Thought cannot know being, cannot encompass the 'thatness' of a single thought, or a single moment of experience, but without the implicit knowledge of being no thought could be what it is; experiencing is shaped out of that implicit and thought-free knowledge of being and is nothing without it. Similarly, while all of your thoughts, no matter how coherent with a larger understanding of reality, are limited and erroneous, there could be no meaning to them if they were not shaped out of implicit truth. Implicit truth and implicit being are the same thing, they are the pure and fully realised possibility of the world, the prior of all experience. It is because you are the knowing of them without knowing, the learned ignorance of being, that you can appear as this experiencing, this thinking, this inquiry.

Being an embodied self in a world, a fully inhabited and integral lifeworld, may be regarded as a wholly immanent event, but it is experienced as a continuously evolving and multi-dimensional interaction with a reliably consistent givenness. The affordances of such a self are bounded by metaphors and symbols which are grounded in that givenness. At a deeper level of realisation, closer to the actively constituting imagination this can no longer be the case, and so the corresponding relations of the self to its symbolisations would be unbounded in every way. This does not make for chaos but for a more immediate fixation on whatever comes first to mind, as if the feedback is unmediated, faster and more intense. And thus the fear of letting go of anchoring in this sweet consensus reality, even if what you let go of is no longer identified with, and everything could could possibly take as being yourself is now so much more alive to itself.

Neither the feeling of alterity, nor the endlessly interlocking and outspreading causal connectedness of things is enough to prove the existence of a transcendent basis for experience, or in short, the objective universe. Such arguments, which seem to underlie the confidence of common-sense on this score, amount to little more than versions of the argument from design, so ably refuted by all the same suspects when it arises in another context. It is really a matter of the minimum requirements for the internal consistency of experience falling far short of such objectivity. In essence this is the same key idea as at the heart of the 'simulation hypothesis', although the latter has not at all given up on the idea of an utterly transcendent real that is out there, they have only changed its register to that of a distorted mirror image. The fact that the way of things resembles nothing that one would wish, or rather, nothing the wish for which one could acknowledge, counts for nothing, since it totally mistakes the nature of the illusion (for want of a better word). In this sense too idealism goes too far - it is still a theory with some reliance on a transcendent real, a way things really are. What is actually at stake is something far more subtle. Perhaps no more than refraining from a certain way of leaning on what is not, and cannot be, there. It's not that one needs to do away with the real - that would always be in the name of another version of the real, but rather to see that the concept has no value or consistency at all, is in truth, unthinkable.

Not to see your self but to be seen by others, to see them seeing you, to see them being seen by you. To touch an other and to see them respond to being touched by you, to feel them knowing you by touch. To want an other and to sense their wanting you. To make no further gesture but allow the ripples of timeless acknowledgement to spread out into pure knowingness. All these ways into the thickness of the world, this gift of embodiment, these interlocking circuits of exchange of awareness, with eyes, with hands, with lips, without a face or boundary.

This is not the record or transcription of an inner voice but the practice of a literary form, an activity the creates the imagined reality which it purports to express, but not as a disinterested activity, rather as implicated in every other project belonging to the collage of your works and days. All of it is literary in that sense, essential structurings of something that has no structure. If one of these projects goes out of equilibrium them they all do, and what equilibrium any of them possess is only tactical, not a goal but a response to unpredictability. Perhaps the whole thing, the polyphony of it, adds up to something essential, perhaps it necessarily does so, but what that is cannot be imagined from anywhere inside it. All that you know is the moment to moment limitation of the imagination, the persistent and impossible desire to devour the whole world.

Awareness of awareness is ever present in the background and is why there are qualia, why there is something that it feels like to be you. It is also why it is always clear that nothing that appears can ever be the experiencer. This is nothing that you do or that you bring about but is the simple nature of experiencing. Nevertheless there is something incomplete in this mode of being, the knowing itself of awareness creates a tension towards fuller realisation at the same time as the capacity for that fuller realisation is already fully accomplished in it. It is as it it wants to add your mediation to its own immediation. But to do this it applies to you the knower, which on the surface appears to be the oddest choice. Why should the full unfolding of self-knowing need to include the personage you in its circuit? It insists on bring it about with the least likely of means. There is such a comical mismatch here, sending a puppet to do the work of a god. Well, if it amuses the god to do so, who are you to say.

Being as a self is a kind of nostalgia in that it inextricable from a complex weaving back and forth between frameworks of time- the future looks back to a past looking to the future looking back... Are all your emotions the result of investments in these patterns linking a past a present and a future, as if the very qualia that make them up are primitives of temporal reference and repetition? But nothing actually happens in time, the whole performance is only in the present without any duration. Such an understanding yields nothing in time. It offers no way out, which is why you can hardly bear to consider it, preferring the strange refluxes of time's fatal worship.

An epoch in which the mind's swarming curiosity, its tinkering and tampering is directed towards its own functioning, its own activity in tinkering and tampering with itself, is one in which it seems we are approaching an unexpected turning point. It is that objectivity itself is being being dissolved into the subjective activity of objectivising, and subjectivity is being progressively emptied out of all its latent structure. At some point all prognostication, all dialectical logic fails, the future can no longer resemble the past, its foundations melting away from beneath it. It cannot be viewed as either positive or negative only inevitable.

Experience is situation and who you feel you are is the heart of this situation and depends on how widely its horizon is illuminated. All of the variants of experience, the way that layer after layer can be remembered or forgotten, are due to the ever changing width of the circle of daylight around you. What is forgotten is present but in darkness, like the world at night. And the aperture can open as well, without limits, as in one of those projections outward from the nearness around you up into the sky and then further out by powers of ten into cosmic space. It is the same expansion but in a space of meaning rather than physical space. But even if you take those journeys you won't have moved one iota as long as there is any centre or heart to the situations, as long as that very idea has any currency.

They ask how you can have morality without God, surely then, they say, anything goes? But it seems that the real question is how you can restrain morality without God? If, as others argue, morality is deducible from reason and science then when can you call it off, how can you prevent it from becoming unforgiving and tyrannical? Where is the irony in this all-pervading literalness? This is an old problem which has no easy solution either way. You would do away with morality altogether, perhaps as a form of dualism, but the idealist who denies the ultimate otherness of the other is in no better shape. There is no dialectical resolution that does not impoverish and betray experience.

Panpsychism often conveys the impression that there are something like atoms of primitive consciousness in physical objects on the smallest scale. These prehensions, precursors of apprehensions, are like tiny grey-glimmering corpuscles of sentience inside the dark heart of matter. And when such matter is rightly configured they can somehow magically bind together and assume their own evolutionary development. This way of imagining it still views consciousness as a sort of ghostly mind-stuff, and it also meets up with the idea of the initial form of consciousness as a sort of dim and one dimensional sense-certainty. Such notions may be premised on the common mistake of equating consciousness with with the quality of sensory experience, qualia in effect. If however consciousness is taken as presencing without sensory commitment, then doesn't this rather point to simply being in a world, something that doesn't have degrees, doesn't attenuate or intensify. Panpsychism on this view would have to grant full citizenship to every entity without any need for 'binding' - and hence the peculiar pathos and beauty of things as they are. Mostly what we think of as consciousness, therefore are only phenomena of mind. And so in looking in the mind for consciousness we are always looking in exactly the wrong direction. If consciousness is hidden it can only be in plain sight.

Any gift of the spirit can evaporate away in an instant, and arise in another instant. You only know how to blindly grope your way towards them, or where you imagine they might be found, those you might still recognise: a collection of disparate and outmoded curios; certain flavours of recollection and broken intimacies, little pieces of abandoned histories still dear to your heart. Thought is just so much noise, what you crave is surrender and oblivion. Forget about the mountains, make your home in the valleys. Return a penitent, reclaim every item of baggage, and start again at the foot of the stairways.

Doubt or seeking is simply the result of a difference in the self-certainty of subjective and objective being, although saying it this way begs the question of the subject/object distinction. It would be better to accept that there is self-certainty without an assumption as to what form it takes. Why would there be any motivation to resolve doubt, much less a persistent and nagging tendency if there were not an immediately known criterion of certainty - but this inner-self certainty is not known or admitted since it has no objective quality. The cogito is of course an epochal attempt to bridge the gap, but it fails by setting up the 'I' as the self-certain object. There is self-certainty but it belongs more to the unveiledness inherent in awareness than to the volatile and situational centre of knowing. The self-evident is experienced with an absolute minimum of intent or cognitive pressure, but every positive experience of a something involves so application of such pressure. These (pressure and no pressure) must not be viewed as contraries on the same level. What is needed is their complete interpenetration. 

It's not that you suffer from the illusion of being or having a self with innate being but that you are habitually in search of such an entity while simultaneously doubting that it can be found. By looking for it you hope to bring it about, being just ahead of yourself. Human experience is such a search and it takes many forms, of which perhaps the least troublesome is the one directed towards confirmation via knowing. When it aims at confirmation by feeling or willing the results are more troublesome and more interesting. It has a terrible beauty because of its pure contradiction. But what you inherit from your historical culture is a way of framing the search and an intensity in pursuing it. As soon as the search relaxes or temporarily halts you are more than ready to laugh it off as absurd, seeing that there's clearly no such thing and that it doesn't matter even it there were, but you are still far from pulling out the idea by its root.

Access to yourself is only through the mind and the mind is full of static, of the detritus of dreams; that is what you are, that is all that you are. Have you ever got the better of mind? Or has it all been an elaborate trick? More than likely; and growing disillusioned do you go back to square one? But square one belongs in a dream, together with squares two and three and all the rest. There is no direction that makes it any clearer. You can only persist in your folly with no expectation of becoming wise. But that's not it either, doesn't catch the oblique flavour. It would be enough to meet this obscurity full-on, but that's just what you can't do. It is sideways to everything.

Consciousness become self-consciousness through externalisation or expression which are themselves only special forms of internal processes that go beyond consciousness. Expressions such as this would seem to begin at a certain level or intensity and presumable also end at another level or intensity. The expression is for the sake of an unrevealed nature, and so what is most real for it is that unrevealedness. Is production the result or error or its cause? Your purpose is only to say and think these dim approximations and intricate evasions towards an end which is also your own end. This end is not in time but in the very form of the thought that brings the thinker to light only for it to be immediately dissolved in its own light and shadow.

The categories by which your self is apprehended are empty in the sense of the emptiness of a net drawn out empty from a plunge in dark waters. They are either subtle inner feelings such as were they to suddenly disappear you would be jolted by the strangeness of their absence into a fine and sharp awareness, and so they have little more value than that of a useful habit - it is restful to 'dial them up' and drown in them, in other words to sleep -; or else they are formal unities, like the unity of apperception: everything experienced is experienced by you, but such unity is empty because there cannot actually be anything, any diversity, to unify, there being no outside; or else it is an introjection of a social phenomenon: you are what exactly others are mistaken about when they address themselves to you, but for this to work you need to first imagine others on the model of yourself, etc. Could it then be what you are mistaken about when you think 'I'? No, you can't pick yourself up by the bootstraps. When there is talk of eliminating the ego it can only mean a vivid apprehension of the failure of all such strategies which does away with both self and non-self in the same gesture.

Oblivion of being - not that what you experience is an illusion but that the apparent experiencer is. What is doubtful in experience is just who or what it is that it opens to, or open from. This is a question you can ask yourself but it yields no answer, not because you are mired is unwieldy concepts designed for the manipulation of objects in space and time but because attention won't bend around far enough - it gets ahead of itself and seizes on something extraneous, it goes back to some subtle object, a fringe of thought. That's why there is talk of something like waking up from a dream - the images don't change but the dreamer is replaced by another who was there all along but unknown. It is always possible to discover yourself to be another kind of subject because the subject position is never filled out in the picture - there's nothing you can see there, it's guesswork anchored in whatever sensations seem the most reliable at the time. That's where the free-play is, the undiscovered degrees of freedom - and like waking from a dream whatever succeeds the ordinary oblivion is felt to be the most natural thing in the world, is instantly recognised as what you were all along - and there is no limit to how far this can go - self after self, and principle of selfness after all selves.

It once seemed that every work of popular art contained a not so secret anagogical dimension, the open possibility of a mystical interpretation, if not directly then dialectically in reverse, but this understanding grew more and more strained as you were confronted with an avalanche of popular works which seemed demiurgical through and through - these pointed emphatically to a kind of absolute, even a kind of transcendence, but it was one wholly lacking in the 'pneumatic strain' - to put it in gnostic terms - the very distinctive flavour of super-mundane transcendence. This was a lack without even a dialectical seed. Something similar is evident in the currency of the 'simulation hypothesis' - this is after all a version of creationism, but one whose God is very much in the image of Zarathustra's Last Man. There is even a fear that if 'we' confirm this hypothesis then 'our' creator will delete the entire experiment - therefore it is better not to know. Again, a debased version of the Tree of Knowledge. Can the transcendental imagination become depressed? Can it fall into a black hole? Do we really have to go there, to the demiurgic Inferno of bad art, to find out?

Not enough is said about neutrality, the metaphysical in-breath that is a suspension of will and desire, not their absence. The pure coolness of a Winter evening without any irritable reaching after certainty or the even more tantalising avatars of uncertainty. Everything settled back into its own place and a kind of impalpable grace suffused in you and through you; and you can only nod in calm acknowledgement of all the invitations to chaos. Windless time resting on the fields of sleep.

Linear time is objective time is the time of objects. As you are entrapped in the shrinking cell of a lifetime you are object, what you are is the imagination of that objective self with all its novelistic pathos, grandeur and absurdities. But objective time makes no sense, the past and the future are non-existent and the present is infinitesimally small, and besides, all your experiences are registered after they supposedly happened - how do you know when you weren't even there? Subjective time is not linear, it is an opening and an opening up within itself, you can think of it as a kind of movement, but not from A to B, but a welling out, a brimming over, a play or ratios and strictly orthogonal to that imaginary linear time; much more happens in it than ever a narration can capture, without anything strictly happening that is coming and going. Attention couldn't be attention without this other dimension that is not attention - and that, as they say, is why it's called attention.

Because the flower is the most beautiful part of the plant, and is the part that contains what to us is the leading edge of its interaction with our own systems of value does not mean that that the entire plant is for the flower, or that the flower comprehends the plant. In the same way your consciousness may be the flower of your life, might even be the leading edge of your social value, but that doesn't mean that your life is for the sake of your consciousness or is comprehended by it. And here perhaps self or even ego could be substituted for consciousness - it is what seems, naturally enough from its own perspective to be the entire point of the exercise, but that is precisely how it serves the greater needs and purposes of life without being aware of it; all the better in fact for not being aware of it. And here again life should be taken in the largest possible sense. You may be sure that you inner self-certainty is at the core of your truth, but in fact the cogito is only the eclosion of a bud; everything you are has been given to you by transcendent processes, and this same giving has sown its seeds far and wide, for ends you cannot comprehend, ends you can only regard as absurd. So unless you realise and surrender your own purpose within that greater inscrutable purpose you are still a belle âme, a flower caught up in floral illusion.

Your past is multiple and labyrinthine, it is multiple temporalities yours and those of others in successive and mirroring perspectives that are blended and infused into the world around you, into every object and place and the life of the city and the skies. No voice of the past but carries its echoes and refractions of old desires and imaginings and the layers of monuments that rose up over other monuments whose obsolete whisperings were never stilled. As if you could hold the whole thing in your hand and feel it as it was meant to be, like a curious glass ball, heavy and cool, mysteriously alive. And all of this inseparable from a future in abstract folds of misty time that recede to some vanishing point from which uncertain questing rays stream forth like headlights on a foggy road at dusk. And here, the fierce and powerless present where one streams into the other.

If mind were like a control-system modeling the world from within the world then you could think of it as having a certain number of degrees of freedom in the face of a larger system with a great many more, and there would be certain hard limits as to what it could 'know'. But mind and world are not separate and in a sense mind thinks with the full potentiality of the world, just as world knows itself through mind and its yet undiscovered possibilities. The evident incommensurability of mind and world is therefore not the sign or symptom of a limit - mind by its nature being the exceeding of any given limits - but a product of their contingent relationship, of the currently evolved form of an ongoing relationship whose further possibilities remain unknown. What can be seen is that the limits of mind in experience are contingent, defined by this inner relationship and there is no knowing what the intrinsic limits of mind are. There is every reason not to accept that these limits are defined by the world, but that the world itself is only a shifting and contingent boundary within the true nature of mind.

Fear punches right through time; it is an emotion to turn towards, going against the current instead of with it, instead of turning away and searching out the most immediate distraction. How much more yourself you feel when fear is pressing into you, and you go back, back in the immediate abolition of the intervening durations to infancy to that mother from whom you are not yet separate and whose emotions you share; and what if you find that she is filled with fear as well, and you see it in her extending back even further, to ancestral memories, and yet further still to the race, the species, the phylum, to to the very origins of life. Fear is like a taproot extending into the pith of being. There are no bulwarks but they can be blown away in the next gust of terror, and that is precisely what is so terrifying, and what fear is trying to show you. O to never be without this salt.