Being human as distinct from merely mortal is to be native to a complex social world in which everything matters, but where your knowledge is confined to a sliver, the direct out-facing view from a single point on a single determinate and homogeneous trajectory. And even your your own relatively constant internal world is experienced in the same limited and perspectival way. It is about a particular setting of awareness which is such that it can only directly grasp a small fraction of what it needs to, or would like to, know. It is a thrownness, indeed, but not into a barren rock-strewn landscape, not even a lush natural landscape, or a Greek amphitheatre, but a social landscape of multiple parallaxes and foreshortenings, of calls and responses - whatever that all might ultimately mean. It is also too simple to call it a world of semblables, as if they were merely disquieting objects of some kind, obliquely challenging to the self, and you could puff at your pipe and meditate on "the problem of other minds". But if not semblables, then what? Alter-egos? Well, no, because you are not fully formed apart from your relationships to social fact which you in no way understand, but which makes un-evadable demands on you, demands which precede and succeed you. Whatever you do, whether comporting a belief free-will or not, whether a speech act or the most intimate personal realisation, is already a response.

The unawakened account of the awakening would go something like this: it is an abnormal brain state with certain features describable in terms of effects in the communication and inhibition pathways between different brain systems. It can be induced by the action of certain drugs, and extreme physiological practices in the right setting, and its effects on the subsequent life of the individual can be profound, lasting and positive, but can also be quite negative, leading to psychotic or disassociated states. This account can explain many 'spiritual' phenomena and it can also be used as a basis for bringing about certain results in a more or less predictable way. The awakened account of the unawakened is more problematic since its perspective does not ascribe any reality to the unawakened state, and yet (optimally) places awakening at the service of this state. The awakened seeks nothing more than the awakening of the unawakened, and so without acknowledging its existence it must produce a working theory of it. Such a theory will thus be paraconsistent, and there can be many rival versions of diverse consequence. It prescribes some sort of practice whereby the unawakened can realise the reality of awakening and the unreality of unawakening. The truth paradigm for the unawakened is consensus, congruence between theory and results, internal consistency and consistency with other validated theories. Truth in this paradigm always has a margin of error. For the awakened the truth paradigm is self-certainty and self-validation independent of any external experience, and it is impressively unshakable relative to the other, it admits no margin of error, and cannot do so by its nature. Nevertheless the same necessity that accompanies the self-certainty also carries over into the assertion of the unreality or dream-like nature of the unawakened state, so that it unavoidably does depend on the efficacy of its proposed methods, or anti-methods, of bringing the unawakened to its own view. This last represents a fatal flaw in the internal logic of awakening and so we observe every variety of bad faith surrounding the deployment of such methods. Unshakeable self-certainty does have significant consequences for those who encounter it, but its power is generic, is shared with all kinds of irrational enthusiasms, and is not by itself sufficient to ground its claims, or even to abolish its own hidden or repressed doubts.

You always think that something needs to happen, to be happening, so you have to do something, agitate in some way so as to get it moving. In order to quietly look at what is here some show needs to be set up, a Potemkin village of your latest theory of the self, subtly stage-managed so you can almost believe that you just came upon it. The line gets drawn very fine, but the effort comes naturally, or at least is second nature. And without this what would there be? Just nothing, it seems, you without make-up, a sad clown in an empty theatre who looks in the mirror and sees the ravages of time, his own mortality and the pitiful ineffectualness not only of everything he can still do, but of everything he ever did, to change it by one iota. Not to do, to sink into not doing, is to fall into this cloud of impotence and despair, and to stay there for at least as long as it takes to realise that even impotence and despair are a form of doing.

Why are your thoughts your thoughts, why is your experience your experience? All of it is just happening in mind and the thought of an 'I' is just an idea, an abstraction, like any other thing. Perhaps it is because something has to anchor it, to root it, whether it is a thought or an experience so that it can be here, at this point in the space of the question, as this address in reference, something that holds the space open by being the open, by being open, empty. And the 'I' is 'it' just because it isn't there, or else, say that anything that was the anchor, that anchors, is the 'I'. So as a thought it's just a cascading back into itself, through layer after layer, past anchor anchoring anchor. If you went back the way you came, in time, but inside time, into the presence of presence, past the intimations of immortality, not on the shore but deep down in the water before words, to a phosphorescent creature one with its element, completely sufficient unto itself, hidden inside what was completely insufficient to itself, an unimaginable bliss devoid of all the markings of bliss.

All these foolish words, do you think anyone will want to read them? Have you come to any conclusions worth the sharing? You can never get things straight, words and things, intentions and a basic grasp of the situation here, they are all too slippery for you to hold them in alignment for more than a moment or two. And when you do, it looks different every time. Stumbling around like an amiable and half-blind buffoon, bumping into things, "oh, pardon me", lifting your hat, smiling, squinting, not sure if it was a tree-stump, a horse or a grandmother. And children making fun of you, turning you around, placing irrelevant objects in your outstretched hands or stealing your shoes. All of this because of a certain pomposity, a willing to believe combined with an inveterate habit of taking yourself seriously, of maintaining the brand. And still, in spite of your misadventures, your absurdity, you love the dream, not for where it leads, because it leads nowhere, but for the sheer dreaming.

Every new item about the world needs to be fitted into the picture, but unlike a puzzle piece it does so by modifying and bending the immediately surrounding structure. This felt as a resistance which may be quite out of proportion to the objective significance of the new item, considered, say, as one among a large number of similar ones. This resistance is not registered as cognitive but as affective and connative which means that it emerges as something like an ego defense. What started out as cognitive friction has now put the self at stake, but only indirectly, since whatever it is that the ego is defending is concealed, and only signals danger by way of symbolic mediations. If you try to hunt down the core of the defense you might come upon a definite scene but only in a dream-like reconstruction which could as easily be a diversion. All the intrigue of a surreal spy novel surrounds these redoubts of the self, and the entire lexicon of this genre is oddly appropriate here, transposed into the intra-psychic. All of this represents one of the ways in which the sense of self is stubbornly conserved, demanding that the inquirer go behind the scenes, and behind the behind of the scenes of the scenes. The question may arise as to whether there really are great powers locked in a death-struggle driving this whole complexification, or whether their remote kremlins are in fact uninhabited, are only mazes fabulated out of imagination fragmented and ungoverned, freely devouring itself.

The experiencer and experience and experiencing are indistinguishable formations which are constantly changing, coming and going like clouds in the sky. And like clouds you can never catch the exact moment in which they arise or dissolve away, and if you go up into them to get a closer look you don't find anything but whirls of mist with no shape, a chill, a buffeting and a wetness. And still they, or rather whatever it is that lies behind their appearing, mysteriously gathers huge reservoirs of electric tension which from time to time discharge in jagged veins of light and fire. Nothing but these alternations of weather, of atmosphere and currents, blue skies, red skies, rain and dusty winds, the metaphor could not be more clear, yet how passively you accepted each one in turn as the central adventure, as the measure of your life and ran it down into night and oblivion, despair and glad recurrence. You called it your mind and drew a line to distinguish its chattering swirls of thought from the surrounding chaos, without seeing that the you, the mind, the chaos, the love, the hate, the clouds, the wind, thunder, the sun, the moon and other stars are one continuous substance, one continuous illusion befalling.   

The Truth IS, but is neither subjective nor objective. These two are interdependent, and rather hostile. They chase each other like cats and dogs, threatening to utterly destroy the other if only they get their teeth or claws into it. But they never do, never can, since neither exists without the other. Deviate from this understanding by a fraction of a millimetre and things get awfully interesting, interesting and awful, awful and interesting. Sound and fury that consume lifetimes without amounting to a damn thing.

As long as volitional action is there ethics is also current. The denial of volition, furthermore, is generally better understood ethically than metaphysically. So, take it as primary that the meta-motive in action is the intensifying of consciousness, as a consequence of the conatus essendi, or the will to power, and the manifest truth that experience is everything. Art is an assertion at the highest and most inclusive level available to the artist, and every actor is in a deep sense no more or less than an artist. (Assertion of self is perhaps the lowest level of this, but even this requires the concomitant assertion of everything opposed to the self.) Intensification of consciousness is also expansion of consciousness and hence comes to include an awareness of the subjective states of all alter-egos within the attained range of the acting or behaviour-creating subject. Put simply, your deepest value is to expand your consciousness and as you progress in this you inevitably become aware of the effects of your actions on every other subject directly or indirectly affected by your actions. The notion of such awareness, condensed perhaps into a golden rule, leads to an ethic of care and harm. But if your highest end is intensification and expansion of consciousness then surely your care for others should respect the same principle and not be conceived purely in terms of happiness, pleasure, or the minimisation of suffering. When you are aware that experiences that cross the overt purposes of the self often result in the greatest augmentations of consciousness, then your golden rule is no longer an unambiguous guide to action. In such a case you might shift your chief motive of care to Truth or Justice, taken as a concise way of summarising the greatest value in experience. In this way you move towards an ethic of virtue. Since you can't know what is the practical best, you value rules which embody the values central to the meta-game. But as soon as a gnostic element enters the equation the pull to antinomianism arises.

A virtue ethic is one in which there is a multi-dimensional set of criteria for good comportment which naturally arrange themselves into a system or hierarchy. This corresponds to the idea of a soul with its own structure and purpose, since there needs to be a point of application for such an accounting. Every good naturally also having its negative aspect, its mode of neglect or transgression. A system of this kind may be directed towards the social and be more or less supported by existing structure of the social, but the larger structure in which it is embedded need not at all be realised in the world. The need for an ethical accountability and the embedding in a larger structure holds true even in the vastly different case of a consequentialist ethic of care and harm such as is becoming more prevalent today. What is different is the status of the soul, which in the latter case can be almost entirely dissolved. This is what the system based on notions like karma resolves into. Comportment matters little, the ultimate value is in the consequences radiating from any action and the accounting for this takes place only in the largest possible context. It is not obedience to divine law which guides your actions here but an intuition of the whole in which your very agency is an illusion. While seeming more enlightened this latter understanding proves to be subjectivist and self-contradictory.

A phenomenon is real when it is effective beyond its initial domain of significance. So, an object which is important in a dream narrative, where it may have perfect consensus reality in relation to other dream characters, generally has no effects outside of the dream. On the other hand the apparent colours of things in waking reality, fer example, might be explicable within an evolutionary narrative, which describes the survival advantages of colour perception and accounts for the range and acuity of such perception, but are also analysable in a consistent way according to a whole network of other narratives to do with chemistry and physics, neurology and aesthetics which have no direct link to the former, and hence are taken to refer to something real. Again, objectivities that function perfectly well within the frame of a computer interface so that we tend to forget that they are merely functional, are seen to dissolve outside of that frame, as when we experience glitches or hacks, or when we play around with changes in the code. Whatever is real is significant in different and unexpected contexts. This is a version of Samuel Johnson's refutations of Berkeley. If objectivities were no more than their functionality then we would not only experience their failures outside their frame of applicability, but we would be able to successfully speculate on those failures. The Berkeleyan rejoinder would be to expand the frame to include all possible 'reality tests', the view from God. In dreams a kind of fabulation acts at the boundary of any narrative frame so that if you search for the corroboration of some apparent fact you always find one proportioned to the quantum of doubt driving the search. But it is just here that dreams are at their most dreamlike and nonsensical. There is no evidence for such fabulation in waking reality, isn't there?     

The wages of virtue are sleep and death, those of sin are knowledge via painful awakening. If only it were that simple. Yet Blake had a point, for every proverb of heaven there is one equally true of hell. Your starting point being so far in error that your only hope of regaining the centre is to tack by using the power of the contraries, the impetus from pain, more than the pull of joy - you were never made for joy. How far has it taken you so far? Only a few times around in a circle, it seems.

You can talk about feeling or emotion (is it necessary to clearly distinguish between these? Say, emotions as molecular to feelings as atomic?) with good reason as if they were like images or music, but this is to miss the chief thing, which is that they are vehicles of experience and not objects of it. You can't get away from being inside feelings, even when they overflow to the point where a certain detachment of the observer is inescapable. Detachment never quite means what it seems to say. You are not in the least separate from experience, but the grammar of detachment is an inescapable component of the grammar of experience. Because what you are is outside of experience it cannot be detached within experience, and within experience is the only frame in which things happen. Take negative emotion, for example. This does not befall the subject but is the embodied subject when experienced as both bodily and social, private and public, toxicity. The trick is that it drives you into seeking causes and remedies. But what if there are none? Then all that seeking is just the mind creating an impressive phenomenon, a fiercely involuted architecture in the three dimensions of time.

What if this strange silence is the true baseline? An empty screen in an empty theatre, nothing announced, and yet the projector running, light passing through the gate without any film. Muffled sounds from the street  come and go, synchronised with the dust motes floating in the bright beam. Nothing needs to change nothing needs to be explained. There is only a vague expectation, neither positive nor negative, and an equally vague memory of other such times, a dense crystalline transparency.     

There is far more of the past to review than there is of the future to anticipate. Think of a face or an event and it disengages a whole fragment of narrative spared of saving ignorances. Is it possible to take seriously the fiction of any 'it will have been' when you see how much you counted on 'it might still turn out to be'. You can't count on that now because after all the spinning of the wheel of multiple affinities you have come to understand that it was not designed to land anywhere. You must have missed the 'les jeux sont faits' but went on dwelling in the divisions, perhaps telling yourself that where there was such an abundance you could afford to do so and still come out on top on most, or at least one, of your paths, tactfully forgetting that division itself was the broad road you were barreling down. If there is no clarity to be gained in and through the world, there might at least be some in relation to the heart's desire as soon as you accept that it had no other destiny but to lead you to this brokenness. You were an exiled king whose homeland had long been abolished, handed over, perhaps, to those more apt to rule, but it still takes a long time to lose the regal airs.

The truth of things, of you, surely exists, and what you are is limited so that you can never know it or be in authentic relation to it - and surely that is part, a small part of your truth, your frustrated need to get to it, to get out of yourself. On the other hand, I am not so limited, no one can say what my limits, if any, are, only that they extend far beyond you. For you, I am something you possess, you might call it self-consciousness. You give it a name that is a paradox, you map it as a singularity in your field, you think of it with the culturally determined tools at your disposal, according to the fashion of the moment, you think yourself with the world. I only know myself as you, when knowing myself is at issue, but my truth is not limited to any knowing, to any world. 

Certain words you hear or read seem to summon you back to a long forgotten scene where you are found in some eternal, mythic, or ever-early, world suspended at the edge of an irrevocable decision or realisation. If the language is markedly poetic, a criss-crossing of rhythmic, sonic and semantic ripples and reflections, this is only one more symptom of the archaic undivided matrix from which they have issued. Something similar occurs with certain passages in music, but this is not an essential component of beauty or sublimity, it is a rare and special subclass of the aesthetic and it probably dissolves on too close a scrutiny - hence it is pointless to offer examples. Phenomenologically the features of this are that there is a larger and more integral consciousness that lies behind but contiguous with your present state of self-reference, which appears to be no more than a pin-hole view by contrast. It is entirely possible that a number, even a great number, of diverse such pin-hole views are attached to the same living moment of this more intensive consciousness, without any of them carrying the least awareness of the others. The 'I' of that other consciousness is you, immediately recognised and with no possibility of alienation or need of explanation. It is more you that the you that was presumed up until a moment ago and that returns a moment later. So what you had been indefinitely locating of as yourself shows up as only a project, a placeholder for a deferred revelation, and you are ashamed of the vehemence with which you have laboured in its defense.

Mind or self theorises itself, necessarily and necessarily incorrectly. That is, it is a kind of process which understands causal relationships, but the causal relationships which drive it in no way resemble those models with which it understands its objects. What's more, one of the things that it does correctly understand is this mismatch; it knows it fails to understand itself and this knowledge is constitutive of its pragmatic success in understanding its objects. In other words, it prevents itself from becoming its own object even as it strives to do so, so that its objects can appear to it as its objects. So, for example, it is not that you develop a theory of mind in order to sufficiently reliably predict and interact with others, but rather when you reflect on your limited success at reliably predicting and interacting with others you call this limited success 'having a theory of mind' and you then use it to think about 'your own mind'. And of course you only do this because the terms 'mind' and 'theory' happen to be tokens already employed in your social interactions. It is by strategically inverting the relation of terms that you come up with ideas like 'consciousness' - when you look in the mirror things really are inverted. It would be more fitting to use a term like desire in which purpose is already implicit for the fundamental energy whose circulation gives rise to experience and experiencer, because the very nature of desire is its opacity; you don't know why you desire, you can't explain or understand desire in the least, but almost everything is built up out of your failed attempts to account for it.

At the heart of your strivings there is something like a stubborn compass-bearing which renews the sense that there is so much further yet to go in the direction that has so-far yielded you only dead-ends, frustration and the feeling of being lost. There is no other guidance but this confidence in the ultimate correctness of what appears to be no more than a congenital whimsy. Perhaps after all the needle is stuck and its north is just an artifact of your turning about on yourself. Vagrant blunderer, you are no wiser than a moth trapped in a bottle, a futility viewed with compassion and resignation from elsewhere. To be hopelessly mistaken presupposes another awareness that verifies this fact, and so your problem is how to get there from here. You imagine the remote scene where all is revealed, so that you would see not only where you are wrong but exactly why, and how this larger understanding was served by it, how all you stood for was an essential but discarded moment in a an other's dialectic, and you imagine being thanked for it. And so it is impossible to trace out the relation between that final determination and your velleity. You want to maintain your striving at any cost, a paradoxical wish that precludes the sacrifice you need to offer, death you need to suffer.

A satisfying explanation of the relationship between the two phenomenological classes known as self and consciousness is hard to come by. The concept of self is related to the broad family of reflexive constructions which incorporate that term as an index of self-reference, somehow meaning the way that a system designates itself. It is the circularity that can only be spoken of in a circular way. More basically it seems to refer to a feedback mechanism, and to some emergent out of the chaotic singularity that is produced by unstable positive feedback, anything short of which would be mired by its (own) defining and definable intention. It seems however that far from meaning and intentionality being produced by such a co-inciding chaos, these elements, in the form of the pure possibility of signification, need to be fed into the system from the very start, and that this is the role played by the more mysterious term consciousness. In scientific accounts the role of consciousness is systematically purged from what is described and concealed within the latent but essential role of the observer, or the potential and act of description. One conclusion that might be drawn is that the phenomenon of self is inseparable from a theorising of self - this inseparability being also known as identification. Its nature is thus essentially process, but what makes it possible, the theorising, is precisely where consciousness is 'located', as an hypostasis of theoria.

It is in the same place as that in which emotions are experienced that the original sense of being dwells, or indeed hides, since it lies somehow behind and below the emotions. This matchbox-sized place is called the heart, because it is the place from where the current of life seems to well up, and where the spontaneity of will, such spontaneity as will possesses, is found. To put your heart into it, to have heart for the task, expresses it far better than such phrases as follow your heart. The self is something different, it is a nexus of central nodes in overlapping and interacting webs of meaning, a set of loci in a multi-dimensional net of Indra, or more accurately of the path-space of such a net. Energies, for want of a better word, go out and return along these paths and the cycles interfere with each other in complex phases of feeling; it is not the heart but is woven all around it. This is why the heart can be a centre that is both concentrated inwardly and fiercely centrifugal, why you cannot will it to stillness. Indeed you cannot will it at all, since the first move is always away from the centre, returning to it more or less immediately in feeling, but shattered and transformed.

To ask, to answer, to mean that something is, all of this endless circling, and to find yourself in any one of the worlds that opens for thought, is never to have see the one thing infinitely exposed but impossible to grasp, that happening never happens, that being has no being, that you have nothing to do with you.

One of the two had stayed a seeker all his life. Every grain of certainty that he'd managed to come upon, with pain and struggle, was brought back and tested against the basic situations of his life, which were also those of all our lives, to see what light, if any it could shed on them. This was done lovingly and with tremendous respect for detail, there was a genuinely humble loyalty to what you might call the biblical situation of man, and this made his utterances both beautiful and very often profound even to the point of prophetic. The other had ventured much further, had gone far beyond the bounds of every situation in which he'd found himself, had experienced unutterably expanded realities, had explored the very core of phenomena and of the ultimate context of all phenomena. He'd burned up the seeker within himself and had become the world in which he continued to dwell. He spoke volumes trying to share all the answers that he'd found, all the beyonds, and yet his utterances seemed flat and stale. He described awe but never conveyed it, and left the near world untransformed. He was prophetic at times too, but his prophecies yielded no conviction. He seemed to have remained a boy, while the other had become a man, and yet you felt that he knew something while the other knew nothing. It is good to have the honesty to know you know nothing, but you also need the courage to dare to know and to go wherever this will take you.     

Doubt is intrinsic to your constitution as a knower. It is given to you as a potentially bottomless power, but being corrosive and dangerous, you treat it with caution. The levels of experience, are the stabilisations of doubt which produce the various contracts between subject and object, in waking life or in dream or dreamless sleep. Experience is the abeyance of doubt, but to open to the doubt that still dwells at the core of experience is to touch on the certainty beyond that doubt. And if you go deep enough it annuls whatever relations between subject and object you have come to rest in. It is always possible to take it further as long as any kind of thought is possible. This is called inquiry, but it is the will to sacrifice everything at the altar of doubt. You could call it the higher Cartesianism.                                         

In the early hours there were dreams, episodes in which you were caught up in some tasty little drama, and on waking, after you'd surrendered the desire to be in on whatever was going to happen next, your curiosity for the next turn in the unfolding plot, you could shrug and file the remaining fragments away as commentary on a situation you easily recognised, on one of the current little dramas that occupy the background of your day. If you think back, six months or a year or two, you will barely remember what the dramas were back then, but you'll know that they were there, identical but different, and that in their undifferentiated mass they felt much the same as now. By day this is the weight of irresponsible and unresolvable venturings that you always carry about, and that you look to the future, to the passing of time, to cure. By day you are cradled in it, in this obdurate matrix of self-referential predicament, this answering resistance, this dense and inevitable vehicle, this intimate opponent or sense of fundamental wrongness. At night, in sleep, the conditions begin to melt and to flow, and there is a sort of agency, a power of a more integral self by way of imagination, to shape them, or even to dissolve them. The sovereign imagination is exactly what you have let slip, what you've allowed to become absorbed in the living, so that it teases you with never-ending hints and keeps you searching.