kind of perforce democracy of subpersonalities; the machinery of state, a ministry of the interior and one of the exterior, foreign affairs which turn out to be so interwoven with internal affairs that no line can be drawn between them. All of this because there is something you want, something you can't and won't cede, and the world to you becomes the demand that you do so, the mirror image of your desire. And whether you win a round or lose one the desire only comes to seem more real, indisputably real, until the very moment that it disappears into thin air.

Accounts of life based on existential or phenomenological paradigms, and these include all accounts developed out of a study of consciousness, miss out out on all the fire and drama of it. These are genetic accounts mobilising basic terms such as desire, anxiety and identification, for which to explain is in some measure to explain away, and so they shed sparse light on the unappeasable fury of judgement, both of yourself and of others, on the craving to avenge or to submit, the thirst for justification, on the ecstasy of tyranny and tyranny of ecstasy. This is why religions with a God and an antagonist, and the secular variants of these, connect more deeply with the human condition than any philosophy. Theologies are more effective readers of philosophies than the other way around simply because they can speak of sin and evil without irony. This, at least is how it appears at times, in what is perhaps a shocked realisation of the utter impotence of understanding and of how far you have permitted a surreptitious 'mission creep' in regards to philosophy. It represents the crux of Job, the point along the path of understanding where you encounter the enduring problem dealt with in the biblical Book of Job. There is nothing more to be said, the debate is surrendered, you can only turn and allow the sublimity, the primal wildness of the whole thing to flow through you.

You depend on something from outside. The mind lacks the scope to properly frame the kind of metaphysical question it claims to want to solve. A certain co-presence of facts forms the premise to such a question, but this only comes about and cannot be willed; the mind cannot store the question's address only its own memory of having addressed it. Where it has the most to say is where it is most deficient. You cannot treat this as if it were a subject matter, something you could delineate and return to, and delineate again. Whatever is seen, once seen, melts away into the surrounding mists. Anything you can do is not worth doing, but you must not cease from doing lest the readiness be lost. There was, there is, a question, but mostly what you take to be the question is the scene of the question, or the scene of the scene of the question. Taking the mind to exist you are lost in the mind.

One resolution to the numerous paradoxes of appearance is to conclude that the universe we find ourselves in is a simulation. It is debatable whether this solves anything at all, or just pushes the problem further out of reach, but if it were the case it is not unreasonable to assume that we might have been designed to discover that fact, and to follow where this discovery might lead. Say this simulation is in a vast computer set up by a superior being in order to enjoy the spectacle of its unfolding, of the unfolding of the abstract premises applied in the building of it. In that case there must be ports of some kind through which this being can access and experience their virtual world. The obvious candidate is the subjective life of individuals. Does it make sense to ask whether a particular such port is in use at any given time, like right now? In other words, given that subjective life apparently has its own internal justification, its own internal self, the one for whom it all is all, and given that on this assumption this internal self does not, cannot, actually serve this function - being only a sort of place-holder, something like a programmed parser that ensures that memories are stored correctly in relation to the multiple lines of narrative that intersect here, that everything is always in readiness for the real subject, the creator or commissioner of the simulation - is there a difference in experience between its being 'enjoyed' by a virtual self and a real self? Is the virtual self aware in a moment to moment way of its incompleteness, aware that it needs the plenary subjectivity of that other to complete its task? This thought experiment points to a radical difference between two notions of the self, the first being as operative core of the functioning subject in its world, and the second being the final guarantor, the underwriter, of the reality of personal, or first-person, experience.

On one side there is the idea of identification, that of a transcendental or veritable self somehow hypnotised by the ongoing play in the same way that you get submerged into the world of a movie or a book, and on the other the idea that what this is is an organ of appearance the content of which is the totality embracing both subject and object - a contingent limitation of which appearance being this division into perspectival shards. In the first alternative you might struggle to break free, to shake off the illusion, say by studying it carefully to find the flaws, to work against the grain of its misdirection, while in the second you strive to expand your identification from the enclosed point to the totality, to reject rejection, reject the sense that anything is more or less real than anything else. In either case there is a truth-operation within experience in which one understanding supersedes another, a truth function in relations with an odd quality of necessity from which you conclude that there is truth beyond relations. If this here and now is an organ of appearance there is no residue of experience that is not phenomenal and the truth internal to experience is no pointer to the truth of experience. In this model of understanding the question arises on the side of the subject only, inquiring as to who the final experiencer is, as you realise that every apparent subject is only a component of what is experienced and hence not a subject at all. While if it is a dream-like illusion there is an inference from error - the inconsistencies and paradoxes of experience are pointers to errors which are corrected in being fully perceived, and one looks to the mystery of how there can be anything at all, of what the ground can be of the something and of the nothing.

In each mental state an aspect of the truth of what is referred to as identification becomes visible, but an aspect of something need not resemble the whole in any significant way, and what is visible need not be seen. What it means is that each mental state possesses an authority that can't be easily dissolved by a different, purportedly more inclusive mental state. Mental states exist in an open-ended context that could be called politics, and conversely, politics is action in the context of mental states. A state is a perspective which does not acknowledge itself as a perspective since to do so would be to surrender its connection to truth, reducing it to the relativisation of its truth. Relativism, or the suspension of truth, is for others not for me, and where the truth resides in each mental state is in its 'I', or eye, or even its 'aye'. Even in a jaundiced perspective much that is essential shows up, but it is no less jaundiced for all that. Or you could say that samsara is not devoid of truth, but the form that truth takes for it is necessarily an agenda, is politics. A mental state and and an agenda are the same thing, equally a climate of feeling, a system of distinctions of ineluctible nobility and its other.

There is an odd transitivity to estrangement: if A and B appear undistinctive in their milieu M, but if C clearly does not belong in M, then what happens if A, B, and C are undistinguished? There are two possibilities, either A and B are revealed as estranged from M, or C does after all belong to M, and M is not what you thought it was. In the latter case, since a milieu is not an object to be estranged but one to be estranged from, it must be your misunderstanding and hence your estrangement. You were not, as you thought, in a position to speak for M. In this way, out of a small seed, out of something about which it appears that little was at stake in the judgement (C does not belong to M), a large and permanent division of the world arises. There is a resolution of this logic if we introduce time and development as possibilities. This would mean that what appears to be estranged now will in the future become fully integrated. If this comes about through a change in M then it is insecure, since a milieu ought to be assumed to have real criteria for exclusion and not to be a merely propositional entity, a reflection of the whim of its contents. It would mean that while the basis for the distinction is still present it is to be deliberately ignored, or reinterpreted as signifying the opposite of what it formerly did. It is as if you were to say that the milieu does not exist where you thought it did, but rather here in your mind, in the rules you make for it. But since one of the defining rules is that something must be excluded, what you now exclude is the idea that M exists apart from your mind. There may however be a kind of change that is not development: M was realised to have always included C, and thinking otherwise was an error which once corrected need have no further existence. Taking this fork leads ultimately to abolishing milieus altogether. The only way to do away with the effect of estrangement is to puncture the entire system, not to shift around the markers.

However you construct your world it is done by way of the common sense and hence the source of a certain confidence in the intelligibility of your utterances no matter how strange or even perverse they might at first appear. How do you know this? How can you presume to be both entirely distinct and entirely general in this way? Isn't it a presumption often proved wrong in the application? Where one looks for communicative reason, kommunikative Rationalität, one, or another, generally ends up with le différend. There is difference in structure and difference in axioms - you know that the structure is the same because it is precisely this parity which enables you to discover the differences in starting points. Well, perhaps, but it is not clear how you would distinguish this higher level of difference, how mark these meta-differences in outlook, only that at some point common sense must be surrendered. There certainly are differences in structure, but structures do not differ wholesale, they are made up of parts and where some parts are common, others may be divergent. Some insight into this is possible. One structure may properly contain another structure, but since their function is precisely to simulate each other, to make models of other ways of knowing, the contained will never know or admit itself as contained. Reflection on the structure of your own knowing nevertheless has a kind of certainty beyond any that belongs to the content of knowing. It is not the philosophical differences but the fact that you participate in the kind of being for which these differences are possible. It is not your world but the world's you.

What you are doing is attempting to view life from inside the notion of identification, as if identification is an event which induces a characteristic anamorphosis. But how could you discover this from the inside without the idea of how it looks from the outside? You need to keep digging further into this idea of identification. Is it necessarily a matter of some transcendent and independent self which has become enmired in physical reality as in a realm enclosed by time and space, a sort of imprisonment? This is a current of thought with a long history, versions of the fall, and it sets one aspect of the the totality of experience against another, the soul against the body, the higher against the lower, the primary against the secondary, the pure against the virtual. This kind of thinking is an intellectual temptation, itself a kind of fall, fighting dualism with more dualism. Whatever identification is however, the context is not dual, so it is not to be understood according to a logic of cause and effect. But then nothing can be understood non-dually, understanding falls back and spins its gears, and many tedious words and phrases are uttered such as 'arises' and 'functioning'. The quest to shed light on the nature of awakened mind is already an enactment of unawakedness, just as much as is the refraining from doing so.

Emotions can persist in the transition from waking to dreaming mind while the concomitant thoughts, which serve to anchor the feelings in some sort of unmovable reality, melt away and are lost. New thoughts, which are not discursive but the rapid creation and assimilation of whole situations - embryonic thoughts are richer in content and more complex than mature thoughts, the process of thought being one of abstraction and rigidification -  these are participatory states of affairs, which arise to take the place of waking thought in order to work in with the emotions, but they do so in a different way. The emotions become more labile, some of the painful binding is released, and more of the mind is brought to bear on them, while the emotional kernel is largely preserved. There is a functional dream representative of the self which is more fluid, more childlike than the waking self. An emotion having been lived through in a dream can emerge with quite a different colouring and on occasions this change can survive the restoration of the parameters of the waking predicament that initially brought it about. It is as if there was always something more concealed in the emotion than we were first aware of. This is similar to the cathartic function of dramatic art, but it makes a difference when the same mind is audience, actor, playwright, director, stage-manager, orchestra and even the very stage and all the props.

The self drives thought like a team of animals, it is invigorated by how they respond and feels pride in how well it has trained them, but then the emotion changes and the thoughts no longer obey, they seem to dominate and torment the self. Surprise, "What happened to me?" This is a negative turn but there are also positive turns, equally binding but not drawing on resistance to do so. The activity of emotion runs side by side with that of the self. Are they your emotions? Pretty nearly, there may be a gap between them and you which varies in width, but it is inconvenient, and generally the source of further oblique and conflicting emotions. The self is entirely caught up in the larger emotional process, naturally enough since it is a system routed through the very nexus of the self. But still, there comes a time when you seek play that gap in a different sense: to detach the self in order to modulate the experience, to civilise it, to cut down on suffering - your motive arising entirely within the system is about making things better. But when you look into it you find something unexpected, something you did not really want to see, that the bondage is imaginary, that it is an option reliably chosen again and again in each cycle of thought. Once seen this can't be unseen, but you do your best to forget it, because if you don't there's no saying how much fun, how much delightful mischief, you'll miss out on.

More or less stable or static feeling is a proxy for the personal self. It represents an element taken to be uniquely determined and sovereign, but itself is eminently substitutable. Emotion or emotional state is different, it is a binding associated with the personal self. There is a constraint to repeat certain patterns of thought, the repetition being conditioned by an inseparable component of feeling, the thought being a figure in time like a musical motif, having affective form but with specific cognitive content, or rather discursive content. Most of the feeling in an emotional state arises from aspects of binding or loosening as interdependent complementaries. The context is the unfreedom of will, the constraint on inner action as instanced here in thought. The subject is uninvolved, merely witnessing, since bondage does not predicate it, nor, by the same token, does thought or feeling. It allows the operation of experiencing to seem to complete itself, and above all of emotion in experiencing. The being bound is an essential attribute of the personal self; there is no escape from bondage for this self because it is bondage with all its vicissitudes, including the delightful and the ennobling ones. This self remains out of view while the thoughts are like its children or pets, fondly, partially, warmly, lovingly and ironically enjoyed.

Whatever you intend or set out to do you must first satisfy the question "Who are you to think you can ...?" You have a long history that says you are an unlikely candidate for the honour: innocence lost long ago, a thoroughly inconvenient memory, an unruly bunch of sub-personalities for whom you retain great affection and considerable trust. Wherever you go, they too must come along, although they'll never leave any place as they found it. As elements in a plurality none seeks identity, they are happily functional, a band of distinct functions offering no resistance to changes, in need of no corroboration. On the other side, there are tight cycles between thought and feeling and will that represent the personal self, they do not stabilise the illusion, they are the illusion. Touch it and it reacts, don't touch it and it reacts. You'd almost think it was alive, with its all-weather appositeness, its magnificent response-ability - but don't be fooled, it's beyond perfect, the rules are bent to it, defense is offence, every mirror is also a sword and every sword a mirror.

Writing about it, thinking about it are actions in relation to the notions pursued and treated, but such actions do not mean that these notions are realised or accomplished once and for all. So to write of a notion, to show your seriousness about it, is still a way of pretending to the corresponding thought, pretending to be the thinker implicit in that thought. In fact you know nothing and are nothing, and every thought of yours remains in some degree, consciously or unconsciously, hypothetical, an essay at thought and at being its thinker; every assertion still in some measure a question. (But hasn't this insight, or something very like it, become widespread in the epidemic of uptalking?) The inner being is moved around slightly in this way and you want to see what will arise from this tiny difference in orientation or polarisation. The enquiry must be sincere, but at the same time the sincerity of the inquiry is in principle the very thing it is set to overturn. Sincerity is a three-dimensional concept, but whatever this is you know only two, and even those might collapse. It is absurd to expect the conjurations of a dream character to open the door to awakening. The dream character, that is, you, keeps worrying at something, something not quite right, whatever it is that keeps him from resting content; he keeps trying to get it in his sights, that's what's happening right now ... but only when he is thoroughly baulked and falls back, stops, gives up, in that brief pause, is there any chance ...

After a singular feat of skill or courage, a hard-fought victory or an extraordinarily lucky escape the first question of the television interviewer is invariably, "How does it feel to have just ...?" The feelings which one can imagine no better after the response than before are products of the narrative and are most effective when they contribute new twists to it, thus expressions of happiness, "On top of the world, I'm just letting it all sink in", are less engaging than say, a tinge of sadness, "I just wish my father  had lived long enough to see this day". Like actions and purposes, fully narrated feelings form part of the web of stories that hold the context together, that realise the theory of mind, which, contrary to the naïve assumption, always begins with the presumed reality of other minds and uses this to infer the reality of your own mind. Action becomes performance and purpose ceases to be determinate but exists only in a superposition, its natural state of ambiguity. The reality of the individual is never in some substantial positive point, the closest it comes being in those moments when you are called upon to share how it feels, when you are affirmed as the irreducible possessor of a unique attribute, but in the process, the entire mediating process that links the personal and the social, and which offers the only complete context in which to interpret such moments. Metaphysics, like theory of mind, is embedded in social network theory.

We ask "How are you doing?" or "How is it going?" or variants of these, expecting, if more than just a formulaic reply, an indication of how you are feeling, a qualitative response rather than an instrumental one: "fine", "pretty well", "wonderful", "not so great, actually", rather than something like, "just by habit" or "very intently" or "Oh, by surrendering to (or by fighting madly against) the current." The question "How are you feeling?" to which these answers would seem better matched, sounds a note of concern, it is a question for the sickroom, and actually refers to feeling in quite a different way, in a narrower temporal perspective. These idioms encode the understanding of existence as ongoing and temporalising process, as does the word for 'to experience'- erfahren. What remains vaguely ambiguous is whether it is you doing it or whether it is being done by the 'it', and whether it is an action or a feeling. The state of things it describes is closer to an action, but if we want to say what it is we naturally resort to the language of feeling which solidifies both the feeling and the subject of that feeling. Now, say you are engaged in meditative self-inquiry, dwelling on "Who am I?". The immediate response that comes up is an appeal to feeling, to find what is felt here, as if it accepted that the question is aimed at an existing substance, the feeling being the evidence, the evident-ness of the existent. This would be to fall for the convention of thought, sliding over the metaphor, rather one should proceed like the autist responding to "How do you do?" - to find what it is in the I-ness or the I-ing that could possibly answer to, and be identical with, the who?-ing.

Purposive action is seen as proving that you exist in a metaphysically significant way so that you are worth the trouble of inquiring into, of going in search of. Without the former, why bother? This is quite a strange recursion. You want to prove that you exist in the image of the self and of the presence, of the self-presence, that accompanies purposive action or willing. Will requires an object, external or internal, possible or impossible - it doesn't matter if its object is achievable, what matters is the act of will. Somehow the thought 'I am doing this' is an always implicit component of purposive action, but not necessarily through either the purpose or the action. Purposes may be picked up and dropped for the sake of intersecting purposes, they correspond to rôles and exist in a complex nested structure in which we can rapidly shift focus from one to another. They sustain identification, but it is the act or effect of identification that is important, not the details - although much literature and psychology can be made mapping purposes/rôles against each other. As for actions, these are not only nested but are largely executed unconsciously.

Will, or purposeful action, is the third support of the self apart from thinking and feeling. Because it is bound up with motivation and valuation it seems closer to feeling, but action is independent of the state of feeling while requiring something like thought to define its intention - what is called instinct is the prototype of positing thought. Resistance to action is a type of feeling, so action originates in the same level of self that was described as noesis, the place from which and never towards which. A feeling can be viewed as a disengaged action, action in neutral. Purposive action or exertion of will, is a modality that adds to the self, confirms it, consolidates it. Will is not, and perhaps can't be exerted continuously over extended periods; it has a special relationship to time. It alternates with periods of passivity or surrender. The most obvious of these is in sleep, although dreams contain a sort of ghost of purposive action. Dreams seem to be a pointed commentary or critique of purposive action, frayed action, oddly fragmented and discontinuous. Habit also can take the place of will in the waking state. Detached from positive action the continuous application of will counts as a salient form of presence. When it lapses and  attention drifts then it seems in retrospect as if you have been absent, a state fully adequate to itself with no need for you at all.

The coming about of the personal self is, for us, as deep as deep goes - although its much dreaded dissolution could be an almost superficial matter overdetermined by decay of the apparatus. It is ongoing origin on the noetic side and so is not in objectivity but feeling. This means it is composed by bodily states, that it is a figure of bodily energies - a particular dynamic pattern of these energies flowing around a kernel (or coeur) or irreducible singularity - the sort of knot, or not, [noeud (fr.) or Not (De.) = need, distress, misery] nothing in itself, but that can't be straightened or flattened out, that keeps its identity even as the field in which it forms changes shape and orientation. There is a similarity between this and falling in love. Love in this sense being a rigid designation of an other, one that matters so deeply that it defines the very roots of our being, touching regions of motivation that override the instinct for self-preservation. This may not be the case in all our loves but we are fascinated by stories in which it does so because they reflect a truth about love that looks us straight in the heart.

The ontological difference results from a quirk in functioning which splits it in manifestation into noetic and noematic poles. The mental self or persona is a subsequent effect, a back-projection of noesis in the context of this distinction. Non-dual functioning in its manifestation brings about these two poles with equal and opposite weight, and in so far as it is intuited it can be regarded as the veritable self, or subject. The projected mental self is variable, discontinuous and inconsistent and deficient in relation to its world which is thoroughly noematic. This deficiency is felt and is deeply pervasive, there is no place that this self can stand secure of it; it appears as judgement of the personal self, where the genitive is alternately subjective and objective. Judgement swings between high and low, guilty and innocent, good and bad, and can never be final. Effort and strain are always present, attempting to bring it right. When you look within for the subject, and foolishly that is where you look, as if inside and outside were a real distinction, you only find traces of the personal self which are always too small, mismatched to the conception. The self's failure to be subject is measured in sin, which is a reality only for this self. It invents the project of improving and purifying itself. States arise, often of tremendous positivity and almost success which point out to you the direction of the true self. None of this is in the least appropriate, or, as they say, 'fit for purpose', the directions are wrong from the outset, but the production of cultural values justifies it. And indeed things do go better with this unreal thing.

In what context does a feeling arise? What are the neighbouring feelings that give it a place? The background, the alternatives, the echoes? Feelings are never very remote from bodily sensations, as if they are translations of them, or are rooted in them. A disembodied feeling? Well, yes perhaps, but it could only be fleeting, the momentary illusion of there being a body it was anchored in. The feeling qualities of colours and smells are significant, but as modalities of sense and as lodging them in a network of wider associations, a larger version of the body that is the same felt body but spread out in a higher dimensional space, one that maps all that you identify with, all your topoi, your places, palaces? - you have no notion how far this might reach, you have never been to the end of it. There is a high level of ambiguity, no fixed meanings; repetition counts - the feeling is different each time its conditions are repeated; feeling has memory. Feelings always appear against a ground, a larger whole but of the same sort of stuff, feelings within feelings. A feeling does not so much have intention as a rôle, like a costume that you put on and then you are in a rôle with all the attitudes, the mindset, that go with it. This is the way feeling is bound up with noesis, action, your action. Now consider that feelings flow continuously, or rather are continuous seeming, but actually full of discontinuities - the bodily sensations are continuous but the associated rôles are discrete. All of this makes up the way that you seem to precede yourself, to already be there in every place you go - 'I found myself experiencing X' - you arrived and found what? - yourself already there. Like a hanger-on you can't ditch no matter what twists and turns you take.

Experience is divided but the terms of this division are not obvious. Say it is into experiencer, experienced and experiencing - but then once you admit experiencing, do you really need the other two? Experiencer and experienced are modalities of experiencing, depending on how it leans, and the leaning is also such a modality, and so on to dizzying depths - the fact is that the mind recoils from a thorough monism, which doesn't refute it in the least. If we merge experiencer and experiencing and keep the experienced then we are back with noesis and noema, which are more general terms than is implied by their reference to knowing. How are thought and feeling distinguished? Thought is on the side of, or has its centre of gravity in, the noema - you can objectify thought without distorting it. Thought is what is unchanged whether it is grasped directly or reflectively, whether I have the thought or reflect on the thinking of it, intend the object or reflect on the intention. The abstract of an abstraction is just an abstraction. Unlike this, feeling is on the side of the noesis. In fact noesis could be defined in a circular way as the inner feeling that accompanies the experiencing. To feel something is to be aware of how you feel in relation to it - it is perception by way of the self. Does it have its own kind of logic, certain fixed relations of different feelings? If so it is a feeling-into, an unfolding of the self implicated in a feeling and expressed in the answering or succeeding feeling - this will be systematic and subject to the test of truth, but context-dependent and not able to be abstracted. Because noesis can't be objectified neither can feeling.