If only it was as easy as drawing, or rather doodling, taking the point of your pencil out for a pointless drive, letting it loop and mock itself, half building things and then undermining them with a twist about, and sending the sweet wreckage off in another direction. This nose for meanings like a dog's with no consistency but running after every trace in the wind and consulting every tree, silly pooch you've done it again. Try to get your ideas all stacked up, like shirt boxes full of finely scrawled sheets and they topple this way and that in clownish heaps. Is it self-luminous or only the effect of a rickety and daredevil escapement that always circles back to wind itself around another digression. Oh, what happened to seriousness, apparently it was never there, and now it's this rattle-banging on forever.

If experience simply happened there would be no problem. Perhaps it does, perhaps there isn't - isn't that the wager of phenomenology, that all is phenomenon? Maybe it is that simple, only not obviously so, simple only when you know how, only after you've done the work. Such a project is not without its successes, but successes can be misleading; you go so far and then believe that you can keep going in the same direction for as long as need be, until you get to the end. But it turns out that the end you see is a painted backdrop. You stride along and then bruise your nose against it, only to find that you are right back where you started. The nature of it is to invite you to understand it, but the very fact that it has done so you means that you cannot understand it. Meantime you have accumulated all this useless data. Say it another way, it describes the real hard problem that all of this doesn't just happen, despite all the evidence you have against the self and its errors; it wouldn't be the way it is if you weren't mysteriously implicated in creating it. You can't find the respect of yourself that is doing so, if you try to grasp it you come up with dreamless sleep, which is nothing at all, but it isn't unconscious either, and isn't an other, it's not even hiding - it's just that you can't make it play, it's that all of your games are wrong.

Your findings such as they are all belong to waking consciousness but whatever it that you are as pure subject is identically the same in waking, dream and deep sleep. Surely then, all you wish to know is rehearsed daily in the transitions between states, which just what you necessarily miss. And yet consequences only adhere to actions performed in waking life. How do you unlock the house of sleep? Not you, the sleeper who shares this one life must do so, find a way through the portal.

Purposive actions have a doubtful status since we can never know how freely they are determined, whether the purposes they appear to promote are essential or merely rationalisations. Nonetheless they have consequences and place us in an inescapable causal nexus which is often far removed from what we intended. The self is bound up in the internal meaning of our acts while their consequences stem from an external meaning which places a dialectical constraint on our apparent self-determination. If it were a matter of reality tapping you on the shoulder and showing you as in a mirror what it was that you were really up to, that would be fine, but more often the external meaning of your acts is only an underside of their internal meaning and it is only your own alienated selfhood that appears to show you a truth which turns out to be no more than a further twist in the dream. Still, it is this kind of inner conflict which forms a large part of what you suffer. Is there any meaning to this? Perhaps only in forcing you to tread more lightly out of respect for an ever-present and undomesticable propensity to destroy yourself.

Every more or less accomplished experience only appears to be rounded off or folded away behind a jump-cut or fade or segué, because in truth it has no boundaries and even in its always ongoing wake is already re-beginning. No need for an eternal recurrence when every lived moment is circular and re-entrant and the only difference is in how wide you mark the loop which can spread as far as you can possibly trace it in new loops and folds intertwining. And so what you call the personal is just a prejudice in favour of a certain kind of history whose depths you feed in scrutiny and shameless profiteering. It is a field inside a larger field and that inside a still larger field and on and on, why stop anywhere, the boundaries fractalise if you ever get a chance to look at them up close and soon you no longer know where and when you or who are.

Take any simple algebraic equation like x = x^2 + 1. This is a kind of self-reflection, and indeed you could iterate it infinitely to get a solution if there weren't a better way to proceed. Aren't mental self reflections rather like this: sequential relations in which the same term recurs in two different places on each side of a an identity. In the realm of the mind every such equation has a solution, no matter how bizarre the system of distinctions is that sets it up, with re-entrant terms internally or externally reflected or both at the same time. Consciousness simply solves these without any iteration, but if you try to figure out how it does so you fall into infinite regressions: I know that I know that I know... etc. again, some equations are solvable in the same terms in which they were set up and some require expanding the field of terms with new kinds of objects which become new terms themselves. That which solves the equations is never encompassed in any of the solutions, but the process of posing and solving such equations fascinates.

Consciousness as fully embodied and enacted presence being the most vivid form of waking consciousness seems to be the moment that best expresses its essence and guides its pursuit, but that understanding may be only an artifact of reflection or of practises which seem the most like awakening, an apotheosis of phenomenality. Every form of consciousness that can be reported or otherwise objectified, which is ultimately the same as enacted, depends on a pre-reflective substratum. You might thing of this as something infinitely thin, like the backing of a mirror, but more likely it resembles the underside of an iceberg only richer in variegated content. You can't say it is fabricated or inferred as a correlate of functioning because it bears on every lived moment but is imperceptible because of the operative limits that define your current self-knowledge. Even to refer it to mind is a limiting assumption, as if that were only filter for appearance imposed on an indescribable and noumenal openness.

Experiencing spontaneously organises itself around an experiencer according to memory and desire as being on the one side the identically same one who experienced various past events reaching back into definitive childhood moments of self-recognition, and at the same time also the one who through bringing about certain scenes will infuse the ever-changing 'me'-ness, the faithful adjunct of the self, with depths of satisfaction and self-possession now only imaginatively projected into the future. The void of not knowing who in heaven you are that you should be this very experiencing is thus filled by this dual temporlisation into the past and the future which draw all their power to claim a form of reality from the intemporal identity of present-source. This shouldn't be as beguiling as it is. Those wondrous childhood moments were only realisations of the felicitous fictionality of your name and your place in your family, and the future moments of satisfaction are merely their revival at one remove by recreations of lost intimacies.

The more we learn about material reality and its structure and forms of organisation the more we find endlessly unfolding complexity and weirdness, and the more we learn about consciousness the the more we find endlessly unfolding complexity and weirdness. One of these is a reflection of the other, which can it be?

Of course there are times when this all seems quite meaningless and futile, an elaborate charade of searching for the sake of the image of the seeker and the surreptitious finger on the scale pan. Ebbing with the gutter of life. And no point then in lamenting the fact as if it were not what you meant right from the start. There is no way of escaping your first intentions and whatever judgment they ultimately call down upon themselves - you are that object lesson and avowedly content to be so. Meaningless or not the truth will out one way or another, and it will be clear to others long before it dawns on you. And then what? Da capo? But perhaps to signal the quandry this puts you in a little more frequently, a little more bitingly. It is in the end a process of subtraction, of cutting yourself loose. The only meanings you recognise are those you have freely chosen, but the only meaning that could stand are those which impose themselves willy nilly, and they are no meanings at all. 

How can the same molecule of experience be both personal-biographical and impersonal or transpersonal at the same time, belonging both to mind and to consciousness? It must be that the frames are different, just as the same object looks entirely different in the street or in a home and mounted in an art-gallery. The frames, then are nested, but that also implies that the smaller frame is an object in the larger frame, is actually part of the scene in the wider perspective. And also that the latent sense of frustration, limitation and heteronomy that appears in the smaller frame and is felt to correspond to its mistaken or illusory nature is also an object-mode consonant with the harmonious quality of the bigger picture. The point then is to accept that there is nothing that needs to change, that the obstacles to waking up are not illusory but non-existent. The idea of a gnosis to be obtained somehow is an idea that resonates with the personal frame, just because on this level life seems to be an adventure of mind-mediated discovery. This is belongs to the infinitely rich mythology of the personal and has that half-true and half imaginary quality that characterises any idea of myth. But it is this whole complex that is already reframed in the bigger picture in terms of unimaginable realities.

The self-reflexive and self-aware capabilities of mind are limited and known to be limited, and for this reason it is clear that mind does not generate consciousness. It is more likely that consciousness generates mind but you cannot know this in so far as you know only through the mind. What is clear is only that mind leans on consciousness in that its limited self-awareness is consciousness-like. The mind has some sense of its own limits such as in the way it appears to itself in relation to and 'objective' space and time and in its distinction between inner and outer, between the sphere of ownness and that of otherness. The mind's boundaries are continually shifting but are meta-stable: in each evanescent formation a homologous structure arises and the abstract congruence of these structures remains stable and is ontologically loaded. The limitations of the mind which can be transcended in imagination are known because of the unlimitedness of consciousness, which is intuited rather than inferred. The mind is your primary instance of a structure that can in some sense capture consciousness, can force it to a virtual self-limitation. If the parameters bounding the mind can be altered then consciousness immediately floods the new structure and matters that were beyond the bounds of the prior version of mind or of the mental self, come readily into view. These 'matters' seen from the other side are exposed as contingencies, as mere contents which no longer play any definitive role in determining the structure of the subject. Hence they are seen by the prior structure as threats to its very existence. Every limited structure that seems to contain consciousness has this thoroughly ambivalent nature; what it wants is what frightens it.

Sensory and sensuous immediacy is taken to be the touchstone of the real in the absolute breaking point of the swell of time prior to thought, but this proves to be an absurdity or at least an exaggeration being the most fleeting of experiences, being the experience of losing the experience, of it evaporating in your hand. You have tested it by repetition - by repeating almost exactly the same sequence of adventures in a slowly varying landscape surely some sort of groove would be worn down into the flesh of the thing, of being? If once is not enough then what about a hundred times or a thousand? Or fewer times but with feeling? But no it turns out that none of these ideas work out. It is just as dream-like after the thousandth time as after the first, maybe even more so because now you are aware that each time might well be the last and nothing gained. You went into this with such confidence because it is evident, isn't it, that something in all of this must be real and by systematic variation it ought to precipitate out, there ought to be a nugget at the bottom of the beaker. But that is exactly what doesn't happen. It's the damned elusiveness of the real that makes you keep coming back. It's not that it passes you by, it's that you keep going right through it without seeing it.

If there are times of strange newness when the layers of experience slide away from each other, fall out of phase and reveal how precarious and fragile even the simplest sense of presence is, there are also times of complete familiarity when everything locks back into synchrony and it all becomes seamless, perfectly at home, and when it is enough just to breathe. These times reveal nothing of themselves, they are folded inwards, asleep in their own life, serenely tolerant of desires as mild as reminiscences that flit like slow bees over the grey blooms of mind. It is as if the interior paramour without revealing any more of herself has placed a calm hand on your head and you curl up warm and wide-eyed in the afternoon light.

It's like dying in slow motion, and you are trying to make it as slow as possible. Isn't that just a definition of life? But it has its ups and downs, its anabolic and catabolic stresses and butresses. Most interesting is the breaking down part, so you'd better build up something substantial enough to make it worth the candle. Or it's like Achilles and the Tortoise, you think that you are Achilles forever trying to reach the second milepost by only going half as far each time, that is your limit, made up out of all your delicious and bitter sins, heaped up, a bulwark of half-truths and unfinished conversations that will be enough to hold 'em, yes, bring 'em on they'll never get past... while the tortoise without seeng anything there at all serenely waddles into the void.

The set of the embodied world reflects back a subject as the one whose natural attitude determines it. This set changes radically in the course of a day, between waking and dream states, between morning and night, and under the influence of strong emotions, desires, intoxicants etc., and what is reflected back at a further remove is the meta-programmer who strives to maintain a level of consistency among the reflexive subjects apparently determining these different 'treatments'. This no longer corresponds to a natural attitude but to a continual struggle in which success is gained but never assured, in which the costs, the expenditure of vitality is not trivial. It is a keeping it together which cannot draw on a pregiven cogito-like certainty but which is driven by deeper urges and compulsions outside the bounds of the person. The self is a reflexive knot of energies which are not in themselves reflexive. You couldn't be yourself without first bringing about the conditions in a medium which knows nothing of any such phenomenon. It is only the unique nature of this phenomenon which produces the sense of having given birth to yourself. Your face before your parents were born is surrendering the insistence on having given birth to yourself.

The mind is adept at generating novelties, new forms of the same, but it isn't the mind, there's no such thing, it's this thought you are thinking now - and the immense crowd of things that came together to bring it about are contained inside it, each instance put together from scratch, newly drawn from dark waters. The only freedom you have, if there is any at all, is not to be found in any such strange fish. Don't haul it in, give it a kiss and throw it back, watch it gratefully swim away. Now lie down in the boat and look up at the sky, deep blue and infinite behind the cotton-wool clouds.

The values you identify with and hold dear are, like the so-called ego defenses, offerings to hostile internal forces or oblations to powerful internal forces whose friendliness you wish to maintain. In all cases  these forces are personified and are internal in that they are always with you and have always been with you. What is at stake is the devolution of cosmic dramas, theomachies for which your intervention is merely incidental; they can see you at all times but you can only sense them when they are close by and at their choice. It is impossible to imagine or to believe in a scene of recognition wherein you would unconditionally reconciled with one of the sides and your complicity with the others would be cancelled. At every stage you have made deals, as it were, with both god and the devil, with multiple gods and devils representing a dizzying variety of cosmic agendas. The political twists and turns of the plot, the expedient betrayals, the doublings, the narrow escapes are endlessly complex and answer to histories that long precede your birth but which you cannot escape or disavow. This is what it is like just a little way below the surface and you venture into it with only the pale light of your meagre realisation that if you would dispose of one you must dispose of all with a single thrust.

What you are as a distinct experiencing is elusive enough that it is easily mistaken for the correlate of a distinguished portion of pure subject - since only this non-dual subject seems to possess the metaphysical authority or standing to confer enduring particularity. Sure, it is said, the drop merges back into the ocean, but at the same time it magically retains its distinctness, as if it has only returned to its place in the chorus, from before creation. As against this, and acknowledging that it share with the subject a perfect and perhaps necessary impossibility of definition, it remains true that every distinction of the individual soul is fully effected within some kind of extended narrative; individuality is ultimately no more than the ability to possess a narrative, or more accurately a bundle of related and deeply intertwined narratives 'functorially' related on every possible level of experiencing consciousness. The notion of ultimately distinct essences brings to mind those fancy restaurants where the regular patrons each have their own personal bottle of cognac or armangnac which are kept in impressively locked cabinets to be brought forth on each visit by the respective customer. It is certainly an impressive sight and lends the privileged diners an hieratic status in the eyes of those lacking in such distinction. But of course it is pure performance and exists only for the sake of performance, and ultimately the bottles are each filled from barrels that are indifferent to their label and destination.

The suffering is the wanting to free yourself of the suffering, it's to be turned around in exactly the opposite direction where the things that matter and that urgently depend on them multiply endlessly. Even the words have a sort of dissonance, the ungentle unoriginality of the urgent, the shallowness of the deep end. What holds on is already dead, it has no force, no tragedy, which is why it leaves only a kind of puzzlement behind. How is it that it catches you every time? Well, why not, let's have it good and hard now, the contrapasso is in the very flaw itself.

Flawed intention falsifying every move as you look back, as far as you can see, but where does it come from this cunningly articulated recursion? You are always a step or two behind, wide-eyed, belated and kind of oafish in your tired innocence. Eventually you'll have to embrace the clown but put it off as long as you can, one more day, turn about and lose sight of it in the fog, and quickly patch up some workable compromise to start again from exactly the same place as before.

Like a spy you strive to be the easily forgotten face in the crowd, the perfectly ordinary man. To some degree you succeed in this, it can never be perfect, there must be a number of people with whom you are more or less close and a broader web of those to who you are connected by karmic linkages - for want of a better term for something very real - for whom you cannot be ordinary since you play a unique role in their lives, a role that you playfully and more than playfully deprecate. But if you do succeed in being a nondescript gentleman, un homme quelconque, as you like to say to yourself, from whom an occasional penetrating look flashes forth, with or without the mandatory twinkle, this also serves to mask the ongoing dialogue within your mind in which you are by turns something special in the department of either mediocrity or greatness - this being a mechanism by which you digest whatever comes in in the form of either flattery or threat - and there's no prior telling which side any such incoming is going to bolster. And so this ego, or egoity, or whatever the correct term might be, grows quite firm under benign neglect, like an unpruned tree, really quite surprisingly firm and wooden and all too serviceable. Because the minute you start to wonder to whom this is all appearing the colours change and all of that, the outerface of the interface, recedes into comical  insignificance.

Under idealism the so-called anthropic principle is reversed in that it is the self-knowing hat achieves actualisation within the universe that requires its structures to be what they are, as if they are the inverted image of that knowing. Everything that is directly implicated in any knowing assumes the form required by that knowing and does so both retrospectively and prospectively in terms of the temporalisation that is concomitant to that knowing. It is because it can be known that what is there appears for the knowing, almost as if it is created on the fly just at the moment when it is needed, when it is locked in by cross reference. Mathematical truth is what the self-transparency of consciousness looks like when viewed from its flickering and complexified human shadow-like embodiment, and the mysterious conformity of physical reality to mathematical truth is a reflection of the constitution of this particular theatre of consciousness in its higher levels.

As though consciousness were a double focus in the one act with experience converging on the individual self at the same time as it projects duality of the world and the individual self as a single event. Inside that projection the self is a moving salient, a free referencing which can and does reference itself through its constantly varying distinction from its world, but the projecting, the outer subject itself, has no salience and is unchanging and so can't be reflected. The subject within the picture is not a true subject and its reflection is not a true reflection; its quality of being conscious is borrowed from the other, it is more or less filled, more or less emptied according to its ways. The other escapes all knowledge because there is nothing to contrast with it, but by stabbing at doubt it yields a kind of astonishment at existence which ripples through the whole scene with a primal delight.

If estrangement is no more than its effect, then so is absurdity, outdated idols of the mind. Whichever way you go there is always a further step, no lock but has its key or combination, no wall but has a door, everything unfolds at a cost you only find out on the other side. This is why there's no giving up on the real, everything else is a reduction, a simplification, useful for a time and then handed over, and you go on through the beating heart of its poem.