The real is that in experience which gives back to you more than what you put into it. But this means that you have a prereflective understanding of what it is that you put in, of the working of imagination and expectation, that you know exactly how far they go, that you recognise the 'feel' of their products, of your own makings, so that you immediately recognise when your boundary has been crossed, and also that you are able to 'read' beyond this boundary. Anything you can read you also could have written, only you don't have the computational power to have created it or to sustain it; what you know as the barrier between the imaginary and the real is the limit of your own power of freely imagining. So reality is the encounter with an imagination of transcendent power. Creative imagination is however a deep property of the subject, it can only ever arise from out of a subjectivity. But as for the subject, there cannot be two, since otherwise one would be the object of the other and hence not a subject at all. In this way something like idealism is inescapable in spite of every new attempt to get around it by way of a more cunning objectification. Every metaphysic, whatever its emotional and aesthetic tone, its serenity or apocalypticism, represents a complicit attempt at such objectification, there is no other jouissance. 

There is a perspective of motivations. You are fully embodied in each action that you take, the motive is your own without any equivocation in the moment of the action, but the sum of your actions has no coherence, the actor is unrecognisable from one to the other, and so they belong to you in a perspective where a motive can lie concealed behind another motive or memory or image. The lived metaphor is that of a complex and capacious architecture such as in varying forms is the setting for every dream you've ever had. As you move through a house or building or landscape certain things come into view while others are lost. It's the way that incompatible motives are non-dialectically synthesised, and is the reason why your lived subjectivity is always tied to a topography, or an even more strange topology. It you were to take the position of absolute subjectivity this quasi-spatiality would be completely flattened so that nothing could be concealed. The concealment is an illusion of immanence, as if something objectively independent of you intervened in the midst of your self-presence. Take this away and all motives become equal, all are equally what contains you and can no longer contain you. This indifferent exposure is why you can never occupy the position of absolute subjectivity - or at least you never would be able to if you weren't always and already that. 

You can only experience the flow because you are stationary, you can only experience mental noise because you are silent, can only experience all this content because you are empty, space because you are spaceless, spheres of affect because you are indifference, and sense because you are without meaning or reflection. The void at the heart of experience can be given any face at all since it is not relative to any other. So is there a true face when the mirror is empty? When even emptiness has dissolved into nothing? It goes on.

Simply describing the experiencing at any pitch of life as it arises is almost impossible because there are no agreed names for the various elements in relation. But an essential part of every experiencing is a rich image of that very experiencing which accompanies it not as a description but as a deeply complicit landscape of possibilities and constants. Putting words to these throws you into capricious metaphors and symbolisations whose intended meanings seem utterly precise in the field of immediacy but which don't cash out in any dictionary. When you care to look you find yourself in something like a recurring dreamscape, a console and consolation for the subject who isn't really there, or wouldn't be but that isn't and is are still undivided. The more closely it is attended to the more the words take on a slippery allusiveness, which ought to rise to poetry but fails to do so through lack of any concrete correlates. A foyer, a web, a hollow, from out of the heart of the running imprint of concerns. All of this suspended in intermediateness, where what seems at first the walls and windows of a dwelling prove to be refractions of memories and gazes enfolded over waiting secrets and self-conscious echos of intention.

On the side of appearance, or of mind, everything is relational, is social, has its being through its mediation and being mediated by its other, while the subject, the experiencer is solitary. This means that every experience that brings the nature of the subject closer to awareness must first pass through the fear of solitude. Pure solitude is another name for death or for the terror of death - to be utterly alone and without support, deserted even by your faith in the ultimate benevolence of reality, in your inherence in a natural order. Can anyone be an adult who has not passed through this, at least to some degree, whatever it might be that is discovered on the other side of it? The loss of illusions is always the loss of mediations. This goes against human reality, yet human reality never adds up, it works against itself to give birth to you, over and again.

How much harm is done by the prejudice in favour of good feelings, of affirmation, of sweetness, or the idea of sweetness. This is not however to vindicate bad feelings, but there is enough energy in discontent to provide a justification for it. Inquiry feeds on discontent and is prematurely choked off by accesses of beauty, acceptance, detached compassion and other such feelings which allow you to think well of yourself at little cost. Beauty is a distraction, and if the price for evading it is a certain cynicism then so be it. Sometimes you evince the softness of over-ripe fruit - when squeezed you drown in a sort of undrinkable nectar. Don't be fooled by the conceits of the heart, strive to be more acid, develop a taste for the sharp rebuffs that expose the vacuity of your sentimental illusions.

It's true that certain one-off events occupy a special place in the geography of the past, but what holds most of the weight of time past are situations properly described by using the imperfect tense, 'I used to...' or even more imperfect, 'We used to...'. There is a special pull exerted by the recall of moments in this mode, you land not at a specific date but in the midst of an indefinite plurality of days or hours. If your past self seems to be alive and to be gazing knowingly out at you it is because it is an accumulated deposit of repetitions, because the mind was freed in such occasions from the exertions of making out newly changed circumstances, from the need to anchor itself so firmly in its present. Allowing the temporal point to be more uncertain allows the sense of consciousness to be less vague. Is this idea just an effect of reading too many novels, in particular Proust? No, it seems rather that Proust was taking advantage of something already quite prevalent in literary language. Flaubert was perhaps the master of this effect of the imperfect, but it was a discovery that he exploited. It is perhaps like the uncertainty principle, the the uncertainty in time multiplied by the uncertainty in consciousness equals a constant, the coefficient of experience. It is not experienced when it happens but awaits a futurity to be realised - and hence it explains what it is you are doing when you think yourself to be bored, when you know something is going on, that your are 'doing' something, because life seems 'thick', but you don't know what it is. Life is made up of epochs ruled by the imperfect tense, and of the often sharp transitions between them, which accounts for the bulk of the distinctly located memories, the point-memories. This quality of the imperfect as the reservoir of consciousness is also a quality in music, but harder to clearly distinguish. What music is in the imperfect tense? The Goldberg Variations, Schubert when he is suddenly magical, Schumann's Kinderszenen, Lizst's Années de Pélerinage at least?

The open-ended presence of the past as retaining the vital spark of each lived moment is what Sartre means by 'facticity'. It is not the object of an intentionality but a property of the intentionality itself, and at the same time it is positive content which accumulates. How is this not an immanence, an unaccountable objectivity in the heart of pure subjectivity? It belongs to what you would call soul if that term retained any explanatory power. The soul can be cleared of, or washed clean of, whatever in memory is opaque without actually losing all memory, it becomes both particular and universal, sublimed. Everything that was merely contingent becomes necessary, is taken under eternity. Contingency itself falls under eternity. This is mysterious but it answers to the sense that whatever is original is purely particular, at the same time as in being original it is necessary and hence universal. You cannot get there by way of abstraction, you must take the opposite route, into the thing itself.

The thought of death immediately brings with it the thought of the course of life. It is not to ask how you have lived but to evoke what you have lived, as if memory's purpose were to retain the open horizon of all of your past moments in order to deliver them for a recapitulating judgement. The moments of experience are not frozen into inert records but remain present as continuous fibres in the background of each now. As you live turned towards the future you have not so much put them behind your back but silently assumed them as their representative. It is like a choral work where each singer enters the stage in turn, sings a brief solo and then joined the chorus quietly repeating a single note, 'ahh...'. The past only seems to be lost behind forgetting and distorted and rewritten memories while at a deeper level of consciousness it remains present in its unmodified actuality. This means that in the final reckoning there is no meaning, no narrative, no causation in experience only the perfect happening of every individual instance. What it is for is not to exemplify anything ulterior to itself. The tone, the quality of what seemed to be a judgement, then is of an acceptance beyond any ethic, an acceptance so total as to be a love that is almost unbearable, a love into which the soul disappears.

Reflection takes some distance from its object, distance in mental or imaginary space, and brings the living of it back to the witness as if that were more real. These are reflexes of the mind and of its delight in finding meanings, but the life scatters into abstraction in such removal. See instead the microscopic perfection of everything up close in the very fibre of things against an empty background. And the emptiness too is ust as it must be. You cannot speak of consciousness but what it is is exactly this perfect conformity in experience. Everything fits without residue or supplement, even the thoughts which blossom like plants with deep roots in time's giving.

The idea of reflection if not reflection itself, that you know the knowing, that without the irreducible reality of this you wouldn't even have raised the question. But on the contrary as soon as such a question is raised all the concomitant notions of reflection and existence beyond thought arise necessarily but only as expressions of the heterogeneity of the premises and not, as you thought, of a latent knowledge that is always trying to break through. So, the mind is such that it must raise reflexive questions which it cannot answer and which it has no warrant for being able to answer, but it mistakes the mere possibility for such a warrant. (What you are trying to do is to push a certain operation of doubt further upstream than it can go. Is this operation merely skepticism or is it Cartesian doubt? Does it break down or break through?) But say that these are questions that arise in a mind which the mind is in no way equipped to resolve, say they are questions you are not entitled to, that exceed the design specifications of the machine? You can still 'do' them? And by natural perversity you can persist in them. What then? Do you blow up the machine? If so, what then follows, where does it take you? Surely somewhere interesting. And if not, then you activate some sort of fail-safe - you are confronted by the incoherence of the striving, by its inadmissibility - but how did it 'know' to do that? Doesn't it have to have been able to get beyond itself to look back in this way?

A kind of thinking with words, but where does the thinking take place? It is a kind of action which is both something in itself, the act of thinking and something else apparently external, the writing, which is at least equally what determines the act. It leaves something behind as it moves, it is a motion in the present, looking towards the arising of the continuation of the thought and immediately releasing it as soon as the words are typed. The strange thing is that there seems to be something that needs to be done, you don't know what that is but you have a sort of rhythmic apprehension of it that lets you find an end rather than a completion of it. You go along to the end. How do you know when to begin? Some kind of thickening in the invisible comprehension of things, which is the closest approach to thinking. The rest is a mime of thinking, but also the only way to resolve that thickening. It bears upon a latent stream of thought without endeavouring to raise it up. It is thin and fragile, like an incomplete web, you engage in it and it submits you to a sequence of changes in which you remain guardedly alert. What is thought comes in flashes, you set yourself up and wait for the outcome, for things seen or sensed in an instant, clear but out of reach. You do this every day, you don't know what you are doing or why, could never explain. By getting away from how it appears, from the interior reference submitting to the spell, you graze against the utter strangeness of a performance in a no place for a no one. Then you go back and fix the spelling.

There can be no mystical solution to the problem of existence since any such solution would begin in pure subjectivity and would have to include the outer world as constituted in and by subjectivity and hence would also comport a solution to all the mysteries of the outer world. These latter are simply too vast to be encompassed by any subjective extension of knowing, indeed they would necessarily also include the full objective resolution of the nature of subjectivity as well as so much more. This is something like taking Husserl's crisis of the sciences in the reverse direction and using it to show the limits of consciousness instead of the limits of science. If you start from either direction you reach an impasse and you cannot simultaneously pursue two opposite directions. Any subjective grounding for certainty could only be a shallow foreclosure, and objectively you cannot ground anything at all because there is no conceivable end to the questions. What can you do then? The outer questions are of infinitely greater value but have no end. You can only go whichever way you are able, with humility and keeping your goals modest.

Like a musical piece that transforms unexpectedly from one sound-world to another or a narrative that keeps changing with dream-like illogical obviousness from one set of premises and protagonists to the next while somehow remaining the same, there is no grounding premise that defines your world that does not prove to be anything more than a thought. The 'fallacy of immanence' is the conviction that there is some piece of furniture that actually belongs to consciousness, or that has got in there like a splinter which can't be dug out - on the contrary everything that forms any part of your awareness has no more consistency than that of a thought which can always be undone by another thought. Admittedly some are so stubborn that it is easy to see how they take on the status of immovable idols, but this is only because the energy of consciousness has not for a long time risen to a level which can dissolve them. That such a rise in energy will eventually occur is however inevitable, this what you know without knowing that you know, just as you know what consciousness is beyond anything that is merely yours. Because the reality is the exact inverse of the way it appears and so it will flip, is already by the mere suggestion, engaged in such a conversion. 

Your identity, in the sense of your singleness, your being the sole subject of your experience, is only relatively fixed. It is not a goal but a portal, and in order to pass through it you need to take back all of your projections. They are too bulky to go through that needle's eye. When you pass through it is only into another version of the same kind of structure, another way of having always been here, a restoration of memories immediately completed. How else can you move away from such contentment? From lack of any nagging desire, from being so perfectly wrapped up in your own emanations. To take back projections is to reclaim the other as yourself. You need to contract to the smallest possible point if only to pass through into a fresh expansion, a new donation of the the original gift. You can have no idea what will follow, all such notions are surrendered. Contentment is fine but not enough, perfect trust is needed as well. That's what goes on in each new horizon, new sphere.

Love is communion with identity, but positional identity, the identity of the cogito, is equated with separation. Hence such notions as 'thrownness' which come to seem axiomatic for human reality. The world seems to consist of fragments each of which contains some part of the self but which cannot be put together. The seeking is endless and doomed to frustration. Synthesis, the reversal of dispersion, is at best temporary and illusory, but this is only so because understanding is framed by separation. This primal separation is taken to be metaphysical but is in fact affective and hence reversible, but not in any way that can be understood. We are haunted by images and metaphors for this process but we cannot believe it to be real, since it would do away with the seeker.

The other, for phenomenologists, comes about through a process of analogy. I look at the other and realise that the other can look back at me, so that every way that I understand them is equally a way that I can be understood by them. Add to this a certain hunger, that the subject is searching in experience for something that will fill an inner void and you have the ingredients of a theory of relations. The primacy of subjectivity is retained even if this subjectivity is an inherently anxious one. The very nature of the subject might be seen to include an element of storm and stress, but it remains stably positioned at the origin of experience. A relational phenomenon like 'falling in love' is as much a secondary structure here, a sort of bad faith, as it is in evolutionary psychology where it serves as a particular relational or communicational or social technology with its own affordances. Consider on the contrary the possibility that loving is a  fundamental attribute of subjectivity, rather in the way that anxiety is for the existentialists. In this alternative take, it is anxiety as the possibility of the loss of love that is secondary. This explains as many things as the other, it would seem, and it also would give more credence to the psychoanalysis, since you could say that we are born into the state of being in love and the first drama of life is the learning to relinquish it.

Where you are most at home within yourself you are not alone. Who is there with you? A mysterious faceless presence for whom you are transparent and who understands you and with whom you belong, but who is not of this world, and who can be lost and found. You might think of it as yourself but it is other, and is such that you seek communion with. When you commune with yourself in fulfillment then you are with this other who brings it about that you can be yourself. It is not entirely a mistake to seek for it in the world, even if it is a mistake to find it there. The mind might reason its way to an ontological priority of the subject, but it does so blind to this relational priority that is deeper than reason, than mind. You can't grasp it and so you take up attitudes towards it, childishly as if it were your mother, or were contained in a family romance, or as if it were nature, interposing narratives in which it is lost. You can't reduce it to something known, can't set it up, but can only keep your heart soft towards it and towards every unexpected way in which it shows itself. Only express gratitude and love.

Words in the form of descriptions or confessions or investigations can fascinate but don't change anything of themselves, the thinking through them is the weaving of a virtual subject far removed from the reality that they serve. Seeds sprout, fevers rise and die away again, what urgency is there in stones and flowers, doors and windows, water and sky? Experiences and relations are more plausible, fall closer to the grain, but prove no match for the simple persistences of time forming and dissolving ways of being, faces no longer recognised, tendernesses relinquishing. Afternoons grow pale and your hands release their grip. If only this blue light would remain, would prevent you rising up again to follow old dreams to old conclusions. Neither this one or another, here nor there, unquestioning the silence. 

If every brain cell has an atom of consciousness how does it understand its restless activity? It would feel like being in a vast economy, perhaps. It carries out its tasks and it gets the nourishment it needs, a tremendous hormone-soaked duty of responsiveness and exchange subject to unpredictably rhythms. Its life is giving and taking. Does it have the faintest suspicion of the mind to which it is contributing? How could it? And now all the brains are wired together in vast non-linear relational networks of flows, and soaked in passions - perhaps they too are giving rise to an unsleeping mind incomprehensible to us? Computational theories of mind would seem to require this. How is it that we know it is nonsense, that it doesn't figure among all the things we know we don't know, and also those we don't know that we don't know? 

Waking consciousness is positional through and through. Every intention refers back to an interlocking network of references in physical and psychic space which align to bring about the effect of a real subject in a real world. All of this exhausts the mind so that periodically it needs to surrender it all in order to renew itself, in dream sleep and in dreamless sleep. The body is temporarily paralysed when physical references are dissolved and in the same way the psychological self is loosened and anesthetised when its referential structures are reabsorbed into consciousness - they are made of nothing but consciousness and have no intrinsic being. It would be frightening to discover that consciousness could retain its vividness in their absence, but until this is realised the waking world, the sense of being a life, remains haunted by a subtle sense of inauthenticity, of being an imposture that veils a truth you feel unprepared to handle, but which always looms over you.

You would seem to hold lightly to identity, with a relaxed grip as if ready to relinquish it at a word. To insist on it would be an error of taste and of logic, a sort of inversion of cause and effect, a presumption. There is nothing unique about you, you are just a kind of person, a coming together of certain experiences with certain mental and moral quirks, an ordinary venture of presencing. And yet being here is so inexhaustibly cozy, needing no grander epithet. The moments belong to their own occasion and soon evaporate, and yet each is perfectly filled, is a perfect instance for empty witnessing and quiet delight. 

The idea that our reality is a simulation is a debased form of theism. In either case there is an ultimate motive for reality which lies in another consciousness, or an Other consciousness. For the believer in the simulation this other consciousness while vaster than what we know is of essentially the same kind, its foundation being outside of itself - and hence its need to experiment - whereas for the theist the creator can be both in-itself and for-itself and the creatures still ends in themselves. Either way the notion gives imperfect form to a metaphysical question which can't be formulated but needs to be formulated. If you strip away the metaphysical machinery, however framed, you are left with the inner mystery of consciousness being the same as but also prior to the mystery of existence, its alien kinship. Your life is not the solution to this mystery but its husk which with all the forces of its nature resists being cracked open.

Why is experiencing anything other than a description of the mind at work - not in the sense of an organ that excretes experiences (although such a notion, playing of reification, certainly plays a large role in contemporary culture), but that experience is just what such a level of information processing feels like, the feeling being internal to the self-organised processing? This is also a form of physicalist soft eliminationism that one comes across. This makes it difficult to define the boundary of consciousness in relation to the  aggregate of all other brain functions. There is an odd way in which despite its rather powerless and captive status in relation to such physical functioning, mental functioning seems to be structured entirely on behalf of consciousness. Consciousness may be a captive, but it is a captive prince, its servants admittedly do everything for it, but without it they would lose their raison d'être. It very worklessness underlines the way that consciousness is not there to serve the mind, but rather the other way around. It is with difficulty that we can imagine consciousness as a concomitant of mind, but the intuition that mind, and the entire objective field in which it is embedded is a degradation of consciousness, is startlingly clear. Everything fits inside of consciousness but consciousness is only illusorily inside anything else.

What an extraordinary Swiss-army knife of a operation the mind is?! It can have perceptions, conceptions, imaginations, memories - all of which are entirely distinct modalities, but which affect each other - it can communicate with other minds, solve problems, theorise, introspect and extrospect, have aesthetic 'experiences' and make fine judgments on them, it can be infused with desire, or a vast spectrum of emotions, it can dream, manufacture and inhabit its own worlds, it can deceive itself mightily, and it can also sift through the relations among experiences and come up with a grain of truth. It can have ideals and ultimates and relate itself to them in various ways. Its capacities seem to be limitless, and even when they are not it can sense its limitations and search out ways to go beyond them. No wonder that times you seem to be entirely lost within it. And yet in all of this, and even in the naming of its endowments, there seems to be a distinction between you and your mind. Is that one more of the mind's tricks? Is the experiencing, the pure presencing something else the mind does or produces as a matter of course? If so, then what is it for, what is the motive for all of this play? And if not, then what are you and why are you hiding there?