There are just a few basic themes: theory of the observer, theory of masks, theory of identity and identification, theory of hierarchy, theory of expression, to name a few. All of these belong to a more embracing theory of relationality. Take two terms and express their two-ness in some way and you already have three terms, the two and their two-ness. If there are two then they differ in some respect and what confirms or witnesses that respect is the third term. The subject, one possibility in this combinatory, is the identification of one of the two terms with the third, while the object is its exclusion. There cannot be a pure duality unless the two remain undistinguished and unrelated. If there were only yes and no they could not be told apart. If there were only two there would be no other. Once there is distinction there are three, and once there are three there are immediately many more, as each can play the role of the third in relation to the other two. "I, thou and it", "inside, outside and boundary", "past, future and present"; triplicity is latent within every term and explicit without it. As much as there is now a proliferation of positions there are also identifications. In writing down the equation, "A = B" you have already committed a triple, or is it now a quadruple, since there is a fourth for which the identification is? In addition, for every theory there is another theory which is its explicit denial.  

A position is what and how much contingency you can make sense of, and since you apparently need to have a position there are a few directions you can take. The most thoughtless would be to simply be yourself the embodiment of contingency, this is the closest to having no position, to be rather a force of nature. Generally this is most often honoured by taking the position that holds no position as an ideal, as the best position. Everyone has a position on positions. This approach, at least as a dodge, is inseparable from all the more elaborated positions. Again you can limit the field of contingency to what feels like a manageable sphere, but the limits you set are also contingent even if easier to defend, because further away. The threat here is more likely to come at you from a blind-spot, from others who occupy closely neigbouring loci, and it is inevitable. Finally you can work on making sense of more things, admitting no limits at all. Expand the realm of where you are comfortable and more importantly learn to learn from where you are not. You can be subsumed, made aware of the antinomies that you refuse to step beyond. It hurts, but is that a good or a bad thing? How many times have you admired the circuitous paths by which a dog returns to its own vomit.

You can always recall that at some point in childhood you discovered that you could decide to remember certain moments. You would say to yourself, "Now", let this be remembered," and you would make a careful inventory of yourself perceiving the world around you, including your intention to remember it. Because of the reflexive nature of such an event it was placed in the same category of experiences as trying to see yourself looking into a mirror that was facing another mirror, something else you were able to do in your childhood home by way of a certain cocktail-cabinet whose inner walls were all mirrors. These special memories could be recalled with an especial vividness and they were lodged in a distinctive way in the temporal map of the life you inhabited, as if they were both milestones and portals, since by concentrating on them you could almost re-inhabit the original moment. They gave you the sense that you could re-enter its sense of presence by way of the tunnel generated by the infinite regress of mirror reflections. One dimension of time extended into the warm grey shadows in the direction of your earlier childhood and birth and an orthogonal dimension extended from the always present now into the always presence of every now. What you could not have known was that in deliberately remembering an event you were using a distinct capacity of your developing brain, that you were activating the memory control in the pre-frontal lobes rather than just the continuous registration of experience in the temporal region. These brain capacities have evolved for good reasons which one could doubtless infer, but the sense of it was something like learning to use some of the unusual new features that are included in a car you have just bought. There is a sense of gratification that the creators of this vehicle have anticipated some of your less-obvious desires, that the capacity to take advantage of these features was already there before you got into the car, and that their presence causes you to feel so much more at home in it.

To think a thought is not a detached smokers' consideration of it but a complete entering in, a letting go, as if going blindly into a tunnel; you are going to be thrown around and you don't know where you'll emerge, even if you know it perfectly well, since you've gone through this very same tunnel so many times before. Thinking in this sense is 'I'-ing, you can't separate yourself from it in act, but are additionally aware of not being able to do so, and so remain separate from it in spirit, that is virtually. This split is nothing new, it is in the very nature of the beast, part of its internal compass. It is the experience of being bound since only a freedom can be restricted; you are bound to think of yourself thinking in this way, the thought and the thought of the thought are one, and the thought itself is part of a complex - which means a tightly connected set of dispositions to a related set of thoughts circling around a black hole. You emerge from one, for a moment you can look around and breathe, and then you find yourself sucked into the entrance to another. It was believed a little while back, it seems, that something called irony could save you from this, that by also standing back and cooly commenting on your own absurdity you would be rescued from it. You were only saved from looking absurd, but at the price of surrendering completely to the hypothetical gaze that supposedly confirms this. The hypothesis of such a validating gaze, in the hall of mirrors we currently inhabit, was soon seen to be just another complex.

The jiva or individual soul is like a media device through which experience is played. This analogy works to the extent that there is a demarcation between the experience and the experiencer. Perhaps this seems all the sharper today when experiences are so commodified and promoted and expected. People strive to acquire a catalog of experiences, special experiences, Erlebnisse, which count and can be counted. Experiences escape - you try but fail to define yourself through experience; the experience ends and you are back to being yourself. This is a feature as it leaves you thirsty for the next experience. Where the experience failed to touch you you retain the account of it, its place in your course of life, your curriculum vitae. Insert an experience in the player, as it plays a certain organised stream of contents arises in appearance (there is no good word for this sense of manifestation, for appearing on the transcendental screen) and then it is over. You eject the file and replace it with another, or not. You can leave the soul empty for a while, with only quiet static indicating that there is a screen somewhere in front of you. Experiences natually break up into chapters, into episodes - punctuated by night (or day) and sleep, for example. They start and end and when they end there is a moment of retrospection in which the experience comes to exist as an event, something you've gone through, erfährt, and that can be named. Self-reflection, like Minerva's owl, spreads its wings at dusk, or equivalently in Autumn, in the Autumnal perspective integral to each lived moment. Only here does the phenomenal self begin to emerge as distinct and not entirely absorbed in the experience.

Try to imagine the smallest corpuscle of experience, an atom of 'what it feels like' say, that emerges out of some complex event built up out of elements to which any 'feeling like' is utterly irrelevant; thus you are trying to understand what it could mean to say that experience is an emergent property of matter. At some point this ought to have happened for your own embodiment as it grew from a fertilised cell. Do you remember? Not at all, but the question makes sense. What was before the before? It seems that it would 'feel' like a waking up, that is, that the awareness pre-existed the event but was in an absorbed state; the waking up being a break in the absorption. Also, to be aware is to be a self; you are not just aware of something, but of yourself as well. Or if this is too much, then say that the awareness would have to be somewhere, to have its own space, a blank screen big enough to swallow all worlds. The simplest feeling is a feeling of something for something, it has structure, it can't just be a one-dimensional intensity. The dimmest awareness would be unable to clarify the object as little as the subject, no doubt, but both components would have to be present. The atom of experience flashes on and then almost immediately blinks out. And then there would come another such event. Can we say that the second event has the same subject as the first one, or a different one? But what you just called 'absorption' is surely the first glimmer of consciousness that you are aiming at. A state like deep sleep, a state of pure feeling where subject and object are not separate. You feel only yourself, only the feeling, there is no light, no power, no movement, no distinction, no time. Now imagine this attenuated down until it is next to nothing, and then nothing at all. But as long as the bare possibility of it re-emerging is there then it is a space, a waiting, a witnessing without a witness.

As a transcendental ego you would have no innate content, you would be a pure cogito that started out in perfect detachment from experience and then became embroiled in it as a result of subtle choices which cascaded you into the thick of context and particularity. To describe it this way is to give a mythological account, built up after the fact,  upon the emergence of a certain kind of reflectiveness within always prior engagement. The question for this narrative is how did all this furniture get in here? There are not only desires and drives such as would seem to fit with the purposes of the embodiment you discover, but several layers of other drives and desires of a more contingent kind that are built on top of these. These include not only an intelligent network of modulations and hindrances to the first set of drives, but also a baroque superstructure of sui-generis drives, such as ego-drives spinning out sub-plots about identity and self-actualisation. Naturalistic as well as phenomenological accounts of varying degrees of ingenuity can be given of these, but these accounts and especially the very need for such accounts point back to the myth. Only a detached self can feel existence as a predicament or as a thrownness.  It performs and throws itself into the role, loses itself and finds itself again but all in performance - until there is furniture piled on top of furniture. But say what you will, where there is performance there needs to be an audience, a watcher and not just a pretend one as part of the show.

At some point you learned to use this word, this sound, this little push of muscle and wind, 'I', for self-reference. Before that you probably used 'me' for the same purpose, a more primitive and social form, and it must have felt like a big step to have let it go, to assume the upright and solitary letter, supporting itself in silence and emptiness. The 'm' of 'me', like mummy and milk, still smells of infancy, is smeared with it; the written letter even looks like something crawling along the ground, and the 'eee!' sound retains an odd quality of the hither, the inward-directed, in contrast to the outward thrusting 'aw' or 'oi!', say. The 'I' was a gift from the adult world, a double-faced one conferring new powers and new responsibilities. Because you loved them, and wanted to be loved by them, because of your evident dependence, you took it up and repressed your misgivings about how it was that something vast and non-unitary, something so open and unlimited could be squeezed into this little symbol, this language game. In the beginning there was no word, and that was perfect, but then you were made one, initiated into an order where you would endlessly need to distinguish yourself, an economic and entropic world where identity is work and work is identity. It was at the threshold of this that you discovered the best use that you could make of this new possession, to simply ask yourself, 'who am I?'

There is a something like a centre of gravity of self-identity. It belongs to feeling and will more than to thought, being the home position where the feelings that spontaneously arise in response to events, pre-understood as belonging to your life, are located, as well as the fulcrum from which the closely related purposive acts gain their effectiveness. It is the heart, the mood in the sense of Gemüt ("Gemüt is cognate with Mut (courage) and the English word 'mood'. Gemüt conveys the sense of the interior-personal core of a human being and the affective-conative aspect rather than the purely or exclusively cognitive." as one commentator on Heidegger puts it, tracing its provenance to Eckhart and Boehme.) If you rest in an alert state and are disenganed from the flow of thoughts you are gathered in this core. If we stretch the use of word phenomenon to describe this, and so stress its phenomenal character, which is certainly not the whole story, there are two features that are immediately apparent. One is that, as quasi-spatial, as having or being a location, it is contained within a larger space about which we can say little other than that your centre is not tied to a particular set of coordinates in that larger space, it is contingent in relation to it. The second is that its initially phenomenal character assimilates it to the imaginary and that this places the status of the imaginary into question (c.f. Colerige's primary and secondary imagination) as much as it does the reality of the self. Its imaginary character seems to be the tip of an iceberg that descends deeply into unknown regions. In this way it is also decisive, or voluntaristic; it is chosen by virtue of a series of decisions that extend far out of sight. In encountering an other we are immediately and intuitively aware of an entirely different set of decisions, which in some sense challenge our own, no decision ever being final.

It is strange that because it is elusive, because it is not an object in the world, that consciousness is taken to have a rather ghost-like quality. It is pictures, or like a movie that runs somewhere in the skull, a dream, an entertainment. Certainly, the appearances it is made up of are not to be trusted, they are subjective in the sense in which that term might be meant in science or statistics, merely subjective, partial and distorted perspectives. The most they can do is hint at truth, but lacking corroboration that is all they can do. Consciousness, which is the locus, the hearth, of all these appearances is somehow taken to be itself an appearance, and to exist on the same ontological level. This is an error which deserves to be corrected, since there can be nothing more real, more of an event in whatever the bedrock of reality is, than consciousness as pure event, happening here and now and in every here and now. Reality is finally felt reality, it is an experience, rare enough admittedly, of the absoluteness of this event. Usually it is some sort of content, something starkly life-threatening that brings this home. Perhaps it only occurs in this way a few times in a life, fighting for breath say, and at the edge of the abyss. Then it is evident that this is of the measure of anything that you take to be reality, of the entire world, that the cosmos only is in so far as it is for consciousness. You recognise this, but immediately consciousness goes back to work, absorbing the recognition as a content, placing in your map of life, weaving it into the dream that is life as you've come to understand it, including the dream of corroboration. Every concept is sculpted in this mind-stuff, and every concept fails to capture what it aims at, but only because the stuff itself is real. You only fall into the unreal because the falling itself is real.

If you can only know objectivities, or better, if whatever you know is necessarily objective, then how can you know that there is consciousness, as something essentially non-objective? This is hard to express clearly. The content of the intentional acts that make up the stream of experience is objective, it is the very definition of objective. This covers everything that can be felt, perceived or thought, so where is the evidence for subjectivity? What form could it possibly take? If you speak of consciousness and mean only various objective correlations, such as might be meant by a brain scientist, then consciousness is only a special sort of phenomenal object, no different in principle from any other. It may be called emergent, but whatever it is it is out there, part of the furniture of the world. Speaking from the point of view of the experiencer, this reduction seems to betray the reality. When you intend your own consciousness you refer to something known directly, something that feels quite different from an idea or a perception. You know yourself as doing it, or being it in a special way. That special way must be an indispensible component of the experience, but not the object of the experience. As if your knowledge that 'this is consciousness' involves something off to the side of the intentionality. There still must be a kind of operation that goes from the awareness of the object to the awareness of the awareness. This is not a logical operation but has at least the same force. Perhaps the cogito is a way of trying to map it onto logic. It is as if a thing, any thing, is connected to something that is not a thing. But how is this possible? Surely we can investigate the thing and find this umbilicus concealed in a blindspot, grab onto it and follow it to its lair.  

Matters which are predominately conceptual leave room for doubt, they retain a hypothetical quality even if they are well-confirmed. The possibility of their being otherwise is part of the territory, part of what enables them to have the credibility that they currently possess. What vcertainty there is is other-validated. That the whole world might be a dream is part of what makes this the kind of world that it is. It is not to be resisted but merely observed that a gap remains open in even the most compelling constructions. Hidden premises have already been discovered and no limit can be set on there not being yet deeper hidden premises, exceding your ability to currently imagine. What certainty is, in this kind of world, is a comportment towards the fringe of doubt, the trace of negativity like a grain of salt needed to develop the entire picture. This is concomitant with the positivity of the self, even if you can never include the self within the picture. If there is an inverse experience, a no-self experience to express it oxymoronically, it is that instead of what is known as doubt being at the fringe of consciousness it is at its centre and is wide open. Then it can no longer be called doubt, it appears to be that very impossibility of a self-validating certainty. This is the name you are tempted to give it by contrast with your previous epistemology, although it makes no sense in this context. It is a complete surprise and shows you that you are no longer experiencing via concepts.

Experience is the structure of the phenomenon. What you see is what is looking - and this is so at all levels. For example, your social world is the inverted reflection of your social self. The 'I' is the concept on which this pivots, in a similar way to other terms, like çonsciousness'or 'awareness', which objectify the subjective or subjectify the objective. The relation, subjective-I-objective is analogous to that of past-present-future: the entire relation is contained in the middle term, is a particular kind of assymetric unfolding of it. Object and subject are not inescapable categories, they are elements of a way the phenomenon can be understood, and they carry their own immemorial biases. If there is to be a realm of objects then there is a counterpart realm of subject, they are interdependent. Objectivity is plural and diveregent, subject is singular, a withinness inside of all space. The 'I' as the object present in all objectivity is the universal object and hence represents the subject. If in the phenomenon a mastery is sought, this is the complete realisation of subject as object, beyond representation. The search, the peculiar imperative driving it, is the very mechanism of the dream of life. But objectivity is as illusory as its counterpart subject. There is no-one to pick up, to identify with, the 'I' object, if so it would be an 'I' outside the 'I'. What you see is that the truth is neither in the extended objectivity nor in the extended subjectivity since these are both virtual spaces. If anything it must be at the strange point where the one crossses over into the other, the singularity closest to the surface of the mirror.

In the expression 'a pre-reflective cogito' the word cogito does not refer merely to the 'I think' of Descartes formula, but to the entire formula, here understood so that the 'ergo' has no reference to a logical operation, because then it would be reflective, but instead summarises a necessary and immediate intuition. The intention behind this idea may well be incoherent (not taking sufficient account of language etc.), but if there is no pre-reflective cogito then the sense of existence would always be the outcome of a reflection and have only the (lesser ontological) force of logic. In fact even as a logical instance it is usually taken to summarise an argument by contradiction: 'If I am mistaken about my existence then there must be someone to be so mistaken and hence I must exist and so cannot be mistaken' or simply, 'I must exist in order to be mistaken in believing I exist.' This argument could also be seen as the assertion that the pre-reflective sense of 'existence' must actually be equivalent to a valid, or post-reflective sense of 'existence': I unthinkingly assume that I exist. Unthinking assumptions often prove to be errors when carefully examined. If that were so in this case the question would remain as to who or what was in error. But my original assumption is true if I am nothing more than precisely that one who is so in error. Therefore I exist. This argument represents the sole instance in which subjective truth must immediately convert to objective truth, whatever the sense that subjective and objective have in this context. If the case has been made for the inescapability of a pre-reflective cogito, then the sharper question arises as to why it seems so easy to escape it?

Visions of directed evolution, whether of the humanistic, Hegelian or spiritualistic stamp, with their levels, emanations and emergent properties (emergencies!), can be intoxicating in their suggestions of a unified cosmology but always leave a sense of dissatifaction, of having missed the mark. There is an order that belongs to knowledge in which a certain state of understanding, a provisional synthesis, can stand in a relation of subsumption or comprehending embrace towards another such state. When this relation is abstracted and ontologised we get our juicy theories of everything, our sense of an order, objective at least for us. If the core of consciousness is not a holographic spark of the most fundamental ground of being, then its dignity resides in the ability to discover the laws of that ground and contemplate its own fragile relation to them. What is betrayed here is the freshness and lawlessness of the moment in pure unknowing encounter. That being precedes essence ought not to be an insight that can be theorised, but how do you arrest the process? As soon as stated the principle becomes essentialised. There is no strategy to end subsumption, it is life of the mind, or would be if the mind had ever been alive.

Beneath the diffidence there is certainty, the assurance of self-authentication, confidence in the solidity of the foundations at least, if not of everything that is built upon them. But beneath that certainty there is a deeper layer of doubt, this time with no bottom in view at all. You don't know the first thing... all of this has no foundation, no core. The only thing that self-validates is the need for appearing to know, which is consistent but weightless - blown away in the next strong wind. In the same way you can say that beneath the gruffness, the nit-picking mind, there is kindliness, compassion, love; beneath withdrawal a sense of solidarity. But beneath that sense of unity and fellow feeling there is a deeper isolation, a generalised ill-will, the obverse of generalised compassion, and an indispensible component in the constitution of the world. How much of art is there in rationalsing this malice into its negative? Not so fast, it takes a considerable feel for reality to dwell here with no movement of judgement or interpretation. As if you are poised on the boundary of the black and white, or the red and the blue.

You can go out to the edge of yourself in silent thought by means of careful questioning, but if you try to leap from that edge you find that you have already anticipated the move and find yourself cradled in your own arms. You question, but the questioning is always missed, the horn evaded with automatic skill. Questioning, enquiry, self-reflection these are all employments of the same basic device of thought, variations on the question mark, an oddly divided signifier, like an upside-down "i" with its head twisted into a backward-facing hook. It gathers the preceding utterance and inflects it a certain way, provisionally asserting or performing something about the subject, as in the epidemic of up-talking which can be applied to the most banal utterances, miming a relationality that it cannot fullfil. But the question is a fundamental part of relationship, perhaps the most fundamental part, Where art thou?, in which you are summoned to reveal yourself before any knowledge of what will be revealed. The other draws you to the edge of yourself and to respond is to leap into the unknown. If only the question comes from the other, even from the other within you, but not you, can it move; and maybe it does, but only once or twice in a lifetime when you take yourself by surprise.

Music, more than any other is the form of art for consumption. It can organise the divergent tendrils of half-grasped notions and half-felt feelings into a sort of journey into yourself, into the arc of a self-abandon and self-discovery that produces the feeling of your having gained something without actually giving you anything at all, only the memory of perhaps having touched on some long-forgotten inner possession or birthright. Filled with air you grow to the stature of the musical statement and then with the release of a few cadences you shrink back into yourself. In certain respects it is the opposite of dreaming mind, which also operates on the fringe of latencies accumulation around the stream of defined experiences. The latter pushes the divergences, it is the very idea of disorder at Key West, it doesn't collapse superpositions but extends them into their inevitable narrativity. The stories in dreams have no sequence of beginning, middle and end, if anything they are all at once, or if you like all middle, but a middle that twists and dances the ends and beginnings out of which it is formed. Music exists within a longing for the other, no matter how much it sublimates or flatters such a longing, while dreams are the real and uncanny presence of the other within the heart of the self.

The perspective of the self - if this term could be used for that inversion of appearance in which what seemed to be law and hence the very frame of objectivity (as time, space and causality) is seen to be the living and freely determined heart of reality, the misunderstood truth behind subjectivity, and what seemed the subjective fringes, the qualia of enjoying qualia, are seen to be floating ideas without any thinker - is latent but never entirely inaccessible, since it contributes an element of transcendence to all judgements. You have definite preferences, but you also 'know' in a mostly disengaged and taboo recognition, that all preferences and prejudices are so much noise: time is not the moment, there is no separation, the agent and the sufferer of action are one. Without the contribution of this perspective ethical maxims would have no injunctive force, but in itself it consitutes ultimate disinterest, or otherwise expressed, detachment. The ethical is thus unstably located between two indifferences, that of acknowledging nothing and that of recognising everything. There is no use in denying that that is where you dwell, you can't think yourself to either shore, but you can see the fluid nature of it, its abundance of ironies. You must swim, but you can swim against the current, if only to pretty much stay in one place.

The organ of experience is your entire life. This means more than the irony that experience is never complete until the one who experiences it is gone, rather it refers to the way that the ultimate referent or experiencer is a submerged core of being which, although contingent and particular, hardly changes, if at all, in the course of a life. It is a sort of fundamental pattern which is only ever expressed in part in the course of any particular experience, so that to gain a sense of the entire pattern you might seek to add together all the experiences of a lifetime, but that there is nothing which guarantees that your lifetime will necessarily cover it all. This is a rough way of saying it; naturally early life experiences are far more determinative than later ones, so that inner significance can be gauged by the degree to which it wakes up childhood experiences, poorly understood at the time and only now starting to reveal some of what was hidden. Every experience delivers something to you, but most of the message is unreadable in the moment, it can only be revealed later, in an other time which may never come in the ordinary unfolding of your life. Another way to say it is that experience woos being, but rarely succeeds in moving it. It desperately wants to because it knows that being is all that matters, and so it tries desperately to force the issue, resorts to chemical or moral toxins, or else it resigns itself to a cultivated and discreet shallowness. The barrier between experience and being is impermeable from the side of experience; you can do so much, get off your face so many times but nothing changes. And if experience has such a hard time of it then the predicament of thought with its phamacopoeia of ideas is even worse. In your waking life you can think yourself into anything but it will all be unravelled the next time you fall sleep. Being has not responded, has not opened its cyclopean eye and taken you in; until that response is just as clear to you in dreams and deep sleep as it is in waking life nothing has really happened.

Think of these moments or particles of consciousness not as presences but as comparative absences; as if they are like small windows or punctures in the opacity of the world through which the noumenal subject can shine. The reference to a self in these moments is then a threshold effect, what 'shines' is pure darkness, but the rim of each window diffracts this energy and glows, producing a location and a specificity, which effects being profoundly strange and alien to the subject, give birth to the subject as self. It would seem as if the only adequate witness of the particular or personal self must be another particular or personal self, but this conclusion depends on a begging of the question. We see it only from the point of view of the particular consciousness, and so cannot infer what it looks like from the other side. It cannot even be regarded as an illusion of the noumenal subject, illusion does not belong to it, at most it is the expression of a possibility. The fact that our reality is witnessed by a self is the form our understanding gives to our being an instance of universal consciousness, and does not point to any metaphysics.

The idea of consciousness, such as that which constitutes your experience during the hours of the day when you are nominally awake, being made up out of an assembly of infinitesimal moments of subjectivity is one that is common to such thinkers as Leibniz, Whitehead and the proponents of Orchestrated O.R. These theories are appealing, not least because they ground a sort of realism - things, objects, may not be as they seem, but are nonetheless real, as real as the subject who is observing them. The problem, of course is in the orchestration, or the pre-established harmony: how can a diversity of subjectivities be aggregated into a single subjectivity with a single "I". What is in question is not merely a functional "I" for which the start of an answer would be to point to the pervasiveness of the integration of individual units such as cells or other organisms into multicellular organisms or coherent societies, and to suggest that the same mechanism must be at work, but the "I" as metaphysical or transcendental subject, the very core of the subjectivity in question. What lies behind this question may be a false analogy between the putative atoms of subjectivity and small physical objects, tiny individual particles, like grains of sand, but granting that there is a valid question here some insight might be drawn from the quotidian experience of sleep and dreams. Could it be that in the dreaming mind there are multiple observers, or at least a relaxation of the coherence which brings about the single observer, sufficient to allow multiple strands of experience to proceed in parallel? This is not so much a speculation as a suggestion that you search in dreams for evidence of coalescence in the heart of that invisible but obdurate reality which in the waking state is taken to be the single experiencer.

But if you are this discrete bubble in space, what are you in time? As a first guess, say you are smeared out in time. You extend back along a root-like system into the past; you are only in the now by virtue of having arrived from out of that past which you carry with you as if you have messages to deliver. You are expelled from the past, pushed out, forced to be reborn in each moment, continually saying farewell, grateful for memory's gifts. The future is not the mirror image of the past; it is a definite and opaque threshold beyond which you can see possibilities, but not yourself. To enter into the future you need to choose and you can't know what you will choose until you have done so. The future is singular but the past is plural; there are many pasts, memories are endlessly creative, you are not necessarily tied to any of them, but that others can revise them, cut across them, weave them into a different story. In the distant past you emerge out of a grey fog of non-existence; you have no knowledge of what this means but it feels friendly, you have no qualms about aeons of pure potentiality; it's fuzzy, there are curtains and breezes that occasionally sweep them aside to reveal other curtains, even further back in the distance. The future, however, ends abruptly, inevitably, bang!, all black, and then even the blackness fades to black. But didn't I say that this was just a first guess? The funny thing is that all of this double vista exists only in the now, only ever now. And just as they say that you can never fall into a black-hole because the closer you get the more time slows down, so can you never fall out of the now.

The subjective space behind the eyes is a small hollow chamber, shaped like a sort of cardioid of revolution about a foot across with your "I" at the cusp. This is a reference space, you don't always feel your existence in it, but this is what space comes back to when you look for it in a calm state of mind. It is the shape of I-ness in the world of otherness; there is a boundary and a blackness beyond which is presumed to be more of the same kind of space, just not of your own. This inner space is flexible, it can change in size, but also in its degree of inner luminance and of tension, the boundary can be felt as hard or soft, as open or closed, permeable or impermeable, intact or torn. The individual I is taken to be the animal whose native habitation is this kind of shell, while also being the one properly located in impossible-to-be-experienced concentration at that cusp, but the shell betrays the nature of creature who lives there. There is a region before you over which you exert some influence - a representation of something encountered, a Vorstellung, is located in that "Vor", or fore-space -  a region that you welcome and that is welcome to you, and there is also an intimate proximity immediately behind you about which you can know nothing but which can significantly influence you. The visual field is a metaphor for this intimate field of ontological kinship; this is the structure you bear in so far as you are a kind of real thing in a world of real things. It is not subjectivity, but the ordinary operating mode of subjectivity. This entire inner-subjective structure can also be experienced as floating free, or rather you can seem to float free of it. It is still there, and its formative insideness is still insideness, but it no longer houses the entirety of what you are, it just a tiny place down below, like a house seen from the air as you take off in a 'plane. It is suspended in a living blackness, in a spatiatised consciousness which turns out to be a more capacious habitation for the "I" that the picayune body-mind structure left below.

There is a reintegration via the senses, especially by sound. With keen enough attention you can experience the initial moment of an unexpected sound, the half-moment before it is registered as such, when it is simply taken in in a blissfully accepting silence. This phase is so quickly written over, not least by your intention, that it is impossible to recover. And yet it doesn't exist in linear time, is not an atom of passing time but is an encounter outside of the process of interpretation and memory which delivers you to a self in streaming embodiment who can wonder about the reality of what he senses, or if he is dreaming. This is why objects retain an irreducibly enigmatic quality, why they hint of a lost Eden.