It's not about awareness of awareness but the impassioned belief in a reality outside awareness. Such a belief as much lived in body as entertained in mind is at least as real as any of its objects, that is, its results. It is attested not by any direct experience but by the consistency with which it is imbricated with every other formal objectivity, together with the altogether false idea that such consistency constitutes a proof or highly significant piece of evidence for what it asserts. It's the passion behind it that counts and that is made out of negativities, out of ideas of suffering. If your pain corresponds to a history of some kind of buried trauma or guilt then you are going to have a pretty strong investment in the unremembered past and a strong belief that a feared exhumation and resolution of that past lies between you and any sort of freedom. But again, consider that from the perspective of awareness the passion is on exactly the same footing as every other kind of transcendentally motivated experience. And this goes also for the presumption that some sort of coherent structure of references is involved, and that there is an owner or locus of such references. If the smallest thing collapses then the whole lot collapses - all of it relying on the same trick. And the trick too, and the idea of there being such a trick, and so on and so on. It's never that it isn't but only that there never was anything like it at all, or that there is something to see or something not to see, or anyone seeing or not.

All these ways of pretending that you are permitted to mean something in speaking of awareness of awareness. If you are aware of it then it isn't awareness but at best some sort of parallax fringe you've hypnotised yourself into perceiving at the edge of things. In other words it is a verbal formula that invents some addition to ordinary mind. It is the same if you think of the 'space' in which all experience 'takes place'. This is admittedly an idea rich in destructive potential: all of experienced space, its contents and their causal and topological relations immediately dissolves in it, as does time, all boundaries, changes, differences ... and then itself disappears so that nothing is left, or the absence of absence (of which presence is a special case) - at which point some fool starts talking about experience 'arising' in it, as if arising were too not long gone. Perhaps it is enough to point to it as the unsullied - no matter the fetid quality of the consciousness, this emptiness stays pristine, unclouded. The worst pain or the greatest joy are indistinguishable - no wonder it seems to wear an enigmatic smile.

To be entirely in situation so that even that thin layer of freedom in every situation, the part that is outside itself and which makes the situation, any situation, possible is thoroughly steeped in the predominating mood. It is in internal motion, a sort of orbiting back upon itself, like being reminded over and over again, re-minded, and this is constrained to a tight compass, so that you only squint in passing at the space in which it takes place. So fast and so populated with ghostly presences from whom you take account and shame. It's not the circumstances but the way you accede to them, something in the heart that has to overcome this song but is so tired of the fight. It is exactly on these occasions where you can barely resist, where your powers are at a minimum, your language weakest, that you have to begin to push back, where that which has never been done before is offered. You are not the suffering but the resistance to suffering, the minute no.

Phenomenology fails, at least for you. You've never come close to describing moods, feelings, or any thing akin to sexual arousal. These are not forms of belief, they are manifest disproofs of a transcendental subjectivity. You can't unpick these states or run them backwards, just as you can't say how form and content get into the mind. Literature, drama, poetry and song, all of these suggest otherwise keeping the fantasy of detachment alive, but they all work by creating situations for which identification can do the work. And identification is a misnomer, it begs the question. What is at work is a kind of mimetic contagion followed by a catharsis, an illusion of freedom, made up out of simple passions which come to seem far more differentiated than they are. It is the delusive allure of higher culture. 

Every depressed thought you've ever had is probably true. Truth and a certain horror are inseparable companions. No genuine observation is ever refuted, at most it might be put in a different context, but that is already a work of confusion. But so what? Is that anything to get upset about? The thing is just what it is, analysis is futile, there are no ideas about it that are going to change it. The subject will change but the fact won't go away. You are never so foolish as when you let yourself be talked out of what you know to be true. Emotional reactions are just ways of trying to avoid simple consequences by inviting, or pretending to invite, persuasion.

What's called egoism is from start to end a social phenomenon in which the emphasis is on one kind of self object to the detriment of other kinds of self object. It's best seen in others, and if in yourself then it is when you imagine your appearance from the outside. If there is a problem with it it falls under morality or etiquette, but it has no metaphysical significance. Self-objects of any kind are assumed and unexamined - since no such object can be its own ground, they don't qualify as self in the only sense that would count. It is quaint that a certain kind of behaviour is taken to be self-directed. First find out what this self is that you would favour and when you do then all question of egoism is irrelevant. How can you favour that in which everything appears?

The Copernican revolution is not what it's cracked up to be. Just because it is easier to calculate planetary motions by taking the sun as the centre of the solar system doesn't mean that it is true to say that the earth goes around the sun. The motions are what they are relative to whatever frame of reference you choose to take. One frame of reference is better for one thing and another for an other. As far as we are concerned as earth inhabitants the sun really does go around the earth, it does so relative to out frame of reference. Contrary to the typical denigration of ego-centrism mind has a peculiar affinity for placing the centre of reality outside itself, for treating its reality as relative to something else 'more real'. This is there from birth, the structure of the ego is already other centred. In the ordinary course of things there are multiple centres revolving around each other and it is only with the greatest difficulty that we can stay with the frame of reference centred on our own awareness. Otherwise it slides around under the influence of multiple attractions, each with their copernican rationale, multiple confusions.

What is it that the simulation hypothesis is trying to say? Is it about the reality presumed to be behind appearances? It would amount to saying that this reality is in fact an appearance produced by another reality still further removed behind the reality behind what we know as appearances. Only at the very end of a chain of such constructions, presumably, would there be a classical reality where quantum type effects do not exists because the primary entities are fully real in their own right. Out of these a simulation has been created by classical 'architects' which veils its artificial nature behind a physics burdened with quantum effects, such a physics being what is discovered by the virtual minds inhabiting the simulation. When you try to put the picture together in this way it becomes nonsensical. The actual motive behind this notion goes the other way around - since unchecked technological development will, it is assumed, inevitably produce the capacity to simulate the universe, including the minds knowing it, we must assume that as a statistical fact that a vast preponderance of the 'worlds appearing for minds' are actually taking place inside such simulations, and hence that our reality is almost certainly such a one. Quantum weirdnesses which seem to somehow point to an anticipation of the observer is then taken to be circumstantial evidence backing up this claim. Either way it begging the question of a reality behind appearances - but what if such a notion is ruled out from the start? It is a very clever and slightly desperate attempt at answering the wrong question.

The cross-consistency of sensory fields and the generalised path-independence of the relations between distinct points in the world are two kinds of evidence for the existence of a solid reality behind appearances. How else, the argument would go, could so much consistency be underwritten? This carries considerable weight against the notion that reality is dreamed up, or is otherwise a product of the mind and its ever-creative imagination, but it counts for nothing against awareness, against that awareness in which both mind and world appear. This is simply because the evidence of any such consistency is only such as it presents itself to awareness. If this seems complicated it is only because it isn't understood, seen rightly there is nothing simpler. It must be grasped before thought, just because what it points to is before thought. Thought being only the thinking arising in primary awareness, and so on.

In the idea of the original Fall, that of Lucifer, we must assume that the angels were created with both free-will and imperfect knowledge. These while not necessarily the same are concomitant. Lucifer acted on an error of judgement about the nature of the Self. Bridging a gap in knowledge in one of two possible ways he chose the wrong one - as, following him, did a substantial portion of the angelic host - in fact a definite proportion of that host, sometimes given as one tenth. Presumably God could have tweaked the parameter dictating the nature of this gap so that a different proportion could have resulted - up to one half? Or maybe even more if their ignorance was greater. Was there an optimisation or a trade-off that dictated the setting? This mythologem seems to anticipate the idea of a fundamental probabilistic uncertainty at the heart of creation, a collapse of the angelic wave-function. Whatever the stuff of reality it follows that it is measurable. Also, once this choice is made by the individual angels it is irrevocable. The angels who did not fall are not always poised at the brink of the same choice, so that in any period of time a similar proportion of unfallen angels would proceed to fall - it was a one-off choice. The latter case would seem to have been true of Adam and Eve: the longer they spent in paradise the higher the probability that they would transgress, so that their ruin would have probability of one in the long term.

Listening to romantic songs when you are young gives form and focus to your desires, they seem to hold a promise directed straight to you. And so you set about the project of realising those desires. You might come close to doing so, but only on occasions and never completely; even as they trace out a history these stabs at realisation melt away in your grasp, until it is clear that no matter how many layers of irony you wrap them in it is not in the nature of desire to be satisfied. If you listen again to those old songs you find that they contained no promises since they stood outside of time. They are purely images, and what you find is that the desires are perfectly subsumed in the image and don't reach out beyond it. There is a kind of transcendence in this which soothes the gulf between you and the world. The song is a taunting reconciliation, a sort of joke openly shared. Forgetting the song or whatever other lures backed backed them, the desires themselves are transformed into the stuff of beauty. Perhaps all desires, at least of the most disquieting kind, can be seen to follow this path.

 Our language capabilities are evidently hard-wired but phylogenetically quite shallow and in the same way it seems  that there must be ego-instincts even more recently acquired. Most of our drives and desires, and the concomitant emotions go back much further into shared ancestry. The ego, however has little or no existence outside of desires, drives and emotions, so rather than being a new evolutionary gift it seems to represent an attempt at organisational unification of the diverse mental processes. Since it generally does a pretty bad job of this, at best creating excessive overheads, at worst giving rise to functional collapse, there must be other advantages it brings, probably along the lines of short-term gains in cunning and deception, a double-edged sword. Everything purposive is taken to be identification and so the ego as the origin of will is extended in time, as hope, regret, love and pride etc. Purposes are multiple and support or conflict with each other giving rise to complex emotions which as the epiphanies of ego are valued in themselves. Perhaps this hobbling attempt at unification is not just a bad turn in the free creation of life but an attempt to more fully inhabit a prior unity which has haunted the mind from its first self-conscious awakening.

Every morning you start again from the beginning, or rather from where you've been left, high and dry, by your dreams. As if waking consciousness slows the process down to a crawl, as if it is no more than dreaming in very slow motion. Whatever it is that is connected to the sources of emotion, which live in a constant wild roiling, freezes up and what remains are what you call moods and half blame on the body which simply can't move fast enough. Music or movies might help a bit by giving you a weak imitation of dreaming, but if you feel tired or attracted to darkness and stasis that's just the drive to resume dreaming. Is dreaming there on behalf of waking life? That seems unlikely given the ludicrous nature of the latter, much more likely to be the other way around. Perhaps there is no emergence of order out of chaos, but only an illusion of such produced by an entanglement which temporarily hobbles chaos to a near standstill.

In the 22nd Canto of Paradiso Dante, elevated to the sphere of the fixed stars looks back at our solar system and is rewarded with a detailed understanding of planetary motions: "e tutti e sette mi si dimostraro / quanto son grandi e quanto son veloci / e come sono in distante riparo." ["and all seven [planets] showed me what is their magnitude and what their speed and at what distances their stations." Tr. Sinclair] If this is an expression of the purely intellectual illumination received at this advanced stage of his mystical vision it would explain why the many complex astronomical references throughout the poem are so detailed and seem so effortless - as if he could from now on intuitively comprehend the space-time relations of his universe in terms of a geometry that in fact, being four-dimensional, went beyond even the science of his time. But the truth that has become self-evident to him is one that we cannot reconcile with our own historically far more advanced knowledge. Does this not relate to the question of how it is that a higher consciousness can have direct and valid insight into scientific and mathematical truths without being able to translate these into terms that would effectively advance the contemporary state of scientific knowledge? This is almost like the Heideggerian suggestion that the cosmic reality that Dante encountered actually was as he described it, that Being itself changes ('change' being not the right word here) according to the epoch in which it is apprehended. Or better, it may just be a principle that excludes anachronism. You might say that Dante was shown the universe with its billions of galaxies in infinte space, but could not interpret in any way that exceded his scientific knowledge by more than a small fraction: "la mente mia così, tra quelle dape / fatta più grande, di sé stessa uscìo, / e che si fesse rimembrar non sape" (Canto 23). ["so my mind, grown greater at that feast, was transported from itself and of what it became has no remembrance".]

Purposive action, or in other words goals. Will is everything. The rage over a lost penny. You can get just as mad at inanimate objects when they frustrate your will as at other people. Even your fantasies can fail to shape themselves to your desire, you depend on imagination which has its own rules. But the social world is such a complex inter-relation of opposed wills, of deceptive signalling and oblique strategies designed to avoid as much as possible the naked confrontation of incompatible desires and intentions. You model others and make trade-offs so as to be spared from having to confront bare power and when this fails, as it often enough does, you find that there is no progression in life other than in dissimulation and self-deception, apart from which you are still a furious child.

You can temporally parse thinking, the arising and drift of thoughts, their pullulation and dissolves, and perception, easily when it is non-visual and with some effort visual perception too - imagine first that you are on a boat out in a broad stretch of water under a cloud filled sky and then allow the ripples to congeal and colour into whatever is before you - but you can't parse consciousness or the totality of subjective experience. Sometimes, standing before certain large abstract paintings you might get an intimation of the unfolding event as if it is pushed right up in the foreground too close to grasp but you can't be sure of this. It's simply because there's nothing to put it up against. If you could, in spite of this, using timelessness or a different kind of time as the register, then you could know whether primary consciousness is impersonal and its quality of selfness something that gets added on in the first microsecond of the birth of time, or whether it is selfness all the way through, which might as well be impersonal for all the little it has to do with the thick and smeary version that you inescapably find yourself always already bathing in.

The world is overwhelming even the little of it that you can encounter, distorted through the pinhole of your mind and you have no power over it, and so it is not in that respect that it is purely for you, it is rather that all your experience is only yours and can never be otherwise. The only transcendence that is possible is towards the mystery of being which can only be approached from the inside. How to take the smallest steps possible, to slow down enough to break each step down into its parts, and then those parts into their parts? To fail and fail again and fail at failing.

As in Kafka's parable about the man before the gates of the law, all of this is just for you, not for anyone else because there isn't anyone else. This is something that you can't take in until the gates are about to close. You might say that solipsism, like scepticism, represents a false answer, but this is neither of those, they are merely scarecrows posted at the boundaries of reality to keep you from straying beyond certain arbitrary bounds. What is unacceptable or demented about solipsism, is its social implications, but the point here has nothing to do with the social, does not touch it at all - in fact it destroys solipsism in the invidious sense. In creative states there is an intimation of this pure and all encompassing ownness, and the irrationalist positions taken by some who seek to shelter creativity are mediations of this realisation. What would Kafka's man have done if he'd realised before the end that this was all just for him? Would it have made any difference, could he have just walked past the guards? Perhaps not, but the scene may have changed, and a new puzzle have presented itself to him. It is only because it belonged entirely to him that it took the form that it did. He created the structures of his own entrapment, but undoing them does not proceed purely from intellectual understanding, it is and must be as complex as anything that could present itself.

As long as you think of it as consciousness you are looking awry, it is what you are, it is what is. It doesn't originate in time but wholly out of itself. Your words and ideas are empty in themselves, but that they are possible touches something real. It is meaning that has to be rotated, or rather held from rotation, taken only inwardly, without words but what makes words possible. And this not abstract but more concrete, this here and now, than anything. The unnameable knowingness or meaningness against which all knowing and meaning breaks like waves.

Things that belong on the same ontological level as the soul: suffering, repression, desire, sexuality, the spiritual (whatever that may mean), conversion, beauty, sin, grace, music(?) etc. These are not mutually compatible but that is perhaps because the mind, including the mind of the world, has long been at war with the soul which in retreat occupies one redoubt after another, even though none of the attacks upon it have succeeded in reducing it by one jot. Is the soul a created thing? Or does it know itself as such? Does it suspect its own unreality, or its intermediate nature? Is it itself it is at war with? Does it have parts? Is there an uncreated part of the soul and a created part? And is that how it can keep reappearing after having apparently been dismantled by science or religion or history, in succession or in tandem? It is neither at rest nor is it in motion, being what all motion is measured by. It is stress, both in the sense of contained tension and accent, but is this of its essence or a contingency of what causes it to appear?

Whatever the verdict of psychoanalysis proves to be it remains the mode of inquiry that most keenly raises the question of the ego and its relations with consciousness and with being. The latter give rise to the dialectic of the particular and the universal, but it is by no means obvious that this should necessarily play itself out through a structure such as the ego-self. If you bring in the constraints of biology and evolution, language and social being, it becomes more plausible, but these only serve as clarifications from the universal side and so they unbalance the relation of the original terms. What is needed, and what still remains mysterious is how this mediation works from the side of consciousness. But here theoretical solutions and explanations are otiose, it is the sharpening of the question that is required. This goes beyond what can be learned from pathologies - it enough to know that pathologies are always a possibility. To put it another way, why is it that the soul is such an effective term, and perhaps in the end there is none better, in the self-understanding of embodied consciousness? Or again, while nothing seems more self-evident than personal egoity, yet if you look more closely at it, there is nothing more strange and inexplicable. 

First thing on waking is when it seems most muddy, agitated waters full of flecks, bright or dull, some that pop like silvery bubbles, and the whole lot swirling slowly, or that's the image of the interior of this hollow body that comes to mind and stays. And it seems to picture a cacophony of voices where you recognise only divergent snatches that are unborn thoughts spreading out in a cloud of buzzing possibilities that can't be resisted, and you go off with now one and now another happy to be back again in the land of the living, the jangling and comfortable default like so many trams taking you back into the city. You inhabit that image until it dawns on you that there is no connection between it and the activity that your mind is pursuing, or that the image is nothing but a thought and the though no more than an image and that the whole magic of it is in the not knowing how a thought begins, and it's only rapid descents into oblivion that mask the jagged and arbitrary quality of it all. And the observing and the one who observes all this is just another part of the ride.

'He had the time of his life', what an odd expression; 'the time of your life', it doesn't mean what it says except that it does, obliquely alluding to the duration of an entire life as if that were the basic unit of time on which the varying experiences were mapped or layed out in a neat ribbon - and see how this one stands out here. This particular measure or numéraire is always in the background offering a sort of convertible reference for valuation, a standardised internal perspective. Not that you know the end of it, but you can guess pretty roughly, the future emerging close-by out of its opaque cloud and the past receding behind, fading into grey shadows with always about the same thickness despite all the memories squeezed into it, and you know it will be just like that at the last moment too. In the faces of passing strangers you fleetingly reinhabit different stages in your past and look forwards and backwards from them. It is strange to see one as if it were still ahead of you but then memory catches up and you see that it is really in your past. You realise the imaginary interlock of forwards and backwards as it can only be known from this moving point, as if that ineluctable motion were finally justified in bring you this ripening knowledge, this foretaste of what.   

Experience is complete in itself but you do not coincide with it. It is what you could relax into if only you could let go of everything, of every need to possess it, to know it. You call it your experience but it is separated by the thinnest barrier from you who are in time while it is not. Either you go to experience or experience comes to you. The first is what you continually strive for through structures of time, through repetition or surprise or pretended indifference. But you can't pass through the moving barrier of the present. So it has to be the other way around since experience already has its beach-head in you, but you have no power to broaden it. Its energy is far deeper than yours but it is stubbornly quiescent. You can only offer receptivity without grasping or hope.

It is the stuff of comedy, that core of egoic enjoyment behind every facade, the the real accounts you keep hidden away from all exposure. You know it's true for you but you doubt that it is so for others, and you laugh uneasily when this is apparently confirmed. And if it were to be exposed in you you would be the first to condemn it, quite sincerely, you recoil from its pure selfishness, its antisociality, but your recoil, which is a spontaneous reflex from the attitudes you would openly maintain out of a self-interest thinly veiled as a concern for the general good, takes its origin from exactly the same knot of self-interested feelings. As a sinner it is impossible to feel genuine remorse for your sin, because the first thing to have been corrupted is your scale of values. The sinful act came after that, almost as an indifferent corollary. So you can't disidentify, but you can notice the odd way that the emotional climate can suddenly flick into its (photographic) negative. If it is only made out of plus and minus markings, ultimately conventional marks, what's to stop them from reversing in valence. They only have the values they have because they are keyed into a larger system attached to immediate feelings. But there are so many of these latter, often at odds with each other, and with only a relative sort of valence, that there is no hard barrier to reversal. Experience that enough times and perhaps some distance can be gained.