Ongoingly unfolding your understanding of what is there, and of what you can feel, and of what you can do, where do you encounter the ethical imperative? Kant was surely right that whatever you do is already understood in relation to the principles defining that action, and these principles are what they are because in action you are substitutable, you are anyone whatever. But in acting it is really only the principles in principle that are needed, and in practise there are many different ways to fit a principle to an action. To choose one of them is already to have made an ethical decision and in doing so you are again in the situation of being called, of encountering a demand to choose, and choose now, to choose, like Adam, once and for all - you are in the situation of your paradoxical freedom. In explicating your constituting processes you move from multiplicity to oneness, and in the process freedom is one of the first things that you give up; but when you make the ethical turn you move back from oneness to duality. In getting to oneness you have been fighting against the current of your own and of the world's conditioning, which is supremely difficult; ethics on the other hand, no matter how great the sacrifice asked, is a surrender to those currents. It is not enough to try to forge an ethics of the difficult, it is ambiguous and at best leads to a warriors ethic which does not generalise. Perhaps the best you can do is to resolve to accept the consequences of your experiments in truth, which does.

Nothing to see, nothing to note - but that in itself is something to note. You cast about for what seemed true just now, it was a certain way of seeing, of facing the visible which found interest in everything. At least potentially so - it was a project, just point your camera any way, make the smallest adjustment, press the button, and lo... perfection! The mind was once and for all meta to all frames; that was as much the nature of the world as of the mind it had spawned... But now nothing, flatness, the eyes fly over the field, everything is closed, nothing holds you. Dullness of spirit, nowhere to begin - but what is it? The indifference of the world after you have withdrawn from it. So it was just your own energy lighting things up while you wanted to believe it was something out there and not just you sitting in your own puppet theatre. But only when you have stopped projecting can you begin to see. In this visual equivalent of silence is where the appearance of appearance hides.

It is not the putative belief in your identity with the body that is the problem, but rather what you believe to be the modality of this belief, taking it for a member of a propositional universe, for example, or as a sort of optional assumption that has seized you like an idée fixe, but which is still able to be speculatively negated. Perhaps only the chronically ill, or those undergoing torture, have any understanding of what it is to be a body; even to live an entirely physical life in more or less good health is only to master or to enslave the body for the sake of the mind and its endless caprices. If once you could fully inhabit the pragmatic reality of this belief you might begin to be freed from your inveterate error. Pointers towards the life of the body: animals, illness, sex, the passion of Christ.

In meditation the intention is to see, or to estrange, the process by which this, as the experience of a self, the expression of a self through a cloud of thoughts is naturalised. You can begin by noting just how variable it is; not just what is looked at, but the set of core values that assumes the pilot position. Self is what determines values, is the reference for values, and since this function corresponds to a definite position in the flux, self is the inhabitant of that position. But as value-giver it is not as consistent as it would seem, it has far less 'character', less principle, when viewed from the inside than from the outside. This is natural enough since a major part of its functioning, its business, is the shoring up of its appearance from outside; but the real problem is that its existence has to be inferred from its functioning. Yes, there is a desk with a sign on it reading 'the buck stops here' but there is no one behind it, no one in that room when you look in. But close the door and the frictionless flow of executive orders immediately resumes. If the self is known by its responses then it is hidden in a time-lag; by the time you become aware of the response the moment when it was decided, if there even is such a distinct moment, has passed. You weren't there too see it happen, but the decision having been taken you are taxed with it, and more often than not it weighs you down.

When mass culture grows reflective it ruthlessly quantifies the self and hence obliquely admits that there is no self. Quantities are perfectly substitutable and perfect substitution can be read as compassion, not only because there is nothing to distinguish you from the other, but because there is a pervasive anxiety associated with the threat of a non-existent or purely formal identity, and compassion, or more correctly just the intention towards compassion, is a way to resolve this anxiety. The emphasis on ethics and identity, in its new purely declarative form, is a reaction formation against the absence of deep identity glimpsed in the mirror of truth. At an earlier period the locus of truth was in transcendental subjectivity and since truth is an overriding value this lead to a certain antinomianism, a sacrifice of life on the altar of a higher value - the figure of this was the artist-philosopher. When everyone is now an artist-philosopher antinomianism no longer works; the locus of truth moves back out to the other, now understood in purely horizontal terms as the mass itself, and the transcendental subject again collapses into the natural subject, morality returns with a vengeance. What used to be the rigour of self-transcendence now becomes the sublimity of the death-wish.

Go ahead, put difficult questions to the onrushing mind, questions that make it stop in its tracks, make you stop in your tracks, require it to say out loud why it is going on like this and it's struck dumb - it doesn't matter, at the first lapse it all surges back twice as loud, twice as urgent, twice as fatuous. When you wake from sleep, as the morning's dreams fade, you find yourself, slip into yourself effortlessly, and are already running along some well-known line without any sense of disjunction or dissonance at all. It seems to be the simplest thing in the world, but that very thoughtless assumption of simplicity is life itself - you only need to assume a death's-eye-view and look back at it. No matter how sour the morning's taste in your mouth it all looks like butter on warm toast in the eye of death, an astonishing sense of entitlement for one existing on such a frail pretext. You've leapt over a chasm and whatever you think of yourself, whatever nest of judgments you stir up, the important thing is that you forget that momentary glimpse of the void as quickly as possible. This is where the 'triumph of life' takes place, every day without fail, and always with a smile. The slight tip, the shift in centre of gravity, that leans you from pure event to this is happening to me is the easiest and most natural thing in the world. Everybody's doing it, the horizon of unison that you first met with in kindergarten - how strange it must have once seemed! It is as if there is a pedal for it, it is part of the action of driving the car. And off you go in a cloud of exhaust and dust.

There is self-awareness but no idea of the self, only the idea of such an idea, put forward to explain certain changes or disjunctions in relationships, certain social facts. Self-consciousness refers both to a psychological occurrence as when there is a suddenly paralysing awareness of being out of step with a social setting and to the broader condition of possessing a second-degree awareness of your own state. The latter is an achievement of maturity, a capability in respect of multiple perspectives, the ability to relativise your own position so that you can grasp and incorporate the differing positions of others in general. With this you can accept criticisms, or make them in what is taken to be a thoughtful manner, you can be self-critical in a constructive way. You become self-conscious in the psychological sense when you fail or believe you have failed at just such an integration, when your native solipsism is exposed, when your self-presentation is faulty, when self-criticism is excessive and unbalanced. You want to be integrated, to be accepted, known in the group, self-aware but without being conscious of yourself, as if in one case your self-consciousness spreads out and is diffused through the group, and in the other it all floods back onto you without having passed through the acknowledgment of others. In the end these are just behavioural descriptions, however they work out they mean that the only contents that point to self are directed patterns of feeling, and their reflections. The shadow of a wince somewhere in the body, an unusual response to a word mentioned, all of these go on, regardless of you lagging behind, as if they already knew what the self implicit in them was.

It is not just that experience is varied but that it is variation itself. The term variation is taken here to mean both change in general, unpredictable, unordered innovation, and variation in the sense of variations on a theme, that is, changes that unfold the possibilities of a defined central notion, that deviate from their notion or theme as wildly as possible while still 'respecting' it in some way. None of this is conceivable without reference to a constant term, implicit in the former case, more or less explicit in the latter. What I am is what is most deeply constant in this flux of experience, and what therefore cannot itself be experienced, but without which there could not be any experience whatsoever. This is not the whole story however, experience doesn't just float in unmoving space, but is always my experience and therefore essentially includes within itself, within each atom or molecule of itself, a reference to what is beyond or prior to itself. Could it even be that in the extraordinary complexity of the variational structure of experience, with its loops and echoes, splits into and collapses of distinct levels etc., the reference to the unchanging "I" is a constructed artifact, bootstrapped from something so much more primitive as to be without any directly experiencable correlate at all? You have encountered such ideas before, but it seems that however far back into the un-intentional such speculation is pushed a sort of catastrophe-creation, a big bang, of self-reference is required, and at a level so prior to temporality and categorisation that it can no longer be held as in any sense sub-atomic, but must be the whole damn show!

There is an elaborate structure of inter-reliant thoughts and feelings around the notion of a self, but no directly evidencing experience of such an entity. The element which requires of all other experiences a certificate of authenticity, or at least a lineage rooted in direct experience, itself has no such certificate and can only evade the request to fully reveal itself. The law itself is a-legal. The self can fulfill such function as is required of it as pure fiction, but it seems that there is also a push to assert its existence off-stage, to insist that its presence concentrated at a kind of vanished centre is of vital importance since without such a belief we would fall into fatal disarray. Normally to need something is also to have a pretty good idea of just what it is you need, but here the whole point is that there is no, and cannot and must not be any, idea of the absent presence, or present absence. Honi soit qui mal y pense.  

This which is going on is either the happening itself or is the happening within the mind. The focus of attention can be shifted slightly and what was just now the thing going on becomes the thing going on as appearing in mind. This is a very odd kind of displacement and it is available at any moment. Whatever is happening is happening for me. If it is a direct or unreflected experience this is clear, and if it is indirect or mediated then its happeningness is the activity of a web of beliefs, and the entertaining of these beliefs is happening to me. But - to take the reverse road from phenomenology - what happens for me first merely happens. That which happens for me is a subclass of what is happening determined by the addition of some factor of witnessing imbuing it with for-me-ness. And even that elusive factor is just happening. Indeed, the very 'me', the putative locus of this event is merely happening. So what is it that appears specially distinguished about the 'me' part of happening, what is it that is strong enough to make the distinction seem such a clear demarcation? Clearly, nothing at all. For the distinction of subject and object, or neosis and noema, to hold up there must be a definitive experience of the border between them, but there cannot be such an experience since it would exist entirely in objectivity, or on the noematic side. There is no experience of the subjective as such, only different modes of the objective, and the only things which differentiate these are their associated beliefs, frame, and colouring, their different lines of association. There is no direct experience of a cogito, an 'I am', only a certain persistent structure of thoughts around this notion.

Just as the most interesting house on a street is eventually discovered to be the one you did't notice for the longest time, the one you have walked past countless times without gracing it with a second look, the one that still refuses to solicit your gaze, so the most interesting of mental states is ordinary mind, the state you are apparently in most of the time and to which you pay no attention at all. This is the state when attention flows away towards its objects with no backwash, no handhold (or hand-holding) for an epoché. It is not strictly a state but a family of states, perhaps unlimited in extent. The natural attitude, in which subject is the protagonist whose interests and preoccupations effortlessly predominate whatever the current emotional weather, and where reflection is simply an ancillary capability and the past, all the way to the horizon and beyond, is a mere entitlement. The well-worn office of a self in the driver's seat, taken for granted. It is the very taking of it for granted, a transcendental sanity which synthesises the contributions of a host of sub-personalities, and is able to add the frame "I think" without any felt need to question just what this "I" and this "think" might be. You think about these things and part of your thought is that in the half-moment just before you said to yourself, "Now is a time to think about these things."

Consciousness retains the sense of a gathering, of a being with, a consensus. At the very least it is a doubling of mind, an incomplete or imperfect doubling. Being consciousness is to be presence, but presence out of what? Presence is transitivity. There is a something that precedes presence that can only read as dreamless sleep, passivity, as absence. When you wake up you know that it is you waking up, so what have you woken from? Consciousness is a field of will as much as it is a field of awareness. The awareness is always out in front of you, across a transparent gap of no-consciousness, which is why it can't catch mind; will is continuous whether active or not, like a servant at hand, needing to be doing something, to intervene in a prior reality, to form thoughts or dreams in which you can be placed, posited. And it is riddled with blindspots where the changes it reports are introduced; waking, the successions of thought, of feeling, of sense, emotion. It could not produce the illusion of transparency, of being transparent to itself, if there wasn't this opacity at its heart - not the opacity it knows, that it calls object, but the opacity it doesn't know - a sleight of hand so simple as to beggar belief. Will and awareness are two aspects of the same event, the tag-team of your world dream.

 

What it is least interested in is itself, but it appears to be interested in nothing else. It only wants itself in objective form, the object of desire is object above all. Subjection or objection? Why is the symmetry of the root terms lost in these forms? Thrown under or thrown against, flight or fight, tend or befriend? The situation of a self in relation to a world; the situation comes about and can only transform into other situations, wheeling and dealing. It is the situation of situations, the original regression or loop, coming about, being about; sit, the present subjunctive of esse, but also site, as in web-site. It strives to make everything into a mirror, sites proliferate, Crescite et multiplicamini, et replete terram, et subjicite eam... Make everything subject. The archaeology and history of being, explanation, exposition; but how does one thought follow on from another - centuries of introspection fail to produce an answer. Consciousness spreads out further and further but does not meet itself; is our vehicle but at its core is unconsciousness. The situation of the mind that identifies itself with consciousness, with presence, but is always absent so that things can appear. That things shine forth and appear to an observing subject only seems to be the truth, but this appearance, unable to render itself up to itself, is no appearance; just as presence unable to be present to itself is no presence.

The veritable consciousness is not asleep and has no need or desire to awaken, and it is not gratified when mental consciousness, the mind's refraction of it, assumes a more blissful, transparent and embracing quality. Identification is an idea that could only arise in a mind labouring to improve its experience, and such a mind, although it may desire bliss, transparency and breadth cannot desire its own abolition in favour of that which it truly is, before all desire. Desire seems to aim at the end of desire, but always by way of the desirable. What desire there is is always a component of the play of desire, of the world, in other words, and its history with all its obstacles, strategies and catastrophes. There is no point in the attempt to align the mind with this truth, since it can't be done, but there is no point in not trying to do so either. To work in this way is to establish and nurture an interest in what is intrinsically or naturally the least interesting thing possible, not the world but the silence behind or prior to the world. The world of mind is head over heels in love with objectivity, what is not and can never be objective is to it maddeningly dull, is what would forestall its greatest love, its road to accomplishment. You can pursue whatever you can imagine yourself as attaining, but cannot imagine yourself awakened. If you think you can then you are looking in the wrong direction.

If something in addition is required, or if something that exists needs to be subtracted then duality prevails: there is a before and an after, a here and a there, a cause and an effect, and what can be done can as easily be undone, is undone as soon as done, doubted as soon as known, known as soon as doubted. In spite of everything this is the way you understand it, that there must be something missing or undone because there you are searching for it! (There, where? Where.) What would it be like to entertain the alternative? Not your knowing but the knowing itself? Every moment of consciousness, whether full or empty, partial, oblique or direct, is reflected back or referenced from a core of knowingness. The moment, the light, the beings in being, phenomenon, event, can only be as it appears known in this knowing with no knower, this life of your life, entirely dark, not itself appearing in any way but as appearance itself (Does that appear?). So where you think you know, your Cartesian centre, is no centre at all; the presumption of a centre is what you call experience, but is no presumption at all, only the abundance of appearing, this unspeakability that is your speaking, body to body, mouth to mouth, breath to breath, light to light, darkness to darkness.

The objective and rational method delivers a reality which is testable - according to the kinds of tests intrinsic to that method - and which also is accretive and reasonably consistent in its growth, a sort of gradually extended map of all that is presumed to be. There remains something deeply unsatisfying about this reality, although again opposing the tendency to seek satisfaction was always one of its founding principles - we cannot be satisfied with any notion of reality that is not unsatisfying - reality is defined as what opposes our wishes. A nagging doubt remains however: the problem of skepticism is not solved, the putative reality is a 'view from nowhere', there is no account of subjectivity, the 'hard problem' remains untouched. Is there a deeper intuition that demands that wisdom tell us who and what we are, and what exactly we are doing here, if indeed 'we' are 'here' at all? Notions of reality reflect the metaphysical culture in which the self that forms them arises, just as this forming self is in turn formed by a prior understanding. If opposing the wishes natural to such a self is a clue along which we can progress, reshaping ourselves as we go, there may be a limit to this process. What seems infinite from inside is seen as futile, a dog chasing its tail, once the whole picture is glimpsed.  

The psychological accomplishment known as reality-testing is a prototype for the scientific outlook, but differs from it in that it is, in principle, compatible with a wide range beliefs about the relationship between consciousness and reality. It is not a belief but a meta-belief which acknowledges the contamination of external perception by subjective beliefs, hopes, expectations etc., in sum by subjective furniture, and in this sense it is what conditions the arisal of the very concept of the subjective. Even if the reality you wish to assert is thoroughly magical it still needs to clear the hurdle of reality-testing in order to carry any sort of conviction. Reality-testing is perhaps best viewed as an intuitive methodology, and as such it may carry with it an intrinsic bias against the magical and the mythical, but as the beginning of a systematic critique of the objective/subjective distinction it may also contain a bias against the purely objectivist or scientistic outlook as well. In the pursuit of perfect rigour the pursuit of the idea that there is no relationship at all between consciousness and reality threatens to destroy both notions. What remains is only the tester, or rather the testing.

Turn it around on itself? No, discover that it is already turned around on itself - everything you need to do is already done, you are redundant! The process goes on but the way it is taken is open. Consciousness is unanchored, is unanchoredness. Interest is what appears to anchor it. It discovers 'being in the present' - this is not a natural state but an achievement built on assumptions, such as time, presence versus absence... In the same way, to have a notion of oneself is a construction and it is only an additional speculation to equate the self with consciousness. It is a contingent necessity, or perhaps a necessary contingency. Imagine your self in another consciousness, or your consciousness with another self. The first of these is easier to imagine than the second. Consciousness cannot be identified in the cognitive sense without being identified in the psychological sense, that is without some part of self, or 'I'-thought, attached to it. There are particular contents by which you seem to recognise yourself - what is the minimal of these? An identity parade - what does it take to identify yourself? Does something identify something else that happens to be the same thing, or it is just the process of identification playing out for no-one, and no-where?

 

The style of thinking has become exhausted and now offers only variations on the same basic patterns. How can it become more exhausted, truly exhausted? There is a certain tone of voice, a ground position that you feel comfortable with in the moment but shows as artificial at one remove. Can emotion be merged with recollection or is the problem precisely the opposite, to remove the taint of recollection from the inscription of what are neither properly emotions nor thoughts? You don't try to take disidentification frontally, you sidle up to it and strike suddenly. It is the thing most taken for granted, the contraction of event into experience. In the fine structure of each observed movement of mind there is a synthesis of experience as yours which presumes a prior and latent understanding of mineness. Question the one who is curious, the one who wants to know, who squares up to the puzzle, who dredges the shadows behind... but behind what? Perhaps the real interest is in what metaphors get thrown up. Only a new twist in figurative language is needed, response of the mind faster than the mind. To be so quick that you have acted before you can intervene. The process is not on your side, is not on anybody's side, it is omnivorous and would eat your death as soon as anything your life can throw to it.

Puzzles arise because you try to find coherent motivations for the thoughts and actions of a multitude of different agents which are only in partial communication with each other. Coherence is only the agenda of another agent, one whose goal is to maintain your relations with the tribe, to keep you answerable, and since he is a meta-agent he retains a certain hierarchical elevation. The whole thing is there to pre-empt the experience of the veritable subject. The agents don the mask of the subject and its prerogatives when it is their turn to act. Close examination of any of them shows that they do not possess, could not possess the self-grounding that is assumed in subjecthood. But it is impossible to reach this conclusion in a firm deduction because the investigator is yet another agent, in turn drawing its power and authority from its own usurpation of the subject position.

The reality of suffering is based on the subjective fact of your own suffering and on the suffering of others which you become aware of through empathy, according to your capacity for empathy which may be innate or learned. When you suffer you wish to cry out, to make an appeal, to invoke an other, an agency, who may have brought it about and who can soothe it, or offer solace and ultimately take it away. Suffering is contingency and social fact. Mental suffering is felt as an action or a choice when it is our own, but seems passive in others, the case of physical suffering is somewhat reversed, but mental and physical suffering cannot be clearly distinguished. While the objective consists of facts that stand indomitably in your way, that you must get around, or else fail to get around, subjective and social facts are thoughts and so are always open to interpretation. Interpretation here is larger than the fact of suffering, it includes what you can think and do, and whom you can address, what questions you are permitted and not permitted to ask. To ask of suffering, "Who suffers?" is to put this entire interpretation into question. You cannot ask this of an other, but you can ask it of yourself. While suffering imposes a limit to your social identity it does not do so in relation to your inner identity for which it is a solvent. There is a fork here which is rarely perceived.

In the midst of conditions; but what are called conditions includes both states of affairs, essentially passive, random in cause and deterministic in effect - but changing in time -, and centres of influence, active, self-reflexive, overdetermined and dynamic as well. You find yourself inescapably in this, of this, and at the same time you are doubly aware of the entire tangled, interwoven network itself - once by way of your individual perspective, as the ground for your figure, and once again as it is in itself, the objective view, the view from outside, from nowhere, in which you appear as a single and isolated point. There are thus three outlooks, your subjectivity, your objectivity, and objectivity itself, the latter being the perspective of the Other, and these are closely imbricated, convoluted, entangled - the word that keeps coming to mind is un enchevêtrement. Intuitively it is simplified: there is you and there is a centre of gravity to the event, two energetic centres that are linked by intensive flows. As and when you are the protagonist of the story then you have effectively captured the centre of gravity and things appear right side up. But with a change in conditions the balance shifts and the centre of gravity draws in and captures you; you are no longer the protagonist, surfaces are everted, flipped inside out, you no longer recognise yourself but feel more bound to yourself. Your self-feeling in disengaged from the dynamics of the event and rebounds from closer at hand. You break and melt away in eddies but then you re-form, oddly persistent like a standing wave. And these fibres that criss-cross the field, that ripple and gather, bunch-up and bloom, bang and crunch, are made of what? Attention, intention, and most of all the play of contingency and coincidence.

A psychological state is the perception of a predicament together with an emotional response to that predicament where the emotion and the predicament reciprocally provoke each other. There is a locking together of the inner emotional state and the outer predicament that it answers to and influences. In naming it as a state of the psyche the emphasis is placed on the inner component so that it can be placed in significant relation to other such states. Emotions are few but situational descriptions are many, their differentiations being unlimited. States however are always general however much they feel like your own states. Any state you have experienced will have been, and will be again, experienced by others, the same state in multiple contexts. States are cultural artifacts. If they aren't entirely made of language, and they are decidedly not, their difference from being entirely defined by their coordinates in the world of meaning is not meaningless but unmeanable.

What you call yourself is a sense of freedom, a free capability, defined with respect to serial time. On the one hand this temporality is seen in the immediate way in which you find yourself determining a comportment towards the future based on an understanding of conditions that arises from your past experience, on the other it appears in that the you as a distinctive appearance is ever-renewed, so that you are always peripherally aware of many parallel versions of yourself along the thread of the just-been and the just-to-come. The freedom which is inseparable from your essence is in a never-vanishing detachment from all known conditions, a deliberative gap which can only be effectively closed by the tacit decision to adhere to a prior decision. Of course a lot could be said to impugn this freedom, to show that it can't really be freedom at all, only an illusion of it. For example, if you can only respond to conditions, these conditions embrace every detail of your awareness and you have no freedom in respect of how they appear. You can only vote as they suggest and if it appears otherwise, that you retain a capacity for insubordination, this too can be traced to other conditions. Conditions have no obligation to be simple and unconflicted, your illusion of freedom is merely a reflection of the tangled and over-determined nature of conditions. However, there is a contradiction in claims that freedom is an illusion, since only a free subject can be the victim of an illusion - if you draw a mistaken conclusion then there must have been a prior and non-trivial moment of decision. The debate can continue but is misdirected, the error is not in the sense of freedom but but in its priority: freedom is taken as being before conditions when it is always after them. This is why we always find ourselves in the midst of something, as if we have fallen into conditions and commitments alien to our nature - when in fact the awareness of freedom is no more than an outcome of these conditions. This error is compounded by the fact that the time-past of conditions is not the same as the serial time belonging to the sense of self. When we acknowledge the timelessness of the unconscious we are looking at the deep roots of the conditions in a temporality orthogonal to the line on which our waking selves are strung.

A being is just as real as their suffering, or alternatively suffering confirms and validates the reality of beings, it realises their reality in finality, provides the deciding act of faith, summoned necessarily, inevitably, the auto da fé. Pure materialism or pure idealism like any consistent monism has no place for suffering since for it the existence of beings is secondary or phenomenal, while what is real is only what, while remaining entirely sufficient in itself, underlies the phenomenon of phenomena. This tells us more about metaphysics as the location of a discourse that treats reality as a viable designation within a larger region of discourse that pivots on, reflects on, the experience of suffering. Here suffering is the social fact that is firmly rooted in the subjective as asocially private or presocial, while reality is the social fantasm of a transcendent objectivity that is its outer limit. In other words, suffering and objectivity are the two opposed poles of necessity as social or discursive fact: the inner private and the outer or physical. If what is is the timeless and spaceless thing-in-itself then love and compassion would melt away with the rest of the dream, together with morality. This would be how it is except that suffering demands a subjectivisation that matches any realisation step for step, or an abjection that matches any absolution. A god that fulfills the function of a God, including dispensing the law, must be One that suffers at the same time as being outside of or beyond or oblivious to all suffering - and what goes for God goes equally for Self or not-Self. This is a paradox, and paradox demands capacity - while the elevation of morality and explanation to primary consideration is what happens when this fails.