As if you are always being asked, "So?" and you scramble to come up with what might fit the bill, what is closest to hand, and your choice, if it is banal enough, is greeted with a chorus of approving grunts by a large but otherwise silent and invisible audience, a humming sound whose reverberations define the cave, and regardless of whether it leads you deeper in or out of the murk. From moment to moment you are always responding, and this spares you from having to stop and wonder what the sense of it all is. You only need to immerse yourself in your long brown history of la vie moyenne sensuelle and bounce back from there, unsurprisingly and in your native idiom. It's what others seem to do all the time, just being themselves, or just lovable imitations of themselves, and perhaps you are just as lovable or ridiculous in the inevitable eye. A soupy naturalness, a magic pudding with the emphasis on the pudding, a not very funny or absorbing kitchen-sink comedy or family romance, endlessly repeating the same one-liners, always on, inescapable, consuming your life and your dreams. Not enough attention is ever given to this gauge of embodiment, this base-note of recurrence, the thickness and opacity and musky aroma of fundamental and axiomatic yin.     

Every 'I' is the imperfectly realised centre of its world, a world which includes every other 'I', which are 'objects' such as can only be understood as equally the centre of each its own world. A world, then, contains the 'addresses' of an unlimited plurality of other worlds. Large parts of these worlds are treated as if they are of overlapping reference, given a transformation in perceptual and conceptual perspective. You think of the totality of this as some sort of kaleidoscopic or fractal reality, but again that totality is a projection from within your world towards a more complete world of consensus than the one you normally take as reference. There is nothing to be explained here, the point is rather to refrain from explaining so that the strangeness of this meta-phenomenon can be appreciated. There is indeed, nothing like it, it is neither object-like nor subject-like. One 'I' can move into the most intimate 'proximity' of another 'I' without in the least disrupting the general features of the pattern, since the pattern itself is made out of the open-ended side-effects of such interactions. 

This thing is going on unqualified and unexpressive, without ideas or judgments, without any content because undifferentiated, and yet somehow there seems to be a very particular predicament. How does the predicament get attached to this other? You have to make an effort to put the situation together, to build it, and when you do so you are doing it blindly, none of the concepts it is made of are self-evident, all of them simply refer to other concepts, and back and back into nowhere. Blindly but not freely: you think that what is not free must be real just because of that obduracy, that fascination, but it could be real only in relation to the free as the basis for that reality, as what experiences and verifies the absence of freedom. But by the same token what is free cannot be known in experience. Only what is immediate is true, but nothing is immediate.

From where did these expectations arise? It seems as if you took over certain vague promises that might have been made to you, or to someone like you, by someone or ones who happened to be there, or by some talk that was floating about, and made them your own. You took it for an assurance and you believed that the ground of it was in yourself. As if you'd recognised something only after it had been pointed to by others, but then forgot you ever didn't know. What you made of it is whatever you dreamed it could be when you dreamed yourself into being. When later you discovered that those others could never have identified, much less endowed, such a thing it was already too late. You were off and running. And when it all goes wrong, as it frequently does, who do you blame? Your own massive presumption or the half-remembered donors who have now been wholly absorbed into the fabric of the world?

As if the monster stirs in its sleep and begins to slough off the gaudy rubbish you have piled on top of it, every gesture of thought undoes itself, every act invites its equal and opposite counteract in this solitude. You can't begin to say who or what is experiencing this immemorial check-mate. Petrified and unblessed, every sin perpetuates itself and you are hammered to its rock. You have never known, never seen a thing beyond the pallid room where your voice dies away without echo. A mistaken instance with no possibility of starting over. Look at what you never want to see, look at your never wanting to see, your intent misgivings, the colours that you bear, the baton dropped at your feet, and mechanically picked up again. The marksman singing to miss his sky. This day, this moment, at the bottom of every single moment in a fool's dusty death, uttering foolish certainties from a fool's beak, from interchangeable heads, like the clown or the puppet that you are, now and forever.

The Sheffer stroke or NAND operation is a single logical connective which is functionally complete, meaning that all the other propositional connectives can be derived from it. It is thus an affirmation which contains negation (a|a being equivalent to not-a), and is a symmetric operation (a|b is indistinguishable from b|a) from which the asymmetric 'entails' operation can be derived, ((a|a)|(a|b) being equivalent to a->b). Doesn't it then, in the small world of propositional logic, do exactly what a concept like intentionality seeks to do for the unbounded world of experience? In the larger case you can't really prove it works, because there's always the you doing or validating the proving, and which somehow lies outside the what that is being demonstrated. But the idea of a single act, or class of acts, which constitutes the all, is an attractive one. You might prefer to call it purpose, or purposiveness, but the example of the happily named stroke is a telling one. Certain characteristics seem essential. For example, that it is binary, or relational, that it can take itself as one of its terms, that it has alternative forms (such as the Pierce arrow) and that for all its autonomy it requires bracketing, or an ordering which witnesses the sequence of the events of its application. So, accepting this in a general way, you can see that the infinite complexity of the world, including your own place in it (which appears as fundamental asymmetry) could be generated out of some simple, but not intuitive relation, one which does not pretend to be self-referential. If you search for the self-reference that you are certain is there then this structure obligingly folds over on itself, growing more complex and displacing your goal yet further. For whatever it is that witnesses all this - that places the brackets, as it were - there is only a play of symmetry and hence no question of self-reference, or of the 'real' existence of the subject.

At your birth did something come into the world that was not already there? It might seem as if birth were a kind of penetration, you were pushed and pushed and the interior of that other place was breached and you broke through into a canal you didn't know was there and, expelled through it, with stress and storm, you penetrated into this 'breathing world'. Only much later did you discover that that other place had all the time been simply a part of this multiform realm you've gotten used to calling home. You learned its rules and to accept the idea that everything is to be found somewhere in here, although you never quite believed it, and kept searching for proof. Again, there is the image of an eye opening for the first time, awakening to life, gazing out in ignorance and trust and wonder. But this image presupposes something before. The opening of your eye was an action that you, or the you that preceded you, deliberately took, a definite and motivated act, so that there must have been a whole structure already in place. But was there a first moment, a moment without a before? This is the kind of question you ask yourself from out of the received notion of time for which there must always be a before. What then, could the birth of time have been? If there was no time before time there was no space before space, no arriving somewhere from somewhere else. Whatever the origin might have been, it is no event, could not be separate, be at any distance, from this, here, now, in any way.

The sense of being, of thatness, differs from being x, or whatness, in that it can't be reframed. Thinking is framing and thinking afresh is reframing. It can and does go on endlessly. It is a away of coming to the evident in which the greatest share belongs to the subject, to the experiencer, who is himself that which lies behind every what and renders it secondary. Thatness is the presence of the frame, but is also that which falls outside of every frame. In the act of framing you sense it flee, it leaves the stage just as you enter, you who are the shepherd of whatness, and are yourself abstract whatness in evidence. And so you no longer have anything to say. What remains to say is the absence of anything to say. The cupboard is bare, you have eaten up whatever you had stored up or grown, and it did not assuage your hunger. But the fact was always the bare cupboard, you still strain to see its empty shelves, to ponder the space it encloses and the invitation it never fails to extend.

Think not of the wild diversity of desires but of the equally wild and unpredictable yearnings that underpin desires, because in them you more readily recognise the strange sense of original possession that you have in them. The drive to satisfy desires vastly exceeds the quantum of pleasure that you derive from their satisfaction, even when you factor in the meta-satisfactions such as the social proof that ensues on the fact that you are demonstrably capable of attaining satisfaction, what could be called with a certain irony the honour and pride of desire. To authentically desire means to not be prepared to cede in any way, to be firm to the point of death, or of murder if necessary. If it were not a matter of asserting some prior and inalienable possession then the cost of sublimating or refracting the desire, would not be as great and as consequential as it is. There is a fiery nucleus to every desire and whatever you are as an identity emerges unconsciously from the centre of that - so that even terms like possession and ownership understate the case, they are already social mediations one step removed from the unspeakable point of origin.

Like Kane's 'Rosebud' it could be that the kernel of your longing is for some lost childhood toy. An imaginative reconstruction in deep memory is needed, but since the longing continually recurs you have an abundance of traces that can be followed. So, it seems that there was the tremendous fulfillment brought about by some object or by some thoughts and fantasies that were catalysed by this object, an extraordinary happiness which did not present itself as a restitution, it looked forward into life, it was the original promise of happiness, but a promise that you made to yourself - it was not all present, but the missing part was assured, you reposed in that assurance. It was the first discovery of a happiness that came entirely from within you, that didn't depend on the love of some Other, perhaps it was the dawning idea that in truth you were the one and only Other. It was evoked by the object, which became the symbol of it, but the object was originally a part of it since there was no sharp boundary between self and world. The object-symbol was there in the wider world as the reminder of what you could always return to. Something that stood out distinct and golden and magical against the crowded background of nodes of meaning that did not pass through you. As time went by it grew more difficult of access and the object-symbol broke into pieces, it became more properly a symbol, or an image-symbol and hence dependent on other symbols according to the laws of differentiation. The object was broken into shards and each part carried only a part of the magic of the whole. And longing, or yearning began to arise in the field of symbol-images as a modulation of that original happiness. Yearning thus as Sehensucht, that is, a seeing and a searching for, a having and a not-having at the same time. And still at first there was a sense that the field of meaning was compact enough that restoration of the object was possible, that the pieces could be put back together. But later as it expanded you no longer had that assurance. The fragments appeared and now they evoked something irretrievably lost, but in the paradoxical mode of yearning. 

In the end it seems you always incarnate some drive. You are one of the ways in which this drive unfolds and articulates itself. And the drive belongs to ... well, humanity in general, it is ancestral, in the blood, etc., because if there is one reason for your existence that can't be rationalised away it's the biological and cultural facticity of your birth. However you came to be here, you hit the deck running.  What you think is yours, the secret task that only you can fulfill is the way that the master idea that expresses this drive feels from the inside, but its truth is on the outside, is its minor place in the matrix of all related ideas, is its being a footnote to a footnote of some great conversation happening elsewhere. So you never know what it is that you express, and you can't know it because only by not knowing it can you express it. The more you strive the more you miss the way, that's exactly what you are supposed to do, yours is not the truth. But you can recognise that what you are directed towards is not the centre, you are not one of the bullets aimed for the heart, but are rather the idea of a short-cut, the idea of getting there indirectly, through detours and errors, side-tracks you are so sure of in the moment. The master idea is that these by-ways necessarily fail, and how can this be expressed except through such a one as you?

There is no theory of this, it just has its ways of acting and responding, of gathering and hatching seeds, of blossoming and withering, dying and fertilising itself, drawing all kinds of matter in and then pushing it out again in kaleidoscopic forms. It needs no theory to do this but it spins theories along with everything else, theories of mind, for example, and somehow they assume tremendous importance - at times they seem the only thing, so eager is it to justify itself, as if there was someone else to hear, as if there was an 'out there' for another mind to inhabit, with justice and compassion, with the power to justify and to condemn - although they aren't really about anything, except perhaps other theories, and as such no different from any other threads weaving, tangling and tearing, through this always extraordinary process. That's why you keep fading up, speaking, having something to say, an outcome, a personage, a dilemma, a curve ball and a dire straight, an underlying and an understanding and a passing understanding, a snapshot that blinks and fades in the sun. 

A value does not exist apart from implicit counter-values and so if you will the value you also will the counter-values. For example the value in ownership of property entails the counter-value of thievery, so if you take ownership property as a fundamental value you are also assigning a value to theft, and to a host of further vicissitudes. This ought not to be paradoxical or deconstructive in any way. Why should any value be treated as if it was entirely without context? You cannot will x without also willing the context of x, since x does not exist without its context. The difficulty is that x may appear to be more or less explicit while its context is almost certainly mostly unknown, but that's no reason to dismiss the value of x. Everything is complex and so complexity is inescapable. Simplicity is the first approximation to complexity, and so is a temporary heuristic for dealing with it. Complexity, however, is not an extrapolation of simplicity, it is an adventure which calls into being the resources needed to engage it. It is summarised in narrative, before ideally acquiring a never-unproblematic theoretical account. All this if there is a dealing with, a dealer and a dealt.

Talk of tool-being expresses an intimation of being as purposefulness, which is also a way of introducing vectoriality without intentionality, or without any anthropomorphic reference to consciousness. Rather there is a reference to consciousness, or to something upstream of consciousness as we recognise it, but is kept implicit. Purposefulness is both diachronic (again upstream of 'time') and a form of universal relatedness. An item, or idem, cannot be purposeful without reference to an other, an alter, and since this alter is also purposeful, and relation is transitive, the web of connection extends without bounds. Every item thus reaches towards the whole and its purposefulness is merely the expression on your scale of its embeddedness in the whole. You could also express the same insight by saying that every item, or idem, or instance, is a striving towards identity, which is the full realisation of thatness. Or you could say that whatness is the striving towards thatness. But thatness belongs to synchrony, it is the perfect presence of this instance, now, its perfect blessedness, its ever original createdness, its individuality as willed by the all. It is something like the equivalence of zero and infinity: to see infinity in a grain of sand is both to appreciate its perfect fulfilled identity or thatness and its perfect definability as itself within the all. The conscious self is something that doesn't exist but ought to exist, or its existence is its ought-to-exist. It is at neither end of the polarity between idem and identity, hence this odd striving towards identity or individuation, which seems to encompass nine-tenths of psychology. The other tenth being the consequences of the realisation of universal relatedness.

There are two entirely different dimensions of the self, each infinite in its own way, the synchronic and the diachronic. The former is the present moment, often taken to be the pivotal reality of experience, the glowing ember, the now, the only place in which all feeling, will and knowing can be realised. But when you look closely at it you find nothing there but a flow of fleeting and insignificant images and sensations, posed against an impenetrable background, a wall of fog, a perennial irony. It appears to be the most banal simplicity and yet if you try to render any of it explicit you find that the commentary is endless. It is pure particularity and so escapes your analytic gaze which only knows how to render up generalities. Every purely particular moment contains an effectively infinite quantity of latent generalities. To dig these out requires work and a measure of genius such as you rarely possess: you need to smash generalities against each other, split them to yield the wild flashing essences, instantly recognised and consumed. The latter dimension, that of the life history, of the narratives traversed and re-traversed by purpose and desire, by the striving to be, to integrate and individuate. It extends into an unknown futurity in which you somehow hope to find yourself. All of this, with its dependence on duration and memory and on the mechanisms of mind and world, seems unreal and flimsy in relation to the self-certainty of immediacy, but it is full, or prospectively full, while the latter is empty. What you barely realise is how interdependent these two are, that there can be no choice between them. One is like poetry and the other like documentary, the tension between them is almost hostile. Your inveterate loyalty is to the former, which is why the latter so often seems chaotic and shallow, even as you keep plunging back into it, insatiably.

Pain is the only mode of experience that forces you to acknowledge its reality, but pain has no necessary objective correlate. You can inflict it, alter it, anaesthetise it, or in some cases even reverse its polarity, by actions on the body, but it is experience that verifies the body and not the other way around. We know what it means to have an unfelt pain, or a pain in a phantom limb, but without being able to explain it - this reaches far into the meaning of subjectivity.  There is nothing more private than pain, just as there is nothing more private than your awareness, but pain forces your response. It carves the world out of this dreaming stuff. Knowledge of the unreachable pain of others is the key to the depth of your world. The hard problem ought to be reframed as the problem of pain and then it would not stay enclosed within the imaginary bounds of a single organism.

In a dream when you were surprised by the sudden reappearance of a dead friend who it turned out had faked her death so that she could take a long vacation - and indeed she looked quite fresh, hair more lustrous than you'd ever seen it and face relaxed and smiling - you went from marveling at what a good piece of play-acting she'd pulled off to seriously wondering whether you might be dreaming. But no, you looked within and assessed the quality of your experience, there in that warm and sun-bright room where you were sitting across from her, and could allay any doubts: you were certainly awake, and the secure world was winking back at you, returning your gaze, just as it's doing now. So, there's really no way of knowing inside what frame you currently are found. Not that you can't build a persuasive case when you have more time to gather evidence, but that's all inference and there's no plumb-bob in the soul that infallibly points to the centre of being. This intricate map of all maps you've assembled so collaboratively, so painstakingly is bootstrapped out of some tiny seed of faith, and in the end weighs exactly as much as any shadow.

Any purposive action has the intrinsic attributes of conviction and scope. Conviction expresses the intensity with which the purpose urges itself into action, or the belief in the reality of the stakes of the action, so that you could say that conviction has in turn the twin attributes of reality and stakes. Scope expresses the maturity of the purpose, its inclusiveness and resolution of alternate purposes and their concomitant actions, and is the product of the individual's entire history of experimentation with life. Your old friends Erfahrung and Erlebnis are perhaps relevant here, with Erlebnis being the dimension of experience belonging to conviction and Erfahrung that which belongs to scope. These concepts belong to experience as imbrication in the sense of understanding that no experience is isolated from the whole of Experience which recognises no spatial, temporal or personal boundaries. Any seemingly particular experience has implicit dimensions which are integral to its purposiveness and that overflow all conceptual boundaries. In so far as experience has resolved a greater portion of its implicit dimensions it has assumed greater scope, but there is no limit to how far this can go. And similarly in so far as the purpose in experience remains speculative and uncommitted, as its stakes are substitutable by alternatives, so is less real, less persuaded. But what this means is that while experiences may be found along a very wide scale of spirituality, from say self-serving and evil to self-sacrificing and divine, from the sleep of matter to cosmic-consciousness, the basic structure remains the same. No experience understood in this way can lead beyond the realm of experience itself. But the invariance of the structure is another sort of fact entirely, and it is the 'subject' corresponding to that invariance that you cannot do away with through any experience, no matter how expansive. 

If you had to draw it it would look like a bright fractal splash originating here, at every distributed centre, and stretching so far into the distance that the underlying field would curve and be lost behind its swelling arc. And up close it would be made out of a linked pattern of tiny images of your flushed face with eyes wide open, mouth gaping, but elongated as if it was flowing away rapidly after the violence of its sudden re-appearance, and facing up and out of the page, chronically misdirected and unable to register its own dispersion. But from the middle distance it would be just a solid red, like a spurt of arterial blood, that you fully inhabited so as to be aware of no gaps, no resistance, just pure and thoughtless self-expression. But this image fails to capture something essential to it. If it is made of corpuscles they aren't just blood cells, thing-like packets of life-stuff, but some weird topology that captures the gaze and threads it through an impossible knot, a sort of Kleinian spiral (Melanie and Felix at once!) so that being outside is being inside and being inside is being further inside, endlessly. And so you can't either be or not be in the very centre of this thing pushing you out of itself, dying into birth, birthing into death. You could call it identification if that wasn't too macroscopic, too much after the fact, too hopelessly late.

You understand that consciousness cannot be grasped because it is always ahead of itself, intentional, vectorial etc., but in saying something like this you are attempting to illuminate the latent 'whatness' of experience rather than its 'thatness'. The image is of something darting and aspiring, a motion driven by an appetite, as if something seeks to complete itself or to become more itself, to attain the Absolute. But when it has become more itself, when it has cracked the nut and tasted the kernel, has it become any more consciousness? Do the terms less or more, intense or tranquil, deep or shallow, properly apply to consciousness or to something else, such as life, power, knowledge, feeling? Take life for the moment as the most inclusive category. Is it at all reasonable to discriminate the two, to assert that consciousness is other than an attribute of life? This would mean that however fine your phenomenology could go the result could only be a deepening of content, an integral fascination, but would say nothing at all about 'thatness', about super- or hypo-essential being. As life in act you can only pursue life, pursue it right into the mind of God, but not into that other deeper secret, the Godhead. Mind is seeking and seeking is manifestly not futile since it will always continue to bring forth wonders. It is intrinsically oriented, it is orientation itself, but the being of the endless event of seeking can have no orientation, can't be desired, and yields nothing. It can't even be recognised or acknowledged, since if it were the whole dance would stop, and mind can never stop. The Absolute doesn't embrace being, that is its world-creating flaw.

There is an assumption which is something like the idea that you can discover your assumptions and then perform a certain manoeuver which puts them out of play while still keeping them in place, or in other words that you can pay attention to what you've assumed until you can see that it is contingent. As if you can keep climbing on the back of your own errors. But it seems as if you've made it too easy, assuming that you can discover what you've assumed, that you are the sort of mind to which it can be exposed, as if that is what a mind is, something that can always take a hint. And once that's done there's the idea that your little manoeuver has anything to do with what you might have glimpsed. The whole thing is disquieting, it is just the sort of thing that is a fatal error, but you don't know for sure that that's what it is. You can only go on, as if you had no doubts, as if you trusted that everything doubtful would result in a doubt, and that's just the sort of thing you can never know. But if you are blind you are willfully blind and that doesn't make you any less blind. Stumbling around you are bound to fall into a ditch, and don't you hope that lying there with a broken head you might just, once and for all, see the stars.

To whom or to what does this experiencing belong? The marvelous intricacy of a life-world being performed is so full of inner circuits of meaning and enjoyment, of thoughts and feelings folded up within deeper thoughts and feelings, dramas and opera buffa, that it obscures the one strange fact of its groundlessness. In every moment you seem to leap the gap to find yourself and to escape yourself so that the experiencing can come into form and melt away, in every breath, in the same breath, so that there can be a you to seem to ask the you who seems to know. The you is the half-formed organ of this eternal bodilessness, the silent urge neither wholly voice nor ear, and that is why it can't stop playing its endless improvisations on the monotonous and never-heard theme, making nothing out of sweet nothing, returning and departing, joining and dividing, a field and a point, ceaselessly creating forms in order to discard them. Only come to the centre of this and let the yous chase their tails in cycles and epicycles of rage and vanity and grim desire.

Part of the background of experience is the sense of your current state of mind and yet there is no clear sense of what a state is or what the boundary is between you and your own state. Once you are aware of the existence and variability of states then a lot of your time is spend in plotting changes of state, yet this only makes sense if the experiencer is distinct from the state and somehow constant across them, and if there is some sort of intuitive map of possible states. Knowing you are here is often precisely not knowing how to be there, as if the meaning of here and there were self-evident in the predicament. Again, you, here and now, certainly differ from the self of another in a different way than you differ from yourself otherwise, but your map of states is populated by others, by other instances of the same kind of being, immediately recognised. If what you are is the same whether, say, you are asleep or awake, dreaming or alert to the world around you, then where in the waking state is the compass-bearing that points to this peculiar identity? It takes only a moment to check in, but the result can be quite misleading. You even do it in dreams, assuring yourself that you are awake within the unfolding story but without the rigour that would expel you into lucidity.

It might seem as if the three otherwise very different classes of metaphysical understanding that fall under theism, idealism and the notion that reality is a simulation, are all somehow versions of the same basic notion, something like the priority of intelligence in being. Under theism what we are capable of discerning of the ultimate reality underlying experience is the mind of God, and in particular the creative power of the logos. With idealism, the relation of our experience to the Absolute is as part to whole in thought; the two may be separated by an immense distance but the meaning and fulfillment of the part can only be in the whole. The simulation hypothesis is like Kantianism in that the ultimate reality is noumenal and unknowable in terms of the appearance, but the appearance itself, which includes all of experience, is closed upon itself, the ultimate meaning of any part being its function, not within an inaccessible whole but within its context, however widely this can be drawn. Where these three differ radically is in the meaning of the subject. With idealism the subject is necessarily related to the Absolute, and a full inclusive knowledge of ourselves is always possible. Under theism such knowledge is real but our relation to it depends on the grace or favour of God. It is possible to be drawn up into the beatific vision, but by the same token eternal banishment to a state of exile and ignorance is also possible. The capability of a soul's knowing God is present but contingent. With the simulation hypothesis we are necessarily in error and whatever we do to try to overcome this error is ultimately futile. We, as the subject, are qualitatively different from our creator(s) and the highest enlightenment we can hope for is to realise and accept our limitation. Do these differences represent a false problem? They seem to represent different grades of alienation within deep subjectivity, being different degrees to which one believes in an obscure Objectivity of the Subject, as against the categorical impossibility of any Objectivity of the Subject. But surely having once fully and deeply apperceived the non-Objectivity of the Subject the metaphysics ceases to have any significance?

A low degree erotic feeling, idle, lightly brushing the possibilities of arousal corresponds to a highly creative mental state. You are recalled to embodiment and distant fragmentary memories each conveying a vividly constructed moment flash up easily, and with them associated fantasies, inexplicit, mere hints that you can reassemble in any way you'd like. The purest form of eroticism is in these rippling moments of sensory life, uprooted from time, falling into the radiant present with all their texture and timbre and wild synaesthesias, their teasing promises of happiness. This has nothing to do with transgression, with forcing a forbidden boundary, but is a native element. But into this faunish afternoon let the green eyes and pale freckled skin of the other enter and tremble as you reach out your fingers and for the first time graze her dewy flesh.