Desire and purposive action and their variants, such as longing and reaction, are intrinsically temporal formations in that to be able to be what they are they require the the unfolding of time from future to past, or from past to future, in all its mysterious inherence solely in presence. They do this in different ways, in that while action consumes time, rendering it ultimately void, desire solidifies time as irreducible duration. Be that as it may, together with this relation to temporality and perhaps just because of it, these experiential formations seem to be such as to reveal consciousness, containing within themselves both an essential pole of self and an essential pole of other such as not to be clearly distinguishable from each other. Consciousness is something you know is there but you cannot describe it, cannot objectify it or know it, so your understanding of it relies on clues such as those offered by temporality. Time is the more concrete experiential trace by which you seem to be able to touch the skirts of consciousness. However if experience is flat then temporalisation is an illusion and so can offer no insight at all into the nature of the consciousness subject to that illusion. Consciousness is precisely not temporalisation, and temporalisation is only one of the ways in which consciousness constructively misrecognises itself.