Everything is truly surprising, there are no grounds for complacency whatsoever, but at the same time nothing needs to change. So it is not a matter of grinding away at the dullness that takes it all for granted in order to expose the supreme knife-edge ungroundedness of all unfolding experience, but rather of seeing that even the taking for granted, the very pith of stupidity of day to day life is itself a miracle of gratuitous appearing. You can only allow what is to reveal itself, you can't become anything since there is nothing to become and no entity that could accomplish it even if there were. And the thing that wants to make it so hard and so complicated, the whole escapement of reactivities with its cogs and ratchets? Just more of the same, as wonderful a little beast as anything you might see under a microscope.

You can experience the succession of thoughts as objective 'arisals' coming you know not whence and going you know not where, and in this way not essentially different from any of the furniture of your world. But the case for this has to be argued and what precisely the point is in such arguments is not clear as it undoes itself. On the other hand the more natural way in which you experience the jagged and discontinuous flow of experience and its contents is so much more intimate, as if each thought no matter how absurd or irrelevant seeming is clutched to your heart and savoured and loved like a transitional object even as you abandon it for the next one. Of course all those feelings, that intimate relish for what is your own, is just another mode of arising thought and again falls in with the other furniture, but that's no reason to deny the pleasure it gives you.

Any evidence we have that the understanding can be aligned with reality or truth comes about via indirect ways of knowing, through a strongly socially mediated form of reality testing. This is not constituted through purely superficial forms of knowing, mere theoretical understanding, since understanding itself, even in its most natural untheorised forms is hierarchical, and such hierarchy is naively taken as metaphysical - that is, any notion of truth involves levels of appearance giving way to deeper levels of appearance behind them extending far beneath ordinary ways of being in the world. The mind is capable of effortlessly shaping itself in accordance with such assumptions. So the mind of itself has capacities for hierarchical self-organisation and can explore its own intrinsic nature without any input from externally directed experience - in particular it can go at least as deep into hierarchical layers which correspond in terms of reality to fundamental metaphysics, to the very origins of experience. But in all this there is no reason to think that internal realities discovered in this way have any relation to external, indirectly discovered realities. In other words there are internal discoveries that feel just like discoveries of the original nature of what is but no guarantee that these provide any insight into the best discoveries of similarly structured discoveries about objective reality. Spiritual tact is to keep these realms in relation but clearly distinguished.

If experience is corpuscular, consisting of a rapidly moving series of co-dependent originations, each essentially isolated within itself, then what is suffering? One sense of qualia is that they are such self-contained moments of sentience, ruthlessly determined by their conditions, and suffering is a quality belonging to these units or cells of pure sentience. This understanding arises as one way of trying to make sense out of consciousness as universal; nothing distinguishes these atoms of sentience but the contingent fact of the stream in which they happen to arise, and hence, paradoxically, all suffering is on an equal footing with your suffering. What you share, you share perfectly with all sentient instances, and that is your basic predicament. And if what is good to you is a reduction in your suffering you owe this just as much to all other instances, all being equally embedded in the stream of co-dependent arisal, or at least all that you can in any sense be causally related to.

Thick subjectivity would be subjectivity imbued with all the dimensions of generalised qualia, while thin subjectivity would only possess qualia in the ordinary sense, the sense of what an experience is 'like', or rather the fact of the experience being 'like' something. But thick subjectivity is largely gone from the world; we seek it in art and in deep experiences, but as an object of desire, as a formal desideratum, it has become delimited, you might even say commodified. It puts down no deep roots, is ready at any moment to be superseded by the next such experience, and in addition it is sufficiently defined to form a token in games of social status. This is something like the evaporation of values from the moment they are grasped as values. This is not something you can necessarily stand back from and witness, it has effects all the way down to the roots of consciousness. Whatever you undertake in the way of enquiry, it is not you asking the questions but your entire situation, and this is exactly how it ought to be.

Theories of consciousness, in the line of the 'hard-problem' come to resemble a complex heap of functioning with the uncanny guest, qualia, somehow necessarily attached. This can't be right, it is as if qualia are the immensely contracted residue of the soul in our materialist age. Actually, any worthwhile theory of consciousness would have to include a whole family of uncanny guests, these are the phenomena of life which irreducibly point inwards to the deepest ontological mysteries of being, in other words phenomena which are or seem to be directly tied to the nature of conscious existence as identified by their almost universal prevalence. There are distinct classes of these. One of them is the ethical, and embraces something like the seven deadly sins, or say in particular the root sins of pride and envy. Another is the psycho-social, the fundamental elements of what we might call mental health in so far as these involve the 'correct' embodiment of consciousness. A third is the phenomenological, which would embrace the phenomena or states arising from meditation and various altered states of consciousness. There may be more examples, especially in the are of religious experience, but even these three are enough to suggest yet another problem, namely that while these have considerable areas of overlap, they are for the most part independent. What is being suggested here is that there are realities as fundamental as 'qualia', having in a sense their own particular 'hard-problems', that belong in each of these regions of being and that are quasi-independent. As if the space of these generalised qualia is multidimensional and so impossible to suggest from any single 'direction'.

Any (broadly physicalist) theory of consciousness would have to leave room for p-zombies, that is, fully functional intelligences without consciousness, or without qualia. If consciousness is not a 'thing' then in every event in which it seems to play a role the same role could be played by the functioning without consciousness, or in other words, if there is nothing requiring consciousness to necessarily be there then it is contingent and might as well not be there. Like that part in a machine which it turns out you can remove and the machine continues functioning perfectly well - often there are more than a few such parts. On the other hand if consciousness is a 'thing', then it plays a distinct role and evolution has selected for it. But then there are degrees of it, more or less, and it ought to be possible to find such disparate degrees of it that the lower ones are virtually no consciousness at all. And since we can already assume that all practical functions are reducible to their general specifications, minimal consciousness might as well be no consciousness at all. You could even imagine that the best philosophising about the 'hard problem' might be done by a mind without qualia and therefore unhindered by having to keep checking in with its experience - it being simply enough to postulate a mysterious inside to responsive and purposeful functioning, as theoretically elegant as imaginary numbers or quaternions. So, if you want to undo physicalism look to your peculiar intuition that consciousness in a necessary concomitant of any being 'like' you. This must be an unscientific insight.

Consciousness cannot be understood as content, it can't be a that which is programmed to take some shape or have some necessary tendency or internal idea, can't be a thing of that kind. It can only be pure freedom from all content. This is the only thing you can be sure of about consciousness and yet everything screams just the opposite, everything equates it content and endlessly spins stories of how it arises from content, from elaborated objectivities. If it were possible to succumb to such a belief you would succumb to such a belief, because only in such a belief is there an entity to whom it could happen. But surely consciousness has contents, this ever-flowing stream of experience? Don't presume that such content is self-evident, that you know what it is or how it comes to appear. That's just what needs looking into. Is consciousness bound, is it the witness of something that is not itself? How could such disparate realities ever come together?

If you look at an event within a strongly delimited frame of reference then everything becomes structural relationships and every element is replaceable by a functionally exact copy - you could say that there is equivalence but not identity of indiscernibles. Something like this is also a condition of thought, and of mathematicisation. The set-up is then intrinsically Markovian, in that the events, no matter how much memory they carry in their complete description are, not path-dependent - ultimately it doesn't matter how they got there, only that they play their roles in a prescribed manner. If there is no frame, or only some kind of weak frame, then the event is what it is with reference to the totality. In that case every event is utterly unique, indiscernibles are identical, and every occurrence is path-dependent. Events don't need internalised memory, the path-dependence is carried by the totality. This is not amenable to thought, and attempts to think it will run into paradox. The question is, what kinds of weak framing are compatible with such a scheme? Perhaps you could define consciousness as that which can be resolved by thought; this would be the same as saying, less precisely, that there is something that if feels like to be it - and we understand just what work the term 'like' is doing in this definition. This might be a way of pointing to that larger something that consciousness is a reduction of. You might also note that in so far as consciousness strives for perfect identity, and necessarily fails, it is pointing to this larger 'thing' or 'thatness' beyond consciousness.

One view takes ordinary human waking consciousness as a thing-like event, a definite and ongoing happening which is also a high-level construct out of more basic parts, say primitive discrete awarenesses assembled into some kind of quasi-unity which mistakes its own nature, and each of the parts is a definite happening as well. This seems to be a kind of bleached and sterile consciousness, a laboratory purification, which may be more of an artifact of the way it is being studied than of anything else. In this view the complex symbolic and mythological underpinnings of empirical consciousness are contingent and inessential historical baggage. In these notions consciousness is Markovian in the sense of path-independence: it doesn't matter how you got to the condition of the present moment, everything only evolves forward from that. One alternative to this is that the ordinary waking consciousness is an an extremely constrained and reduced version of the intrinsic nature of consciousness - it's not built up from smaller parts but built down from an unimaginable vastness, and that the trace of this vastness is the extreme path-dependence of every subjective state in which the entire origin and history of consciousness is concealed. As consciousness allows more of itself to be revealed it thicken rather than thins. You cannot avoid passing through the realms of ghosts and gods - there is more truth in Dante than neuroscience.

The problems of the nature of time, of causality and of consciousness all seem to be the same problem, or at least that resist mathematisation in the same way. Any models of these will involve some kind of basic directionality, an arrow, a directed graph or category, or else coming at it from the other side an alternation (or several) of quantifiers: for all, there exists... Perhaps the one way out of the limitation of any mathematical model is via an implicit appeal to the totality, to the all, of the 'for all', or to the most general setting of the constituent events. It might even be in the form of the optimisation of an integral or functional over the entire ensemble; for all, there exists, such that for all there exists... and so on. This suggests a striving for complete self-reference which is mathematically impossible except as an aggregate of partial or failed self-references. Consciousness, with its roots in content, in the finest grade of object or of prakriti-matter, is merely the ultimate form of failed or partial self-reference, which idea is only the way in which the Subject-purusha is misunderstood - not such concept or consciousness being any part of it. The only non-duality that counts is that of the collapse or withdrawal or otherwise disappearance of this ultimate dualism.

If you are sitting quietly and counting breaths, and again and again you lose the thread and begin again, this has nothing to do with breathing - the breathing will continue whether you are counting or not, whether you are attending to it or not - and only to do with the mental stream, with how easily it can suffer or resist discontinuity. And is that any sort of choice? The breathing is only a particular kind of mental projection, you don't experience breathing in itself but only your available representation of breathing and what you have in the mental stream is the result of an intention to keep this representation active. And in the same way your counting is another inflection of this stream of thought or of abstract affordances, to keep a degree of self-reflection sufficient that you can remember where you are in the count. And that it is something you are doing, that you quietly strive to persist in it is just another kind of ongoing but intermittent content. So, do as you may, you are simply brought up close to the texture of the impersonal mental stream with its more and more evidently jagged quality and its sheer gratuitousness.

If you say that there is nothing beyond experience then the incredibly detailed structures by which the coherences and consistencies of experiences are revealed also belong to experience, but since these are infinitely remote from anyone's immediate experience this means that all of such are perspectivised fragments of a larger but unknown experience, something like a world-mind or mind of God. This is like saying that everything is information and that even the engines on which the computations that make such a statement possible are running are themselves entirely composed of information. In this way you end up saying that everything is made of mathematics, but this in turn is just a way of pushing the veritable Subject as far out of any possible picture as you can, which in turn only asserts it all the more fully. As against this it seems more parsimonious to anchor all of this reality in some sort of matter which is not mind. It is like an analogue computation, in which the experiential possibilities of what-is are only a selection from an infinite set of alternatives, and are chosen only because they happen to be what you are looking for. But if you go to a fine enough grain you can collapse any analogue system into a digital one, so you can't escape the conclusion that all is mind. Defenders of matter have an ideological and ethical commitment to the integrity of science, but from the mind-only point of view this becomes a particular and freely engaged 'meditation' of mind-at-large in which human minds play a role both central and ancillary.

There are various contents of the mind clustered in patterns of interdependent and grammatical (or 'grammatological') relationship. Any such relationship has a profile in the dimension of subject/object, or equivalently of independent/dependent, which does not amount to a full-blown instantiation of these terms, but something more like a difference of potential. At any rate, the point is to perceive the ongoing contents of mind in this multi-tracked and multi-dependent form. In such a structure the veritable or veritably virtual Subject is that unique node which is relatively more subject than every other node in the network. If the existence of such a point is not immediately self-evident it can be constructed via a well-established limit process - which to the layman might be called meditation. The fact that such a node can always be called into being is not an ontological truth but simply a mathematical truth about the kind of structure involved and its operative rules of inference. Mathematical limits like this are first grasped intuitively via somatic intentional structures, the latent embodied language of spatio-temporal gestures. This intuition is strictly metaphorical and entirely out of keeping with the level of abstraction required. But mathematical limits also have a more rigorous definition, one that is utterly flat and atemporal, completely devoid of any gestural dependence. The Self or Subject can also be grasped in this way and it is powerfully free from all thought. This doesn't make it true, but its parameters are new kind of reality that invites further investigation.

In cases where the two hemispheres of the brain have been surgically separated it is thought that each isolated half of the brain 'houses' a distinct consciousness with a correspondingly distinct personality and thus a distinct self. Accepting this we might then ask, which of these is in continuity with the original self of the undivided brain? If sense can be made of this question then the natural answer is that they both are, since it seems to be absurd to assume that a new self is created ex nihilo in the surgical procedure. Similarly one can imagine an inverse of this procedure, perhaps soon to be feasible, where a sufficient bandwidth of data sharing is achieved between two separately complete brains that they 'mind-meld' into a single consciousness with a single inclusive self. Indeed you could also say that in the course of your ordinary diurnal experience as different parts of the brain are activated or become dormant, different selves 'come on-line' without you noticing any seams between them. These though experiments point to the strange logic that must obtain for the various subject-objects called selves or consciousnesses. If you make the distinction of pure awareness as against any possible content, then you the other is the virtual owner of the currently salient totality of content. With this distinction it is only the second kind of self that is subject to deconstruction due to its unwarranted appropriation of the prerogatives of the first kind. Or else, the error might go the other way around (as well?), in which the absolute Self of pure awareness is understood on the model of the virtual and content defined self of mental experience. Any idea of the unity or continuity of consciousness is exactly that, an idea, and belongs to the intrinsic structure of the mental type of self - the idea simply could not apply to the Self of pure awareness, which in fact has nothing qualitatively or existentially in common with consciousness. 

If consciousness is the experience-ness of experience as distinct from its content, from that which is in some sense describable; if consciousness is the possibility of something being described (even if it is never actually described) and not the describing or the described, in other words that there is something 'like' what is going on - if it is understood in this way, then it rightly falls under witnessing, under the most general noticing of arisings, and it remains a mystery why it should be so drawn to agency and purpose, why it should give rise to the apparently mistaken notion of free-will, of identification with the agent.  Perhaps it is like this: that purposive action is the most challenging of the tasks carried out by mind or if you will, the brain, the prakriti. It is the most computationally intensive bringing to bear of diverse considerations, and so if there is a rudimentary 'what it feels like' associated with the mind or brain it is the occasion where the degrees of freedom of this proto-experience are most reduced, where 'what it feels like' is pure constraint. But the pure witnessing is the maximal degrees of freedom of any possible experience and so the sheer contrast involved gives rise to what we reflectively label identification. Pure consciousness as witnessing (or purusha) is infinite degrees of freedom, while mind in purposive action, being massively overdetermined in every one of its motions, as as close to pure constraint as possible. The witnessing asserting its ultimate or noumenal freedom in the very heart of pure constraint, is exactly the feeling of the self, with a small 's'.

It is satisfying to have a narrative self, to be able to tell a more or less coherent story culminating in the present with equal parts assigned to self and world. It is something you do for an interlocutor, a fantastic construction which gives expression to the immediate feelings they elicit, even if they, the interlocutor, the feelings, are largely imaginary. You don't entirely believe it in the telling but that doesn't matter since you have now handed over a good part of your truth. But something like this doesn't happen, the narrative self is a thing of nostalgia and brief slippages; the anchors have been let go. But you like to see it done, you admire the tenacity of these narrators, thinking they absolve you somehow, which they don't.

This wild fire-hose spray of awareness, you can't hold onto it as much as you try and and as often as not it snakes around and blasts you in the face. But what you understand are torrents of thinking and feeling locked into their strange marriage, and you forget about will, the most lively of them all. Because as much as you are sheer willfulness, amoral and irresponsible you are also the receiving of the full force of will, as if from an other, turned on you and subjecting you to every sort of constraint. You discern a looming and inescapable figure outlined in the spray, mighty in his bounds, but it is only your own shadow, dark and rainbow-fringed.

Open-ended and undetermined in every way. If you think of subject and object then the object determines the subject as much as the subject determines the object. The lines go every way but they don't harmonise. Wherever there appears to be a resolution you only have to look again to see that this is a fragile construct with no consistency and no one to see. And so if there is awareness there is no subject of awareness and if there is a subject there is no awareness.

Imagine, the lights come up on a living room with no one in it, after a short time a phone on a low table starts to ring with an old-fashioned bell tone, it rings for a while and then falls silent. After a long silence the lights go down again. Almost nothing has happened but the scene is infinitely rich in unrealised possibilities. The lights come up again, same room, but this time there is someone sitting in an armchair on the other side of the room from the table with the phone. Is it a man or a woman, are they young or old, do they appear alert or distracted? The phone rings again. The person looks over towards the ringing phone with some surprise, or anxiety. The phone continues to ring, the person remains seated staring at the phone until it stops ringing, and continues looking towards it for some time until the lights again fade. In that suspension the idea of a summoning, a calling. To be called forth. The sound of a phone that can rouse you out of sleep, you didn't even know you were asleep until it wakes you. Or else, the same scene again and this time the person gets up and answers the phone. We hear one half of a conversation, or something less than a conversation. They might start talking rapidly to someone known, or it might be wrong number, or a cold caller - whatever it is, the tension is diffused, the story begins, the summons evaded.

Weren't you drawn into all of this by the idea that there was a definite goal, some sort of 'enlightenment', a being let into the cosmic secret that was at the same time a transformation in the roots of being? This notion has been terribly discounted since, say, R.M Bucke's 'Cosmic Consciousness', from something rare and rather magical, and most of all, a powerhouse for the creation of cultural value through a massive augmentation of the intellect, into something rather banal, by mo means rare, and a little smug, rather petty, and human all too human. Enlightenment has been subjected to enlightenment in the cultural historic sense of the term, the dissipation or eradication of the last vestiges of magical thinking, the perfect alignment with the findings of science. What can one hope for other than getting all the distinctions right once and for all, something that might as well come about without any intervention from the other side, a well-curated set of fundamental notions. But the cultural-historic sense of enlightenment has taken a beating in recent years, one does not wish to be aligned with its barbarian detractors, and yet it is also the enemy. You need to destroy it, but from the other side!

Consciousness is the colourless, odourless, tasteless, invisible inaudible, impalpable medium in which experience happens. Your experience, or experience in general? Can you imagine an experience, or rather all the ingredients of an experience, a pre-experience, taking place but outside of such a medium and therefore not 'being' or constituting an experience? Say there was some residual reflex activity still going on in a 'dead' brain, would that be something like it? A responding to stimuli only outside of the medium which transforms such a response into experience. Say it was a chemical reaction of neurotransmitters taking place in a test tube, witnessed from the outside but not from the inside? What is wrong with this line of thinking? It has already given up the field of experience and replaced it with a theory. There is no experience in general, at least not until you've got to the bottom of your experience, this experiencing here and now. But all you can do are thought experiments, and you can imagine all sorts of variants of experience: dial up this, dial down that, let go of the immediate echo of meaning that all of your experience carries, forget yourself, your history, continuity, memory etc. and simply by virtue of having imagined them they belong to the same filiation of being as what you are experiencing now. Does this shed any light, or is it a tautology? Another idea might be that consciousness is to be in direct relation to your self. You don't know what this self is, every thought you have about it is an approximation, negated in the same moment as it is affirmed, but all these thoughts circle around something overwhelmingly real. Consciousness is not an ultimate but simply a name for being in relation to this centre, which is not itself conscious, is in no sense an experience. This line of thinking seems absurd, but it has the virtue that it seems to assign a (more) correct status to all the phenomena in the family of experience, consciousness, awareness.

There are many different kinds and qualities of consciousness, some considered usual or ordinary and others not so. It varies rapidly in the course of a day, although the variations are not accounted for, or not to a great degree, partly because at the same time consciousness is considered to be continuous or one. There is room for this latter understanding (who exactly has this understanding?) to be wholly mistaken; consciousness might equally well be discontinuous and without any underlying unity. (And who exactly has that understanding?) You can talk of being conscious or of having consciousness, but not of making or doing consciousness, and there is no single verb 'to conscious', although 'to be aware of' or 'to focus attention on' sometimes stand in for this lack. On the other hand you can have sex, or make love, and there is also a single (transitive) verb which for some reason is considered vulgar and functions as an obscenity. Again, despite the various grades and qualities of consciousness it is considered to be all or nothing, and is not generally thought to consist of a mosaic of different interlocking components, although there may be some neurological evidence that this is so. It is perhaps a little like weather - there are various kinds of weather, and some, by drawing attention to themselves seem to be more typically representative of weather than others, concrete universals of weather, but they are all equally weather. If someone says, 'In this place there is no weather at all' this is usually taken to mean that the weather rarely varies. But say there was no atmosphere, and no nearby source of radiation, say you were on a spaceship in deep space, wouldn't it still make sense to speak of the conditions of dust and cosmic rays as the weather? So is it the case that there is always awareness, always consciousness, something like the way that there is always weather - is it any more than a way of speaking, an always possible transposition of certain general ideas?

Bishop Berkeley pioneered the methodology of the subsuming of experience into its subjective pole. What he stated in succinct terms recurs in many other guises and contexts through the philosophers that followed. For Berkeley the resulting understanding of the nature of experience required God as a cosmic subjective pole that guaranteed the infinite complexity and consistency of the result; a sort of world mind being at the least one of the lower functions of such a God term. What happens to this term in other versions of the same reduction? Does something else play the role, or it is deemed unnecessary? In the strictest sense, if you follow out the logic as far as it will go, turning it in the end upon itself, then the God term is absorbed, disappears. There is something of an idealist 'blob' about this, it overreaches. But if you refrain from going all the way the line you defend can only seem arbitrary. It puts the whole method into question. And indeed the method (in common with every such conceptually 'universal acid') is questionable, it contains an unquestioned assumption about the efficacy of intentional meaning.

You don't directly experience a division between subject and object, these are theory-laden terms that are applied in a deliberately directed attention towards distinct ideas; the idea of the objective pole in this particular experience (E) and the idea of its subjective pole are two different ideas, only formally or hypothetically related. They are not experienced simultaneously because you can't experience two different things simultaneously, and they are in fact not strictly related to E, which they only supersede by way of a set of conventional associations, a kind of accepted logic. Also, they are not abstracted out of an original moment in which they occur fused, but an idea of this sort is dictated by that same accepted logic, and so the machinery of association brings up another version of the same ideal split, this time with the monad fusing subject and object, or global noesis and noema, on one side and a deeper avatar of subjectivity called 'awareness' on the other. You can go on with variants of such a schema for a long time. The nature of the mind is that at its best it delights in its skill in playing out the consequences of blindly accepted logics without any ability to question the logics themselves. That creative delight is the very essence of the illusion in which you are held - your best instrument for undoing it is exactly what betrays you.