The more refined the consciousness, the more subtle and penetrative it becomes, the wider the scope of your experience that it unifies. In this way a greater part of what functions as your life history both as stored memories and as ongoing creation is revealed as the natural concomitant of whatever it is that functions as subject, or better of the ongoing ever-present functioning itself. So inevitably your metaphysical self is exposed in self-reflection. What is it that you will see here? Is it a sort of meaningless patchwork, like the diverse sensory data around which dreams crystallise, a fundamental incoherence which is unified only by a belated fabulation? Or is it something with a unity of its own a soul with its own ultimately necessary being inherent in a greater Being? The former is perhaps the Buddhist or the neurological version, the latter the Platonic or spiritual reality founded on a soul. Roughly summed up you could say that in one case the ultimate truth only the unveiling of the basic error of ascribing inherent being to the transient, in the other it is your place in the Pleroma or the mind of God, from which there remains a further step to take into the uncreate. Are these really alternatives, or do they only differ as projections onto time, time which itself, in either case, but perhaps in different ways, is non-existent? At any rate, although you might lean one way or the other, there is no reason to foreclose either alternative. See them both as expressions of fundamental doubt.

If you are not utterly gobsmacked by all of this, by the way that attention is absorbed in this infinitely complex and utterly meaningless interweaving of worlds and stories with which it has exactly nothing to do, then you are asleep in it and only dreaming of being awake. The only appropriate response is astonishment, and even the astonishment, being a species of identification, has to be let go of. The astonishment is a gift that has been waiting for you from the very first moment until now, it is in fact, the very heart of the unchanging now, which is why all the threads you've woven out of eagerness and avidity just peel away. They won't fit together, that was never the intention, but they are literally charming so that you can only feel affection for them, like animals or children, in their freshness and innocence. And whether you get it or not makes not the slightest difference.

Up and then down again, from light to dark, from thin to thick. Whatever comes about in time departs with time and cannot be what was sought which is what is outside of time and unvarying in presence. The mind does time with so much flair, but you are not the mind, you are what makes mind possible. You do the mind as blindly as the mind does time. In a way there is nothing sweeter than this embrace of being, even when it is bitter-sweet, or maybe even more so then. The silence, the night sky, breathing.

What comes first, the word or the thought? Brood over the pearl grey screen of mind. What comes first, the brooding or the screen? Anything can happen, and it does! Every time. Perfect.

In entering sleep you surrender autonomy in order to gain more freedom in feeling and imagination. For all its variety of detail the movements permitted in waking life are highly constrained, and this constraint is frustrating and exhausting. The movements in waking are cut short but in dreams you can 'follow through' even at the cost of being unable to make much sense of where you are or what is happening. What is it that needs to move in this way? The heart? The soul? Whatever it is it seems more real than what you take to be yourself, this unknown thing that you live on behalf of. As if you feed it with experiences, take it on holidays and to shows, feed it with art, religion, as if it is as demanding and incomprehensible as a baby. You are never quite sure what nourishment it craves, what, in short, is the point of experience. There are theories, of course, tacitly understood, mostly social in nature, and therefore entirely vacuous. It is nothing if not entirely inward.

In remembering some distant occasion the pattern of events seems quite clear and you have the impression that if the memory were to grow clearer and its focus wider the pattern would become clearer still so that everything would be seen to fit together perfectly. The same must hold true for your current now to which you are as blind from the dazzling salience of the present and the need to be broadly reserved in looking to the future as in any poorly recalled past. Still, it's not impossible to become aware of living in a tiny part of a vast pattern while actually doing so, that to is undergo an alteration in the temporality of presencing so that it inheres in kairotic rather than chronological time, and for this to be a potentiality at every moment. What this implies is that the ordinary perception of living in the leading edge of flowing time is a product of a certain kind of selective blindness, something like a projection into a lower dimensional space - the kernel of which, to continue the mathematical analogy, is the so-called sense of self, although largely obfuscated. It is perhaps enough to see that the living now does not visit each successive moment but is precisely what each moment consists of - up to and including its own half-blindness.

If there is a necessary connection between consciousness and being it does not follow that there is a necessary connection between consciousness and you. But what about the connection between consciousness and someone? Oddly, you can think of 'your consciousness', as if it were something you came to possess, a troublesome gift perhaps, more easily than you can regard yourself as belonging to consciousness, as if you were its disposable and replaceable vehicle. Perhaps it is correct to have an intimation of something that precedes consciousness, but it is also the case that whenever in the course of things you are more or less consumed or partially annihilated the result is always unproblematically positive, an unencumbering without mystery or drama. But you can never-endingly manufacture mysteries and dramas to prevent such a thing from happening or even being imagined.

There cannot be a consciousness without it's being located; it is an awareness of something relative to something. There can be no single 'sciousness', a pure distinguishing or cutting-out without anything to be cut out from, but always a relationship of awarenesses, one inside the other. But you are used to taking the world-thought, something really quite late onto the scene, as the basis or the base from which your consciousness stands out, as something whose reliability and constancy defines your shadow-like evanescence. But what is not consciousness cannot be the basis for consciousness since it is by definition unknowing and unknown, only consciousness can be its own boundary. This is the strongest argument for idealism and is absolutely evident when seen in the right way, (crescendo) and entirely unconvincing when seen in the habitual way as secondary to the world's being (diminuendo). Even a consciousness that was far below the level of reflection would have to knowingly be its own foundation. Reflection obscures this by interposing an inapt model of self-founding for which infinite regression would seem an insuperable barrier. The burden of proof needs to be turned completely around. 

If you think you need to look for it then you should take a look at who is looking. It is as if the play of presence and absence, with its notions of evidence and verification, has imposed itself over a presencing that needs and sustains no such markings. You invent subjects because of the idea that a subject is required, but all of these subjects, these 'I's of yours are just objects in thought or experience that you take to be the thinker or experiencer. And if you think to do away with them you are falling into the same error. They are simply the backwards parts of the mechanism or organ of experience. Or you could say that the distinctions that structure experience are all distinctions in experience and hence no distinctions at all.

Most of your thoughts are not your own but derivations from the cultural moment you inhabit, and that of course includes this thought. It's not merely that, it's more as if each thought or element of reflective experience comes with a signature, with a more or less hidden label certifying its origin, its lineage and date, its appellation d'origine contrôlée. If you aren't aware of it it means that it is likely to be recent and more or less concocted. It is truly your own only if it reaches across time and gives you the sudden intuition of timelessness which is no more than the medium in which the self has its being; and time is only the ground-up powder of diverse timeless moments. The apparent flow of time belongs only to the profusion of succeeding objectivities - there is no retention and protention on the subjective side only a shimmering of multiple moments known immediately and without separation. This is the intensive manifold whose logic is incompatible with that of the extensive manifolds of perceptual reality.

In perception the subject is wholly cut off from the object, while in thinking you might say that the subject is in the midst of its object and in feeling they are entirely fused. These are not all the possible modes in which a content arises in consciousness; in every case there is a characteristic implicit distance between subject and object and it is probably never greater than in perception and never less than in feeling.  Perception is taken to be the prototype of attention, or of intention in the phenomenological sense, and so it is easy to assume that the separation between subject and object is always evident to simple reflection. This is really a case of perceptual bias, wrongly labelled sometimes as the 'metaphysics of presence'. The sense of an objective self is concealed in those modes of consciousness where the subject and object are not and cannot be clearly delineated, in modes that do not show themselves in the light. The most obvious of these is feeling, but feeling is also never separate from will, in the sense of preparation for possible action on the basis of valuation, which is in turn never separate from thinking. If the question is then how to be attentive to feeling without treating it as an object of (inner) perception, then one obvious answer might be via music or dance. These however, are essentially mediated by social consciousness. You need not go so far. It is possible to be attentive to feeling and to incipient purposeful action without making them into objects of a quasi-perceptual kind. The trick might be to use the sense of 'I' not as an ontological pivot but as no more than a sort of organ of awareness, without distinction, affirmation or negation.

It's peculiar that literary mimes of the stream-of-consciousness are most aesthetically pleasing and insightful when they seem to best represent the so-called 'default mode', that murky and multi-threaded self-centred musing that takes up the largest part of waking consciousness when you are not engaged in any focused or creative activity. As if the highest creativity is expressed in representing a state that is at best passively and whimsically creative, but generally not creative at all. It's like a sort of mental compost, rich in many broken down and decaying fragments and disjecta of past engagements. On one side it is the blankest and most useless of states but on the other it seems to have the deepest foundations. The trouble with focused states is that the mere presence of an active will flattens them, the will creating a kind of backstop or limit to penetration. The absence of active will or even of self-consciousness in the default mode opens the back channels even as access to them is blocked buy a buzz of mental parasites, or static. This is probably why psychoanalysis prefers free-association, which is merely the default mode with commentary, and with an (implicit) listener. Perhaps, taking a cue from stream-of-consciousness, it is time to revalue this mode, if only for its absence of all striving?

Guilt or shame or responsibility are only so many forms or vehicles that the pervasive tenor called egoity takes on, they represent no ultimate in any way, and many other variants are possible, but are typical as drawn forth by a certain evolutionary inheritance. More generally what is it? A sort of concerned delineation within a still shadowy and half-awake knowingness, crystallisations in a still cloudy medium. In another respect, more strictly evolutionary, they might also represent a kind of 'back-door' or 'Trojan-horse' accessible to social programming, or the need for the burgeoning self-awareness to not be able to know itself too well so as to avoid being wholly enclosed in its own defences, a necessary opening, a necessary way of being traitor to oneself.

What the ego is is not ownership or identification but responsibility, culpability. Isn't this clear even in the Biblical story of the Fall? That it was the tree of Knowledge, of a certain kind of knowledge, is not as material as the fact that it was a forbidden tree and the act of eating from it a disobedience. Eating of it was a breaking of faith with their Maker, and if the result was a feeling of shame this was not about their nakedness, but shame at their act which caused them to see themselves in a new way, as guilty of a trespass. So that this guilt became attached to themselves and to their sense of being together. It is only in retrospect that the knowledge is called of good and evil - it was the trespass that brought those concepts into being. What each of them saw in the other was a reflection of the act. That their own experience belonged to them and was private, that there was an I, me, mine, was simply a fact of nature and no cause for shame. The true mystery, in so far as the Fall can be taken to be a symbol of the involution of consciousness, is the origin of shame, guilt and responsibility, and more than this of the peculiar fashion in which they proliferate within the psyche. How could that phenomenon arise out of primal innocence and be the seed of humanisation? As if God is brought in ex machina to try to explain this strange fact.

The object in attention is never simple but always a figure-ground relation, in which figure is relatively clear and simple and ground vague and complex. In any distinction between two simultaneous objects one is always more on the side of figure and the other more on the side of ground. Ground stretches away to the horizon and no further, but like a hyperbolic plane more and more content is packed into it the closer it is to the horizon, so that infinite 'stuff' is compressed into the horizon's inner rim. Matters in the ground are differentiated but not in an accessible way. They are differentiated because at any moment with your purposeful interactions with your world the presentation pivots so that some element of the ground becomes figure and what was figure recedes back into ground. What you take to be yourself as subject at any moment is an element of the ground, and is thus always an object or a pre-object, a prefigure. The veritable subject is beyond the horizon but since there is infinite content on the near boundary of the horizon it would take infinite energy to cross it. It is just because the veritable subject is beyond the horizon that the field of awareness is known as consciousness with all its paradoxical properties. There is no way to intentionally cross the horizon, but perhaps in an event akin to quantum tunnelling you might discover yourself to have always been 'there', outside of any possible 'there'. This gives a whole new meaning to Gertrude Stein's famous "There's no there there."

Theories of consciousness, or of self in so far as these coincide, and there are some quite good ones around, sophisticated, nuanced, au courant with all the latest research, etc. confronting the 'explanatory gap' at whatever level, all resemble Job's comforters. They are the best thought through, the most pious attempts to square the problem, to draw the optimum conclusions, but they exist only as the more or less indirect occasions for God to break His silence and come raging out of the whirlwind and blow them all away. There is no answer at any level of intensity that they command, whatever it might be. Or at least there shouldn't be, don't you dare even dream of it.

Self or selfness is a general concept that applies to any self-sustaining system premised on marking a distinction between self and not-self, and is therefore quite a different notion from consciousness. Selves in that general sense are relative and conditional virtual entities, easily deconstructed in thought if not so readily in practice. A self understood in this way does not need to be conscious, but since we grasp the phenomena associated with a self in an intentional manner is is hard to fully dissociate self from at least the possibility of consciousness. A self minimally seems to temporalise in the same way as a consciouness. On the other hand it is hard to dissociate the idea of having a self from consciousness, even though it might only appear in that special variant known as self-consciousness. Non-reflectiving consciousness is called pre-reflective for just this reason. What takes the place of self for consciousness is the subject, which since it is other than all objects and therefore can't be any sort of entity, is not deconstructable, is in fact what is pointed to mutely and uncomprehendingly by all deconstructions. Can you conceive of consciousness wholly without a self? The very question pushes the concepts to their limits and beyond like a koan.

Consciousness may partition into awareness, recognition and ownership, or in other terms, illumination, content and the sense of 'I', but not only do these aspects mutually imply each other, but each one can be subsumed as a special case or internal aspect of any one of the others. Of the three, however, it is only the middle one, recognition or content, that seems likely to be matched with a full description in mathematical terms, based on a suitable collection of objective conditions. But this means that the other two, the ones that seem to require metaphysics for their elucidation, could also be understood as special cases or annexes of this mathematical description. Metaphysics seems to insist when we try to understand certain aspects of consciousness, and so to give rise to more than one kind of hard problem, but it may be that this is an illusion born out of the quasi-self-reference of the contents of consciousness, together with certain structural inversions that block intuition. It could all be as simple as that. Any experience that suggests otherwise needs to be subjected to this kind of criticism - criticism whose conditions of possibility should also fall out naturally as consequence of the theory of content.

You could almost present it in pictures, a sort of wild pathos, like mercury flowing among dark abstract shapes that would resolve in the body, or in organs without a body. Unacknowledged generations of absence and refusal, room after empty room, without stillness or progression, of cold moonlight through bare windows and hidden rage. It's rare that you get see even this much of it through the confusion of dialogues and mirrors and you want to take all of it inside leaving nothing behind, without understanding but driven into clear emotion, and turn it round and around until it belongs only to your pure possibility.

Everything you understand as consciousness or presencing is temporalised, it flows according to the schemes of retention and protention etc. And temporalisation itself is temporalised, it is a more subtle resolving but flowing with the rest, with breath, with the beating of your heart, with the slow revolution of the light. Upstream or downstream are only different ways of precipitating a fleeting image in and out and back in time. You only look just ahead and are severed as as completely from what has passed no matter how large the scoop you have employed. For this to go on the subject must be outside of time and so cannot be grasped as any form of consciousness, the subject, or what you are, is neither in consciousness nor in time.

Objective being presents as reliably self-manifesting, that is, present there, independent of you; preceding you, accompanying you and bound to be there after you have vanished, regardless of what position you take towards it, reverence, respect or doubt or any variant. However the suspicion remains that whatever objective being is, and whatever you might happen to be, the latter is prior to the former; it is what it is for you and only for you. I other words it is doubtful in such a way as devolves on you to judge. In this sense the subjective enjoys a paradoxical ontological priority relative to the objective - paradoxical because the subjective is for the most part concealed and apparently insubstantial. Granted this, epistemologically it enjoys no such precedence. What determines true knowledge? Objective knowledge has the criterion of consensus verifiability, while subjective knowledge has only what amounts to its own feelings, its notoriously unreliable sense of reality. You have no answer to this beyond noting that objective truth or reality extends no further than objective ontology; that consensus itself is as much for you as what it is consensus about.

The content of consciousness is made up out of multiple fields of inner and outer senses, relative to the body, as well as ideational fields such as memory, expectation, imagination and temporality. You might say that they are overlapping fields, but this would be to simplify the relations between them, implying that there are marginal regions where they manifestly coincide. Certainly they seem to be joined together, but this might more accurately resemble a patchwork with hidden gaps and seams. The natural presumption is that the synthetic unity of the subject is paramount and justifies the unity of awareness, but there is no obvious witnessing of this. The witnessing is rather an individual feature of each diverse field, an attribute of consciousness as such. The intuitive certainty of a unified self is a posterior construction or interpretation layered over the the individual components in a process of rapid alternation. If this seems a rather Buddhistic insight, the fact remains that there is no especial care whose focus is the unity of the subject, it is at best a parsimonious working hypothesis.

Three attributes associated with consciousness and which are equally present in waking and dream are witnessing, content and ownership. These are of course mutually implicated, together with a fourth attribute which need not be present other than potentially, which is (the capacity for) reflection. Indeed, if reflection is defined as placing either witnessing or ownership within the content then we must also add not only the actual or potential freedom of self-determination, but also other forms of subsumption such as content within witnessing or witnessing within ownership etc. To say that these are attributes of consciousness therefore immediately contaminates them with consciousness, in the sense of a certain fractal nature whereby what is peripheral in one moment can unfold into being central in the next moment, as in a sort of spatialisation of the paradoxical infinitude of self-reflection. It is not only the simple regression going backwards of 'I know that I know that I know that...', but a version of the same action that which spreads out in all directions. The notion of experiencing is not subject to the same pullulation, but sits lightly without any tension in the direction of either 'truth' or 'reality'.

Maintaining waking consciousness seems to entail an energetic cost as if the brain machinery involved in the coordinated tasks that underlie this state becomes fatigued and needs to be refreshed in sleep. This is why the higher faculties of memory and reasoning become blurred and less and less available as the hours go by unless artificially boosted by stimulants, and sleep is felt to be a recharging of reservoirs of energy. Dreams might contribute to this by sorting and consolidating memories and emptying the buffers in which they are stored over short durations. In fact, to the degree to which our dreams are particularly energetic we might find that we wake up more tired in some respects than when we went to bed. The anomaly in this intuitive picture is the way that after a lucid dream one generally wakes far more refreshed and energised than after ordinary non-lucid dreaming. This in spite of the fact that some of the higher powers associated with wakefulness have been activated and put to work during lucid dreaming. This suggests that there is something about waking consciousness that is not simply the activation of machinery of wakefulness that is what is tiring. It is rather the constraint on consciousness in the waking state that is tiring, its being forced away from its native state. Just like the body having to turn about during sleep because nerves are squeezed and blood flow is restricted by remaining too long in one position, the consciousness in the ordinary waking state grows numb in parts because of the unnaturalness of its postures. What we think we know of consciousness is mediated by the parameters of waking consciousness, but these may be highly misleading due to their service of a body in an evolutionary landscape.

If you suddenly found that you were having a lucid dream you would not immediately test out your relative super-powers but would instead stop whatever it was you were in the midst of doing and carefully examine the material texture of the world in which you found yourself. You would want to bring about the sharpest juxtaposition of the certainty that all of this was mind-generated with the quality of infinitely rich layers of texture that material objectivity must have in order to pass the tests of independent reality. You would not want to waste an opportunity to view the imaginative constitution of the world from the other side of the tapestry. There is no need to wait for a lucid dream to do this, you can 'bracket away' the absence of the certainty that you are dreaming and perform the same kind of scrutiny with ordinary waking reality. If it helps, why not accompany this with the thought '(this is) experiencing'. Such a thought seems the furthest 'upstream' you can go, it is certainly prior to any notion of the 'I' and to the so-called natural attitude, and best of all it is prior to itself.