Thought is to be understood more generally than the sort of fantasmal propositional activity such as might be prominent while engaged in writing or speaking. It should include every kind of purposeful activity and differentiated perceptual or more generally passive experience; it is engagement in situations where it embraces both sides of the integrated whole, the situation and the one who is engaged. Perhaps most generally it covers any experience or aspect of experience which is intrinsically dualistic, that which is most naturally grasped in dualistic terms regardless of the many different kinds of distinctions such dualisms can be based on. It is in this sense that it is contrasted with awareness,  which can be taken to point to that in experience which is intrinsically non-dual. Of course the distinction, thought/awareness, is a dualism and therefore belongs to thought, and as such, no matter how well awareness is 'understood' there will always seem as if there is something further to do, and as such it is a self-deconstructing distinction. For the same reason there is really nothing that is intrinsically dualistic; the very same natural lines of cleavage in any experience dissolve into something unspeakable when 'viewed from awareness' - if that last phrase were not an immediate contradiction. It is because the structure is not a structure that it is such a cunningly entrapping structure.

There is a Darwinian version of critical realism, but does it make sense? It goes something like this: There is a reality external to but inclusive of experience which has determined experience along evolutionary lines. Our entire understanding of that reality, which belongs to experience, having evolved according to maximal fitness is a reflection of it only in its aspect of fitness landscape and not as it is in itself. The shaping of experience is real, but relative to the whole of reality, the shaping process is unrepresentative or uninformative. Experience comprehends itself and its world only by way of distinctions historically determined by fitness and these distinctions bear no necessary relations to the distinctions intrinsic to reality. It seems that this both underestimates and overestimates the function of understanding. It underestimates it in that it does not take into account the ability of understanding to exceed its brief, to seize on the smallest anomalies and inconsistencies in order to forge a larger and deeper view of things than was imagined possible. For example tool use has a clearly role in maximising fitness, but it would be impossible to predict modern scientific instruments from the typical evolutionary use cases of primitive tools. On the other hand it overestimates understanding in maintaining realism, that of all the basic prejudices of understanding the one that should remain unquestioned is that which insists on an external and determinative reality with a distinct nature of its own.

The more perfectly that art is able to render or presentify experience the more it points not to experience itself but to its essentially fictitious nature. That is, the more its fictions are true the more it reveals the fictitiousness and immanence of truth; its truth is the implosion of truth. These dazzling possibilities are immediately fetishised, they seem to belong to the representation, but are only in its apprehension. You should turn away from the object in seeing how it points to the construction of your own experience, which is necessarily richer and more detailed than any work of art. But in practise just the opposite is what happens - it is first and foremost a social fact, entirely at odds with its deeper possibilities.

Propositional attitudes or purposive actions are cases of experience where a self-centre is indirectly indicated, triangulated backwards as it were. It is the strong belief that accompanies these mundane instances that constitutes the belief in something like an 'inherent self-nature' such as certain people are always banging on about. It isn't a belief in the same sense as a belief in an explicit positing, but a sort of indirect version, a belief that lives in the sinews rather than in the bones, perhaps, a movable or tactical belief. A different and even more powerful version of such a belief inhabits desire and fear, one that is both more vivid and temporally displaced. In desire, the vividly imagined fantasm of the self fulfilled in enjoyment is entirely off to the side - you feel only an utmost obligation towards it since it seems to be more 'you' than you are, as if you are its servant and your reward should you succeed will be an almost perfect participation in its anticipated realisation. Fear seems to be the negative of this same pattern. The fictions of experience always posit a centre that is elsewhere. To bring experience into coincidence with itself is to go against the grain and to sacrifice everything either desirable or fearful.

If you were to describe your experience in conventional terms it is not clear that you would be describing anything at all of what it is actually like. Such descriptions do not even correspond to a mind's internal self-mapping, since there is not even a unique and well-defined crystallisation; everything is hugely underdetermined and this is obvious as soon as you look. You might, for example, say that there are contents, or arisings, in the light of an awareness, but that turns out to be no more than an unwarranted extension of the metaphor of the seeing eye; awareness is not like light and its correlates are not like pictures. Furthermore the whole family of metaphors based on the idea of a self as source point of experiencing collapses under the lightest examination. Even if you admit something like an 'I', it is only an ideal centre for certain kind of thoughts, an inference and not a spontaneous showing. Whatever the event is which comes to be thought of as this experiencing, there is no reason to infer its limitation to the set of thoughts that revolve around this one apparent centre; the 'same' event could be producing other such centres, incommensurate with this one without being split in any way. It is more like the way that the same electromagnetic field can be carrying a myriad of different, independent and interpenetrating signals, than say like a theatre with a single stage and witnessing audience. As you approach it according to any aspect it melts away before you.

If experience has certain features or contents, A, then you might look for an explanation of such features or contents. But this means that they are related to another kind of feature or content, B. If the latter is taken to be unexperienced and unexperiencable (as in everyday dualism) then the explanation depends on a theory that bridges the gap between transcendent realities of the type of B and immanent realities of the type of A. Such a theory is impossible to conceive because A and B are categorically disjoint - for example, if B is material reality then B is supposed to be invariant under changes of point of view, but A is certainly not, its very existence being tied to a specific point of view. B might then be itself something belonging to experience, such as a certain belief, unexperienced but experiencable. The relationship between an experience and a belief that conditions that experience is however a doubtful matter. Is it an example of causality in direct experience or more likely a posterior fabrication of a theory of experience that exists only as a theory? You did not know that belief B was latent in experience A until the destruction of B leads to the disappearance of A.

Mind is imagined to be a complex mental organism in the same way as the brain is revealed to be a complex organ, and the composition of the latter as it comes to be studied and understood modifies the intuitively constructed, that is mentally constructed, picture that constitutes the entire existence of the former. If consciousness and mind were in any way equivalent then consciousness too would have its parts and structures most of which would be hidden in ordinary experiencing. There cannot however be anything like this because unconscious consciousness is an oxymoron, even if it has some viability as a poetic or literary notion. This notion would be something like a prismatic split of the 'light' of consciousness into say a nested series of experiencings of interior subjects, or as if to say that as you experience your deeper ancestral selves are also experiencing inside of that experience itself. The shorthand for this is the sense of subjectivity as 'thick'. And perhaps there are experiences that evoke a sense of such a 'thickness', and quite highly valued experiences at that, but be that as it may they come and go, and are objective qualities rather than invariants of the self-awareness of awareness (another oxymoron). These are no more than ways in which the zero-dimensionality of consciousness is veiled from... not consciousness, but mind. In other words, the 'picture that hold us captive' is the mind's picture of consciousness, a picture drawn out of no evidence and with no authority since the two have nothing to do with each other, but exist on wholly incommensurate planes - the corrective itself being purely mental.

Consciousness is not in space or time, this is astounding enough, but in addition you cannot say that space and time are in consciousness because then you are picturing consciousness as space-like, going further with a metaphor than the brief insight it might legitimately contain. Space and time are for consciousness, but neither the topology nor the ontology of our ordinary self-centred experience of the world give any clue to what this consciousness, which is all that we can ever be, is 'like' - in fact again, it cannot be like anything, it doesn't belong to experience. It is a further twist on the eye being unable to see itself, the subject not being any sort of object, here that which makes experience possible cannot be brought nearer by way of any understanding or thought process, since these latter can only be analogies of experience. The only experience of the experiencer is the experiencing itself and nothing that is or can be experienced.

The other is alter-ego is the most radical and consequential transcendence in experience, but it is so only in experience. That means that everything that falls under or can be made to fall under ownness cannot stand for or be analogous in any way to consciousness in the sense of the global field of possible experience. You might even push this further and assert that what could be called the 'transcendental unity of apperception', that is the field, is utterly betrayed in being equated to that to which 'I think' can be appended, that is, the sphere of ownness. You were looking for a clue to lead you towards the originary consciousness and for various natural reasons you chose the phenomenology of 'ownness', the crystallisation around the cogito, and in doing so you simply took a wrong turn, and everything that followed from that decision only entrenched the error. Instead, look for a variant of the cogito, a sort of 'forcing extension' in which the self/other distinction is suspended without favour to either side. Which, after all has the greater weight, self or other? That's the wrong question too, both are infinite, and hence the almost inevitability of the wrong answer.

Sometimes the city just beats you down and you can't recover your composure, that is that losing the subject is the subject.

If in writing some sort of structure of reference is maintained, as is the case when the 'you' is used as a subject anchor then a context of givenness is assumed against which this experiencing can arise as an episode continuous with various other off-stage realities. The condition is that to whatever degree the subject term names the consciousness in which or to which the experiencing arises it is not everything but is defined against a transcendence which is not its own creation. In other words, the language even if it is deployed to express a totalising or non dual vision is still inherently dual. No matter how cunning its condition of truthfulness contains a reference beyond itself, something that it needs in order to be stable and meaningful, in order to operate its seemingly all embracing humanism. If it could be pushed out beyond this, and there is no reason why it can't since the way the words mean is not really given with them; the words don't really determine anything beyond some abstract gestures, then the very foundations of the world would be shattered. The 'you' in its coy way bot invites this and wards it off. There simply is no pure theory of identification because there is no possible subject of such a theory, every subject being already the performance of what it takes to be such and identification. The subject represents the subject for itself, and since this is nonsensical it doesn't in fact represent any possible subject or factuality at all. Any self naming is a (failing) mise-en-abîme, including this one.

Slow experiencing without reflection. At first you think you've mislaid that active centre, no longer anywhere near the head, or else it has all been squeezed out as if it were some stuff that came in a tube. There's only a shimmering sphere of empty sentience, vaguely up here, say around the chest, unable to converse with itself. You are not really sure if you are there any more, as if you were something that had to be worked up each time. This is just potentiality with no accident, sweetly indifferent propensity refusing all comers, yet available for any sort of mischief.

If the idea was to report in the lightest and most unfiltered way the day to day changing nature of simply being here, to produce something like a fever chart of identification, then you must admit to have failed. It was perhaps more in order to uncover the recording instrument than to assemble a record that limned the object, if these two could be so separated, but either way the aim was to close in on the heart of the matter, on that point of inevitable unguarded honesty that was as true as prayer for one who had no one to whom to pray. To one who has no god there is only the the idea of death as that against which or in the face of which you would be compelled to truthfulness, so that looking back from the brink you could see a struggle to maintain a course in the face of the tempests of the mind. But the mind is like a whirlwind in that the closer you come to the centre the more furiously it hurls you out on a tangent.

There is a fundamental anxiety against which all our defenses are mobilised and whose shadow is glimpsed behind every malaise. Theories about it cut no ice and displays of indifference soon exhaust themselves. You approach and then you veer away, in orbit around a dark planet. What attracts is what seems to know it.

'Many are called, but few are chosen' - is there a way to understand this non-dualistically? Not that the called differ from the uncalled, or the chosen from the unchosen, but that being called should not be confused with being chosen. You can't will or presume your own awakening, but you can't refrain from doings so either - it is only about you and yet not about you at all. Like Kafka's parable 'Before the Law'. You can't but over-reach, and yet every over-reaching will be slapped down, sooner or later, gently or brutally, with apparent malice or irony.

But to realise existentially what you know cannot but be true, ah, that is a different matter... there are hindrances. Hindrances? They tell a good story, go way back in time, are buttressed with all kinds of corroborations. But don't all of these rely on just the same sorts of hypothetical dirt as the flash metaphysics of the self? They are part of that onion thing in fact, at a certain level, and seem to be much stronger than what you expected since they are based on how things would appear to a neutral observer, a kind of generalised social 'they' whom you obey as a matter of course. Not just your imaginary, but the whole force of the social imaginary which decrees you your place, and for which you had better be grateful. It's more than that too, behind the mask of the social there are further masks hiding forbidden enjoyments. Your tales of woe are in place likely enough merely as a way of protecting these, a 'secret stash', what you are least likely to want to give up, a certain complicity with your internal other. Are the enjoyments the problem or only the way you have of sheltering them? What if the enjoyments are exactly the ways of sheltering them? And the hindrance nothing more than the imagining that there is something here that actually works, that is doing and accomplishing something?

If you do a quick sweep of how you are spatially, the implicitly understood layout of embodied self, you get a sort of onion pattern of consecutive layers radiating out from a self-centre which is not exactly in physical space, but out of which physical space is abstracted. The layers are like distinct shells and there is a sense that there is an ontological difference which defines, determines and stabilises them. But if you wonder how you come to 'know' this you immediately see that it makes no sense, what could possibly ground such a knowledge? It is the other way around, then. Because you think this is stable, so that it can position you, you invent an idea of an ontological difference which thickens into a sort of grey and neutral and objective stuff lining the concentric spheres, like dirt in the imaginary onion. That's the closest you get to matter, just an invented thing to keep open the relations of containment. It's a marvelous invention, since it comes out of nowhere and appears to do so much. But there can't even be such an idea because there's nothing like it at all that you can have directly known, it is an idea or representation with no possible referent at all. 

Realism in no way resembles the colourless fantasm of otherness that is refuted by arguments, so many sophisms, against it, but is more like the childlike vision that sees things of the world as huge and alive, that enjoys them to no ulterior end. It is not Samuel Johnson kicking a rock but children thrilled by the wholly unexpected eruptions of effects without a cause. Philosophy may begin in wonder but what kind of philosophy can it be which does not also end there?

The inherent uncertainty of experience is not that there is an unbridgeable gap between subject and object, like two partners in a marriage who bring incompatible gifts to the union, the epistemic and the ontological, but that such a gap is called for but remains itself uncertain. The division into subject and object only happens later anyway in a subsequent moment of deep reflection. Then it is more like a divorce and the problem is the impossibility of making a division of property. That there are two sides seems clear but in their union they are so mutually contaminating that it is impossible to draw any line between them. The problem ought not to be able to arise at all and this means that the uncertainty itself, what is taken as the negative in experience, is not to be bridged but must become the sole positive and prior to any such notions as subject and object, knowing and being.

Say that minds were nodal points in one overarching 'mind-at-large', forming in and sustained under conditions of flow and multiple interaction. Then the so-called sense of separateness would be a nodal parameter that could vary on a scale from close to zero, giving a form of global consciousness compatible with a soft individuation, to a maximum of one which would correspond to a psychotic state of paranoia. In any local regime of such nodes there would be a distribution of this parameter, probably somewhat skewed towards the high end. This would be determined by conditions of contagion and reproducibility resulting in certain strongly supported optimal values, one or more norms or modes, stabilised by feedback effects for deviations from these; indeed driven into (slowly changing) local maxima of viability by the unforgiving hand of evolution. The point of this speculation is to try to understand why the ideal of overcoming or 'seeing through' separateness is so unattractive, at least on second view. Separateness has all the best songs, it favours the aesthetically rich over the veridical and the virtuous, even in its douleurs.  It is a case of “Le coeur a ses raisons que le raison ne connaît point.”

Kant's phrase "transscendentale Einheit der Apperception" translated as "transcendental unity of apperception" seems to say it all, that whatever is experientially known in any way presupposes a prior field of knowing, an awareness without any content of its own in which everything arises, and yet it is commonly understood via the (posterior) idea that "I think" can be appended to any experience without modifying it. This treats it as if its acknowledgment is optional. In phenomenology the transcendental field is accessed by performing a special kind of mental act that takes you out of the "natural attitude", as if on holiday away from home, as if it were not the so-called natural attitude that was the result of adding something extraneous to the truly natural transcendental consciousness. This ought to be how it goes, that once you grasp what is at stake in transcendental consciousness you are back home in it for good, and the natural attitude loses its ability to keep you tied into a distinctly unnatural set of implicit assumptions. Admittedly, it very hard to speak properly, that is, without circularity or self-contradiction, of that prior awareness to which Kant's phrase so felicitously points.

Wittgenstein's no private language argument and Aristotle's third man argument against the Platonic theory of Forms both rely on the fact that for two disparate elements to be in a pre-given relation to each other, identity in the one case, participation in the other, requires a further witnessing or act of the same kind to bring about, or validate, the relation itself. In the first case there is no-one else around to accomplish this, to confirm the sameness of the two instances, and in the second if it were achieved it would lead to an infinite regress. In ordinary intersubjective reality the relations of disparate matters are stabilised by convention, and so are necessarily contingent and never lose a penumbra of doubt, which the expression of a 'reality effect'. This is a luxury that is not afforded in inner experience or in the presumed metaphysical reality - the very cases where a reality effect cuts no ice. For example, when in dreams you recurrently find yourself in the same place, the convention that underwrites that sameness is dreamed too, and indeed you are usually not alone in these dream locations. Despite this there is an ineffable unity in inner experience which somehow short circuits the need for confirmation - it is as if it comes about outside of time, out of a concrete atemporal and original identity. This is a strong source for the idea of the self, although it is not itself an idea or any sort of apperception.

You conduct an enquiry in thought. This means that you assume a sequence of connected ideas each of which refocuses attention on a different object. At the conclusion you pull away the scaffolding of thoughts and are left with attention pointing to a hitherto unsuspected object, independently of any thoughts. Your world is thus expanded, since it is not made of thoughts but of capabilities of attention. This picture of the process must be incorrect since it begs the question of attention having an object apart from thought, indeed of attention being separate from thought. Try this instead: attention is presumed to have an object; the presumption, the attention and the object all making up what is called thought. The thought of thought is that thoughts can be strung together in logical articulations. So in thought you can follow through the lines of such an articulation until it breaks. The collapse of the articulation recoils back on the initial thought and breaks the presumption. The only thing left unbroken is that which you mistakenly identified as attention. And was there any mistaken identification in the first place, because you 'know' that every articulation of thought will so break!

Step into a large and empty and very dimly-lit theatre. You are not on stage but, initially, somewhere in the centre, a few dozen aisles from the front. You look towards the empty stage, there might be a darkly-patterned velvet curtain if you are asleep, or a very large cinema screen if you are dreaming or about to dream, or there might be a stage set if waking life is about to resume. You can feel aisle upon aisle stretching away behind you into a cool and perfect blackness into which you are subtly being pulled. The space behind you doesn't narrow but expands; it is immensely spacious yet weirdly intimate. You are no longer where you just were but are moving back and back into that sweet blackness as the screen and the front aisles grow smaller and smaller in the distance. You are like a giant eye, no not an eye, the retina of an eye, not even that, but the pure abyss of receptivity. You fill space, you are space. This is what witnessing would feel like if it felt like anything.

The three gunas form a sort of treadmill. The sattva has a short half-life it decays into equal measures of the other two. Rajas burns up in fits of passion yielding tamasic ashes which accumulate together with the other products of decay and would drown you if they didn't prompt a sort of reflex ginnying up of desire, the soul's drug of preference, rajasic intoxication, a fraction of which allows itself to be transformed into sattva and the rest into colourful chaos. How well you know that moment of flicking the nothing of passivity into the something of intent want. (You can see this in others more clearly than in yourself.) And so it goes around and around. So, what you believe in is stimulus, is the state of being stimulated, regardless of its apparent goal. This is basically a love of pleasure, with more or less of a pretension to refinement. And isn't your patchy intellectuality, your love, your humour, your aesthetics, just this kind of gourmandising?