Its not that being is consciousness but that consciousness is being and so all things can come to rest in appearance without anything hidden, without an elsewhere. The peace and gentleness of phenomena gradually comes to envelop the self, the last outpost of restlessness and striving. Thoughts decoupled sound one by one against a background of silence, their urgent entailments quieted like a frightened child.

Mind is made up out of happenings distinctive in space and time and therefore consuming energy and subject to the laws of physics. If consciousness is also a happening, something like mind to the second degree, then it is also limited by the economics of the conservation of energy and increasing entropy. In this case there is no hope for idealism or anything like it. What is the alternative? That consciousness doesn't happen, but is the intrinsic nature of happening itself. It is not a phenomenon, and so can't be measured in energetic terms, but is rather what measures, what makes phenomena possible - without itself being any sort of 'what'. And so mind will always seek and understanding of consciousness but can never achieve it - the looking, neither present nor absent, can never be seen.

The immanence of temporalisation gives an eminent reality to time, but it is a reality of bondage. When there is an intimation of freedom from time, of its ultimately illusory quality, such as in Proustian recollection, your sense is of regaining a truer reality, a native state outside of the dream of life. Time is what you are most immediately up against, you are in its grain in a way that feels imprisoning just because you know that it can be escaped, like the imposition of an idea. In a corresponding way the bondage of space is your subjection to the gaze of the other, or if you prefer, of the Other. In each case it is a mode of being  which is alien to consciousness. But you can do no more than imagine that these can be awoken from, just as every duration no matter how oppressive is already abolished in the present in which it terminates, and every externality is no more than its meaning, potentially realised in the only way possible which is in that same presence.

The way you inhabit words when actually you don't. The words just go into words then curve around and come out the other side, like smoke rings ruffled by the gentlest breath of wind. If it wasn't easy to turn attention back onto its source then you never would have had to put up so many guard rails to prevent it. That you might just fall into a bottomless abyss, for example, or that you have to bring all these ideas along, or watch them dissolve like sugar in hot tea. The subject, and that would be you, is so naked it is frightening, absolute nakedness, what would that even look like after you'd taken off, or stepped out of, appearance as well? Something like an eyelet, perhaps, shiny and gold-coloured with a hole in the middle, clamped fast, riveted, crimped. Who did such a neat job, made that satisfying little sound? Hear it? So that you could dive through the hole, or the whole, but without any movement, pure act, the unmoved mover in every heart, and all the colours there too.

Attention is so enchanted by the visual that you imagine you can feel spatiality from the inside. But in this you are just superimposing the inner sense of the gesture which is purely temporal and qualitative, purely musical, onto some aspect of the visual field for which you have no corresponding inner sense at all, a fleeting representation of copresence. Which is to say that time and space are radically asymmetric and what you are is only the temporalisation. Indeed, if dreams are evidence of anything it is of the pure fictitiousness of space - you make up spaces as you need them the better to try to organise the overflowing of your experience as time. By the same token the sense of time as a linear succession of instants is a further confusion. You can't say what time is, this mysterious upwelling, this reaching and receding, because you are time, or better you are temporalisation without any possibility of a fixed object. 

Mind and awareness belong to different temporalisations and yet they meet in what from the point of view of mind, which is that of ongoing experiencing, are brief and native moments of inspiration, like touching base, slowing to breathe and wordlessly asking yourself where and what to which mind in innocence responds with fresh images and metaphors delighting in its own invention. It seems impossible that this could ever be exhausted since it draws upon the ever present immanence of being, and yet after all this time the marriage grows stale, the two sides move out of phase and no longer recognise each other. This is what it is and it frightens you because every attempt to restore the harmony just pulls them further apart. Can the mind ever be forgiven, ever forgive itself, for its inveterate whoring after strange gods?

There is no logic to the forms of succession, nothing is ever transcended or cancelled and preserved, things just follow in their own sweet way, even if it isn't always all that sweet. There are no answers because there are no questions, no arising experience is ever a question in its nature but only sometimes in its confused tenor seeming to need a response. To be under constraint you pace restlessly like a beast too large for its cage. The door never opens; there isn't a door. When that finally dawns on you then behold, you were never in there at all.

Too far ahead of yourself, or else too far behind, always out of true. You aren't clever enough to maintain beginner's luck for more time than it takes to hook your eternal gullability, so all that's left would be dumb and stubborn head-banging if you weren't too clever by half for that as well. But the beauty of stupidity is that you can keep it up without trying. There is no end to the gifts of freely accepted ridiculousness, just go on blindly, there's no other way.

It's not really a point of view but a reliably persistent and recurrent pattern of reference and co-reference within the unfolding event that creates and responds to the varying adventures delivered in time, and so while seeming to be at a certain remove from experience is only the way that experience is brought about. You can go on trying to add understandings to it without moving it in the slightest. The fulcrum and the lever are only images of what they might be and as such immediately melt back into the identical presentation. If it is only the idea of escaping egoism then it stands in the way of the the simple assumption of the 'me' at the centre of things. Whatever this is it is happening to you without any question about who or what you are. The assumption is without understanding and without need for understanding. The more tired you are the better because there is nothing to add to it and nothing behind it to get to, no next step to take.

Enjoyment is exclusively of consciousness, there needs to be a subject to enjoy, a subjective genitive of enjoyment, but enjoyment is split, it is refracted into a spectrum of distinct shades and it is divided into shards like criss-crossing reflected rays whose origins are lost in further reflections. So every chagrin is another's joy and every joy yet another's chagrin and all of these are mutually reinforcing within the same system of mind; self and other being movable counters in the same field. While there may be a certain contiguity in the enjoyments in that you can sense the echoing currents running in ambivalent channels the associated knowledges are hopelessly cut off from each other - knowledge being a belated addition, the only way in but out of phase with feeling. This is how the fiendishly clever puzzle of embodiment is put together and why no one stumbles over awakening despite the most varied forms of experience. The further you go in it the more hopelessly entangled you become. 

When you know that in a few hours you will be in a completely different place, in a different season, in a different reality, the world begins to lose some of its fixity, its inevitable quality, it begins to merge back into imagination. Even people's faces seem to lose some of their hardness and determination, to become less knowing. All of this goes on until a certain farcial element begins to appear, as if they are all poorly rehearsed actors - you feel vaguely sorry for them. And you wonder why you cannot see the world like this every day, why your imagination is so weak that it needs this most banal of catalysts - your ability to withdraw? At any rate it punctures that old bogey of the world going its merry way without you.

Note: Posting will be interrupted for next eleven days due to travel.

Desire acts on the will directing it towards the restoration of an earlier state of integration, but every intervention adds a further layer of disorder and so any such return is ruled out by the very fact of being wanted. But reintegrations do take place, unhoped for and without warning, by a sort of grace which momentarily suspends the will. And such moments are seized upon by the mind and become objects of desire in turn with all the attendant mechanisms of individuation, the ways of managing desire in a social context, endlessly ramifying, so that at the end of it you find yourself wondering if anything happened at all. Desiring to desire is as futile as desiring not to desire, there is no way to keep this simple once it has been touched by thought.

By the time you get to saying something about it you find that you're talking about something else entirely. It never puts itself forward, never suggests a form of words or a way of starting off. That's actually one of the things about it, its more than discretion. As a matter it is always there, silently abiding and blended invisibly into whatever is captivating reflection. It takes some attention just to notice that all the things that define the moment with seeming obviousness are utterly inadequate to define or explain anything. They cloak themselves in the ordinary so you won't be pulled up short by the mystery of how they got there in the first place, by the fact that they rest on something that isn't ordinary at all. The talking is always beside the point, but in such an odd way because the talking being present is the point too; call it the silence inside the words.

There is nothing in experience like subject-verb-object, no half-realised self-like thing aspiring to fullness; it's all streaming and intertwined lines of intention with no particular endpoints unfolding in endless kaleidoscopic variety with glints like reflected sunlight sparkling now here now there. But if that's a more precise version of it it doesn't get you any further, it might even be more misleading because it has filled in more of the blanks. Wherever the mind discovers a blank it quickly fills it in and anchors the filling to further rays of intention, endlessly spun. No, it's only that the whole mode of presentation is subject to sudden and complete changes in nature by the pulling of an invisible string, or the accidental bumping against a switch perfectly hidden in plain sight. It's like the way that the shifting of focus of a lens reveals the position of the camera out of any frame of represented space. Like that, but not in the visual field but the metaphysical one; a field you are always ready to swear does not and cannot exist at all.

Your inheritances and personal history, your place in the stream of human becoming determines the type and scope of your possible realisations even though their meaning is grasped in relation to being in general. Your access to Being is only such as can be mediated by your being, your particularity down to its finest differences. How is this possible? It is as though each particular was already accounted for within the universal, as if the very distinction of particular and universal melts away. But you can't explain this without doing an injustice to one side or another, and that is almost always the particular.

Among the things that you know with groundless certainty are that you are not your own creator, not the author or originator of your being, and also that your own being, that which is you in the deepest end most eminent sense has not arisen contingently but goes right down to the very root of being. These two knowings are contradictory in a way that doesn't trouble you. On the one hand everything that is is ultimately impersonal, that it 'does' its being without any account or distinction of individuals, and at the same time everything that is is utterly personal, with a personality of which you in your unknown depths are the perfect exemplar. Another way of saying this might be that you are not contingent but everything you know and experience is perfectly contingent. Perhaps this is what is meant by being 'necessarily contingent'. This is a notion which is almost thinkable, so take the thought and see that it has two sides like a coin, depending on where the stress is placed.

Your reality is not determined by the representation that you inhabit but by the world in which you act and interact. So then in a dream your world is the dream-world and your self is the dream-self as it arises from your dreaming experiences and engagements. If this were like the putative simulation, where now it is your brain that is doing the work of the computer housing the simulation, then your awareness would be only a dream-awareness. But isn't it in the nature of the dream that the awareness is not a mere thought or representation of 'an' awareness but your very awareness such as it is in every experience waking or sleeping. This is why lucid dreams are possible and why you can have insights into the nature of pure subjectivity in dreams whose aura of well-being and satisfaction persists for a good while after waking up, being only lost through the usual process of discursive overwriting? The analogy with the simulation hypothesis breaks down here; the dream may be an encapsulated virtual world within a world, but the non-point of observation is unchanged, is neither a matter in dreaming world nor in the waking one. And what if every objective world is nothing more than an ideal construct, so that there cannot be a sharp ontological boundary between the worlds inside or outside of a simulation? The problem is in the weight accorded to objectivity, the projection onto this concept of the sense of ground which you cannot yet accommodate in its only possible site in pure awareness. What lives you is your own incredulity.

If the experiencing inclusive of awareness were the running of an elaborate computer program then what would be needed to bring this about would be, in some ground reality, the installation of that program on a suitable device and that device's activation. In this case even if the resulting mind were able to discover its situation there would be no relation between the version of being internal to the unfolding computations and the being of the site in which that program was being run. It would be analogous to the disjunction between the diegetic world of a movie and the world of the screen in which it was being shown, except that in the latter case a direct connection exists between the seeing of the movie and the showing of the movie, both being in the same reality outside that of the movie-world. The former requires a moebius twist linking inside with outside. The complete independence of the two. It represents a possibility that can be imagined in the limit, but it goes strongly against our intuition as to the nature of awareness. One apparent solution to this dilemma is that the program does not need to be run, its giving rise to experiencing is assured merely by its existence as a formal object like a mathematical formula. This solution is no solution at all, just an immense question begging, but it seems to be the only way to save the initial assumption. There is something zen-like about its completely paradoxical nature which forecloses thought and leaves only mute wonder.

An economy is a system of exchanges of goods, services, permissions, attentions etc., all of which are concrete objects or actions, or consequential dispositions. All of this could therefore continue to function is exactly the same way without money, say if money were replaced by some other signalling system that was purely abstract or disembodied, that did not require a quasi-objective status on the same level as the matters concretely exchanged. But, of course this would not work without either collapsing the system or rapidly recreating a new form of money. What would have been withdrawn was the factor of motivation, the eliciting of active desires and purposes, and a system of ratios and equivalences which structures desires. Money however, doesn't 'know' how to do this, it is an abstract catalyst that enables motives to be mediated between minds in general - it the medium for a vast analogue computer. Motives and desires seem to be ultimately grounded in biology, but their mediation by money creates a vast superstructural filiation of further motives and desires, a sort of monstrous exoskeleton without which the world as we know it would collapse. Is there a psychic equivalent to this phenomenon? Surely there is? One the one hand the symbolic order, but on the other something like the endocrine system, and perhaps an inextricable combination of the two. You cannot understand the life-world without taking this into consideration, yet it is largely hidden from self-consciousness.