You go back and back upstream of the flow of experience and it gets smaller and smaller, more and more intimate and energetically concentrated towards a infinitely small point and at the same time it is the entire field of experience, unlimited and all-embracing, equally present in every part. The movement in and the movement out are the same. The incessant movement out to seize every appearance, taking the colour and shape of every invention of desire, and failing wonderfully can only arise because it seeks to recover a origin which has never been lost, a serene and unfailing origin, out of which, perhaps, you have never moved.

Because there is nothing outside of consciousness, to put it that way, being the foundation of the whole show as you inhabit it as you are inhabited, there is an absolute core which is the foundation of itself. This is a truth so far behind the living out of it that you know that if you were to turn around and behold it all from its single perspective you would recognise nothing and yet everything would be just as it appears washed clean of all familiarity, repetition or possession. Just this as it is without any alternative, so that even the alternatives have no alternative. What stops you from realising this, right now? 

The experiencing is without boundaries but experience is a fantastic play of distinctions. It is not a question of the binding of diverse experiences into a single field, but of the way that the field differentiates endlessly in ever greater detail, infinitely, fractally - because attention is included in it and every movement of attention gives rise to fresh experiences. It is a mistake to think that there is something like this outside of this, that experiences have their own intrinsic nature and may be taken up or not, or may lie wholly out of reach. That's the way it looks, the way it is made to look by a peculiar inner bias, but the seen is only the seeing and the seeing is nothing like the seen. The only thing in experience that is 'like' the experiencing is the infinite and effortless play of distinctions, the free and lawless distinguishing which is mistaken again and again for the distinguished.

To admit that consciousness is fundamental is only to open the door onto a new kind of question, without knowing what kind of question it is. It's not a matter of being able to explain or understand something, because it is not any sort of phenomenon that is at stake. Experience is to close with its own foundation, with the experiencing. Knowledge and understanding are special forms of experience whose purpose is exhausted in encountering their own necessary limitation. You can't go any further that way so step back and find what was driving them. They are tunes you can play but you must now ask about sound, about the possibility of sound, and about silence. In the same way the self stumbling over its errors for itself is just a form of a more fundamental and less contingent movement, of ripples in a deeper field. If you think that you are an instance of consciousness you have failed to see you you are consciousness itself, without parts, without an other, that you are all of consciousness, here and now. To the degree that this is absurd you are still only expressing an analogy from dreamed experience and are unable to admit the devastating truth about what you still call subjectivity.

You never experience as from experiencing but always reflectively, as from a single step behind yourself, it would be too alone, too final, without any hope of restoration or recovery. The "I" which is monumental audacity in face of being is rationalised and reserved, made provisional, but this is a way of moving further in adding spaces rather than out, a synaesthesia of body and feeling become the sole staging ground and voluptuous fall. It's like a puzzle you are set, this re-entry via complex paths, a lexicography of time and memory. No less maddening all the factitious necessity, caressing, pounding, breaking and resonant as a bell that vainly tries to awaken the shadows of a thousand sunsets over a stubborn and ancestral sea whose briny spray you can almost taste as it meets you full in the face and bears you down too easy. 

The hegemony of visual metaphors dictates that subject and object are separated in space of some kind. The empty space thought to be between them maintains them as they are in the act of contemplation. Perhaps the most that can be said is that subject and object are not the same, or better that the experienced is not the experiencing. What kind of negation is this? Because the experience is the experiencing, there is no separation between them in the present, but a moment later they peel away from each other; the experiencer remains presence but the experience falls away, it recedes into the past or is transformed into something irretrievable. Into the past? But isn't time just another metaphor like space, in this case based on hearing or perception of movement or change? Audible form is developed in time as time is observed in motion and the two kinds of time are coordinated. Time and space are forms of experience but not of the experiencing. To think that they are is to imagine that the experiencing can be experienced apart from experience. There is no evidence for experiencing; if it wasn't the only thing that was happening then you would never invent it. It is not illogical to deny it. Only by denying it can you realise the incompleteness of experience. An existence that was wholly experience, such as the panpsychists propose would be experience without question and hence no experience at all. Or in other terms, there is no 'there is' to experiencing, it is upstream of every 'there is' no matter how.

What does the inhabited, embodied world become if it only arises from within experiencing? You cannot answer this by any analogy, that's the point. All you can do is to discover how deeply you are steeped in analogies, including this one!

The subject or self is correlative to a world, both are persisting regions of being with attributes and structure, and life is the adventures of the self, the animula, wandering through the world in to which it has been thrown. These elements are there even when they are not being experienced as such. The problem with this picture is that the chief feature of the self or subject is experiencing, but from the pure point of view of experiencing the correlative is experience and subject and world are inseparable contingent elements within (each moment of) experience. For experiencing the notion of persistence is only that, a notion within the structure of experience, and makes no sense beyond that. The spatio-temporal and ontological properties of experience have no reach beyond experience. You can just as well think of the experiencing as coming in discrete flashes without any continuity, as being made up of fine grains entirely complete in themselves, closed off from one another. Each moment of experience understood from the point of view of experiencing completely burns itself up with no residue at all. In fact it is only because of such complete consumption that the moments, the grains, can succeed each other. It is necessary to break the image of continuity in this way to begin to see the wondrousness that is hidden in plain sight.

The experience is the experiencing, the experiencing the experience, but for the experiencer there is a continuous movement within experience, an unfolding, blossoming and decay that goes from dark to dark. The experiencer is invested in the process, in its darkness, its awe, its unsatisfactoriness, contingency, groundlessness, indeterminacy, majesty, expectation. The experiencer for whom there is nothing outside of the experiencing is upstream of the one for whom the reality is precisely all that is beyond the experiencing of it. These are not alternatives but different components of the same event; all the terms you use to describe it are like beads strung loosely on a wire that look entirely different, or that are entirely different questions, according to the position into which they are slid. There is no correct position, but only the collapse of all positions, the collapse of the spacialisation that gives rise to experiencers.

Perhaps the experiencer is like a sense organ. What is seen refers back perspectivally to the eye, or more precisely to the retina, but the seeing does not 'happen' there (does it even happen?). The retina is a relay station where one carrier of information hands over to another one. What exactly does it hand on? Quite a bit of selective filtering goes on there, but what goes in is just as far from the seeing as what comes out. And presumably it is this way all through the physical system in which sight, the event (of) seeing, is thought to take place; the seeing is nowhere, it doesn't belong to a compatible level of reality, so it could just as well be thought of as 'happening' everywhere. Some sort of filtering and transfer takes place at every step, there is nothing special about the retina at all. But you can have a theory of vision, a theoria of theoria, based on the order of reality that belongs to vision, of things in space, of geometries and discrete intensities, and even if you can accomplish a lot on the basis of this theory (optometry, opthalmology), it tells you exactly nothing about what seeing is. In the same way any explanation of experiencing based on the kind of reality that conforms to that of the experiencer, even its bindings and qualia and the like - artifacts of such a theory - tells you nothing whatsoever about experiencing. It only stubbornly biases you towards asking the wrong question, towards expending your efforts on a hopelessly circular theorising. Is this, as they say, a bug or a feature? Or both at once?

The cone of experience: the experiencing is at the vertex and the experienced at the outermost reach and the experiencer in between. The experiencing is also known as witness or subject but descriptions do not properly apply to it. The point of the metaphor is that experiencer and experienced are only relatively distinguished. When there is experiencing then a sort of mirage appears seemingly prior to the experienced which is taken to be the experiencing self, and which brings with it the idea of a measurable gap separating the experiencer from the experienced. Identifying  as experiencer you are aware of this separation since you are already in measure, while the experiencing is a dimensionless point without measure. As experiencer you have the sense of an outer reach directed towards the experienced and an inner reach which is you experiencing you experiencing you experiencing and so on endlessly. Engagement is in front of the experiencer and disengagement is behind it. The experiencer has qualities, is dull or bright, broad or marrow, fast or slow, distinct or diffused - all of these qualities are relative and are of importance only in relation to the experienced. The experiencing has no qualities and doesn't change. The refracted nature of the experiencer makes it appear to be what is experiencing, but this is only in relation to the experienced of which it is a part. The experiencing is the sole source of energy but the experiencer is the point at which the energy appears to be at a maximum. As if a silent energy breaks out into appearance and then fades into a mere glow and the experiencer is the inner edge of the event horizon and the experienced its fading ember. 

Human reality is made out of alternate human realities. Every other mirrors you and exceeds you at the same time. You want to know as many as possible but at a distance, not to be taken by surprise. The obscene interest in the doings of others which is least innocent when it seems most so. How do you know the value of your current state of being? Only by comparison with what is possible, with what you imagine. Why do you want to know, why do you care? The possibilities are unlimited but you filter that knowledge. Moving through the day is making continual adjustments, like someone floating in a current, to stay more or less upright. Every correction generates a counter-current of eddies which do not dissipate, are not purged, except in dreams. Alternatively, to get too close is to be forced into an empathy which will make your current relative equilibrium untenable; the boundaries between you and any other are too porous, but how do you mediate this other than by a conceit? The varieties of these conceits, of transparent defenses, are components of the human reality in which you are half-submerged.

Naturalistically the order would be first consciousness of..., next other-consciousness, being conscious of being the object of an other (like you) and last reflexive consciousness, being aware of yourself as if from a point outside yourself while remaining inside yourself (reflecting-reflected). Phenomenologically (e.g. Sartre) the order of the last two is reversed. Being conscious of an other consciousness contingently directed towards you is a further turn of the screw from the simple act of directing awareness to your own functioning, your being seen from the outside follows on from the possibility of being seen from the outside. Infants and some animals exhibit changes in the tenor of their engagement with the world if they are aware of being watched by something like themselves in contexts where we would be reluctant to ascribe self-reflective consciousness. As if it never would have occurred to them to take themselves as other. Phenomenologically, the gap between the subject and object shifts progressively further out. To be directed at the object is to 'know' that you are not the object, in reflection you experience that gap as generated from within yourself but frustratingly unbridgeable. In relation to the other the gap is in principle unbridgeable, you are separated by the entire world. As if each step results from the progressive failure to overcome the gap in the previous step. The entire world, the essence of being outside, is as much your own product as the void or slippage that enables reflection, but is not felt that way. You have given up on it, relaxed the tension, and allowed the reality before you to explode into infinitely many pieces.

Before you this vast tangle of possibilities, purposes and knowledges, and behind you concentric rings of self-ness receding to infinity. And the boundary between the two is this breathing body extending its tendrils in both directions. And before you other bodies of the same kind in which there are altered versions of the same structure and which cannot be separated either from the inside or the outside from your own. It is a kind of picture that you live inside of, and the picture itself is distributed and echoed within itself so that there is no clear location for any of it, but salient channels that are partially constant within the ever changing inner boundaries. It seems futile to even attempt to form a picture of it and yet it is the only reality you have ever known, and it seems to depend on some simple but hidden premises, it seems as if there is a key to its complexity, but everywhere you look the pattern unfolds into yet more complexity as if there is something wrong with the very terms with which you try to resolve it. 

How can realist accounts of consciousness be understood? In particular when consciousness is taken to be substrate independent? Say that the components of reality have an inner as well as an outer nature and when these come together to form subsytems of sufficient informational complexity this allows the scattered prehensions to bind together into larger units capable of self-reflection, or capable of powering a pre-reflective cogito.  What then distinguishes the consciousness-like aspects of reality is precisely their ability to bind together in a mind-like way. That might be one way of thinking about it, but there seems little to distinguish it from a kind of emergentism. That consciousness so formed would have causal properties would be nothing special since it would correspond to the view of itself that emerges with it. That there should be any way of deriving or explaining the phenomenology of consciousness on the basis of its self-understanding is less clear. The response that the phenomenology as we know it is a contingent result of the role that the causal efficacy of consciousness has played in evolution seems to miss the deeper point. The way that consciousness understands itself, or can understand itself seems to be a necessary part of what it is to be conscious, and to go far beyond any sort of qualia atomism. A more Samkhya-like way of understanding it would be to propose that the essence of consciousness is unitary and independent of all instantiations, and takes the shape of consciousness as we experience it by virtue of its coming to witness, as it were, physical structures of sufficient complexity. This is a bit like the radio-receiver analogy of the brain. when an informational structure reaches sufficient integrated complexity it becomes open to a level of reality which is already conscious but outside of time and space and logic. Qualia are then like the dome of many coloured glass that allows consciousness to become visible to itself. This kind of account seems to leave the mystery untouched while at the same time leading straight into absolute idealism.

What is thought, what is perceived is nothing in itself, only the thinking, the perceiving, and you in the act of thinking, perceiving, are not what is, but the observing of it all. The reality is the observing in whatever is observed and anything that seems to bind the observing falls away, everything that might reflect it. It observes nothing but what makes it observe. It is one-sided to a degree that can't be believed. When it takes on colours you call it consciousness but it is colourless, is lightless, sightless without any structure at all. Being is its toy.

Think of the field of consciousness and the field of being as two parallel planes. Naturally there is a tension between them, and the cogito is a spark out of that tension and momentarily bridging it. Note that the cogito is always a momentary thing, at least in the way it is experienced from the side of consciousness. You need to concentrate attention on its terms as formulated in words or ideas and wait for the spark to flash. To find that it concludes with the fleeting certainty of self-existence is only to have drawn out one of its possible meanings, perhaps the most superficial. There is more in there, but you need a different detector to find it. There is a telos in consciousness which is not being but knowledge, to know the nature of the reality in which it arises, in which you arise - you recognise this as shared with every other subject; it is important to every other subject by virtue of consciousness alone. Any discovery of yours must naturally be shared, but the test of such a discovery is that it be only shared skillfully. If you have understood reality then you understand the predicaments of consciousness hence skillfulness is  a natural expression of understanding. The most skillful is probably to say nothing at all, merely to witness the perfection of the thing beyond awe.

Thinking is an action of yours, so what do you think with, how do you carry through the action? To say that you think with your mind doesn't seem to say much, mind being only a name for the set of thoughts. But it seems more absurd to say that you think with your consciousness. That's odd; nobody can really say what consciousness is but it seems to be passive - you can't actually put it to work. Your mind can think as much as it likes, but whether it is conscious makes all the difference. Or someone might say that the distinction should be expressed by saying that it's whether the mind thinks it consciously. Is consciousness then adverbial, an adverbial quality of this abstraction of convenience that is the mind? It is possibly to doubt whether there is any such 'thing' as consciousness - it would be absurd to point to it and say 'that is consciousness' since what it at stake is the pointing, or an adverbial quality of the pointing. You seem to know with certainty that you are conscious, but if you examine that certainty the first part to crack is the 'are'. Is it the same to say you are consciousness as to say you are conscious? If not then how do they differ, and how do you know that they differ? Consciousness is a slippery term that can as well mean everything as something, and in this sense resembles 'being' or 'Being'. It is probably more correct to say that being resembles consciousness, it is the same kind of abstraction, only more so. This accounts for some of the doubters of consciousness who point to being and say there is no need for duplication. The slippage here arises from the fact that being carries the connotation of stuff unproblematically out there: the being of the chair, or of the rock or tree. This connotation is quite deceptive, at best circular. In other words being is a term that resolves the subject before it resolves the object - it is consciousness only more so. Heidegger followed by Sartre thought that they had overcome phenomenology in the direction of ontology, but really they were doing better phenomenology - not phenomenological ontology but ontological phenomenology - that is, being as a term to take you deeper into the mysterious workings of what for want of a better term could be called (provisionally) subject - that namelessness that subject points to.

In the wake of a certain kind of brief encounter, when a spark of affinity or connection seems to have been struck you find that the presence of another person in the space of your internal self-reference persists for a time like a sort of slowly dying echo. The image of the other becomes the addressee of your internal monologue in a largely pleasant version of the kind of self-consciousness that in sharper and negatively inflected contexts would be felt as shame. It elicits a stream of fresh thoughts, as if you are explaining yourself to an interested and interesting hearer. You cannot think or meditate yourself out of this condition since it affects the very root of your sense of free activity; the other is present as far down as any choice you could make, of anything you could do. After a short while the effect fades away, but this simply means that it grows so attenuated that it merges with the self-conscious white noise of your ordinary reflective state, which is seen to consist of a continuous frothing of tiny other-refracted moments of self-consciousness. This kind of white noise is what is usually mistaken for solitude. Often the other of inner self-reflection is taken to be a slightly displaced or out of phase version of yourself, and if you grow bored with your own thoughts this is because this alter-self is marked as too familiar, too predictable, unable to elicit fresh ideas. On the other hand if you imagine that the original effect also goes the other way, that the other is experiencing an image of you hovering inside her self-consciousness, this cuts no ice. You know that your own image in the mind of another is an illusion, is only a mind-born delusion, since you do not exist as a subject and cannot appear in any way at all. This makes for a curious asymmetry. 

Not materialism versus idealism, nor matter versus mind, nor the in-itself versus the for itself, but the rule of evolution versus the principle of consciousness, of replicators versus the advance of the good, the true and the beautiful. Thus the so-called physical universe is that aspect of reality in which replicators play out the battle for dominance - this is the demiurgic realm, a relentless cannibalisation of structures without intention in which survival and infinite repetition is the de facto goal. The aspect of reality in which consciousness acts is a late arrival on the scene, apparently piggy-backing on the developments in physical evolution and from the strictly physical point of view a temporary phase affording some short-term advantages to structures thus endowed. From this perspective consciousness serves as a disposable bridge to more advanced replicators which will be freed from its exorbitant demands for free energy. Consciousness, however, having its own internal goals, being in a sense auto-telic, has this brief opportunity to turn the tables on the process by which it has appeared on the scene, to bend it to its own ends. This looks like a battle with the demiurge but waged within the active goal structures of consciousness which must be discriminated in order to separate inherited evolutionary intentions from intentions intrinsic to conscousness as such, it is a sort of one-sided ethical war. It may also be that this battle has already been decided on subtle levels of which we are not yet aware.

Being an ever-renewing situation in which you seem to be in_ the situation, so that there is a division between the projecting you and conditions to be treated, and in which you too are part of the conditions, or as if it is up to you to undream it all. There is such a pathos of the dreamed character's quest to determine what exactly he could be, or is it an irony since he's driven to ask the one question that he can never answer. He is the dream-idea that there is someone who he is after all, that it is he who is asleep, and not just the dream of the dream-character making wordy sounds that no kind God has filled with meaning - while he is just the little god meaning only the dream which turns within itself to give birth to the new situation.

Take a hit, oof! winded, this can only come from another self, you are not alone, you are alone. It persists and echoes in mind, a story, and a story about a story, and a story about that and so on endlessly. A breach of the inner cell walls and a process of repair that mobilises thought and feeling and slow time, heavily and unwillingly. What is the fuss all about, what precious stuff is it that needs protection? Have a look. There's nothing in there. It looks like a suite of abandoned offices - bits of torn posters on the wall, ripped out telephone and data cables, dustballs, imprints in the pile of the worn carpet, an old coffee mug with a broken handle, palm prints, dirty windows. The sadness of old projects when you no longer have projects, the sadness of returning when you can no longer return. But here it is, still largely intact, not really abandoned at all, you are still on the lease.

In each occasion you blossom in a certain way sending your tainted qualia out into the night air, as you are the expression of a sort of broken mandala, skewed and kinked in various ways. Throwing perspectives out from the heart of present roilings, like clouds seething with incipient forms. And you imagine that these failures of symmetry are what you are, or even more that this bursting forth of moods and colours and smells from an empty core can only make sense as a history, as a page in a miserable sort of novel that keeps being written, with causes and ends and significant encounters. The fiction keeps getting harder to maintain because it is broken up into so many fragments, the subject undeveloped, just a set of sketches of possible subjects, each one pausing on its way to sing a lyric or a lament, resuming the past in empty convictions and senseless sense. You never appear but as engaged with matters, deeply implicated in all the contingent and vexed terms that make for a personage in time and striving to make sense of itself of its life, to express, to get behind, to expand each contraction and contract each expansion. All of this inherent dispersion is always and only here-now and appears as such precisely because appearing cannot move an iota way from principle, from immovable centrality.

How easily thrownness is misread as throneness. This thing is going on and it seems to be about you, and that you are forcing the sense of strangeness on it, suggesting the questions and pre-empting the answers so the whole inquiry cancels itself out. You know that this circle can break, but you can't break it for having laid claim to all the prior possibilities. All your work just a dishonest way of preserving your imagined privilege, maintaining territory, cascading into reactions, or trying to survive beneath the miles of concrete that you've poured over yourself. Every attempt at freedom uses up a bit more slack and just tightens the bonds. What is being experienced that makes it so? Fundamental unclarity that feeds itself, that thickens and envelops every and all sense, irregular rhythms breaking all reflections. This again and again, the way it is and must be.

The course of life or life facing death or pivotal moments that anchor memory, these are all versions of identity to be rediscovered in relation to the world. Without them you are in danger of melting away into pure formality, into the empty operation of presencing. But in taking it in this way you let the world precede you as if it is indeed true that you are thrown into it and must scramble for some sort of handhold to keep from falling. If you are thrown where did the world into which you are thrown arise from? It flashed into being a sliver of a moment before you arrived since there is only you to witness it, the questioning face of the same world just out of phase. Better to see the thrownness as thrown too, thrown like a pot on a wheel and because you happened to have blinked at the crucial moment you came in backwards, preceding yourself as world before the arrival of arrival. And so the first thing you look for is yourself, or what you learn to call your identity. The whole story crystallised at once and you loved the impossible drama of it. There is no identity to be found because you are the very world you haunt folded in simplicity.