Objective reality is not only objective for you, but objective in ways wholly foreign to you. You can iterate this insight; the objectivity of last resort is what you are in search of. Why be interested in it at all? It is infused with a peculiar significance. Every distinction melts away unless rooted in this pure otherness by however remote a thread. If all meaning depends on it then does it possess its own significance? Impossible. It neither can nor can't - it is the complement of pure subjectivity and their identity can be neither asserted nor denied. Materiality is one name for the belief in this other that cradles your subjective experience and lends it a quality of objective being which you strive to encounter, to turn around on itself. The purely subjective being of inner experience has an unsatisfactory dream-like quality, an etheriality, a falseness. You want to find the mere being of the subjective world. Being devoid of adjectives or adverbs has an intrinsic satisfaction associated with it, it is beauty and rest, fully adequate to its place in totality - everything you are not. You can only mime this mere being of the subjective life. You watch it until it slows and subsides, but the disjunction in identity between the watcher and its object is unaffected, untouched.

Subjective experience is a process in time made out of events. These events are the contents of experience, sometimes listed as thoughts, perceptions, feelings, memories, desires, decisions and so on, and they have a dual mode of being. They are one thing in experience and another thing in objective reality, this latter reality being the basis out of which subjective reality is understood to emerge. The boundaries defining an event are different in the two perspectives; in objective reality these boundaries are contingent and observer-dependent, they are not integral to objectivity but they must be tested and honed for efficacy, while in subjective reality they are natural and more distinct, possibly ineffective or nonsensical, but still unable to withstand close scrutiny. For this picture to be true it ought to be possible to specify sufficiently clear terms through which you can assert that this subjective event, A, indicated and delimited in such and such a way, corresponds perfectly to that objective event, B, perfectly indicated and delimited in an entirely different way. This does not appear to be the case and the difficulty may be more than a matter of mastering the complexities involved. The version of objective reality invoked here is itself a mental construct and hence an internal object, and what entitles it to be called objective is the rigourous system to which its categories are subjected. Such a system, a hygienics of objectivity in any instance, is an evolving cultural project, an emanation of the hive-mind, a project of objective reality, which is at the same time the project to colonise subjective reality. When the levers of mind are fully understood, even if only operationally, then the privilege of the subjective, the claim to any sort of irreducible access to reality in pure subjectivity, will have been undermined once and for all. The term 'event' however is already shaped by the system of objectivity, it carries an enormous amount of baggage. Is experience really made out of events? Unlikely. In fact the experience/event distinction is already part of experience. By reflecting on experience we withdraw ourselves from it and view it as an internal event, a quasi-object, but we know in doing so that we have lost the essence of the original experience. The unexamined life is certainly not worth living, but the examined life is not life at all.

The rainbow colours of a drop of oil in a puddle on the wet asphalt puts your finely discriminated introspections to shame. It is so unemphatically itself, this tiny event in the chaotic transitions of substance through the skin of the earth. It is parsed by the light of the sky as nothing but itself but in that moment it is made known in a beauty utterly without a heart, without any desire, forever immune from the pathetic fallacy. To dry up, to be washed away, to soon fall out of the light and go their way in other faceless interactions, the molecules that brood upon the water, now spread-out with most delicate links in a microscopic layer, will never again be visible, and even now few remark them. The human world is all pathetic fallacy, little else, and the molecules that make this thought, by oxidising or reducing, by shuffling some ions about in the dark chambers of the brain are behaving no differently. Where one lot spreads and makes a rainbow the other lot infuses and makes an identification, an emotion, a drive, but they happen, they happen to happen, in just the same way.

The experience of pleasure in a mind-brain hardwired for social interaction, a mind that mirrors others, leads to alienation of pleasure coincident with the formation of a distinction of self from other, and out of this desire is born. And as the consequences are pursued this leads to the experience of envy which strengthens the incipient desiring self and also threatens to tear it apart, two tendencies that work together to create more and more structure, in the process weaving in everything that can be known and used of social space. By the time this stage is reached all the ingredients of the narrative self are in place which now tracks the development of the understanding of the social and its world. This is the bare scheme of an account of the development of the psyche. In this instance it begins from pleasure, from the pleasure principle, but an alternative account could be given starting from desire, or from envy, or conatus, from anything which can serve as the energy source driving a mind and body process. What is it that all these accounts must have in common in order to be appear to shed light on the origins of the self? Perhaps there are just two things. One is a driver that straddles the boundary between the forces of nature and mental forces - for example pleasure can be seen as the release of physiological tension. This seems objective, but if the tension in question is not already mentalised, owned by an 'I', actual or latent, as it would be say by using the term conatus, then there is no reason why one physiological state is preferable to any other. (The compressed air in a tank doesn't want to get out of the tank, doesn't want anything. Whoever put the air into the tank wanted to create a certain kind of energy storage for reasons irrelevant to anything about the air molecules that were the means of doing so. The air tank is the trace of a mind's wanting but is not itself a wanting.) The second is some sort of reflexivity or mirroring, since the self has both and inside and an outside and is subject to and shaped by the complex interplay of these. Again there are various terminologies which try to capture the zero degree of self-other play, and this will open up the social as coterminous with the individual. Neither of these two desiderata has a satisfying solution, and these parallel failures are what is most unvarying about inquiries into the self. What's more they are absolute failures that resist every dialectical trick to flip them into successes - these tricks do no more than remap the descriptive terminology.

You see yourself as having states - states of the soul, states of mind, states of consciousness, and others of the same kind which you think you can distinguish. A state is not the content of a here and now, it is no simple object, but it is something about the subject that you can know by monitoring your own pattern of inner and outer responses. There is the object you intend, and then there is your knowing that you are intending the object, and then there is objectifying of that intention as a point in a space of intentions, and then there is you making an object of the space of your intentions, as if there are many different such spaces, a space of spaces of intentions. This is the level of abstraction at which these subjectively delineated states seem to live. To be aware of your own state is a differential operation, you need to simulate a small variation and see, by imagination, what it does. This gives you a clue to your current state, but to complete the insight, to give meaning to the identification of state, you need to imagine the ways in which the response could have been different and so place this response in its context. The differential operation is the creation of a mental model in the form of a little story that explains the pattern of your responses, as for example to say "I'm angry" is to tell a story about yourself. To be a description of a state you need to go a bit further. In saying "I'm angry" you can avoid any awareness of state by meaning to say that "state-free-I is subjected to certain emotional conditions while remaining state free", as if to say "I have anger." A state is a disposition to a certain pattern which entirely pervades the subject, so to be aware of it is to be aware of yourself as a variant form of the function of constituting the reality which happens to be yours. The logical structure of this is complicated, too complicated for this sketch perhaps, but awareness of state is not universal. It is acquired through experience of the succession of contradictory, often mutually exclusive, dispositions. What is it that we acquire in this way? The ability to monitor ourselves in new ways. Does this mean that we gain greater access to the witness function? Is this the essence of disidentification? The self is a story that minimises the number states, while witness is the awareness that corresponds to more distinctions of states.

'Avoiding relationship?' 'I hope so!' There is a peculiar frisson that occurs when you meet someone's eyes and there is openness on both sides. There is not the world and two I-nesses, there is just the world and I-ness. You'd like to think the other is very far away, on the other side of the world, but they are embarrassingly close, right here in fact. But relationships are something else, people are not so interesting, entanglements are born of desire, they are 'foreign dust', and it ill becomes you to be so eager to wallow in the notion that there is something you need from them, something that only others can supply, that you'll pay for with your solitude so eagerly foregone. To engage is to take a ticket for a circular journey, but not to engage, to affirm your self-sufficiency is to take a trip for a different sort of ride through a familiar set of stations. Since you are never immune from desires and demands, the state of self-sufficiency becomes defensive, becomes a shield. You end by feeling so safe that the impulse to expose yourself to temptation becomes irresistible. Oddly, in spite of the disinterested spirit with which you undertook the experiment, the temptation proves unexpectedly effective. So next you think you can harness the energy it releases and divert it to serve your ego-drives, that is, your inquiry into the nature of the more authentic self now come into salience. This stage doesn't last long, but leads to loneliness and frustration. Detachment from desire simultaneous with experiencing desire seemed to open a clear path to gratification, but in the event it made no difference. You are forced to ask yourself why you can't satisfy your desires. And why not easily, since you can see they don't matter? What else is it that you lack? What social capital? What had been taken as a positive choice for isolation is now seen to be a forced choice. This realisation leads to paranoia. You have performed so charmingly in order to receive grace but have not received it. You look at yourself from the point of view of this judgment and there are no limits to your self-contempt, your guilt. And so then you must turn back to others to beg some absolution, and the cycle resumes.

Timor mortis conturbat me. For some it might be enough to begin with a strong intimation that they are about to die. Not the conturbat but the calm that comes after it. Is that decreation or deconstruction? The sudden collapse of all the lines through which you sought for continuity. Structures dissolve and you see how they fall, and so how they were put together out of a belief that ultimate value was there to be found, in thereness, in o-therness, in others. Only alter-egos were reflexive and complexive enough to be players in this game of deferral that you'd been practising, to make it work by passing the ball in such a timely manner. Now, all investments are called in, you are alone, alone before the prospect of your annihilation, which is, you now acknowledge with a surprising relief, as alone as you've always been. None of those strategies could ever have worked, they were not there to work, they were like literary terms, objectives, motives, means, obstacles, alliances, rivalries, etc., just what they appeared to be and nothing more. What's gone is the mystification, the fetishisation, the fearsome and feared priority, the secret romanticism which seemed the link between your unachieved intimacy and the social. There is no trace of the God of the philosophers, nor of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Moses, only perhaps an understandable misreading of this vastness in which, had you ever really existed as more than a thought, you would be instantly and painlessly dissolved in serene fulfillment.

When mental suffering occurs, in the first moments of recognising this, there is a drawing back of consciousness into a personal frame. You and your needs, as experiencing and embodied being, immediately override all other formations and can determine the context of all the immediately ensuing moments. The rule appears to be that out of all possible interpreted realities that one which will have the most marked effect on the future must be managed by the executive system most cognate with it. This rule and the hierarchy of realities implicit in it is seen as natural and as operative at all times, although in a latent monitoring capacity when not actively engaged. The hierarchy of realities, and the corresponding internal agents or executives dedicated to these, are not determined by metaphysical deliberation, or by any sort of deliberation, but by the placement of override switches - how they were so placed appearing as a given. Any version of the world not at the top of the hierarchy has a provisional nature, and however developed it may be, however rewarded, however much mental space it has managed to colonise, it is not able to take itself entirely seriously. Hence perhaps the common feeling of being an imposter, although in other respects not taking oneself entirely seriously is a virtue. Still, to awaken or to detach, you need to go straight through the heart of these personal overrides, not to undo or reverse them, but to see that they are not the expressions of an enduring authority. This is the opportunity in suffering, but it is not always seized. The masters of reality have far less mastery than is thoughtlessly assumed, but it is a mistake to replace them with other masters.

You know that you are conscious but you have no idea what consciousness is. If you try to objectify it you only find the discarded shall of the previous moment. There was something inside that shell, but now it is empty, what was inside it is is what's now looking. To strive to coincide with that elusive inhabitant is to fall into a backwards regression. This is just a picture, an attempt at an analogy for the predicament in trying to know, and if it explains its failure it also suggests that the inquiry be redirected to the originating moment of consciousness, the face of time - because here time can no longer be strictly linear, a matter of before and after, but must express a dimensionality entirely in the present, an intensity - in which the conscious moment emerges. If consciousness were a phenomenon, as in the uncritical understanding of it as something like the unrolling of a cinematic image, then it ought to arise out of a nothing and be built up, like the way that when a movie frame is viewed in sufficiently slow motion it is seen to emerge out of an intervening moment of pure blackness, a momentary reset. Consciousness, on the contrary seems to emerge out of a fullness, an infinitely overdetermined fullness. Every definiteness in the completed conscious moment is an overlay, a restriction and limitation of original presence. It seems that it would be impossible for consciousness to have the peculiar quality that it has - subjective, insideness, living, selfness - if it came from a void of annihilation. Even if you go into it with the expectation of a blank void you end up with the same result. Analogical thinking breaks down, the emptiness is fullness and the fullness emptiness.

"We are such stuff as dreams are made on...", as much as you would serve in the place of Prospero you find yourself also in that of Caliban, or near enough. If you show as prosperous you can mask for a time your insatiable envy. You are the emptiness of what others possess and you hate them for it, although you can't make up your mind whether this is because what they have is rightfully yours having been stolen from you through an immemorial crime, or whether it is because you are so different in nature from them, so inferior in being, that you could only ever possess in fantasy what is freely theirs to dispose. And if you insist on the former since it justifies a certain compensatory indignation, this is also because you can find no reason to doubt the latter, which is by far the worse of the two since it offers no hope of redemption. Either alternative, however, has its own unique flavour of hate. You remain aloof and separate to conceal this envy from others, and also from yourself the better to keep it from the sight of others. This shame is not at the infringement of moral law but out of fear of punishment, of the revenge of the more powerful. And so you also seek occasions, and allies of convenience, and pretexts of deniability, so that you can secretly act it out, to relieve the pressure of aggressivity, which is sometimes intolerable, as it confines you in the ever-narrower cave of yourself. You are scared also of this envy passing over to those others on whom you depend, either to plot their destruction, or worse so that they become envious in turn in which case they are at risk of self-destruction from the sheer intensity of the passion - which you perhaps are uniquely capable of withstanding. To envy, shame at envy and ways of concealing envy from others and yourself we must also add self-pity as a member of the same family of passions. Despite its reflexive name this is not a self-sufficient or narcissistic emotion, it requires a second person. It is not that you pity yourself but that you imagine how pitiable you ought to appear in the eyes of another, in the eyes of the envied other. How you ought to appear, but don't. They fail to pity you, they are oblivious to your suffering, and this gives you a further justification for your loathing of them which is more acceptable than seeing it as a direct consequence of your envy, and hence its exposure.

Of course you cannot point to anything that is not consciousness. Pointing, a function of thought, is so late in the game that by the time you have reached it all openings have been shut down. Is feeling, the feeling of what happens, more open and hence conscious than thinking? This is like a rivalry between the hemispheres of the brain. Your thinking is always associated with feeling, it is for example, heavy or light, dark or bright, fluid or stagnant, and it is always the utterance of a certain character, tied one of the masks or personae that the self adopts - the ideal of perfectly disembodied thought exists but is massively overdetermined. And in the same way feelings always mean something, they are self-interpreting, even as they seek to overwhelm and silence the discursive, to be all in all. Feeling seeks to evade the mind or make it redundant, as if we could drug ourselves on feeling, become perfectly snug in the body. But you cannot be perfectly snug unless there is a storm raging outside. The situation of feeling is to be alone and on the edge of the great void - you might call it vertigo or nausea, but whatever it is it is the background of every formation of feeling, and hence of thought as well. Does feeling then have an immediate and non-thetic apprehension of what is not consciousness? Perhaps it does, but it is unwise to believe feeling. The whole thing is a performance, it can change its character in a flash. The only constant is the silent witness.

If you imagine it to be built up from nothing in a series of moments, the first ones would correspond to setting the stage, and these being indefinite would be plural, intermingled and dependent on each other in circling ways that make no sense, while the last stage would be this most vivid here now, the subject, conscious at last and utterly particular, possessing direction or intention, and turning this marvelous gadget around to see where and what he was. The subject is a finished or crystalised point of view and appears to itself as complete simplicity, as the primary axiom out of which every thing is derived as a result of his investing some of his being. The object is contingent, he graces it with his attention, delivers over some of his delightful particularity for its unfolding. The set of frames, all the structuration that preceded him is pushed out to the periphery, as if it is a realm of vague objectivity behind the object. The subject's imperative is to annex all reality but he's uneasily aware that he does not originate himself. If he tries to get upstream of himself he trips and lands on his arse. Rather than turning himself inside out he should consider turning the whole picture inside-out, that is right-side up, and trying again. The end point, intentional consciousness, is the dead-end, the only life to be found, his only life, is in what comes first, what, once he'd thrust himself into the light, seemed merely the horizon.

If you say that everything is consciousness what you mean is that all of the relationships between appearances, whether they are themselves apparent or not, and mostly they are not, have the same kind of being as the appearances themselves. There is an ongoing enterprise of putting together a comprehensive map of reality, and on this assumption it is worth pursuing. There may be dead ends, the need to backtrack, to abandon whole world-views, dismantle and cannibalise their lexicons, and find a new starting point, but in this process there is a continual evolution of natural-philosophy into true philosophy. The encompassing process proceeds by internal criticism and the assimilation of new perspectives and extraneous partial truths originating in local inquiries. If the order of the world is finally comprehensible then the division between mind and world will be revealed as merely formal. This is a version of the notion that since man is created in God's image then it is possible for the human mind to fathom the secrets of creation - like those physicists who describe their enterprise as penetrating the mind of God. That few believe in such an idea has not lessened the fury of interpretation, in fact release from the goal or the responsibility of working towards a unitary interpretation has given new fire and a certain imperiousness to local inquiries. One's politics may be global while one's metaphysics, which means here interpretation of interpretation, is fiercely nationalistic. The understanding that everything is consciousness can still survive in this climate but it must be modified by the assertion that consciousness is more than the appearance of consciousness, and since appearance and consciousness are at the outset effectively equivalent terms this entails that consciousness is ultimately not consciousness, what we understand as consciousness, as the functioning of mind, is only a thin refraction of what consciousness truly is. Now tell me, do you find any evidence of this?

There are placements of yourself as the doer or the sufferer or merely as the presence in a scene, these are placements of a something in a world of somethings. It is from such modeling as this that thought takes off. The kind of thought that is always going on, the commentary on the models, not from the point of view of the modeler or the modeling, which remains latent, but of the subject-object in the picture. This is also called distraction, it is intrinsically distracted, that is, off-centre, a deferral, a provisional or indifferent filling of the empty place of truth. If distraction is noticed as such the event is reframed, there is a refreshing of the mental screen. How can being lost in a train of thought be noticed if not from outside that train, from awareness in a larger and more real context? So you can step back and say 'I was distracted just then', and bring the mind back to the present, the action being as if pivoting on the base reality, and like when you touch the sea-bottom with your outstretched foot you can't rest there, you can only use it for orientation and leverage, as something to briefly kick against. The belief in such a base reality is a constant. You measure the distance of mental states from it, you measure their necessary degree of unreality. Mental states are happily unreal since much of what they are called on to do is simulation, imagination, review of counterfactuals, etc. To take any step you need a sense of the field of possibilities that the present resolves. The distinction between real and imagined states of affairs is a fluid one and ultimately unsustainable. the operative difference being not reality but faith. So there is an irreducible position of the real in this play, like the position of the dealer in a card game, but it is entirely on the side of mind.

Even in detachment there is a background promise of happiness and this translates as the future prospect of possessing the power to gratify desire. That's a long chain of mediations but it's strong enough to transmit some energy. And what is at the end of it but a scene of your own gratification? If you envy others when you see them experiencing such joy, desire is the same process applied to yourself in the form of an imagined future self. So desire is envy of yourself. Many directed emotions, positive or negative, have a reflexive form, there is self-love, self-respect, self-esteem as well as self-hate, self-contempt and indifference to self. Self-envy seems impossible, but this is only so if the self to be envied is located at the identical point of time. Desire is thus envy of a future self. Strong desire, like envy, hits you in the pit of the stomach, blanches your features, and it prompts scheming, rehearsals and fantasies, and the shocking sense of a sudden rearrangement of powers. This is the reverse of the idea that desire prompts imaginary or even hallucinated scenes of gratification - no, these images come first and desire is the response, a secondary, even defensive reflex. Still this is not the end; it suggests that there is a sort of proto-desire, an undirected, unformed disposition to respond with desire - a pure indigence, a nothingness at the heart of being.

Phenomenology, aetiology these become progressively more refined, but where are they leading? There is a mode of the will at work even in pure disinterest. As an enterprise, enquiring more and more closely into the causes and conditions of embodiment, into how this experiencing is constituted, into the will behind will, seems to move you ever closer to nihilism. At what point do healthy instincts step in to arrest this process? "Le vent se lève! . . . il faut tenter de vivre!" The answer will be different if it concerns a community or only one individual. It may be a matter of a getting through a screen, a barrier, the desert of indifference, the dark night. One, for whom it begs the question to turn back, may resolve to find out what there is on the other side, but the scouting party is compelled to return. The categorical imperative is fine if you're a category. And is this what motivated the ethical turn? Is ethics a swerve from pure phenomenology, or its natural extension? Either way there is an imperative - to go further, or to turn outwards. If we keep going upstream of every way that things are and find that we were always held answerable to a command, then how do we know this? If the voice of God looms up in our unbelief, do we accept it without question? It is a hard slog getting to the boundary of how and such, while ethics is easy, it's exactly what everyone does in their generality.

As humans we are bathed in narrative, which statement means to regard narrative as a kind of solution or better as a soup in which we are all afloat. Like a culture medium we absorb parts to make our own vehicle, and we also emit parts for others to use. All kinds of things drift and swirl around in this broth, more or less digestible, more or less already digested, consisting mostly of articulated fragments. We are nourished by it, feel at home in it, are glad to enrich it when we can, but there are also suspect regions which we enter at our peril, rancid or gamey or toxic. There is however a general flavour and texture to the whole thing and this is what changes or evolves with the times. It is doubtful that we spend a larger proportion of our lives today than in the past attending to stories of other lives, but it does seem as if the variety of those available to us is greater. This is a quantitative change which brings with it a qualitative change, evident but hard to describe. Saturation of narrativity does not contribute to psychology in the sense of giving us more understanding of ourselves and others, but it does contribute to interpretation, to the many different ways we can interpret the behaviours of others and ourselves, an enrichment that may well lead away from understanding. We would be better to study narrative theory to gain insight into the constraints on our moral intuition. What makes a character? There is a certain minimum of elements and if these are not found they must be filled in from our imagination, a shockingly easy task. And what is the status of complexity? Is a simple narrative, mythological in character, a lazy reduction, of a truer complex one, or is every complex narrative a mask and a diversion from the simple one that it harbours? Is truth in the reduction or in the complexification?