You can write about presencing and if you had more talent you could expressively evoke indications of it in a poetic fashion, but you cannot mean it, even as presencing seems to be the at the very heart of all meaning. Once the words are written they escape completely, you could die, that is cease presencing, in the next moment and it would make no difference at all. And the words themselves are snatched out of thin air by the writing process, out of some sort of intimate otherness which is never here. Presencing remains serenely elusive, it doesn't care, is incapable of caring, just as it doesn't matter at all, has no objective value. To think that it does, that somehow your wish is to impress it onto the world, onto the real, in such a way that it would be inescapably witnessed is a mistake, since this could only be done for some peripheral concomitant of it which was already a sort of object. It is not beautiful, not fragile and ephemeral, but so much the opposite of these as to beggar all imagination. You cannot care about it, but what you care about is precisely the way that it is indispensable to experience - no, more than that, that is the only thing that makes experience matter at all - without in any way being (an) experience. This is so strange that that it continually elicits your curiosity without in any way corresponding to any possible object of curiosity, or having any connection to anything you think of as yourself.

Human reality is coextensive with the world, it is multifarious like a troubled sea teeming with strange life, but all of it, down to the most contemptible filigree is only this human reality, everywhere and in each and every instance, is this arising of consciousness, absolute particularity, banging its fist on the table. The current is too strong, too wild for the vehicle, consciousness overloads us, frays the circuits. Human reality is the striving to take on the shape of consciousness, which is as much as to say that it is contraction, its blinding its suppression, and the failing to achieve anything. Human reality is the ranting child, being schooled, unable to learn the first thing. You know it here as the ineluctable modality of presence and you strain to raise your mind to its wavelength, but in just the same way it is the continuous breath of desire, of wishing, that pushes and pulls at your tired body, the very mind and heart of desire.

What you've always known is consciousness in situations, as being inseparable from situations, so that it can seem as if what goes by consciousness is only a particular reflection of the ongoing situations which, integral to the world, follow streamingly. But the situations by themselves seem incapable of coming to life, they are like an immersive cinema in which you are fully absorbed but which is only for you and not you yourself. Although this is a strange way to think of it because the personhood belongs to the situation every time and might express nothing about the consciousness. No, the strange thing is that even though the scenes shift quite rapidly, go pell-mell onward, the 'camera' never shakes, is never in the slightest degree pulled off-centre. Which is not to say that what is identified as consciousness, as the light of experience, doesn't change in its glow and warmth and penetration, but all of those transformations correspond to different kinds of situations as they come about. The core of it is wonderfully fixed and it's that unshakable constancy, which can only mean self-adequacy, that is the clue that keeps the ever-arising personalities intrigued and searching and wondering who or what to thank.

The senses, sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch are pointed forwards in time; when you give full attention to one of them you perceive what is breaking in on you. Sensory memory may be an essential component of perception but this so as all the better to delineate what is coming to be encountered through sensory experience in the present. To be present for the senses is to be directed towards the future, or perhaps it could be said that futurity is first of all defined by the orientation of the senses. Thought, on the other hand, is always backwards directed; even new thoughts are built up out of the known. In thinking we proceed backwards and perhaps this is the only way in which we can be surprised by thoughts; we suddenly find ourselves in the midst of something new, realising this a moment after we have arrived. In this way you can tell that the 'sense of self' is really just a form of thought, because it is experienced backwards in this way. The question remains as to whether there is another hidden dimension of self that is experienced forwards, or in a different and exclusive direction entirely?

Beethoven's "O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!" was a (possibly deliberate) mistake. All the discovery of joy in the 9th Symphony occurs in the 3rd movement, the conclusion is just a lot of vulgar shouting about it, and thus a sure sign that the point has been passed over without one's realising it. Even the emergence of the 'Ode to Joy' theme is suggestive of the inane ear-worm that it is. So, what is it that happens in the Adagio molto e cantabile? It begins with a motif, earnest, questioning, not exactly solemn but without expectations. After it is repeated it returns again, not in a variation so much as an extension, as if a thought process that had been stuck suddenly discovers an open door which it goes through without even realising it. A freedom is discovered but without being quite conscious of the change and the tenor changes with no effort. The solution to the problem arises so effortlessly that you barely even notice it. The extended theme now discovers its lightness, it can dance, it swirls up in the most delicate joyousness imaginable. There is nothing more moving than to witness this self-discovery. In the remainder of the movement it tests itself against doubts, the theme is dismantled and the parts laid out, the forward motion is temporarily suspended and it proves robust, is realised as an inalienable possession. Only in a reflection does it now seem to be something to sing about, but in the singing about it it is also misrecognised. True joy is silent realisation but the mind cannot hold onto this, and so it is fitting that it is concealed behind the mask of a narrative. The proof of this is that the third movement is the only one in which something actually happens, rather than just being the statement of an idea. But what happens is so infinitely light that it appears like nothing at all. A theme is repeated and without any doing at all everything is transformed.

Existential psychology is fine as far as it goes, but can it explain the existence of extroverts? Perhaps the question indicates a misunderstanding; it is precisely directional choices of this kind, choices between active and passive engagement, that it does explain. What it points to is the common predicament for which there is no pregiven form of resolution. Choices become set, but there is no reason why they should remain so other than historical inertia, the tendency to keep to a course once taken, not because of the weight of habit but the belief in such a weight, the acceptance of historicity. This moment is only the end-point of history to the degree that historical time is acknowledged. Everything out of which your world is constructed has this equivocal quality; on examination it never proves as perfectly adapted to the case as it seems when it only forms a consideration within some other motive. It is wonderful how the household gods of the mind deliquesce under the light of attention.

Thoughts come and go in the flow of time in ... presentification, in the habitat of the experiencer, of the 'I' in experience. But presentifications come and go as well, only not in the flow of time, but in some more impersonal temporalisation. It's the presentifications that come and go in mysterious heraclitian succession. For these there is a structure of back and forth reflections constituting the flow of time, and in space, in the mutual space shared with other subjects, in world-space, all there is to humanisation. The others are as much an irreducible part of presentification as the subject-self, but they work differently. The rays of recognition bounce backwards and forwards between self and alter-selves. When they are strongest in the direction going outwards then the centre of reality is in the 'I' and this is felt as a positive state. And when the valences are reversed, when the being-seen carries more of the energy of consciousness than the seeing then this is felt as a negative state, as intolerable. These alternations of balance correspond to the continually pending 'court-case' to which you are subjected, as described by Hubert Benoit. All of this is merely the structure of presentifications, and the seeing of this is the Buddhistic recognition of selflessness, since there is nothing in them that can stand as 'self-nature'. The 'space' in which this takes place, the originary temporalisation and spacing, in unchanging, and there is no need to refer to such a 'space', which is no sort of space at all, as Self or anything else, but in the same way no need not to refer to it in this way, since it can't really be referred to in any way at all.

You are here and now, right? Pure here-nness and now-ness. Here-being and now-being: Dasein und Jetztsein. But there is no here without reference to a there, you need to be there before you can be here. Hereness cannot be the centre of space without there being a space and the here-ness at some point in that space. It lands there and then is able to say 'here am I'. And it's not that the spatiality exists before you do, but the space and the time are co-original with you and the finding yourself to be here and now are a second moment, as it were, carved reflectively out of (generalised) there are then. So, enough of your puctiliousness. Call it spatialisation and temporalisation if you want, but the consciousness is spherical and thick before it can pre-tend to be presence of an 'I'.

Intention, or intentionality, suggests something purely of the mind and ineffectual, that you are 'intending' to do something but will probably never get around to it - what you will end up doing is a whole host of things that you never really 'intended' to do. It is a hopeless terminology. 'What happens while you are making other plans', is on the other hand an invocation of passivity, like 'stuff happens', and you metaphorically throw up your hands. No, you are always doing stuff, doing what you mean to be doing, its just that most of it is very minor stuff, ancillary to some other project lost in the fog of your accepted goals. You do the multitude of such overlapping doings at every moment and if you want to get some sense of it you need a sociology of purposive actions, of enactments. There are the proletarian enactments, all the many tasks and subtasks needed to keep the show going. We refer to these by such summary terms as washing the dishes, driving to work, etc., but this masks somewhat the immense complexity of the component actions involved. There are also lumpen enactments, like scratching your backside, isolated actions to no end but themselves. Then there are the middle-class ones, making your bread, pursuing your metier, etc., and then there are the upper-class actions, the meaningful or spiritual activities meant to produce a 'deeper' satisfaction, self-described 'ends in themselves' exerting a sort of hegemony over the lower purposes. Well, all this is fine if it help you get through life, but from another point of view, call it the point of view of consciousness, faute de mieux, these are all on exactly the same footing, the same level. They are all nothing but doings, and if you want to know what you are you need to discover yourself in the act. In relation to this 'intention' the simplest actions are the best, stripped of all ulteriority, and these are actions in the world, and where actor and world acted upon are inseparable parts of a whole.

The distinction between the necessary and the contingent, the de jure and the de facto, or the a priori and a posteriori, is often treated as if it were an objective one, something about or in the cosmos, somewhere in the borderlands between the subject matters of mathematics and of physics, or between metaphysics and physics. In fact the distinction only makes sense for consciousness and belongs to its very structure, so you cannot ask about the necessity or contingency of the purported fact of consciousness without begging the question. Normally it seems that the subject, bolstered by a pre-reflective cogito, belongs on the side of the necessary while the perceived world is the domain of contingency, but this is the exact inverse of deeper insight reveals. The subject, the experiencing consciousness is entirely contingent, as is the world, which is only the subject's experience, and what is necessary in contrast to this, is the subject's contingency. You are a necessarily contingent being - which is much the same as seeing the truth of the Buddhist notion of emptiness (of self-nature). This is because you are not your own foundation. There is a deeper insight beyond this, but it can only arise on the ground of a full realisation of the meaning of necessary contingency. Ordinary consciousness approaches this to the extent that it surrenders its fatuous claims to, or project towards, its own necessity, it claim to de jure existence.

What distinguishes gaining insight from gaining understanding? Insight illuminates the situation in which you are right here and now, while understanding broadens your appreciation of hypothetical situations the reality of which is taken for granted. You could also say that insight cannot be aimed at, but might be found in facing what you avoid, while understanding consolidates your general picture of things, even if by adding chiaroscuro and dramatic intensity. Insight is poverty, while understanding is wealth. But 'Vedantic contempt', seeing the operative goals of life as the masks assumed by your desire for reintegration is merely taking pride in poverty. The first question should be that of fully inhabiting your situation, such as it is, without interpretation.

There are models for extending your field of understanding, say to add some new heterogeneous view to an already developed system of views and then to allow the consequences to propagate through prior beliefs as far as its credibility will carry it, following the logic already present in the system. But then there are the kinds of new understanding that are only roughly conceivable of the original basis, the attaining of which requires not only new contents but substantial modifications to the structure of the targeted systems and which are meant to modify the self-structure at the core of those systems. This is the paradigm of 'consciousness-raising', one in which all rules of credibility weighing are suspended. More radical still would be the engineering of new attitudes that extend to the transcendental grounds of the self-system, such as would seem to be called for by utopian revolutionary changes. There is no hierarchy among these models, but that of being driven by an ever keener sense of deficiency. None of these shed any light on awakening except to show how far a distorted image of its ideal pervades our anthropo-ornitho-tho-tho-logies. And more of the same, squeezed from the same tube.

Mostly when you refer to yourself, when you invite yourself or celebrate it, you mean your character. This is both the character you play in the human circus a well as everything that is petrified in the ways you engage with the world, your ways of trying to get what you want - which amount to the same thing. How you find life in this or than moment, how beautiful or ugly it seems, are just your various clown masks. There is only an aesthetic responsibility to remain true to character, to always be in character, so that however irksome your role might seem at times it is a species of politeness, of good form to keep it consistent. In this way being more or less aware of playing a role, a better or worse interpreter of the script you are given, is simply part of the role itself. It is thus a social thing, a mode of being for others - you are concerned with how it appears, and you take up attitudes towards that unknown, merely guessed at, appearance. There is no one to whom it appears, but you refuse to disappoint them. Like every clown what makes your role both comical and sad is that you take it so earnestly, and it's your attempts to take responsibility for the role that raise the loudest laughs.

The word consciousness works either in the limited sense of the waking state, as opposed to sleep or trance say, or in the sense of the other's consciousness such as what a nurse would report. Words refer to things or matters of fact and these are the relevant respects of consciousness. But its full sense can only be to point to your own consciousness and in this way it breaks down, there is no thing or matter that is the place of all possible things or matters - it is like the universal set - so that the so-called unconscious (mind) would correspond to the Russell set, an empty concept. In this sense it is important to realise that consciousness does not exist - rather, if you could say so, consciousness is what you exist with, is the organ of existence. But again, there can be no such thing. If you must refer to it at least treat it as a gerund - consciousing = being. Awareness or intentionality is the way that consciousnessing symbolises itself by way of a subject-object escapement - behind their dance all of being is in play, without moving at all, naturally.

Willing, thinking, valuing - in some well-buttressed fashion every self-conceit consists in believing yourself to be free, smart (in your own unique way) and good (likewise in your own way). The counter-case is not the contrary of these but the realisation that your respective conceits are pure illusion, which discovery is effected by being exposed in the act of fabricating them. Here is your pathetic illusion of being able to act freely, or of having a few clues, or of being good, that is, worthy. So it is a particular light which illuminates the hasty fabrications behind the scenes that is the threat, and this comes down to the other-subject in so far as they deliberately or inadvertently cause this light to shine in your own self-understanding. How can this possibly come about? In encountering the other you come up into the field of their own self-conceit which in so far as it is exposed is instantly 'read' by yours and one of them must outdo the other. At this level comprehension of the stakes is instantaneous. Friendship is then a tacit contract to mutually preserve each others deep illusions. It is a miserable sort of commerce, but it is what we do. Shouldn't you instead welcome the exposure of such illusions? If the ground under your feet can be cut away then surely the sooner the better? But of course even this becomes grounds for a new set of illusions. It is still other-directed, it is the 'martingale' the strategy of winning by welcoming defeat. The cunning of the self is inexhaustible - while you persist in this world of self and other.

There are various dials that you can turn up and down, they don't affect the laws of the place or the way that dark nothing runs all through like marbling in a good piece of beef, but they do change the tenor of it all, the lighting the tensility of the connections, and more generally the neighbourhood. Much better to lose yourself in one where everything is allowed, where all urgency has been unplugged, where the play of the eyes goes darting like minnows. It's probably true that most states can be turned inside out like a raincoat, but what use is a raincoat to a minnow? Just seeing, seeing, seeing.

So much of what passes for psychology is a sort of chemistry of the mind, a pre-modern chemistry steeped in recipes and potions. What is needed is a physics of the mind, a few basic laws from which all of chemistry can be derived. The need for validation, for example, belongs to chemistry, being-for-the-other to physics. At some level the former is a choice, a contingent formation that seeks to resolve the latter which is necessary or ontological. It is not the only way that a resolution can be aimed at, but all attempted resolutions bear a family resemblance. The self is a structure mediating being for the other by reflexively internalising as much otherness as it can. As such it is a fiction and remains fragile no matter how well-consolidated. If its fictionality is revealed then it shatters and you experience pure being-for-the-other, which is felt as suffering. What you see is that you can't recuperate it by any appeal to consciousness. It's not that there is a problem of other minds, it's that others exist to shatter the mythology of own mind. What you take to be your mind is no mind. There really is nowhere to stand, can you stand in that?   

You are just in the thing or else you make a conscious effort to be aware of being in the thing at the same time as you are in it. That's how it seems, as if you could pull back from the arc you were following and see that there is the arc and there is you following. And it seems as if, by a change in attention, you have moved the centre of gravity of the affair back into your ownness, as if you are reserving what would otherwise be squandered. But have you really done such a thing? Have you intervened in anything or have you only folded the arc of doing back onto itself? It's still a doing, just as before, but with an alteration of the idea of what it is. And besides, the original arc doesn't actually continue, it quietly faded into the background and attention is now taken up with an image of yourself doing what you were just doing. This operation certainly effects a slight halt in the continual unfolding of the doing. It is not so much that a new kind of reflexive content has been attained, but that the process has been momentarily confused and thrown out of rhythm. A moment later the movement resumes, aiming now at the subjective object that has been conjured up. The stab at reflection is subsumed into its idea, or into a blurrily felt meaning. But this meaning is less connected to the web of motives than was the original unself-conscious doing. It refers only to a vague kind of feeling and so in following it you descend momentarily into a dream world full of strange goings on unrelated to anything. And after another moment you pull out of that with a mild start.

Forced up onto the shrill surface of yourself in ridiculous predicaments determined by other subjectivities. Nothing new here at all, fortune and men's eyes. The cricketers wonderful term, 'to declare' - Why can't you just declare, end the game and admit that it was all over long ago, from the moment when... x or y or z, and luxuriate in defeat? Catch yourself in the act. Have you anything to declare? Well, now that you ask, no. This is exactly how it doesn't work. None of these labelled experiences is actually experience at all. It floats like a mirage some way away. You want to tether the experiencing to some stake in the game, pretend that it has an interest, but you can't yoke together two faces that respond to such different levels of reality. Suffering is the inexorable causality of the unreal, and logic proves nothing except itself in an elaborate game of concealing its premises under layers of conclusions, an ironic terms for exactly what never concludes.

Consciousness is directedness towards an object in distinction from that object. You tacitly say of your object 'I am not this', you withdraw in order that the object can appear, you confer being on it but in a humouring way since you never forget that you are the source of all being. But of your subject you say in the same humouring tone 'I am this'. There is no difference between subject and object apart from the viewpoint you adopt. This perhaps explains the paradox of how you can have any ideas at all, that is, any believed ideas. Otherwise it is a mystery how all this furniture gets itself into the nothing that you are as consciousness. You can even remember installing some of the furniture yourself, as when you learnt something and it became part of you, say a piece of mathematics, to name what is typically the most solid kind. Most of it however just happens to be there - being born is coming to live in furnished rooms, there's a lot of stuff left over by previous tenants and more still that comes straight from the landlord. So many 'ideas' have this well-worn look - and smell. The minute you become aware that an idea of yours is just something you have adopted the point-of-view of it is seen as object-like, you no longer take it entirely seriously. Ideas, meme-like seem to know this and immediately enlist you in their somewhat ridiculous cause. 'PoV', there is something about three-letter acronyms with a hole in the middle! 

There is always so much going on that interweaves expectation and memory in varicoloured interlacings that slide and twist over each other like snakes in rut. The incorrigible and shared present is the iron gate of this and final reference even in its eternally lingering withdrawal. It will have been no more or less than what gives given, the finally resolved commotion of all you contribute for and against intention. However you cast imagination beyond the reflections and steely glimmers you only act within its natal embrace. So insistently real but that its contingency undoes it completely, revealing the stage mechanics of dreams past all telling and other worlds but one. 

The geometry of relationships is entirely built up out of two primary forms the one-and-the-world and the one-and-the-alter-one. The Buberian language of the 'I-it' and the 'I-thou' gets this, but drastically misleads by making them alternatives and by moralising the distinction. They are building blocks which combine in structures according to rules of concatenation and subsumption. Sartre's for-itself (vs. in-itself) and for-the-other does much better; they are the only two ontological foundations in experience and every kind of unfolding complexity is brought about by combining them in the aforesaid ways. For example, it means that there is no three-ness, so that a triangle is inherently unstable - if two are for each other the third is for (looking at, or being looked at by) the two together as an objective (or subjective). Furthermore the common self expressed in the 'we' or 'us' operates at a more superficial level, being a mode of the 'I' in relation to the 'it' of a collective. The 'I' is not sufficient in itself and seeks to consolidate itself by attempting to change the content it assigns to itself or to its world, on the basis of its awareness of its troubled relation to other-I. To see it in this way is to go against the sort of psychologisation that gives primacy to social instincts such as the need for acceptance by the group, or for attention. Hence the description of intimate relations that is possible in a novel is deeper than that which can be shown in a film, since in the latter the relationship is seen as taking place right in front of the observer as audience or camera, whereas in a text the sense of immediate presence is preserved by being ruled out by the very form. This is why the earliest novels tended to be epistolatory. Is there such a thing as an epistolatory movie? Chris Marker's "Sans Soleil" comes to mind, the exception that proves the rule, since it is necessarily one-way and narrated from a distance. On the other hand cinematic elements in novels are a sign of decadence. 

Apparently, what used to be thought of as the collapse of the wave function as a result of measurement, is better understood as the diffusion of fragments of information about a mixed state via every interaction that it undergoes, each interaction releasing a fractional clue about the state to its respective interactive partners which then spreads further via other interactions, like gossip. All of these tiny fragments must cohere, must tell a consistent story even if there is no single site where all of the information is gathered together, and so as the fragments accumulate and the 'story' gains focus the state is constrained into a narrower and narrower range of consensual possibilities, the consensuality of which, being point-of-view invariant meaning that they are necessarily 'classical' states. The same pattern might be experienced in certain intimate relations, so that as long as they remain quite secret two-nesses they allow all sorts of strange superpositions and interference patterns to arise. As information about the events leaks out, even to no-one in particular, then the strangeness dissipates and collapses into a banal narrative, as viewed from nowhere by a generalised other. If it seems plausible that such strange quantum-like effects can arise in a two-ness which don't survive exposure, as if a two-ness acts like a double-slit or a quantum computer, then the question arises as to whether such effects can be observed in a single consciousness. Can you 'interfere' with yourself in this way? Strange things might occur in deep meditation, but the answer seems to be no.

Functionalism is the idea that there are only outsides and no insides, and that what are taken to be insides are just a disposable illusion, or a mythology adhering to a world of outsides. One consequence of this is 'substrate independence' or 'multiple realisability', which is scandalous to the degree that one refuses to entirely give up on insides - after which surrender it would be a matter of course and of new hope. The opposite position could be called idealism, the notion that there are only insides and that outsides are a sort of masquerade, a trick that insides play on themselves, originally in fun, but somehow having got out of hand and become quite serious, even tragic, before perhaps some final recuperation. An intermediate position might be called realism, in a naive sense, for which there are both insides and outsides which are cunningly and complexly interwoven and easily confused - the task of the subject being to remove that confusion as far as possible through a careful anatomisation of experience. Wherever insides are taken seriously there is such a thing as intrinsic nature, or at least it makes sense to think in this way, and 'substrate independence' does not exist, is an idea that expresses a removable confusion of insides and outsides. Intrinsic nature provides a foundation for value, a concept which belongs wholly with a world having insides. The functionalist world can't provide any ground for value at all, which might explain why functionalists tend to be obsessed with ethics, especially of a utilitarian flavour, making the biggest display to cover the places where they are most naked. In travelling one gets the impression that some countries are more functionalist by nature than others, reality there being more wholly made up of pure outsides, being more 'transactional' in essence than others, despite the various metaphysical views of the inhabitants. Or else that there is a rising tide of such functionalism which is almost impossible to reverse. This might be called nihilism, but again the use of such a term betrays vestigal inside-ism. Whether the two poles, pushed far enough respectively, meet up in the end is an open question.  

The same gesture welcomes it and wards it off and this naturally proceeds from a pivot point in the heart or in the gut or somewhere in between, in the viscera where you live. This pivot is firmly anchored in itself, which is quite a trick for something with no inherent being. When it is threatened by what it seeks the earth moves beneath it and it rebalances in an instant but not without awareness of what it has had to do and the cost to consciousness. This is when age-old reflexes are called upon exposing promises made to yourself and to others through old woundings, personal and beyond. You were born to right old wrongs, enlisted in causes whose vigilance remains unsoftened beneath layers of night. It is one face of the dragon, the uncanny reflection of your own alienated face, nightmarish with sad drooping eyes belying tremendous power. It only wants you to approach, the same gesture welcomes you and wards you off.