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Wednesday, 7 June 2017



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.

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