What you strive to do never succeeds because what you are actually doing is never what you think you are doing. This is fine as long as one of the things you want is above all to continue wanting. To awaken in thought would be to achieve mastery or detachment, and perhaps these are the same, but mastery over what or detachment from what, if not from the restless inventions of desire? What would it be to awaken in your wanting? There is something like a dialectic of desire because directly approached each desire opens to reveal a deeper desire, more challenging still. We like stories in which the protagonist resolves their desire, so that we can believe that desires are capable of being resolved, as if it were a good that desire could be resolved or tamed, that its plurality can bring about a viable compromise in which the power of wanting can be put to work, in which the destructive ferocity of wanting forms a fading background to the vanities of thought. But while wanting can be deflected to some degree or numbed it can never be destroyed.

And now I'm doing this, and now I'm doing that [writing..., pressing keys..., trying to find words..., thinking about..., recollecting..., gathering up the threads of a day that's gone like this and so..., putting that out of my mind..., responding to this expectation..., savouring the light paralysis of self-consciousness..., leaning elbows on my desk..., chewing stale nicotine gum..., sweeping attention over the debris of the last few hours...] Certain words come, but also wondering about the words that might come but don't. Selecting actions to animate with a sense of 'I' that slides clumsily through them without sticking to any, a mass of feeling that revolves into itself while flowing elegaically like clouds pulling away in pale vastness. Knowing how to reference the knowing, giving a little squeeze from time to time to pull out another picture to describe, or to discard... Nothing simpler nor more enigmatic than these moments of self-reference, trying to coincide with the animation that begins again in each moment, that casts off images, like flakes that peel away from an unknowing core, but are only themselves that core and everything around it bathed in equal light, like a moment before sunset in cooling air and the first stars pricking through the canopy of sky.

"The signifier is what represents the subject for another signifier". This recursive formula is as much a definition of the subject as of the signifier. It is in its form the key to a system generating an endless web of signifiers which can never exhaust nor fulfill the motives they generate. The system proliferates subject and signifier at the same time, each occupying different phases of an unspeakable momentum. But as well what can be heard in this formula is that it is always directed towards a revelation of the subject in spite of this being ruled out from the first. The system is the system because it searches for the subject and is complex enough that it can never assimilate the knowledge that there is no subject to be found. The idea of the subject is the idea of a grounding outside of the system, but as an idea it clearly belongs to the system, so what the system is is something complex enough as to fail to be able to comprehend itself. However only an outside to the system can enable it to do what it does. The question being whether this outside is above, below or inside the system? The first alternative is gnostic-transcendental, dualistic in the sense of Samkhya. The second is materialistic, in that the non-signifying materiality of the signifier plays the elusive role of the real. There's a lot of cultural investment in this solution, but it is unclear whether it is not just question-begging. The third is the non-dual solution, with its dizzying collapse of ontology. The distinction between these three is itself purely internal to the system.

The expectation of happiness is hope, while the expectation of pain is fear. These are two emotions and are roughly symmetrical while belonging to different orders. The absence or devaluing of hope is depression, while the absence of fear is something else again, certainly not happiness, but not unrelated to it. Again, happiness is a social good while pain is a private evil, their modes of evaluation are different but the systems are entangled. Fear or anxiety is contingent to the self, while happiness or joy seems to be an essential attribute of the self. If the former is taken to be ontologically grounded then the self is viewed as contingent. This is an influential interpretation, but it contradicts our deepest experience, so that to retain it we must also take contradiction to be ontological. But on the other side surely the contradiction is even more salient? How can happiness be both social, and therefore entirely the result of a complex process of interpretation and evaluation, and ontological? The 'moneyness' of happiness means that it tends to melt into signs for itself. You imagine that money starts out as representing value, but you soon find that it only represents only different money. All its reality depends on the system of exchanges. Value is upheld by dignity and pride and depreciated by shame and guilt. The happiness which is the nature of the self does not enter into exchange, but this is why it can be the absent signified that sustains the circulation of imaginary values, and also why the response to challenges to those imaginary values can be so disproportionate. It is what makes identification possible, mistaking value in the system for the value outside the system.

It is not certain that we become aware of the pain of others with the lightning speed at which we recognise their happiness, although that recognition is probably for the most part an exaggeration or imaginative projection. The faculty which accomplishes this feat is our own promesse de bonheur, our near-ontological sense of entitlement to the good, what analysts might call primary narcissism. It is not alienated in the other, not in the first moment, what we see is ours, and only in a contingent second moment might it be inflected as lost, or missed, or stolen. So, what we recognise is not the other's happiness but the sign of our own in the future tense, we see our future happiness, not as realised, but as a promise, as the sign of a promise, and thus as something like money, but more like a forward contract or option. The next step, the felt emotion, is the immediate valuation of this contract, its pricing in the market, indeed its convertibility into some more immediate currency. We make the valuation ourselves, but it is imposed upon us, the market is too serious for subjective manipulation, it is the nearest we get to reality. This is meant as an explanation of emotion and of its volatility, in comparison to the feelings that anchor it but do not determine it. Emotion is valuation of the promise of future happiness, and it is tradeable and exists in the context of a market, sensitive the tiniest flows of information, to fads, to every kind of superstitious nonsense. The analogy can be pushed quite a bit further. For example, what would short-selling correspond to?

The social intelligence moves towards a condition in which each agent's point of view, or relative centre, is treated equally, and so the inherent demand for justice for and on behalf of each agent, for their entitled respect, will have equal weight. This becomes the human law, but it is only so as a usurping of divine law or the caprice of the gods, which is what exercises the final choice and assignment of value. This divine caprice however, or its nakedly Darwinian form, is necessary to maintain the structure of society. Say there is a certain position of power or prestige, and this can be at any level, and in order to fill it a candidate needs to be motivated to a degree that requires significant sacrifice of other options. To ensure that one such candidate exists many must be trained, must voluntarily submit to the training. Only one can be chosen, but each must train as if they will accept no other outcome. Since there can only be one winner the losers need to find a way to deal with the pure negativity of losing. The structure can offer consolations to some degree. If it is a sporting contest, then there is the hope of doing better next season, if it is a skill competition, there are lesser but meaningful roles that can be accepted by the 'runners up'. At some point these compensatory mechanisms within the system break down, especially as each agent's demand for personal preeminence grows more uncompromising. The system itself can be reconfigured to some degree, but each time this is done its anchoring in the unsearchable will of the gods is weakened and it grows more fragile. The social structure is designed to assign meaning to failure, to create such meanings out of nothing, to even make failure more meaningful than success, but its ability to do so is inherently unstable. The more the structure succeeds in its task of recycling empty sacrifice into meaning, the weaker it becomes. There must be periodic tantrums also known as revolutions.

There are changes in experience that you can bring about through intentional changes in the mind and body, by way of faculties such as attention, perception, imagination, abstraction and reasoning that are in some degree under control, and these changes are in a broad sense predictable, not in detail certainly, but as defining a sort of experiential space of several dimensions but with its own underlying stability. It is the space of human experience, more or less communicable. It is the kind of thing that an introspective psychology attempts to map out, and although known through the kinds of objects that are met with it it also reflexively maps out a range of possible subjects, which again allows you to infer certain even broader limits of experience for the speculative imagination. There is an economy of sorts in this, a certain subtly defined give and take between objective and subjective poles, which is also felt to be a limitation. As soon as this is grasped there is a striving to break the bounds imposed by such an economy, and the most obvious ways to do this are via sex and drugs and what might be called the numinous. These are ways of altering or temporarily shattering the economy of experience by going beyond anything that can be positively willed, predicted or prescribed. You exceed the tolerances of the vehicle, selectively overload it, break it down, but in doing so you discover that you cannot break the silent experiencer which is thoroughly without limits. It doesn't ask for more, it is simply and neutrally adequate to every extension, every trespass on the agreed terms. Your economies of experience, no matter how far you extend them, remain in this sense limited economies in relation to the subject you truly are which is the infinite openness of a general economy.

"Until the real thing comes along...", old songs, entertainments, nostalgias, reliefs, answers found and then lost again. The question remains the same, but you can't bear to meet its full intensity which would be the falling away of everything, not just the ground disappearing from under your feet, your feet disappearing too, the crumbling of every bit of mastery you thought to have earned by now. What have you risked? Never enough. Strip everything away and there is just that will to plunge again into the illusion, into dreams and sweet f utilities. O spare me, spare me again! 'It's all too good!' through gritted teeth. What lends the illusion of certainty to these mediations, these foyers, is the same as what takes it away, elaborations built up, idols installed, the worship of the tribe, and the overturnings in the name of new certainties which are just the old ones in new masks. The wheel keeps turning, you keep turning it, and coming back to the same place until you recognise the step away, the fall. You haven't recognised it yet. Anything but! Keep spinning the wheel, faster, stay hypnotised at all costs.

'Experience is a window onto matters of fact which transcend experience'; but those matters of fact and their transcendence also belong to experience. Matters of fact are resolutions of experience within experience, they are convergences or collapses of experience as it observes or experiences itself. It is marvelously complex and consistent, it accounts for its own errors, for the seer and the seen, all of which bolsters the idea of transcendence as the only efficient explanation of the whole show. But it only needs explanation, or seems to need it, because of the limited sense in which you understand experience, and that in turn is based on the same idea as that of transcendence. Is there really such an idea? The whole trick is a begging of the question. And that too is just experience. You can't get used to being something so vast as to obviate all factuality that is not absolute and nameless presence.   

These ideas have less interest in themselves than as soundings of what a being so constituted would think, of what these limited powers of thought can deliver at this age and location, with no assumptions other than that there is a beginning and an ending, both equally certain, both in the present and beyond it. Being embodied, being cast into time, being neither wholly body nor mind but a couplement; there are experiences which could arise in no other way, experiences of a particular flavour in which the essentials are blended inseparably, and which appear to hint of larger truths beyond your grasp, and which elicit thought on the scale of time determined by birth and death. For example to compare your childhood expectations of the story of your life with what it has actually become, now that you can pretty well see the whole shape of it. It is not illusion and truth, but the bringing together of two kinds of truth. It could only have happened in time because you are continually discovering the nature of time, not as external to the self but as an aspect of it, the bitter flavour of it within the sweetness. To know what it is to be called and not chosen, because not being chosen is also a way of being chosen, both of the same inner necessity. To be victor and vanquished, hero and fool, blindness blindly leading, surrendering of all and still stubbornly persisting. 

The experience is nothing at all, which means that it's full to the brim, offering nothing to attention, to interest, but the condition of experience is complete as ever. It's the condition that you want to understand, not the shapes it takes, which take care of themselves. What is the nothing that this is the something of? Behind the sound the silence, and behind the silence the one true sound, the one taste.

In attempting to observe and theorise about our situated observing and theorising it is all too easy to fall into the way of treating the process as a solution to a problem of information processing, and in this way pushing what is irreducibly individual and personal into the background. In other words, nothing is easier than to ignore what doesn't fit into a promising line of inquiry. The self, even as the centrally motivating instance, is what has arisen in time and what is expected to dissolve in time, it is peripheral to the significance generated by the achieved computations. Is it a principle mistaken for a principal, or the other way around, or both at the same time? In order for there to be a problem of world construction there must be a principal on whose behalf it is to arise, or else there are only a plurality of such problems arising out of Darwinian principles which are each conveniently but not entirely coherently resumed under a virtual principal. It might be said that a certain historical thinker's self was merely the disposable motivating vehicle that allowed what was original and valuable in his or her thoughts to be uttered. It doesn't feel that way though, even here where there are no particularly original or indispensable thoughts. The striving to know falls short of what the self requires but the requirements of the self in taking on life still are paramount. The self is perishable and imperfectly realised and yet its uniqueness provides the sole justification for its existence. One feels that there must be a reconciliation between this ontological singleness and its knowing which transcends singleness. The notion of a personal God acknowledges the depth of this desire without proving that it can be resolved.

If there were two heterogenous sorts of facts, one concerning objective matters in the external world and the other concerning internal matters in a subjective world then the task of where and how they map onto each other might represent a legitimately challenging 'hard problem', but this would require the existence of a more encompassing realm where both sets of facts existed side by side. The idea of such a realm however seems to be incoherent, or at the very least a kind of theological assumption, a kind of mythology. In fact there is only experience with its complex internal relationships and if a hard problem appears it ought to be that of justifying the peculair eminence accorded to the 'beings of reason' which make up the projected world of material reality. Idealism is closer to grasping this self-evident monism, that is it is closer to assigning the correct status to beings of reason. Idealism is not the mirror image of materialism, it doesn't render objective reality ghostly in the same way as materialism renders subjectivity ghostly, or epiphenomenal, the notion of experiential reality at the base of idealism in no way resembles the phenomenon of mind as projected and problematised by naturalism, there is no reason for it to do so. It is closer to simply observing, in the most unprejudiced way possible, that there is only one kind of fact in the sense that any two facts that are in meaningful relation must share the same kind of factuality. If it is impossible to carry this out completely in theory, this simple points to an inherent limitation of theorising, which could be the starting point for another enterprise of knowing altogether. 

Present are only sensory experiences, polyphonic, all life in the moment in these colours, smells, feels, sounds, that change from moment to moment, and then a cloud of thoughts cascading and airy nothings but performed wildly and without consequence. There is no sensory life unless you know what you encounter, can name it, the taste of an ice-cream, the smell of a pie, the squawk of a parrot, the smell of a bus, the pressure on a key, and again none of that without attention. It is attention that you are, the free focalisation on this and now this and now this. To bring yourself to bear lightly on these changing objects you choose and so must know before the act itself where to turn next, or where and how to focus open expectation, how tight the intent, unless forced by a sudden violation of the interlocking harmonics. What you are is in attention and experience is what is given to it, half-predictable, half-troubling. So bend attention in onto attention, the very pulp, reveal the only thing you know.

How is it? On one side a unique common world in which a mutitude of I's has arisen by some as yet unknown mechanism, each the absolute source of its own version of that world, and so as many worlds as I's, and yet really all pointing to the same world, just viewed via different pinholes. Or else a single I, but knowing itself perspectivally through the medium of selves, or partial objectifications which produce an irreducibly plural world which articulates imperfectly according to the degree to which these perspectives overlap. The whole self-system as a sort of medium. The odd thing is that even though the first notion of how it is is the one tacitly accepted as explaining things truly and objectively, within our worlds, at this time, as it seems, the frontiers of thought keep pushing towards the effective truth of the second notion, but only as a sort of provisional ideal, not taken with the seriousness it deserves. At any rate whichever way you cut it there is something that is absolutely one, out there or in here, and if it seems far-fetched that it should be in here that's only because of the peculiar prejudice we retain that we know ourselves through consciousness, that we know ourselves being conscious, instead of what's more obvious which is that consciousness is knowing and is completely in the dark as to who it is that knows.

All of these people walking around and when I look into their eyes it appears that they unthinkingly take me for one of them. But I am sharply distinguished from them all, being the only one with consciousness, the only one without a body, or rather with this peculiar open headless half body and compacted sentience, the sole subject. Yes, of course you can say exactly the same thing, but that's as far as it goes. There is no common world, only certain functional overlaps, or better, interlaps, between our apparent actions, our puppet worlds. That's what makes it so inexhaustibly strange, that we can play these worlds together in a dizzying set of mutual acknowledgments without ever bringing them into direct contact. Again, and paradoxically, this is the same as the realisation that that the oneness of the 'I' is absolute, as revealed as much in my own deepest experience of myself as in our deepest experience of togetherness. 'I' is the deepest life in this and is expressed in experience of body and mind, and the inside experience of this body and mind here can never be the same as the inside experience of this body and mind there, and that is exactly what experience does, the same 'I' behind this witness wherever it finds itself. I am not my experience but experience is nothing without me, and experience is divided within itself into myriad leaves including each headless subject dreaming its world. The same 'I', but I don't experience what you are experiencing in the division of experience, and nothing fills the gaps, there is no common witness outside of us both precisely because we are each what we appear to be to Me.

You cast yourself into time. Here this brightness is falling into the dark, is the very falling more brightly, more sadly, not faster but increasingly naked as the ballast is consumed. The desire to get the better of time was behind all of your strategies, you tried them all, consumed them. Knowing beforehand that they'd fail you bravely, foolishly seized each one as it came within your grasp, put all your faith in the venture, but the very attempt only drove each new ending. Repetition over novelty or the reverse, it works out the same way. The not-self that overcomes you is time, or say what you are has always been this attempt to borrow or beg a reality from what destroys you. It is a condition of experiencing, a way of realising it, this resolution of the field, a currency for the half-real observer who strives to exist by the possession of correlative moments, once and for all a matter beyond your hallucination.   

The attainment of a foothold in a view from nowhere is felt as a great liberation, not so much from the confusions of subjectivity which are great enough, but from entrapment in the views from the other, where the least that can be said about such other is that its name is legion. These in their various ways posit an external viewpoint located in an immediately recognisable space, be it social or pyschological or emotional or theological from which you are observed, and which seems to precede you, it is virtual but so ramified as to seem inescapably real. It is arguable that the two cases of subjectivity and the metaphysically neutral nowhere are just limit cases of this class of views. As an empirical, or empiriological subject you are first granted a location by the operation of the idea of such a point of view, you seem to depend on it while knowing that the opposite must be the case. In your most private thoughts, in your lyrical self, it is not a single voice that sounds but an almost synchronised pair of voices, you and your sound, you and how you sound. There is nothing finally outside about the reflected voice, you are peripherally aware that you are driving it, dreaming it into being, but you cannot reabsorb it, cannot by any act resolve it back into unity. Instead you find ways to come to terms with it, through discourses which represent provisional solutions to the problem, such as truth or beauty of love. 

Scientific explanations of what and who we are are given a lot of authority in the culture but ultimately fail to satisfy, they fall short of telling us what we want to know, or rather they show us that we don't yet know the right questions. As a family of discourses they belong in an ongoing war with rival discourses each unable to entirely overcome their various cultural antagonists despite implicit claims to totality in a variety of rhetorical modes. One peculiar weakness of the scientific arises from the very source of its strength, its detachment from any particular point of view, or what has been called its 'view from nowhere'. Other discourses which sacrifice the claim to an attainable and universal objectivity in various ways can wound it but at the cost of fatally weakening their own claims to truth. What do you call these factions of meaning? Are they currents of thought? Are they political proxies? What is the political a proxy for, the biological, the spiritual, the will to power? What stakes are they fighting over? All this glittering creativity, but looked at another way and it is endless rounds of 'ignorant armies clash[ing] by night'. Nowhere has no borders; the alternative to a view from nowhere is another view from nowhere. What does it take to let go of the very idea of such a view?

Awareness doesn't arise in you, you arise in awareness, as if you are no more than a fully articulated vehicle for the particularisation of consciousness. Why particularise, why the need to do so? Actually it's done quite poorly and incompletely most of the time. The particularisation of what you are is a goal you are in the way of achieving, to be entirely present, to fully exist, rather than just taking existence for granted, it passes through a knot which is taken to be the 'I', the concentration of all the lines in a singular point. But the goal is not ahead of you, it is behind you, you overshoot it continually by wanting to bring the mind along with you. Not enough to be, you must also possess the thought of being, its image, and so you retard it slightly in order to give the mind a little space in which to catch up. But this too, this slippage on the oblique is nothing but a mode of being - to be what it is that is in default of being - that's so human! A loved essence. It's on the way to something with the sort of irrepressible movement that exists in one of those optical illusions where you can't help but see the painted dots as swirling. It's an artifact of particularisation, the moire formed by the superimposition of two scales which don't quite coincide, sense and understanding, or love and surrender. A vast reality that is seeking to be born, it couldn't be if not for the Love which draws it.

There is a spacing in experience which is taken as the schema of a detached and empty awareness set over against a passing flux of inward and outward extending sensory content. You can treat this as a transcendental witness or a field of impersonal awareness, or as the eye or 'I' of God seeing through you. But these projections are ghostly, thinned-out to an empty limit devoid of force. Consider that what it is that this tries to account for is the immediacy and infinite ease of recognition of each passing moment. The nearest you can go to a moment is evidence of something quite different, not a tranquil emptiness but the fading of an intense spark, a fullness before its imaging in reflective consciousness. Experience is a devolution from a direct apprehension of essences, it is already known before it is recognised, it is fleshed-in to a degree beyond thought. You know that experience is a falling away from fullness before you imagine it to be an imposition on emptiness. It is a high energy state in which everything, all of life, is in the one now. The incompleteness which haunts ordinary experience is the adumbration of a falling away of appearance into the virtual sorrow of a lonely point isolated in time and space, which are only the effects of holding to another kind of essence running backwards.

Not only do they believe implicitly and absolutely in the reality of the non-I, of a determining reality over and above experience, but they use all their ingenuity to propose ways in which all experience is produced or excreted by the convolutions of this reality. Thus consciousness springs up when systems reach a certain threshold of feedback, or else it is what is registered when a certain kind of informational friction comes about, whether it be in the gap within experience between expectation and outcome, or the as the 'feel' associated with the reality of what we know as calculation in act. All of these proposals are patently absurd, but they express a peculiar type of homage that the objectivist or naturalistic ways of thought must pay to that consciousness the question of whose existence they shamelessly beg. Their self-confidence is such that they can convince themselves that if they make this gesture grandly its empty nature will go unnoticed. If consciousness results from some process who is it that witnesses this production? If it is only the process itself then consciousness is an illusion born of subtly deferrals, but then whose illusion is it? Who are they trying to fool?

It's not theorising or an activity driven by a passionate interest because projects of that kind are undermined by their partiality, they belong to contingent identities, and one of the things this is is a weariness or a fecklessness of all identities. You admire them in so far as they are admirable, but can't or won't stand for one. No, it's just a curiosity about what is going on, about the endlessly varying foundation of states. So is this then a state? It's how words are used, but state is a passing condition of a something that is not itself that condition, matter to form. You don't know what it is only the condition that seems not to coincide with itself, a sort of ebb after waves and waves of participation. The waves break into ribbons of foam, their intent rush now yielding to this every which way of tiny currents, broken up, meandering and fond fragments that express a faith in sweet oblivion, a fountain of sparks falling back towards the musty green smell of night grass, to pure maternal matter, holding. And you want to do it again, and again, you won't let go, so now go down shut your eyes in pale light and the play of memories, the late sweetness, out of age, so improper, dare to feel, as if it was the very being enjoyed then.

Realism, idealism, materialism, naturalism, phenomenalism and all such are practical mythologies for rendering the extraordinary telescoping nature of experience coherent, or as coherent as may be. You could say that the underlying stuff of all things, their substance, is consciousness if only consciousness were anything more that an idea, or a character in these myths, but what you mean to point out is that all you can see is seeing and all you can hear is hearing and all you can feel or think is feeling or thinking. The question turns on its head once you pull out the pin, and the pin is the reality you surreptitiously endow on the image that represents you in whichever of those myths is currently in play. It's no problem that there should be such an image, it's there for you, but it belongs to the myth, is made out of nothing but the believing.

Key words, shifters, such as 'here' (and 'there') and 'now' (and 'then') and 'I' (or 'me' or 'he' or 'she'); what do we do when we use them? There is a remarkable distinction, as pointed out, between their use with reference to the worlds called external and internal. In the external world here and there are interchangable depending on where we place ourselves, but in the inner world here is absolutely fixed and there is everything but. Similarly in the external world now is a point on a continuum and it takes the place of a future then before passing into a past then, while in the internal world there is only ever the same now. Again, the external 'I' or 'me' is an evolving project of learning 'who I am' which passes through various cruxes, gaining as much as it loses as it goes, being proved, tested, affiliated, burdened, freed etc., while internally it is only ever one thing, of which it is sometimes observed that it is as it is identically at each stage in relation to the evolving external life. In the inner world here, now and I all refer to the same nameless reality, which is the source of every other claimed reality, and this reality is in no sense an idea. In the external world reality is determined by latent metaphysical ideas of causation and power of determination, it alters and is subject to ongoing inquiry. The internal reality plays no causal role, you cannot board it as you would a vehicle because you already are it. You cannot think it nor can you doubt it, but all the categories you bring to bear from the ideal external life fall short without making the least impression.