Phenomenal reality is something you can only speak of in retrospect, that is, within a certain internal conceptualisation of the event. At best it is a misleading metaphor, a pointing to something which really isn't here. The word connotes an appearance for a subject, something that arises and passes away in time; as if there is a stream of phenomena, on the model of cinema frames. When you are trying to think the unthinkable it seems to help, until you look around and see that there is nothing here resembling it at all. You have never seen anything arise, but you are already in the experience, in the event, and then in the 'next' event that you happen to pay attention to, but never in the transition, never in the act of entering into it. You are not apart from the event, and you cannot fix a boundary to it, there may be no next, but only the one event, one event ever, except that this 'ever' would be inside the event not outside it, if there were an inside - so you can't frame it as eternal, still less as one. There is no montage in real experience, montage is an artefact in the simulation you make of it in order to know it via the knower that you think you are. Estrangement is an excellent thing in art, it evokes the kind of detachment in which meaning is made, but it is never here, is only a sort of projection of a complete detachment which would be the final paradise of meaning for the knower that persists as an after-image. The knower is the imagined desire that there is a knower to wake up in perfect detachment.

It is discomfort and pain which produce the keenest experience of time as duration, or as nested durations. Does this structure still stay stationary, does it still represent a self, does it belong to an aesthetic subject? The structure is secondary to the pain which is primary and unthought, the structure is imposed as a way of managing the obstinate event of pain. Even just to think about what it is is difficult. Pain moves, it is always building up or fading, 'it comes and goes', and these movements subtend periods as much as they define subjectivity. Pain is what only you can feel, no matter how much empathy is extended, it is utterly concentrated, resembling nothing but itself. You endure, you play tricks with your waiting, count, restart the count, try to begin again as if it were a new beginning, that is, you try to map a past duration onto the future one, 'if I could get through that one then I can get through this one, the one starting now.' There seem to be cycles of absorption, of attentiveness, where awareness of the cutting edge is dulled, periods of attention where the over-riding need to stop the pain is side-tracked; but whereas a past cycle took up so much time, this cycle only persists for a fraction of that. Inside a cycle you are not apart from the sensations without feeling the need to do anything about it, without having to face your lack of control. It becomes a matter of internal administration, a mediation between agencies, planners and executives, competing ministries for various cares. They operate in time, economic units to which energy and attention must be allocated. Wherever there is energy there is time: pain and time, pleasure and time, food and time, sex and time, the time of human interactions, life time.

The curtain opens on the day, it is unmistakable, the creak of the pulleys, the gust of cooler air, it opens every day to something fresh if not so different on the stage, but there is always an edge of anticipation, an echo of an echo of the excitement at the start of any show. You are the show, but you wonder where your favourite characters have got to, it's a while since you've seen them. Today the blinds at the sides of the auditorium have gone up as well and the pale light of day floods in. The stage is empty but for some old props scuffed and scored with repurposing, and the coming and going of an occasional hand who moves a piece around and back in a seemingly random way. Everything says, "this is not a show, you can sit there if you like, but nothing's scheduled for today, the theatre is closed". But what you can't help seeing is how shabby everything appears in this light: torn velvet, stained boards, flaking paint, dust motes floating in the diffuse light, a musty smell. This was the scene of your greatest adventures, there could be no other, but what is it now? And what was it always beneath the willing suspensions? Nowadays the empty theatre is almost a cliché of the theatre and you keep waiting for the joke to be revealed, for the meta-narrative to insinuate itself with a wink. Meanwhile you imagine the actors having a day off, sitting in a bar somewhere, drinking and smoking, the real jokes are always behind the mirror, laugh at them and you are lost, don't laugh at them and you just as lost.

There is a layer of inner monologue, not very artful for the most part but essentially well caricatured by writers, poets and comedians. Even when you are talking to yourself there is a staginess about it, it belongs to the cultural belief that individuation is in the end a sort of dialectic, is inherently social. Have we not begun to outgrow it? Aren't monkeys the most perfectly social of beings? We can only give up one social network by adopting another, and none are entirely stable, none can keep us from diffusing into our simulacra. As refined as we seem to be, we have invented the other, the alter-ego, a sort of god, and as this invention occurs for each of us it frames an always prior event, a sort of big bang, the catastrophe creation of a fundamental split. It is the origin of subjective time, the idea that consciousness is the kind of reality that is contingent and repeated, that it is only one instance out of an infinite plurality of other consciousnesses, all equally real and ephemeral, flashing out and then gradually being extinguished. This event finds us in a universe filled with a mysterious background radiation - something for psychology, for the folk psychoanalysis which is our fictional metaphysics of being, to explore without end. It is however only a layer, a band of noise that gets louder as we approach it until we find that we have somehow passed through it and it begins to fade away and we find ourselves still falling, surprised to be peace with others who are suddenly found to have become irrelevant, now perfectly alone with nothing to say, and still falling.

Consider affect in the technical sense of observed expression of emotion or desire, where 'observation' includes self-observation; this connotes both a distortion of awareness, a decentreing, and also a basic sign of life. The self as auto-affection: forget qualia, to be alive is to experience affections, to collapse the irony inherent in being affected. It is to experience vividly but to be unable to fully claim that experience until it is recollected, and thus to be spaced out in time, on the altar of the real, which is time. So it is to be scattered to the winds, as if the internal currents of being as appetites and evaluations, as fundamental motion, as the vectorial nature of being, is suddenly aligned, forced or drawn into alignment by a coincidence of outward circumstance with latent inclinations, so that the working stability of the self is compromised in the face of something more real than itself. Every self or persona is a situated commitment, and commitments crystallize in the universal form of judgments; what you feel to be your good is what you believe to be good tout court, you are the arbiter and proof of all categories, what you want is good even if it is unacceptable - and it does not cease to be unacceptable even if it is good. Affect can and does turn on a dime. The persona knows it is unreal, is the working knowledge of its own unreality.

The strange logic of the self - that the part is the whole. Everything hinges on the modality of this 'is' which can't be delimited in any way. It is so because you are the thought that the boundary of the self can be delineated - but only with the kind of reversible thought that unthinks itself in the very same act. Sometimes the word love refers to this phenomenology, like an apparently limited category that also proves to be the universal category - and here everything hinges on how it 'proves'. For example, the 'phenomenon' is always 'this', an invariable structure apparently filled by differing contents. The structure, which is you as identity, is like the spiral of an infinite seashell that rejoins itself in an unknown dimension so that the way out is also the way from. Your seeming to experience is the view from one point and behind it the subject lies curled up, infinitely potent but concealed from view and out in front a prospect is framed in ever larger prospects out to and beyond the limit of vision. The phenomenon is just this but is absolutely inclusive of that as well; it takes in everything that only seems peripheral or contingent, it embraces its conditions to the final degree. The spiral is a version of parallel lines where what seems to meet never actually meets as you follow it through, as if there really was a difference between in and out.

Being in motion in a train is paradigmatic of all your experience in time. If you look through the window the near landscape goes by quickly while the distant landscape changes slowly. If you turn your eyes back to the carriage in which you are sitting you appear to be stationary, but this is only relative to what is moving with you. Your internal structure of retentions and protentions is homomorphic on every scale, you can think in terms of your departure from one station and arrival at your destination at another - where you'll leave the train together with some of your fellow passengers, but others will remain on board and a whistle will sound and they'll recede into the distance; inside the carriage someone else will have taken your seat - but you can also think in terms of the larger journey of which this is one part, of the years of your life, past and future landmarks and stages, your birth and your death; or in terms of smaller units: being between stations, being between two pages of your book, between breaths, heartbeats etc. Always the possibility of looking forward and looking backward, but what you look at keeps changing. The objective you think of as the moment now seems to evaporate and be built up afresh as you gaze into it, a two-faced moment crumbling away on one face and freshly accumulating on the other - but this could represent the moment falling away into the past and renewed from the future, or else the future itself melting away while the past accumulates. The structure is always the same and you are always the same, as if stationary, but the internal change is inexorable. Again, it is like watching a cloud in fast-motion, roiling on itself as it is slowly swept across the sky by the wind. Because you are already in time you can identify these images of time without knowing how it is possible to to be this, to know this.

Even a small flash of insight brings with it a certain satisfaction. There is the metaphor of light, which seems natural, aha!, even if what you see into is only your own darkness, your guilty darkness or just your abysmal darkness - not just the fact that you'll never see the light, but the reality that there isn't any light for you to see. Facts might appear in the light of day, but reality is only glimpsed in a flash, and the flash brings on a certain satisfaction, like a certain smile; something is more present in it, you are more present in it, than not. It's the sense that the truth might show itself, not to you, but in place of you; the truth can only show itself to the truth. If you want to see truth you have to be truth, but the truth is you can't be truth, never were, never will be, and there is a certain satisfaction in this, aha! I got you! So truth doesn't just sit there in the dark, like your mother waiting for someone to turn on the lights, or pop the flash, in order to be seen doing something perfectly staged, it isn't a performance, exacts no response - there's nothing there for the one who looks, truth is the light itself and what is illuminated and what sees. All you know of it is a certain satisfaction - that happiness is closer to truth, is more true, against the odds - that what your mother kept telling you, keeps telling you is untruth: that everything that goes up comes down, and everything that goes down stays down, in the dark, where there's always a place waiting for you.

To go back up through the axis of yourself. At every moment there has been something you held as the truth, as your truth, but you haven't always known what it was, never had a full understanding of it, but it has always changed with the days coming down. You could never know or face the beliefs on which you rested but somewhere, in your most intimate outside, in your extimacy, they were entirely exposed and collapsing on themselves. You can recognise your commitment, your wager, immediately, so that if you went back to an earlier moment when you were in the midst of other conditions the first thing that would strike you with sharp embarrassing familiarity would be the collection of beliefs that were being ventured. It would be painful, even if now you could do no better, as far as beliefs are concerned, but merely being past, and having been yours would be enough to make them false. You are in flight from yourself, up through that axis, gathered around what seems most real, most to be valued, most worthy of being acted upon, even with your finger held firmly on one side of the scales. As if your life were a long and tedious argument, refuting itself as it went and swerving away from the consequences of each refutation. This is about the way you don't map into time, even as you have no other medium than time to know yourself in. As if what you are is the collision with appearance which can only shatter into those fragments you call time, the time of your life, each isolated and erroneous shard holding the entire image just outside its grasp.

The fourfold hormone/neurotransmitter system as mapped to varieties of motivation provides a good but partial picture of the wheel of life, that is, the internal dynamics of the life-illusion that maintains the integrity of the dream. Characterisations of the poles, however, tend to stress passive descriptors and miss the sense of how each provides a distinctive system of desires and a corresponding colouring of truth. They each have their modes of satisfaction, but also of outrage, of high and of low intensity. Still, you can begin with a rough list: the dopamine system: risk, novelty, creativity. the serotonin system: sociability, prudence, conformism. the testosterone system: skepticism, assertiveness, directness, decisiveness. the oestrogen system: empathy, imagination, trust, practicality. Doubtless there are more that would be needed to gain a full picture, to say nothing of the cultures associated with each of the chemicals, endogenous or exogenous, that screws around with the balance. The point is that they suggest an elusive but plausible grasp of inner variability. If you could just pin down the churning between these systems you would be less surprised by how what seems true or desirable in the morning seems false or repulsive at night and vice-versa. The gestures of understanding that you come upon which seem to reconcile opposing tendencies, or to sublate one in another would suddenly seem less profound. If we lacked a peripheral synoptic view of all our constitutions we might even slow down the movement, being tossed from one to the other, but as it is there are few things we like better than the tranquility we imagine we are experiencing as we recollect one passion from the heart of another.

In one respect the terms happiness and unhappiness are just shorthand for the chief poles which orient the motivational system. It is not that we pursue happiness but that that happiness is the attainment of what we pursue. The system of motivations, or of desire which is almost the same thing, has far more consistency than that of happiness, even if the latter would seem to map more readily to brain chemistry. But this is only because happiness is seen as a state resembling more or less various experiences of pleasure or intoxication. In fact the varieties of motivation map quite well to the balance of the four fundamental hormones and neurotransmitters, oestrogen/oxytocin, testosterone, dopamine/noradrenaline, and serotonin. We can thus speculate that there are four independent systems or parties within us which each evolve and drive their own agendas. On a higher level they are reconciled by an evolved partitioning of life in a certain way so that each attains a proportional satisfaction. There is no separate system or self to effect this working division; it draws intelligence from the culture - you could say it computes in the cloud - it creates character but it has no self. Self only exists as a concomitant of motivations, and so we have different selves sharing the same body and memories and often with little need to communicate with each other. If consciousness is definitively intentional, self is definitively committed - to some system of goals, values, etc. It is not quite so simple, however, as self has no quantitative dimension - selfness is never a matter of degree but of something vaguely metaphysical. Selves can arise because they lean on an unmanifest reality.

For the non-dualist the error of falling into monism, especially in the form of idealism or mentalism, is both more tempting and more severe than giving way to some form of dualism. Monism is a privileging of, or clinging to, the subject when what needs to be seen is the mutual inexistence of subject and object. Similarly, between nihilism and 'something'-ism it is the former that is the greater trap. The purpose of double negation is simply to destroy thought, to puncture thought-built worlds, and not to establish some new and glamourously paradoxical basis for belief. The peril is in what you believe because it is so mercurial, not in what you can't  or won't believe. There are so many reasons why you'd like to have a basis; it seems to be essential to any sort of action, and action is solace, but only when it is unashamedly dualist. So follow duality where it leads and be deaf to the siren-song of one-ness.

A sort of truce with time, deep contentment, like a child lying on a freshly mown lawn in a large park early Autumn, relaxedly watching the slowly moving clouds, the moist green smell of grass, the passing sounds suspended in amber. Every moment seems to fully unfold, to blossom completely in the now. This is a deeply individualised state, you feel immensely and properly yourself, you are at the source of love and it is yourself, only and ever yourself. The aesthetic only produces an eidetic version of such a state at the second remove - people will pay a small fortune for it - while romantic love is a sort of operatic version, staged, musicalised, spiced with pleasure, with high drama, urgency, but the same state at a single remove - people throw away their lives for it.

The analogous ideas of a screen of time or a screen of words propose the metaphor of an almost impermeable barrier within consciousness that separates the timeless in experience from the time-bound, or else meanings which can only exist in a matrix of language from those which do not. Since the division is within an identical consciousness it is less a matter of a sort of membrane than of qualities of energy that cause certain fields to become active and certain others to fall into passivity or to assume the unconsciousness of the horizon. Or else we could speculate that such a barrier represents a certain kind of frequency threshold, below which it appears essentially solid - and the more so as our foreground or identified consciousness operates at a lower frequency - and above which it becomes increasingly traversable and invisible. To take the example of the time-barrier and considering various states from low to high, we can see that at the lower limit we are merely subject to the passing of time and passive in relation to our destiny. To historicise is to see the world from the point of view of the oppressed, to feel a certain rage at the fact that in each instance the initiative was already seized by others with some greater apparent freedom in relation to their destiny. This rage, however is the beginning of our own movement to a more energetic state where the notion of will now makes some sense since destiny is no longer entirely fixed, some opening in time is perceived. In the next broad frequency band time is the arena for self-actualisation, everything seems to be in motion towards a state of absolute freedom, but a freedom that is premised on the overcoming of obstacles still needs its obstacles, and so time does not yield. If time now seems to be the final challenge it is one that can only be passed by dissolving the heroic frame completely. The next band is the first at which time starts to become transparent, and here it is as if time intersects eternity and a contemplative consciousness awakens. Will expresses the relation of consciousness to time, and here it has been ranged between two quiescences, from infra-temporal to ultra-temporal. The only point of this fable is to point out where different understandings fall into sterile conflict with each other.

Philosophies and world-views make a difference in what is possible, and do so only by rebalancing your attunement to matters and things, not by providing a more correct picture of an unknowable reality. A philosophy cannot be compared with what it purports to describe; but the way of proceeding that it gives or permits can be roughly made out and assessed. This ought to be clear if you look aside from the contents of such systematic reflections and consider the earnestness and even passion with which they are held. Philosophies seem to provide a scheme for the way that individual lives differ from each other; at best there is an elaborately courtesy in disputations which veils the underlying bottomless incredulity and contempt for the opponent. If the error in your position appears clear to me then you seem to be wasting your life on a futility. The value of a position then cannot be exhaustively determined from the outside, at least not by a wholly rational or argumentative consideration of its terms, but must also depend what it offers to someone who takes it on. This is the problem with religion, where you must believe before you can know. But whether it is a philosophy or a religion inconsideration, we judge it after reserved consideration by means of a sort of gut reaction, a judgment of the quantity and kind of life that it contains. This judgment takes the form of the presence or absence of a recognition of something already known but not explicit. It is not an image of ourselves that we seek so much as a restoration of some alienated intensity of self-presence - the sort of self-presence that might lie precisely in the most rigourous askesis of all naïve versions of self-presence. The energetic figures that are embodied in this interplay of life and understanding are as baroque, and perhaps as exhibitionistic, as in any perversion.

It is a peculiarity of the phenomenal reality that it contains the seeds of its own undoing. There is an unadaptive drive to get at the truth, to extrapolate along lines already firmly established in appearance which push it further and further into crisis. You can find such a path and attempt to follow it, to see where it leads, but you will inevitably swerve away from the line. The further you go along it the fiercer the interference, the easier it is to confuse the goal with something else superficially similar. You grasp at something finally in reach and it takes you back to where you started. The illusion of escape from phenomenality is just as much a part of phenomenality as its possibility. As if appearance is a reduction in dimension of a reality whose dimensionality is intrinsic. It is the very same reality but now it doesn't add up, in every mode of understanding it makes sense locally but not globally. You ought to stop worrying at it, but you can't, there is something you know which you don't know, something you don't know which you know. You are constrained to look from a point inside the pattern, but you aren't actually inside the pattern at all, there isn't even a pattern, the pattern is you, and so is the constraint.

Whatever appears is exposed, and to be exposed is to be evident. The notion of truth is rooted in evidence and is not that makeshift distillation of advantageous beliefs which is taken to be true. True belief leans on truth. Appearance is in the present moment, the point present - this may seem doubtful since the things that are closest to us are lived in duration, but it only takes a single flashed image of say, a dog I've known, to bring the entire animal before me. What is familiar is known in an instant, and the instant is certain, unlike the next or the preceding one. I know myself in the same way, all that temporalisation is folded into the capsule of the instant like the ribbon of DNA in a cell, and its genesis is recapitulated, reanimated in detail, and slowly because in equally folded time. In the fringe of each perception my entire life is lived over, I gaze at you out of the past and out of the future too. It is not a history because it is not summarised, not symbolised or represented, it is the time itself, incompressible content. But I am aware of more than just the life there on the fringe of the living moment, but of the structure in which it is held, the horizon of the horizon, and this is the closest I come to knowing what I am.

Self is a kind of object among other objects. It is assembled out of legacy components and must pass through a number of trials which, like annealings, not only test but modify it, before being fledged or deemed fit for purpose. The probability of inherent flaws or of further breakages can be reduced but never entirely eliminated. It is specialised and purposive according to a large but finite number of distinct capabilities and specifications, while retaining some general adaptability. It is a distinguished object in a world of objects, modified continually if not continuously both by internal acts and processes and external encounters, where internal and external are only relative terms. It knows itself more extensively but not more thorougly than it knows other objects in its world but the full range of its potentialities remains largely unknown throughout its life-cycle. Self is a sort of possession of yours, you can care for it or neglect it, coddle it or thrash it, and it will bear the marks of how it has been treated; but this is only a way of speaking since there is no distinction between it and "you". There is an indeterminate and ineliminable oscillation, or vacillation, between active and passive moods when speaking about it, and in its own hidden self-reflections. It provides the chief metaphor for every kind of circular causation of effectuation. It is however not self-sufficient; the circular pathways that define it did not originate in it and are never free from participation in external systems. Its self-reference may be largely by fiat, a currency only for exchange. Still, those who insist there is no self are looking in the wrong place, as are those who believe it to be fully substantial.

There are simple forms of self-reference such as in the visual-spatial field when objects grow larger as they come closer to your eyes, or sounds become more distinct as you focus your hearing on them, but these never exist in isolation from complex coordinations of distinct self-references - being in a situation, moving around in it, open to inner reflections from memory and imagination, mapping your goals in time and space and through the mediations of possible actions, each with its own history, path-dependent updates of probabilities of success and failure, of responses from others, planning, contingencies and so on. This sort of multi-dimensional triangulation places you as a distinct entity of a certain stature in a world, and creates a highly mediated sense of self, the posterior sense of self which is equated in a paradoxically Cartesian way with the founding subjectivity, the ultimate prior, the field of all fields. Out of this comes the characteristic phenomenology of that functional version of the self known as ego, its intermittences, its paranoia, its scrupulousness, its insecure megalomania. It's very strange that you can 'lose yourself', and just as unexpectedly regain it. Are the stakes real or not? This drives people crazy, they invent sins and search for a god to propitiate. How is it possible? The pathways have shifted, the feedback gone sour, but there is no one who has lost the thing that was itself.

A temporal object, like a musical phrase, the taste of a wine, a kiss, the moment to act, these all have a shape in time a sort of face that is briefly turned to us and then turns away, continuously transforming as it sinks into the past. They are memorable because they contain something unexpected, because they can seem to be looking back at us, to fix us in a moment, marking an encounter, an Erlebnis, an adventure in being. The self is touched by these productions of time, but it is not kin to them, it is not a temporal object at all. However, this is what we mistakenly take it as, as if it were itself merely a much longer phrase, running all the way from birth to death, a curriculum vitae, a extended riff that blows itself on the horn of being with a timbre that varies from iron to gold, from paper to glass. You seem to yourself to have a face, an inner countenance, you think this is what the eyes in the objects are looking back at as they pass, but look more closely and see it floating there against the night sky, nothing but a reflection of all the passing fires. Objects are endlessly astonished by your entire absence.

A moment of time at the edge of presence announces itself from the future and then blossoms with a certain character, and this character is the way we have of holding on to it in memory and of watching it fade into the past. This picture of time is conventional and persistent: time is made up of moments, it is near to being purely quantified. The moments could be discrete, atoms of life, of awareness, of being here, Dasein. Only so many of them to count down until death, until cessation, until the bag is empty - and the rottenest ones on the bottom! To live like that takes a certain blind courage, relinquishing each moment to to the past, which is nothing, the ghost of a ghost. And even if you found some other way to be in time you'd still end up losing that, your only victories over time, through art or fame or progeny, are Phyrric. The bright flare of each moment, something hopeful about it, a promise, as if it would give itself to an experience which would eternalise itself.
Und Schlag auf Schlag!
Werd’ ich zum Augenblicke sagen:
Verweile doch! du bist so schön!
[...]
Die Uhr mag stehn, der Zeiger fallen,
Es sey die Zeit für mich vorbey!
But however beautiful is always fails, this moment so vivid that can't be seized. It passes, it was. You believe we are the prisoner of time in this way, but do you really experience such a flow? And if you did, who would it be experiencing it, half in and half out of the flow? It is all involuted in the unknown present. The sense of time is made by you without my knowing it.

A ticket purchased, an appointment made, a meeting arranged; these indicate events in the near future and they are accompanied by a sense of an intervening duration with its content roughly blocked-in; this duration is ancillary, it is to be traversed. The anticipated event is also blocked-in but in a central way so that you define it with a displaced form of presence, you look forward to meeting yourself there, you hold it as constant in foresight as the intervening duration shrinks, contracts to nothing. There is a way, a rhythm to this contraction which may vary greatly but which maintains the position, the accorded reality of the event. You may be wishing the gap shorter or longer, or merely observing it, but in spite of your subjective comportment towards it it melts out of existence. And the event is now present, a concert or a tryst, a flight or a visit to the dentist; the anticipation is cancelled, the ticket handed over, the event itself opens a new sense of present duration; other anticipations remain open; you more or less fail to meet yourself in the unmediated unfolding of the event; you can only gather impressions as well as you can as they deliquesce in your attention; oddly the projection forward has not ceased, time filled with pleasure or pain never stops. The event is now complete, the account is closed, you go home; a new duration opens between you and the event, but now in the past and growing without limit. Temporal structures of this kind easily overlap and meld. Each has its own rhythm and these intertwine in a complex counterpoint. It is always like this and yet nothing actually flows, nothing really moves. The now is always here, the future there, the past over there. If there is a sharply defined sound you can attend to it as it recedes into the past, as the reverberation smoothly fades to silence, but this is just a way of thinking, the sound never moved, your attention swiveled on its axis. This present, stationary and so very alive, becomes confused with what filled it a moment ago, and we imagine the present itself falling away into the past. But present is always present, future is always to come, and past is always passed.

Your discovery of death as a child, discovering it as positive constituent of the world into which you had come, its solemn presence, et in Arcadia ego, is the paradigm of many other formative events which force acceptance of this ongoingness as a life embedded in time. These mark a series of encounters with reality as a succession of brief struggles with an angelic force of limitation and initiation from which you emerged diminished, compacted, named and determined - and able to speak. Whether this genesis is accounted for in a psychological continuity or via physicalist discontinuities, whether the emergent notion of life is reflexively examined or not, the accounting draws it out into a succession of coincidences in spatialised time. The utility of such accounts does not lie in their truth, as if it were a matter of the reliability or otherwise of memory, but in their ability to abolish the temporalisation and recover, or at least bring you near to, the unconditioned simultaneousness, the ever-open, ever-presence of these turning points. For your entire past life to flash before you in the moments immediately before the final surrender would seem the obvious result of letting go of the movement of time; of course it has only ever been now, and that letting go is now, Now!

Whatever is objective to you you are outside of, so whatever you can come to know of yourself you are immediately outside it. There is not one thing outside of another thing, not a thing playing hide-and-seek with itself, but just a mind constrained by this subject and object structure. If the object or content is taken to be, then there must be a subject equally in being which is the witness and evidence to this. Mind is nothing but the taking up of contents and in doing so it reflexively appoints a posture or position which is off-stage but peripheral to the content. The position is also something taken up, back-handedly, and the content can only be had by assuming a subject as occupying that position, adopting the requisite posture. In other words, for each presentation there is a virtual subject, unseen but assumed to belong to the same staging as the object. If you want to understand your seeing of the object, what you ascribe this seeing to is this virtual subject, the complement of the object, co-partaker of the identical this, but itself a kind of object posited in a modification of presence, in the particular version of presence complementary to the given form of presence, and commonly called absence. The nature of the virtual subject is thus entirely determined by its corresponding object; the subjects of perception, of feeling, of knowing, of will are quite distinct except insofar as their defining postures include a blanket assumption of identity. But there is endless interest in the way this fictive identity plays its hand as it is forced out of passivity.

Morality is derived in part from a moral instinct possessed in varying degrees by every social animal. It is a component of sociality and grows in parallel with the complexity of social interaction. Compassion is thus not an axiom that accompanies the fundamental process of perception of others as being essentially analogous to, or substitutable for, the self, but a sort of optional epiphenomenon of behaviours constructed in the usual way out of generalisations, short-cuts, cheats and work-arounds - out of heuristics, in short, which are there to optimise group behaviour in a context where intrinsic variability is positively weighted. In you, social understanding overlaps with the similarly constructed but quite separate systems of instrumental rationality. You need it to make sense, to be explicable, to possess an account of itself. All of this should go some way to explain why you not only desire what you believe will make you happy but also want to feel good about yourself in the process, to feel justified, and why in doing so you need to lie to yourself. For example, it is not enough that you need to dissimulate the ruthlessness of your greed for personal well-being but you also need to believe in your dissimulations, to fool yourself as much as you hope to fool others, but in a provisional way as your goals will certainly change. Psychological metaphysics is born out of this, and spiritual psychology as a particularly persistent variant of folk-psychology.