If you don't make something up there's nothing to tell, just the old mute animal that sleeps and wakes and revolves its discontent against the light. The words begin as an annoying buzz, like a fly that has found its way into the room, an excess having nothing to do with anything, buzzing away in fly-Latin, questions and answers and who taught you to read the persistent ribbon like a second screen behind the well? It likes to pretend it's been going on for a long time, that it has a claim to settle, but you step out it as easily as out of damp clothes revealing the naked nauseous present like a lump on the surface of the round white moon.

Two monozygotic twins raised apart are typically found to have uncanny similarities of detail in their lives, such as being married to partners with the same first name, driving the same make and colour of car, preferring the same kind of pizza, etc. This is more than you would expect if brains wired in the same way were shaped by entirely different sets of experiences, in which case the similarities would emerge in more general dispositions. It is as if a fault in the steering mechanism of your car was expressed by your always turning left onto a certain street every time you passed it - if you complained of this to a mechanic you would be thought crazy. It is not unlike the highly specific behaviours induced in certain creatures (apparently including humans) by certain parasitic infections, described not inaptly by researchers as 'zombification'. The common idea is that of having desires which are not 'truly' your own, going beyond what could be accounted for by such mechanisms as seduction or mimetic desire where influence is effected by heteronomus steering of pre-existing autonomous desire. It suggests that what appears necessarily to understanding as self-transparency is in fact a peculiar mosaic of belated opacities. By the time you have identified your deepest and most immediate thoughts they are merely the wake of an event that has happened very much more quickly than you can consciously grasp. So that while there is self-transparency it it seated prior to consciousness, and the conscious intuition of it is already a mediation.

Fantastic mosaic and foam of the psychological life, interpenetrations of writings that are readings and readings that are writings - you can already see how the whole physical frame melts into this, how the strange flavours and textures of things renew the experiencer by forcing meanings out of frame. And the experiencer himself is only more meanings, is a theory of meaning, a spinner of theories about spinning. Because if one thing is clear it is that the meanings are what perfectly appears and so are not the appearing. They arise on a quality without qualities or attributes - what everything is a metaphor for but which can't be grasped metaphorically. Not sound but the sound of sound, not taste but the taste of taste.

The gap that separates you from others is more readily negotiable than the one that separates you from yourself. The perils of the former are great enough, seductions, hostage taking etc., but fall short of the uncanny effects associated with the latter, as in the image of the doppelganger, or of the anxiety of freedom, of the revelation of the artificial character of the structures maintaining your identity. Language use is largely designed it seems to facilitate accommodations with the other, even if and when these exceed the limits of what is comfortable, and appears to be ill-suited to the deepening self-knowledge. Instead you gain functional self-knowledge through mutual interactions, which means in some degree enacting what otherwise seem impossible, namely sharing the same thoughts with others as if your minds are connected. Proposed neural links, for example, are likely to reveal how basically familiar other minds are, since such links will only intensify and speed up what already happens in intimate conversation or art. Courage and honesty are surely required but the rewards are immediate in the form of a lessening of loneliness and estrangement, expansion of sense of self. Effects of alterity are merely challenges to be overcome except when that alterity is deep within the subject.   

The siren song of experience offers you the world in return for putting your faith in the world. This faith is a treasure that you can't hold on to so you invest it in what appears, making an overarching reality out of what is no more than a toy world, a play of the imagination. What could be easier and more compliant than to hand over the reality you bear within you to the image? And if you refuse to do so, going against the whole developed grain of things, what then? You will have set yourself up for a response from the only force worthy of making such a response, from deeper within you than you are, the truly terrifying abyss, the one place, the only place, the sole begetter of all this.

If you try to say what it is that is going on here you might answer by detailing the flux of sensations and thoughts, the overlapping intentions and purposes that take up most of attention most of the time. The real question however is what makes it perceived or known, or how it comes about. This question is recognised but impossible to formulate in a definitive manner because words become vague when used to point towards the experiencing. Objectivities are equal to themselves and so they seem to characterise being as what is subject to the law of identity. The experiencing has none of the attributes of being, it does not equal itself, has no identity, but only confers identity. A certain mundane prejudice takes it for a ghostly thing, somehow guilty of not quite existing, and it is this prejudice that needs to be turned on its head. However the experiencing may or may not be, however its mode, it is primary. The naivest gaze can see that everything is in its gift, and that apart from it being is only a marvelous idea and a sheer joy at being given.

An inquiry repeatedly reinitiated becomes a structure, becomes an identity of sorts. It opens to the new at the same time as consolidating and thereby limiting the possibilities for change. It seeks but also strives to contain the seeking, to put it within a programme with past and future horizons roughly marked out. In so far as the activity produces some immediate positive value there is a natural tendency to confuse the aim of the quest with the maintenance of such value, it embedding within an economy. Is seeing it in this way actually seeing something, or is it an expression of a resistance which seizes on any occasion to spin out a narrative? And if there is such resistance is it worthwhile trying to unpack it, to gain insight so that you can reclaim its motivations? To think about temporalisations as acts is already to temporalise. To regard the work as inquiry is already to personalise it, to accede to narrativisation. No doubt it is all very flawed, no doubt there are missed opportunities. There is no reason to trust the process, but equally there is no reason to mistrust it.

To admit probabilities as irreducible elements of our best picture of physical reality is to give a central role to negation, or more radically to non-being. However determined the law which defines the probability in question it must be finally be understood as proposing certain possibilities and then ruling them out. What is 'chosen' entails no problem since it is in being to just the same degree as the real conditions that preceded it, even if those conditions are no more than a value of a wave-function; it is what was not chosen, what was rejected, that is the problem - what had a kind of being and now has no kind of being. In order that there could be in effect a non-being, contradictory as this is, would seem at the least to require exactly some such structure. That is to say that if you wanted to create a reality in which non-being played an essential role the most economical way to do so would surely be by way of probabilities which of themselves evolved deterministically. That the scandal is the non-being of what is rejected goes some way to explain the appeal of something like many-worlds, which flatly denies the non-being of what is not. What is the feeling or intuition of being such that it can only be imagined as full, as having no truck with non-being? What is it that is refusing to be seen?

What is known and felt, and the limits of what can be known and felt which are so much larger, but still the limits of a life. But then the feeling and the knowing cannot be felt or known, belong to another dimension or whatever name you can give to what it is appearing within. What is doing this, closer than any thing, is you. The hint contained in the way that being seeks its foundation, is always pointing to it and so what it points to, is directed towards can't itself be being because that would only repeat the gesture. It points because what it points to doesn't point, the inherent transitivity of being can only be so because it indicates here what isn't transitive, doesn't transcend. Consciousness isn't 'set up' to be conscious of this its own reality.

 

Memory is not just a jumble of uncertain records, but fragments of some broken whole always in reach and always true to a moment or two still perfectly alive, still happening, but moved behind the mirror. Pieces of a puzzle that you have been trying for a long time to put together out of what seems to be confirmed, that your truth belongs in the realm of necessity and heteronomous judgments, while you stumble around in this labyrinthine and half-believed world whose nature is revealed only by what can't be believed. Memory and expectation, past and future are structures by which the chief parts of yourself are sequestered, retained and still integrated but separate and unreachable. Such a strange division in the heart of presence, as you've chosen to look only through this narrow tube, which is a glass tube, which isn't even glass but made of air, of vacuum, of effective nothing. And is there even a division, the very idea of a division? It's either all or nothing, or both at once.

This ragged and ramshackle psychological self only seems so real because everyone talks about something like it, mostly their own, or that of third-persons, sometimes your own. It's so persistently put forward but only in talk. It's a collection of symptoms or traces - it doesn't actually produce the thoughts, the mental chatter, la folle du logis, but is in their echo, the way they are responded to, like the way that hearing sounds in the dark can give you a sense of the kind of room or landscape you are in. Apart from such edge effects there really isn't anything to distinguish inside from outside. The conviction that such a distinction rules ontologically over phenomena is surely the greatest and most groundless of self-confirming fictions. It seems to explain so much, but the puzzling constancies that it orders are only its own consequences. Thought is like a detective that has to invent the crime that is there to solve, otherwise how could it justify being what it claims to be? The inside is only ever some arrangement of what it pretends to distinguish itself from, what it calls outsides, surfaces, appearances. There is, of course, a peculiar and rich pathos of the inside, but what else could you expect from something as imaginative as thought? Rejoice in that creativity, enjoy it, but don't for a minute take it seriously.

The body changes over time, but you stay the same. There is a continuity in the feeling of inhabiting this body, a signature flavour, a complex concrete memory, which slowly evolves so that it maintains a smoothly flowing identity, but sometimes even that changes suddenly and you feel as if you have to re-learn this body all over again. Intimate as it is, and there is in many ways nothing more intimate than the body, nothing that is more your property - there might be phases of being that are more inward but in relation to them a concept like intimacy no longer quite applies - you retain some detachment from it, like a habit or a house. The psychic self, the locus and reference for that phase of living that is called psychological, seems to be exactly the same kind of intermediate phenomenon as the body. It is historical and evolutionary, retaining its scars and quirks of development, it is contingent but its identity is persistent, and although it has a greater play of associated feelings of being inhabited, it is also exposed to discontinuities. Its being is a melding imagination and memory and yet it has a coherence that must be respected. It is made of a kind of stuff in which objective qualities inhere. Which is to say that the psyche is not coincidentally like the body but is itself a body. Its fascinations are many but you are in it as in a house or institution - it changes and you stay the same. Which is also to say that it is an error to credit it with being the source of what freedom and agency are expressed through it, or to get too excited about its apparent reflexivities since, unlike you, it need not coincide with itself.

How else could you find it to be always in the present moment if that were not the invariant shape of it? Presence occasionally catching sight of itself and ceasing to answer to its notion. And then this other thing roiling away within that frame, including the thinking about it. It would seem to be made up out of a vast scintillation of tiny sensations, the way that a picture is made of tiny dots, or others think of it as rippling schools of firing cells, tiny dots of sentience that add up to this presence of a someone to a world. This is only an idea that bears on its face the unfolding scene and conceals its ideality behind a fascination with how it all feels. It is absurd to imagine that thought, that something as pure and colourless as ideality, can be made up out of sensations. Its nature is that much more hidden because you can't conceive of intellectual light. Identification is the falling into what boils inside the frame, but it can do so from the direction of, from the reference to, the unchanging. The present in both senses of the word can only be what it is by its constancy, its independence of time. Sometimes this is seen so clearly, and at other times it's lost sight of, but even the losing sight of is played on the same stage.

Fundamental insights into the relations of soul and reality, for want of better terms, are not the property of everyone but largely of the charismatic through whom they are conveyed to the multitudes by channels of mimesis and mixing. There seem to be two or perhaps three classes of these, the negative, the positive and the dual. For the negative reality is hostile or indifferent to soul, so that the unaccommodated condition would be infinite pain, chaos and alienation. The positive view would have it that reality and soul are at the greatest depth one, that beyond the emotional turbulence given off by the successive surrenders of limitation soul will find itself entirely at home in the real. Since these two correspond roughly to the traditional images of hell and heaven, then we cannot ignore a third view in which both are true but the relation to soul is in a judgement which determines in each instance the appropriate destination. It is therefore odd to find X, driven by a searing vision of the negative into exhortations to live a religious life as the only possible bulwark against chaos, while Y, prompted by experiences of oneness exhorts his followers to abandon the remnants of religiosity as dangerous obstacles to attainment of an unfiltered vision of all-inclusive reality. Tragedy or comedy are the high stakes in such public metaphysics, which since it cannot itself be one or the other can only be played out as enigma.

So much depends on the not-I, on how you name it, on how you treat that name. What could the evidence be? Since it doesn't speak, it can only come from you. You are the witness of it, you express it in poetry, in your way of dwelling. Out of that you grow your systems, and also your receptivity to how it appears from elsewhere. There is a conviction you have about these things, and it is one that has either been breathed-in, or force-fed, from the miasmas feeding the mind or gained in some turn-around of the soul impossible to doubt. And what are those miasmas but the accumulated shells of others' revelations ground up and digested by the medium? What could be more attractive to the half-awakened soul that the effects of others' convictions? These are the most excellent of mimetic attractors. Choose your poetry off the shelf until you discover how unexpectedly far your freedom extends.

If you imagine that the objects in your world are dreamlike appearances constituted via complex syntheses out of atomic sensations, the you are helpless before the mysterious and wonderful obduracy and infinite unexpectedness of things. When you think in this mode of the sensational 'matter' underlying such appearances then they are framed as bodily effects imperfectly grasped, like those that dreams cunningly convert into presentations of imaginary worlds. This frame already begs the question of inside and outside, and makes the veritable outside into something positive but not directly knowable outside the reach of the intimate sphere. It gives only possible content of consciousness the same status as the 'I', as if consciousness is limited by the questionable reality of that self. Consider, however, that while it is true that consciousness by its very nature cannot encounter anything other than itself it bears no phenomenological resemblance to the 'I'. The mysterious otherness of the world is in consciousness, is inward, but is nothing like the ancillary idea of the self. All this means is that the alien quality of things loses its alienating quality. It is not exactly a metaphysical difference that is in play here but simple one of the values associated with that difference.

Predispositions, characteristic comportments which embed you in your world, affinities which may run deep, all the half-revealed mysteries of personality, these are the things which we identify with subjectivity, in that they are taken to be synonymous with the subject. How else can we explain the determination of identity by historical or biological contingencies without any residue, as demanded by the times? Thought, having seized hold of the tool of criticism which reads back into the knower the unthought conditions of the known, has run mad with it, applying it to itself over and over again. What might have served to loosen the web of identifications has now, by striking away the ground as literally and morally unthinkable, only tightened them. Something other than thought, but which is the basis for thought, is needed. But how can you find it or even admit that it exists with only thought or its variant forms to go by? Thought has devolved into an interested form of disidentification and reidentification. You can disidentify with anything if you make the attempt, but it is another matter to disidentify with disidentification.

 

Under the effects of some exogenous cause the sense of the body is deeply altered and this brings with it changes in the way of experiencing the various sheaths by which the self is embedded in its world. Habits of thought and feeling arise but don't engage and so they float past estranged like fish in an aquarium, no longer relevant to the new, but old, condition. The sense of self is like a silvery capsule floating high in an imagined sky and tethered to obscure childhood memories of inarticulate flows and strange architectures. The feeling of being lost in ancestral realms is not clarifying but nonetheless fascinating, you would linger here if you could, would find the pathways to deeper sources prior to all your entanglements. There is a vast forgotten history here that has taken place inside and behind the one you normally recall. Where you have been eager to do nothing but exercise the capabilities of each day, this one concerns the potentialities themselves whose end is not in their exercise but simply in the way you choose them. The real story goes on in such inner landscapes, as if this is all that finally you could take with you.

The idea of a subject is the idea of a point, like the vanishing point in a perspective, say the single point from which all vectors of intentionality originate. There may be some value in this idea for local engagements, but it provides no picture of what consciousness is like. Intentionality does not have the functional transparency that it has by virtue of intentionality. The transparency is prior to intentionality and is as such only through itself, its being and being conscious are not separate and it provides the priority which makes formations of objectivations able to arise. To name it consciousness is a stretching of the term, but there is no other, so call it a spatial consciousness, where space alludes to equal containment, to embracing, of all possibilities and differences, including time. You feel it as yourself, spread-out, ever-present, not needing to be thought or questioned, and staggeringly obvious, obviousness itself, the exact opposite of the idea that anything could stand in its way. You can live a whole life and never notice it because it is closer than anything you have ever thought or seen. 

The thought that there is what-you-are and that it is connected by opposition to the world, so that the more the world looms in awareness the the more of you is absorbed in otherness leaving only a sort of pilot light burning for the self, and the more the self expands the more it fulfills itself so that the world retreats, tamed and optional for your service, is just another thought. Thoughts in thrall to the image of a chessboard where you play out an endlessly teetering stalemate against the world, arraying forces and strategies, sacrifices made and exacted, but nothing in the nature of thought decrees that it must look like this. Instead consider that at every moment all of you and all of world are in play together, not an idea but a different way of thinking, of thought being used, being sung. Self is not lost, not hidden, not promised, not like anything, fully present in presence that at the same time is enacting a world. If you close your eyes or open them it makes not the least difference, no forces have been regrouped. There is no compensation, no exchange, nothing is concealed, the love is immense, at first, at last.

Good to keep in mind how limited the value is of thinking things out. Thoughts of this kind have a theoretical side for which their content consists of propositions embodying judgments which are to be reconciled with the impersonal coalition of all related judgments already accepted, and a poetic or intuitionistic side by which they are used as instructions for setting the orientation of mental vision, pointing it in a certain novel direction in order that you might fleetingly experience for yourself what it is that they indicate beyond thought, so that you might become that experience. These two sides are inseparable twins and play off against each other so that the process becomes an endless circular dance whose inner motivation is its own perpetuation. The process is a doing which nets as wide a range of understandings as it can and as pertaining to the doer. It perpetuates its loving what it loves and not simply what it loves. The mind must do something and why not this as opposed to anything else. But as it circles you maintain a certain vigilant detachment keeping watch for the knowledge that you know you know but that stays hidden from yourself. You recognise its traces, it's the beloved that once tasted can never be forgotten, the beloved that will accept your sacrifice, your gift, your self.

What can you say about happiness, except that it is golden and fluid and passes between hearts without once touching and that there is no theory that goes with it? The shadows are gone, as is inwardness. The mind may be a little drunk but you are not, everything is just as it is and is good. Desire blossoms rarely but when it does it expands so that everything is gently infused with it, you can't call it desire any more, there is no tendency or structure only a subtle beauty a pervading radiant stillness. That's what's underneath, the most undeserved of all accidents.

Physicalists for whom consciousness is at best an embarrassment when they want to insist that the 'hard problem' is not just bad grammar point to it by the question, 'what is it like to experience X?". It's not that they expect a reply, the question is an instance of a kind of question - for every experience X there is a what it is like to have X which cannot be folded into a detailed or functional description of experiencing X. It is an odd question, as if the essential quality of X can only be given by saying it is like Y, by giving a sort of metaphor for X expressed in exactly the same sort of terms as the original experience - by giving tasting notes for the experience, which analyse a complex into primary components, including their temporal modes, attack, finish, after-taste etc. Additionally it suggests a certain kind of social situation - tasting notes only exist when there is an attempt to make a private experience conversational. Can you imagine two wines which have exactly the same tasting notes but of which it is said that they are distinctive because the same parts are differently combined? This is fine as far as it goes, but a subjectivist or phenomenologist tries to turn this around or to take it to the next level. What is it 'like' to taste raspberry in such and such a temporal profile? What is it like once you have got to the bottom of all likenesses? The analogy suggests a purified or eidetic sensationalism, but this is surely not adequate to the sensation-conception duality in experience. The fact is that even if you take consciousness to be fundamental you are still left with a 'hard problem' within consciousness. What is it like? You are doing it all the time, even now, but no one can say in the least what it is like!

You'll never get it right. The very nature of this thing is pure spontaneity of an indescribable freshness, that is why there is something rather that nothing, it is the only way appearance can appear. But it embraces everything including thought and somehow thought proves too much to handle so that it would say what it is, as if it all could be described, or fitted into forms for the knowing. If there can be reflection there is reflection right inside the moment which cannot be, and if there were thought it too would be right there, a kind of reflection, a second creation, and couldn't be. Only thought demands that there be thought. If there is only a single creation then everything collapses into the thoughtless immediacy which is all it ever could be. Unreflecting thought at play.

Awake and anxious in the early hours of the morning you suffer the unrelenting skittering of thoughts until after a long enough time the process begins to tire and a wave of sweet detachment washes over you, dissolving the skeleton dance of thought and letting you return to sleep. Many explanations could be given for this phenomenon, but in the way it is experienced there are certain constant features. The anxious thoughts have a rapid high-pitched a dry quality about them and seem to be confined to a small space at the front of your head. Their connections are rigid but not logical, they are existentially thick in that their reality or truth seems unchallengable and they form a highly enclosed system. The anxiety felt is strongly coloured with primal fears of death, decay, abandonment and powerlessness. The other thought which finally resolves them comes as it were from outside, from a much larger space behind the head, but it is imbued with a strong sense of self. While the anxious thoughts are of 'me' the comforting thought is of 'I'. It seems always to have been there, but unrecognised and unrecognisable before the point when it entered the field of awareness. It seems to literally dissolve the anxious thoughts, which break down into their constituents as if, no longer able to hold you trapped within them, they cannot hold together. The obvious image is of the child whose nocturnal fears are soothed away by a parent to whom it is at last able to entrust the wild sense of self that it was too weak to control. It is tempting to use a word like grace, but there is no Other involved here, the parent thought is what you are in a mode which overpowers and opens the constricted and frightened child form. These are shifts within consciousness, like a change of key, and behind them is a sense of latent powers and of the mysterious coexistence of different centres of consciousness.