And dreams can bite back, or at least turn into nightmares in which all, or most, or some, your foolishness and complacency, your playing both sides of the street is exposed. You have not much control over what happens, but you are entirely implicated in it, you are entirely responsible for it. Consciousness may be unbounded knowingness, but what gets known is finite and what is lived is the unstable relation between the negative freedom of the knower and the positivity of finite choices, made and remade in every moment. How seriously should you take all of this? It's bound to catch up with you sooner or later, but is that any reason for choosing the tragic view over the comic? 

Anxiety, fear, and the persistent gap between yourself and your experience are more typical evidences for an experiencing entity - where there are stakes there must be a player. But then it would be as if the colour was so strong that the eye soaked it up and was that colour all through, in which case it would no longer see anything at all. It is because the existential evidences are entirely within the experience that they can appear to be evidences - it only the rules of the game. It is always taken to be directed and so just as there is a direction toward there must be a direction from which, and that is how it goes for the idea of directedness. Think of experience not as happening to the experiencing but as happening on it. In the same way that a dream arises like a turbulence on the surface of dreamless deep and dark consciousness. All of this is appearing on consciousness, and as such there is no limit to the forms it can take. There is nothing that can limit consciousness not even itself - this is the astonishing truth that winks at you behind all phenomena and that must inevitably be realised.

Experience is performative theorising of the subject (of experience). There are obvious objectivities - which are always and essentially changing - but these can only be what they are because of non-objective absences which are taken to belong to the experiencer existing in the same reality as the experienced. For example, there is no objective desire but in the way that what is desired appears, as startlingly desirable, and in this way it is taken to belong to a desiring subject, and to prove the existence of this subject. If this subject were not at stake in this way then perhaps the whole game would cease to work, say if there were a distinct sense for desire. It is the existence of intentional modalities that are assumed to point to the being of the experiencer, rather than being seen as more general forms of objectivity. It's the nature of phenomena that is broader than we expect and there is a lot invested in treating this as somehow existentially mysterious. However phenomena could not be what they are without a non-phenomenal fringe, without such limits to phenomenality. These ought not to be seen as anything other than special kinds of objectivity. All of this is to say that the discrimination between the seer and the seen can extend without modification to all those existential parameters usually taken as the private business of the subject. 

It's not as if the question, of being, or of the good, or whatever - the original or the final question and its concomitant questioner has any ultimate reality either. To be the being for whom being is in question - well, that clears away a lot of junk, but it is junk too. Who are you to presume entitlement to deep questions? An entity aroused by depth, or at any rate some sort of entity. It used to seem that the desire to be special, to be 'the one who knows' in distinction from all the ignorant was an insurmountable stumbling block, but this was really just a way of giving unquestioned reality to a 'psychology'. What if that simply isn't a problem? The realisation is a weird thing, it doesn't happen in the dimension that you think it does. The idea of separation can't do away with the idea of separation, but that doesn't make it real. Quite the opposite. It's not about your question or anybody else's. It's more like being prepared to surrender the question, surrender the knower and without that surrender being any big thing at all. It's perhaps more like: 'oh, it's gone!'

Naturally you are interested in all sorts of matters as they come to you in your place and time, and even though you spend most of your day pursuing one or another of these with varying degrees of interest, it seems vulgar to ascribe enduring importance to any of them. Which is as much as to say that the 'outer' life, or the thematic life, is something like a dream since its intrinsic implied values have no solid ground, are a chaos of differing motives which lead on from one another, criss-crossing and circling back on themselves to no final end. This is the realm of essences, of whatnesses. What you discover is that in itself it never could have gotten off the ground, is imaginary through and through, but that concealed within it is a wholly other kind of interest, the secret mainspring of the whole show. This is how being, or thatness, is uncovered, the interest without any essence and hence no interest at all in the usual sense. And so you yearn to shift all of this inquiring energy, all of this purposiveness around to the only goal for which the ground needs no further motive. But that is so much easier to conceive than to carry out; how can you want what has no form or image or nature, what can't be thought or imagined or personalised in any way? It would be absurd except that as you clear away the noise it gradually becomes clear that it is what you have been doing all along, that you've never done anything else, could never do anything else, but 'pursue' being - at least if being could be pursued. You need new words - not 'being', not 'pursue', but something else in a private language prior to all (public) language. The proof that there can be no private language is precisely why a private language is needed.

The most mundane stuff of consciousness without reflection, without a subject in thought that comes to itself across time, without vision or structure, unmoored to sense. It keeps appearing but to no-one in particular, the pure grey nothingness that simply maintains, that ticks over in flight from form or feeling. The material before taking shape and that resists any shape. You see it but it doesn't see you and turns over and over as if in a dull sleep, turns away from the day, the afternoon, the dull sounds, the breathing, the well-worn fall. If only you could complete the thought, the way you belong in these confines, with only the question of no question, the conviction that this is all there is, and awaken the very fog in which you slowly dissolve. An opportunity at least for the poetics of dullness.

It is a peculiar characteristic of altered states of consciousness which understand themselves as 'higher' that they tend to dissolve the distinction between self and other. One has the strong conviction that whatever alteration in the angle of view is in effect it is necessarily an accessible possibility for everyone else, and that they are separated from it only by a screen of thoughts - and since thoughts have no ultimate reality, by nothing at all. This is the same kind of thing, but far stronger, as the sensus communis of that lends universality to aesthetic judgments. The apprehension is achieved via the very structure of consciousness without explicitly awareness of how that structure could be objectively described. Again it like the dim opening of another sense altogether, one which would make a radical transformation of the 'topology' of experience utterly self-evident. Or perhaps a better way of saying is that it reveals the much vaster extent of the invisibly self-evident that underlies all experience and that is simply presumed in every interaction. In ordinary circumstances this is so much in the background that we are left focusing only on the derived and abstracted mental debris, the half-thought-out half-maps of reality that so sharply distinguish us from each other that we uncritically build our ontologies on the basis of intractable difference and separation. From the altered point of view even the perverse investment in pursuing such a strategy takes on a wholly comic character.

The experienced world being the sole correlative of the experiencer displays the most varied textures in ontological space. To begin to see each phenomenon in terms of the often shocking complicity of subject with object and object with subject that is revealed in this way is to move closer to intimacy with the world. You are melted into it without consent or denial. You get your soul dirty.

Consciousness is perfectly embodied, not just inseparable from its embodiment, from its outside, but one with its presentifying expression in immediacy. Holding on to this thought, experiencing through it, makes it all arise more vividly, and that is all the proof of it that it needs. But like all such interpreted insights it remains a thought, a particular topology that reflection has learned to give in experience. The determining thought is well-established like the solution to a problem it can't be tampered with very much, but it only can do what it does because of a certain freedom that exists at a still higher plane, known but unaccustomed. You determine yourself to experience in a certain way and however fine that way is, however much it resolves prior questions or doubts, the act of determining remains more real, remains the site of the mystery. Nothing you have discovered about the topology of consciousness applies to that level out of reach; because it determines it is itself entirely undetermined. It's the topology of that that draws you onward.

To raise all experience to the condition of perception, of encounter, to being grazed by something other. What is it that distinguishes perception from conception, texture from contexture? They are not sharply distinguished, as if they were two alternative processes. Everything that you would call perception, more or less pure, is still contextualised, is identified as being what it is, has whatness as well as thatness, quidditas as well as haecitas. And in the same way every thought, every adventure in quiddities fails of pure universality in being presence, or having this-ness, as if you are putting forth some stuff. But you can feel entirely enclosed in thought, it is filled by your sense of self, of doership, you are absorbed in it, while the ideal of perception is a certain passivity of the self, a stepping aside, or a harmonious relation with what is not the self. Still, however ecstatic (ek-static) pure perception might be there is a certain tension that has to be maintained. After a while you let go and the thoughts come flooding back with a slightly guilty pleasure - like indulging in junk food, junk experience.

Sensory particularity is just what it is, and although experience ought to be built up out of nothing but these intrinsically delicious particulars which have their being in exactly the way that presence is, there is always something else added into the relation, an inconvenient third, which is meaning, or ideality. Whenever this extra ingredient can be seen as itself made up out of particulars, of qualia, then it is if we have disentangled ourselves to some degree from the dream life in which we have been suspended, and this brings with it a sense of restored happiness. It's not that you suspend thoughts but that you have discovered a tiny gap that separates you from them and by which you can endow them with the nature of mere happenings in sensation. It would be unfair to say that the whole process depends on an understanding of the constituents of experience and hence is itself only an idea, but the ideal shadows it closely and almost instantly produces its ghostly replica. And that process too, at the very root of thought, is made up out of nothing but particulars.

What it is that you want to bring forth is what it understood purely through being consciousness and nothing else. And so it is precisely what everybody understands. But we understand it without knowing that we understand it, all of us to different degrees and filtered through the most extraordinarily varied and convoluted outlooks. And we all want to bring it forth because the pressure it exerts on our presencing is unavoidable and works the same way even when buried under layer after layer of cherished notions. The feel of it is immediately recognisable, everyone is swayed by the telling when it gets a little closer to the truth. As if the sun keeps wanting to break through the clouds, but the heat only draws up more clouds. What could be more lovable than these strivings, these goings astray, these peculiar and unavoidable inquiries, their very unavoidableness that keep undermining all those notions?

Not just that the thing is done, the music is played, the food is made, the journey taken, but that it is done by or for you, that you are the one for whom or in whom it is accomplished. Doesn't every form of desire come down to this? To have been present at the event, adsum, to be in addition, being and more than being; assimilating the event in your own being, owning it. This peculiar existential discomfort of airports. Being and having merge into each other. How could jealousy arise without this; it is not enough that it happens in a completely indifferent manner, but that it be in your appropriation. All of this all the time; the medium in which life takes place - the mediator requiring no explanation, no reflection. There may be states of consciousness more or less free of desires, but how could there be consciousness without desire, the desire inseparable from being present? The desireless state being only a more sophisticated object of desire.

There is nothing outside of experience and yet what is experiencing cannot be experienced. You know that it's you in every case, under every state, but how can you know that? And that you know nothing else? Experience is reference, is always about whatever it is about, but what refers cannot be referred to, it has nothing in common with with anything that can in any way be referred to. It is necessarily out of experience, and you know it is you with unembraceable particularity. The only way it can appear is as the totality of experience, but it has no need to appear; experience is contingency and contingency can only be so because there is necessity. So it's tone has got to be that of a joke, as in the sheer ludicrousness of self-reference, as if that could ever be a clue. And see how they run. It refers, you refer, you can never be referred to. And how do you know it is you? How? It's not the kind of thing that can be experienced, it has no meaning, no shape, is not light or dark, sweet or bitter, soft or loud, painful or pleasurable. You want to say that it is too concrete, too particular, is itself to an unimaginable degree and so impossible to objectify in any way. There can be nothing next to it, nothing that knows it, but still by the very appearance of appearance you know that you are you. Completely out of reach, you can only laugh.

If you accept the idea of the pre-reflexive cogito then you must regard it not as an alternative mode of consciousness but as a concomitant mode, so that ordinary consciousness would necessitate the simultaneous action of both modes. And if two, why not more than two? The analogy is musical, perhaps, in which the pre-reflective is like the bass accompaniment. This raises more questions than it solves. Could there be reflective consciousness without the pre-reflective, as you could just play the treble-clef part of a piece? If not then in what way are these modes necessarily tied together in order to produce what we acknowledge as our own consciousness? How is it that they somehow refer to the same subjective reality, but in different ways? Certain phenomena of 'altered consciousness' are less like the switching of channels than like a change in emphasis, a brightening or increase in salience of one dimension at the expense of another, and in which the newly salient one arises in the mode of having-always-been-there but not noticed before. This is supposed to explain the peculiar phenomenology of insight, the immediate recognition of truths known but not previously known to be known. And if there are such multiple modes, how far do they extend? What are the limits of insight? Surely there is no a priori answer to this, every mode having its own particular model of knowledge. And if we allow that there are different states of consciousness is this a fact about consciousness itself or about the contingent conditions of its production of self-awareness, its realisations?

 

You've come such a long way and yet you haven't got anywhere. What could be more ordinary than this vague sense of disappointment? But it's nothing solid or to be proud of, as if you have finally seen through yourself. When you think about it, when you are in your chair, you're always way off to the side of what you actually know but can't quite bring yourself to admit. It's the turning away from what's too hard, too unformed, too commonplace that constitutes the pose you re-assume, the one in which you sincerely question what is afoot, the one you believe in for as long as it takes. It's a shabby affair, and it counts for nothing to call it out in this way. The new dodge, it's always new, is exactly the same as the old dodge. That's just how it works, is the dodge, is working now. You either see nothing or you see right through yourself and out the other side and in neither case are you there.

It isn't that there is freedom and transparency first and that it somehow calls opaque structures down upon itself. It is rather that the mode of experience is freedom and transparency in the face of opaque structures. They are dual but interdependent and so in this sense 'not two'. The opacity of the opaque does not threaten transparency because they are on different planes, but importing belief in opacity into the heart of transparency hobbles us fatally. The difference is in what transformations are possible, in what naturally follows from what. What we are used to is that in such transformations the objective unfolds while the subjective remains constant, and what is missed is a whole other family wherein the objective is relatively constant while the subjective unfolds. Every setup of experience is a way of maintaining subjective constancy, but between such setups it may be almost unrecognisably different. Consistency demands of us that we suture these implicit differences, but this demand is unexplained. Why is it believed to be so vital? What high price is paid for acceding to this prejudice, the prejudice of the enjoying and suffering self?

Consciousness becomes experience of consciousness and nothing could seem more ordinary. Ordinariness is the experience of ordinariness, and nothing could be simpler or more wonderful; a cup is a cup, breathing is breathing, and thoughts are just like thoughts, parades that pass and leave no trace. 

If presencing were something then you could wonder how all these attitudes and wants got to be inside of it, how its transparency and freedom could be taken over by such bulky and self-important experience while remaining untouched by contents. But it is just because it is isn't anything that it can open up unlimited room for them, and being nothing it nevertheless acts, is pure act without employment. The experience is the use of it, its appliances, while it uses nothing at all. Both the origin and destination of each lived moment is in this unchanging transcendental point outside the frame of that moment and all surrounding frames. Only by this mystery is experience possible so that no mystery can appear in experience. Only by what can't be understood can everything appear to be understood, so that it recedes before you gaze and you can only search for it in vain. You can never find it, it is what is looking.

Presencing resolves in situations, but to be in a situation is to have assumed it. You don't find yourself there, you have already lost yourself in it, as if the presencing is a wave function that collapses into a cascade of situations and can only have done so by way of an initial act. But can it act upon itself? What is that primary assumption that brings about the pointed spaces experienced as the nested and overlapping situations that resolve as experience? It is as if you are always wanting to say that the embodied reality made you do it, that there was no choice, that the choice was always already made before you came on the scene, but this is only true for a space that is already resolved, even to an infinitesimal degree. The background feeling, the ineluctable modality of it is the uneasy recognition that it was freely chosen. Being resolved is to know, to enjoy the many forms of heteronomy as they flow over you, wave after wave as you click into position. But initially there is no position, no time and no space. The trace of this initial assumption is in the absence of any point of view, or in the weird ambiguity of the points of view you take on as the situations unfold, the very slipperiness of consciousness.

The notion of an witnessing subject, like that of a self engaged on a journey or an education or evolution, belongs to the projected hidden side of consciousness. Such notions require presencing being to be somehow thick, ethereally substantial like a soul or a 'shade'. But what if nothing of the sort is even possible, if the very nature of consciousness is so fine, so flat that it can bear no obverse, that it can be attached to no kind of substance? It's not that everything is obvious at a single glance but that such structure as consciousness can be made to yield is all and only presencing. This means that there is no beyond, no 'real' spatialisation or temporalisation, that all of consciousness is this presencing here and now, that fulfillment needs no perfecting, that there is nothing to seek, could never be or ever have been anything to seek. Isn't this much closer to how things are actually experienced, doesn't every transcendence melt away like a mirage under scrutiny? This is why there always seems something salutary in those deny the existence of consciousness at all, however misguided they might be in other ways. It's the subtle habits of its reification that must be seen through to deliver us to where we have always been.

Much of what passes for 'theory'-informed writing is actually a form of intellectual hip-hop, a charismatic and incantatory mode of expression that cultivates a street-credibility of assertive protest by way of a standardised lexicon of tropes, artfully exaggerated in an evolutionary ecosystem strongly biased towards the apocalyptic. It is a triumph of a certain kind of musicality or sheer performativity over any desire to make sense, or rather in an explicit rejection of 'sense'. This is quite odd when looked at from a distance but almost impossible to evade from close-up. It seems as though Heidegger was the original philosophical hip-hop artist, but whatever its origins it now seems all-pervading, so that even those schools of thought that appear to value sense-making above all else come to seem as if they are no more than variant forms of the same tendency but valuing different kinds of structured dissonance. Having discovered the inseparable rhetorical reverse side of all thinking the question of how to incorporate this discovery remains open, but surely not by uncritically embracing it?   

Certain kinds of positive feelings such as ease or satisfaction or equanimity can be imagined as increasing indefinitely, but certainly not all positive feelings. An unlimited intensification of pleasure or bliss would seem to be indistinguishable from pain or would simply tear the body apart. Similarly happiness amplified beyond a certain level becomes mania and hence filled with delusions and is certainly a horrible thing to witness in others. The feeling of triumph or success ramps up into grandiosity and a devouring madness. What is it that distinguishes these positive feelings from those others? is it that they are 'egoistic' or self-regarding? What about the case of affection or compassion? Even when freed from attachment to a sole object or a limited range of objects these 'adhesive' feelings would seem to turn into agony above a certain threshold. The examples mentioned at the outset could also be considered to be self-regarding, but they also contain the antidote to self-regard. As ease increases one becomes more and more detached from self in any narrow sense, a natural benevolence takes effect. No, what these special kinds of positive emotions have is a sort of direct link to the self. As ease or satisfaction intensifies you effortlessly become ease or satisfaction, or rather you realise that you always were supreme ease or satisfaction; there is a homecoming, what seemed to be essences simply become names or addresses.

Every meaning is a streaming forward in time in multiple linked layerings in which you await yourself but never arrive since the next turning is yet another streaming forward. All of being present or being now falls into this same pattern, you can't arrest it by way of any meant act or meant arrest from action. This temporalisation is not forced on you, it is exactly what you do, are doing at every moment, you are wholly given over to it. But when is this entering into time taking place? Where are you established for the dive into time? From what eternal shore do you flow?

 

There are two versions of the world. The objective one is a sort of infinite locally Cartesian space filled with material furniture including various sentient beings, including yourself and all other persons, each one having its temporal coordinates and world-line, and in every specific case resolvable into inter-related functional parts, among which are neural mechanisms forming continuously updated and much reduced models of the world governed by discoverable general laws. The other one, the subjectively based or phenomenological world consists of a sheaf of multiple hyperbolic or anamorphic sensory and ideational spaces with a distinguished singular point, so that the space becomes more and more inflated as you move attention closer to the singular point and contracted as you move it further away from it. The singular point is not in the space but attention can move infinitely close to it experiencing a corresponding infinite expansion of content. The objective world maps into the phenomenological world, but the phenomenological world does not map into the objective world, although there is a strong prejudice that insists than it nevertheless does so. The phenomenological world retains a stubborn ontological priority but in this world every matter melts into the act of being aware of it and so it contains nothing graspable in the way that the objective world is filled entirely with graspable things. The phenomenological world is marked by the absence of the the subject and our objectively biased cognitive and emotional processes seek to overcome this absence by various kinds of referential trickery and recuperations of failure. But the feeling remains that it is possible to completely resolve the phenomenological world without resorting to these functional tricks but merely by a subtle modification of the nature of attention.