To be yourself you feed on interest, faute de mieux you surf your own mind as if it were the 'net. But from time to time the 'feed' dries up, a neutral and passive state ensues, not really unpleasant unless you define it so. It is a kind of boredom or emptiness by which you can gauge the degree to which you are habituated to stimulus. It is a state easily overlooked, or seeking escape you'd put yourself to sleep or try to awaken sexual desire. You become aware of your body which has slowed down and relaxed its tone, no longer willing to silently bear the character, to provide the music. There is a truth here which is normally masked, a complete failure of the project of understanding yourself, you cannot account for this and yet it is the earth-taste of the clay out of which you are shaped, it is fundamental poverty when all the toys have failed, and if the meandering fantasies and monologues continue it is without a master or any desire to submit to one, 'the human engine waits, like a taxi throbbing...', not silence but a Tiresian state which puts all others into doubt. The mind at low tide and all the stinking things on the beach, dead fish and seaweed, garbage swept up by the tide, shallows as far out as you can see. Eat fish and chips, go for a walk, watch the sunset through dull eyes, an extraordinarily grey intimacy, the mollusk self withdrawn into its shell, the melancholy base from which strange beauty would arise.

Travelling in the landscape of the soul is to move from choice point to choice point. Each such point is a moment of spontaneity and self-determination and is unrepeatable. You cannot enter the same river twice not because the waters are different but because you are. This is what you are as the function, the minister, the guest, and there is no way to take yourself out of it as an objective being. But can any object be spontaneous, self-determining and absolutely discernable? Well, it depends on how you understand object, but these remain attributes of the subject, and as subject you are potentiality, principal and host. Only as subject can you play at, or be in play as, object. There is no dialectical resolution of this aporia; if there seems to be this only more of what the object is. You cannot get to the other shore, no need to step into the river, you have always already been there, that is, here.

There is a geography of the inner world, there are places you recognise, places that you revisit, but they have no absolute location; where you find them is how you happened to get there, the path you took, or that were taken on. And finding yourself in such a place there is a little local freedom to move around, to project yourself into the limits of the scene, to view it through the figures of mind that it suggests - but only so much freedom as to make it a habitation, to make you its inhabitant, belonging to a certain here, but never to retrace the steps you took to arrive, to make sure you'll be able to find it again. You can't plant a flag and assure your return, the degree to which getting there depends on you is almost nil. You walked but the landscape moved too, deceptively matching the rhythm of your steps, but in its own way. This is why in dreams you are always in transit, moving from scene to scene, and why you can never return to the same room, the same house, the same street or park, and yet are always arriving somewhere familiar. And it is because of this strange arrival that you know you can never know yourself, because only when you have arrived in a place you failed at first to recall do you, so easily, take up again the life that was suspended there.  

The question of free-will is moot but ultimately irrelevant to the experience of the enactment of a self, or purposive action, the sense of there being ongoing deliberate intervention in ongoing states of affairs including the intervention itself, conscious action in short, including thwarted action and reaction, that has a coherent point of origin, that includes an account of itself, an account that belongs to it, even if wildly misleading in terms of making sense of the consequences of that action. If you try to refrain from grasping onto the hypostases of folk psychology you find yourself floundering with some sort of picture of an incomprehensible flow and various attractors, metastable forms on which the pattern of the flow appears to depend, and held together by other overlapping patterns in other more slowly moving flows, a sort of shifting moiré which has hypnotised you since an immemorial past, which might as well be just now. All of this to reveal ever so slightly the sense of ego or ahankara as seeming both autonomous and entirely dependent on a balance of tensions, inward and outward pointing, desires, dependencies, defenses, that puts you here and now cradled in these intents and countercurrents and leaning towards these imagined levers, going forward, bringing yourself forward into the next moment. All of this both solid and imaginary, because at times whole sections of it can be erased - can fade like a dream into the never was - without the slightest effort, and suddenly the whole system tips over and you wonder how you can ever be the same.

To get out ahead of yourself means to act in a situation which is mostly imagined. The distinction between what is imagined and what is really there is mostly approached from the side of the imaginary, where it is difficult but not impossible to discern. For example, it is not so much to seek a response as to want to establish yourself as of the kind that evokes such a response. But you should only live speculatively if there is a real risk of loss, if to gain yourself is to lose yourself. There is no system and you don't know, no effect that follows inevitably from a cause; do not seek but tread lightly and without the least caution.

You need to turn at a certain angle to things to be overwhelmed by the strange obviousness of the fact that what appears is precisely the invisible, that what is in time is precisely the timeless. Appearance is glaringly incomplete since what it appears to can never appear - and must precede it in every order but that of precedence itself. That what appears can appear to what never appears means that they are of the same nature, the appearance being within what it appears to (where else could it be?); it is simply the appearing mode of the non-appearing. In the same way only what is timeless can experience time, time which ceaselessly unfolds can only do so within the heart of timelessness, only timelessness could notice time; so that time is the temporal mode of the timeless. The nature of the self is to know and it can only know by being what it knows; it can only know itself that is the very meaning of that strange word-token: self, hence otherness is the mode by which the self knows (itself), and the ego, the knowing self in appearance is the complement, the optic mechanism of this knowing, apparently extended in time.  

Attention is appetitive before it is intentional. This distinction is confused when you think in terms of the object of desire. Objectivity is desireless and is a secondary or abstracted state; 'object of desire' combines the abstracted experience of appetite with the doubly abstracted goal of that abstraction. Appetite feels like movement in just the way that your mind or engaged self seems always to be in motion, and in this the subject or driver is not yet separated from its object or intent. By the time you describe this in terms of desire or want it has already given birth to an object. Compare a cinematic image of a stationary scene with the same scene in a projected still image. The former is vibrant with life, it is compressed energy ready to spring, it is pregnant - the latter is the same, but too slow to see. Every moment is a process of birth, it is ecstatic union followed by fission, primary forces polarising and then dying into each other and producing a third autonomous element always breaking free; to call it synthesis is to already fall in to an idealised framing, to choose the very mind on which everything is lost. It's not that you are always bursting out of yourself, you are the timeless bursting, even when what you think you are is the reaction, the strained effort of holding the whole crazy process down.

You are the medium through which what is invisible and real passes into appearance and you are also what appearance appears to. Like an actor in a role you not only perform the gestures, but you also express the inwardness which chooses but never quite means those gestures. Part of the role is that you are aware of not being the role, and like a well-known actor you are always yourself at the same time as being the character, and in the role of yourself, which you play off against that of the character, you are just as detached from that loved and familiar face and voice by whom you appear. This is part of your charm, like the charm of anyone, to hint of being someone quite apart, watching with a detached amusement which might take the form of anything but detached amusement. Others can only see a part of the show, and for the rest you are the only witness, which brings with it a lonely feeling. Everyone is immersed in this ongoing play and the many-fold inwardness is determined by a current of events which is just as much shaped by law and necessity as what is out there in the apparently shared world. Sometimes you strive to open up this inwardness and at other times you work to keep it closed, and most of the time you do both, and that of course is just what you express, this diffidence, like the play of shadows over your own infant understanding.

You might seem to be thinking or writing or reading about something, but this is not the case. It is the very thing, and the about just dangles in empty space like a torn-off cable, maybe raining sparks... How could you possibly be interested in your mind, in any mind at all? How many minds do you have, how many are there? Don't start with one, two, three... Here the count begins at zero, the big empty hoop of an 'O', where that collapses into this, and this collapses into that, deviously, obviously!, and then look to see if you can take a single step beyond. 

Who is it that experiences? Everything objective is limited, limited by other objects and by the very experiencing of it, which experiencing cannot be the same as the experienced. The same objective reality can indeed belong to different experiencings, but objects differ in the degree to which this is possible. An 'outer' object is one that can be experienced by other subjects de facto and de jure, while an 'inner' one can only be experienced by the one subject, although in different ways, in different temporal adumbrations for example, including repetition. The closer the object is drawn to the experiencer the fewer the alternate modes available, so that its very objectivity becomes strained and is inferred to collapse at the limit. What you have been calling the experiencing is actually a kind of inner objectivity; when you turn attention away from the object and towards the experiencing of the object you are refocusing on a nearer level of objectivity. The subject here is understood to be only a virtual point, an inference from the internal relations of different kinds of experiencing, and a pillar of the theory of experiencing - which may be all or part of what is called theory of mind. Through interaction with other subjects not only do your experiences change but your own deep experience of experiencing may also be changed, and there is no a priori limit to such change. This is taken to confirm the otherness of other minds, and indeed it also confirms the otherness of your 'own' mind. Experience is the deployment of mind and the concomitant metaphysics including the nature and limitation of the subject(s) of experience arises from the settings of that mind.

To be out of the cave and to see the sun for the first time is to see the world under the light of the sun for the first time, and is to see a greater world of which the other is now known to have been just a tiny misunderstood part. So you know that you are out of the cave because you now understand how those shadows you took for reality were produced, and there is no way you can ever believe in them again. If you go back into the cave and try to convince others to slip free of their shackles and come outside with you you will have your work cut out for you and you will perhaps be spared a further doubt. But now that you understand how the reality one world can be destroyed by the experience, inconceivable wholly within the terms of that world, of a second world - or it may be of the same world but now more amply perceived - the reality in that more ample perception will be subject to the doubt inherent in the possibility of yet a third world, a world corresponding to a still more encompassing perception. Once you've taken in the idea that a world, which in every way seemed a complete cosmos, can be transcended then how can you ever trust any world ever again? You will understand the principle of parsimony by which those who apprehend themselves to be the inhabitants of a certain cosmos dismiss all talk of a further cosmos, how they can prove with iron logic that the very notion of a further cosmos is incoherent, a result of the misuse of language, of language 'going on holiday'. If for Plato the philosopher is the one arguing for transcendence, today the philosopher is exactly the opposite, the one who argues against the possibility of any such transcendence. On the other hand you could maintain that this parable of transcendence is a generalisation from something that happens often in life; we are continually breaking through shells and thinking we have finally arrived, only to find a little further down the track that the boundaries of this new world are starting to crack. Or we might emerge into what seems a new world only to find that we have been here before and the old breach is still open, we just had our backs towards it. Either way it seems as if the only transcendence worth going for is with respect to all worlds, to the very principle of worlds. But how could you ever know you had arrived at such a non-place? If you have to ask, then you can't be there! But if you don't ask that doesn't entail that you are.

The natural sense that you are an independent being possessing free will and, as long as life persists, are rooted in an open and public present is a component of phenomenal existence. Remaining in the phenomenal but shifting focus to its theorising about itself you might consider this sense to derive from a transfer of energy between levels of subjective embodiment. This is a different register of language for what in other contexts is called feeling and intent. Consciousness in actuality is grasped peripherally as a succession of pre-reflective phases of absorption to which the loose name of 'energy' can be applied. There is naturally no theory of the succession, but the alterations in the topology of feeling that accompanies its instances has an explicit and discursive dimension as the sense of self. Nothing is real but absorbed consciousness, and self-theorising is a peculiar and superficial concomitant of that. A project exists to refine that theorising and make it less superficial but most of its content is drawn from cultural rather than direct self-reflection. Even 'energy' is never felt but only its change or transfer from one system to another and the reason this term seems appropriate is because there is  an opposition between a realism in which it is strictly conserved and an idealism in which such exchanges seem to generate a surplus. To shift the metaphor slightly the independent self is an arbitrage between the different modes of absorption. Again it is as if to say that the essence of self-consciousness is the conviction of immortality, which is neither real nor illusory.  

Whatever this is it is one instance out of many millions of life as it appears to itself, and if science is to be believed it rests upon or emerges out of many billions of instances of striving life which do not appear to themselves. In no way is it a quirk of the individual but the individual is the prism through which it shows up... Shows up? The metaphor is of emergence, of arrival, as in a coming into the light, entering a clearing, coming out from behind a curtain, acquiring distinctness and so on, but none of these metaphors should apply since in all the paradigms they rest on it is already assumed that there is an awareness, a watcher, an eye or an ear, for it to appear to, which appreciates it. It does not matter which sense it awakens, but that the sense was somehow already present, that it preceded the manifestation, was waiting for this moment, and that its centre is elsewhere. What arises together with the individual as the final refinement of its drive to exist is the project of understanding itself, as if its purpose is to systematically assimilate its every contingency to universal self-transparency, as if its self-consciousness is merely the glimmering dawn of another self-consciousness, fully adequate to itself, always already present but unknowing. Thus either the striving takes place because of the appearance or else the appearance is not appearance but only an artefact of a blind striving. The second alternative seems incoherent since even the illusion of an appearance is an appearance, it has the futility of Descartes' evil genius, and if we enjoy speculation about it it is precisely for the sake of that enjoyment. But the first alternative is not much better. We strive, but if what we strive for exists then it is indifferent to our striving which can only approach it without ever getting any closer.

There are no objects, there is a being-towards without an other which is experienced as entirely a matter of feeling and will which explicates itself through invented objectivities. Behind every act or intention there is a state of feeling which reaches back into the body in time, you swallow, feel your heartbeat, the weight in your legs, it all changes in a moment, is always the same. When you speak of yourself you speak of the feelings which are the outward face of this constantly varying inner state, the way in which you are seated in the vehicle of your events, the silent music you are moving to. You can't see this because you are locked onto the middle distance. Knowing lags acting, so that for you there are only acts of will, and the reaction of every act of will down to the most minute is to constrain you to look away, to not know, but invent, explain. It is the law of appearance and you can only identify yourself with it, a sort of Stockholm syndrome of the unawakening.

Objective being is the correlate of action or of intention to act (in the non-technical sense) or of its various modes such as desires, dispositions and so on. This applies to the mental or subjective sphere as well. For the most part when an experience is formulated as a thought there is a point at which it is first seized or gathered, this seizing or gathering being no metaphor but an inner act although possibly quite subtle. Whatever the experience was before it is now the object of that act. At the other more rare extreme the process is almost reversed and it is the words that come first, on wings as if by inspiration, and these direct the attention to some matter it would not have been able to take in before, and will not be able to fully re-evoke after. The point however is that whatever you can act on or comport yourself towards is objective, which means that it has self-identity, but in order for this to be the case there must be a something (but hardly a thing) that is open in some way but is not objective, which is a matrix in which what we later distinguish as subject and object, the "me"-ness and the "not-me"-ness in experience, are fused. To say that it is open is to say that it is conscious, that intelligence applies within it, that it is near and non-intermittent. Relative to our care for objectivities it is marginal, an anamorphic squiggle at the edge of awareness, but in fact it is the only thing that in any sense could be real, is the only place where anything is happening, if indeed anything is happening at all.

Sometimes moving down the constitutive hierarchy makes things far more interesting. What could be more banal than a conversation about holidays overheard on a bus? But choosing one narrow band of abstraction and attending to the complex interplay of temporal framings at work turns it into a wonder. Memories reworked into narratives, the triggering of responses in other temporal frames, past and future, the pacing of the utterances and so on, all embedded in a set of conversational protocols as formal as a sonnet. All of this work delivered effortlessly so that what? A subject can express itself? A dreamer can remain asleep? 

To go in search of something is to first install or load the 'I' who would investigate. You must engage the detective before you can detect. There is no point in asking such an agent to investigate himself, he is merely a role, no, you would ask him to reveal you. According to the genre that is often exactly what the detective does, but in this case the game collapses since you are acting that role as well. What you ought to be able to acknowledge directly is that you experience the interaction of a self-system with a not-self-system. The self-system might be the one that supplies this distinction, without exactly grounding it, but the energy and whatever intelligence seems to be available comes from the not-self-system. This distinction is inherently slippery, and it might even see-saw quite excitingly, but it doesn't deconstruct itself. The possibility that it is an illusion that vanishes like a magician's knot can only be suggested from the outside, that is, by a wholly unexpected break. So for you there is really nothing to do, you might as well call off the hounds.

Dogs bark at something, it is directed, given with intent, and they bay at the moon and when they are in a pack at prey, but for the most part they express desire silently, with a look or by straining their bodies to a point. Dogs may have a sense of self but they are not reflexive. Cats on the other hand meow to express desire but in doing so they refrain from pointing to what they want, they might just mean to tell you they are hungry or that they want to be let inside, but the message is shrouded in ambiguity, they won't make it plain and instead make it about themselves. A cat seems to be all sense of self, its every gesture reflexive, to be a kind of solipsist only reluctantly conceding that you might be of some assistance in this case. The cat says, 'I want something, but I don't know what I want', in this way expressing the pure form of desire. This may be a cultural thing. Dogs in India sometimes seem to draw attention to themselves with a strangled bark, as if they have learned to speak from cats.

Every moment of thought when it can be placed under scrutiny, when for some reason it has become present-at-hand, seems to carry with it the entire root system by which it emerged, a sort of Brownian path of appetitive leaps through prior thoughts and partial thoughts of which it is the terminal. You can retrace this some small way, except that since each node is over-determined, the way back is as much a branching tree as the way forward seemed to be. Writers expert in stream-of-consciousness fall victim to a mushrooming of content which suggests that it would take a lifetime to fully document the context of the smallest thought. To trace a thought to its source in this sense is not the same as to trace consciousness to its source, but in either case it seems as if it is something we ought to be able to do. To think a thought is to inhabit that thought, to have re-created it in some sense, and if we utter it we are expected to be able to answer for it. Similarly consciousness sees itself as transparency and as self-grounded. It is in the very nature of these phenomena, as they are understood, where their understanding and their being are one, to be self-illumined. Clearly this is not the case in either respect, we fail in performance. Consciousness is credit, is nothing but paper currency, a social conspiracy - but who is it that is being misled? And why is it this very image, this miniaturised version of god, that is the lure of the deception? Surely intelligence could be embodied more efficiently? Is it only "training wheels"?

There are muddles which, once noticed, seem to be simple until you try to straighten them out; they provoke a kind of stammering as when something looms large and obvious but you can't find the words for it. The 'I' in consciousness would seem to be an instance of such a muddle. Isn't it clear that there's nothing we know better but can't in the least explain? Well, there's actually a plethora of explanations, and many of these are implicit in the ways we use the term, but none of them hold up under scrutiny. Take three versions of the 'I': the inexplicit functional 'I' of purposive action, the explicit 'I' of verbal self-explanation, of giving an account of yourself, and the latent and pervasive sense of self, the 'I-I' centred in the heart. Of the first we can say that it is as homely and practical as your favouite saucepan, it is the kitchen-sink 'I', the working man's 'I'. The second is intermittent, it arises when multiple strands of reflexive intentionality coalesce and the resulting unified intentional self steps onto the stage. It soliloquises at best, or otherwise just speaks its lines; it can be fantastically and convincingly eloquent, but then melts away after the show and may never reappear in the same role. The third is usually ignored and anyway can't be ordered to appear. It is nevertheless what makes self-reference possible, is the elusive remainder of semantics that can't be entirely subsumed by syntax, and without which all the proud syntactical monstrosities would collapse in a heap of rubble. As long as we can't separate these three and only apply to each the connotations that belong only to it, then the muddle will persist.

The changing now of experience, when regarded as identical to the specious present is seen to possess a certain variable breadth, (cf. Pynchon's "delta-t") and most importantly a rich internal structure. Simply stated, there are components which lean forward and other components that lean backwards. These inseparable parts of phenomenal time are also highly variable, but their essential inter-relations are invariant. In this sense temporality is constant even as time flies. This insight can be extended to engulf all of phenomenal time, so that all of the past and all of the future are seen to have no other basis than the now. A version of this is the apparent virtuality paradox that the possibility that entire universe was created a second ago, complete with all its past history etc. can't be decisively ruled out. This structure of temporality is a concomitant of the self, but any equation of the 'I' with the 'Now' is not called for. The invariance of temporality does not have a strong metaphysical dimension, and in this sense is quite different to the stationary now, or nunc stans. In so far as this latter enters into experience it points to a further dimension, in which it can be understood that the 'I' and the 'Now' are the one substance.

It's just some mind, some life, this little knot of destiny woven out of common stuff, constricting lens for awareness - that always passes from there to there - to focus to a here, yet always comically beside the point. You exist in the garden of wonders but can make no more out of it than some dim shadows, a toy world of thrice-told tales and stale horrors and jumbled dreams, which is in itself the very wonder, the very grain of sand in which the universe blossoms, like every single in itself, if only you could see instead of staying stuck to the screen because you can't let go before finding out how the episode ends, before the dull satisfaction of another cliff-hanger and yielding up the day to sleep.

In the ongoingness of matters that is the ordinary course of things, you can't say there is awareness, or that this is phenomena, because you who would say it are inseparably inside the supposed awareness or phenomena. You might call this identification, but you can't yet say what or who is identified with what. It is as though you were trying to see a mirror, but all you can see are the things reflected in it. You know the mirror is what makes these appearances possible (how do you know this?) but since all you can see is appearances you can't rid yourself of the notion that the mirror is just such  a thing, that it is revealed in and by the appearances, that its nature appears. No matter how many and how diverse these appearances are, they bring you no closer to the mirror itself. What awareness is to you is this kaleidoscope of feeling and colour and activity, and that is not it at all. As long as the seeing is absorbed in the seen, you are unable to find any ground to distinguish them. The mirror can't be seen, but what you can apperceive is the space in which the mirror is located, and through this perhaps force a separation in appearances, a separation between the appearance and the appearance of the appearance. This is hard enough, but to do so would enable you to finally speak of phenomena.

"An example in case, taken from audition, would be the fact that neonates can distinguish recordings of themselves crying from recordings of other neonates crying." There is thus a pre-conceptual, and even pre-relational, self-recognition that precedes and conditions what we might identify as self-consciousness, as if the intimate face of things is already structured in some way, has its own proto-grammar. It seems as if this is related to temporal retentions as a component of present consciousness. For example, in being able to grasp a melody we must retain the prior notes and values in the immediate perceptual field of the fresh notes and values as they arise. Something is enabled to emerge into salience, to arise as a gestalt, or appear in its identity, via a pre-explicit pre-recognition, in a sort of bootstrap process. You don't need to go even as far as music to see this, it is there in the comprehension of spoken language. In this case the temporal moments of the individual sounds are finally merged into the meaning of the utterance, so that the contribution of the individual parts is not fixed until the final part has been completed. In the special and high-level case of the assembling of words into a sentence we say that the synthesis is ruled by grammar, but there seem to be more general proto-grammars that rule over every kind of temporal synthesis, all of which may be parts of a larger and very abstract grammar of experience itself. One might expect that there is something binary at the heart of this, say the first distinction of self from other, or this from that, but this would prematurely definite, and a loss of the inexplicit and extraordinary rich meaning-bearing possibility that is latent in such 'differentiation'. Understandably, language fails badly here - its wavelength is too great.

There are developmental stages where you learn to take over control of what were previously automatic bodily functions - or things that were done for you by somebody else, like tying your own shoelaces. You take them over and perform them in your own style, and like your signature they become part of the body of your self. To become the subject of verbs, transitive or intransitive, and their corresponding sentences: 'I see it', 'I go', or compounds, 'I can see it', 'I will go there', is to inhabit this body reflexively, and to learn to do so is counted a great achievement. But you don't need reflection for the assumption of control to represent the attainment of a self. When a dog marks its journey by leaving small pools of urine it is using voluntary control of bodily functions to leave signifiers of itself in a social space. When it returns to same place later it can presumably distinguish its own olfactory signature from those of the other dogs that have visited the same spot, and it can probably also (roughly) date the various markings. The concrete sense of self is thus mediated by presence and absence, by social assertion and by temporality. It is hard to see what our verbal reflexivity adds to this ontology, except perhaps the ability to vary the forms in which self-recognition takes place. It is likely however that a being with a more comprehensive consciousness would see all our ways of propagating our selves as being just as instinctive, limited and stereotyped as we see those of a dog. Although dogs may have associations of reward and punishment with various smells, they appear to have nothing like our aesthetic distinction of the delightful from the disgusting, and much less anything like our reflexive application of this distinction to ourselves. A may be indifferent, but never finds a too-familiar smell boring. The relish with which a healthy dog undertakes an investigation of interesting smells is enviable, and somehow cheering.