This experiencing, going on and on, restlessly roiling in itself, othering, same-ing, departing, returning. It can't arise without a basis in which to appear, and while experiencing can never coincide with itself its basis can never not do so. But there is no basis except in the appearing and no appearing except in the basis. That which makes consciousness possible is not conscious, being the fulfilment of everything consciousness appears to venture, it requires no mind to express it, and yet it has no other being apart from the appearing.

The cultural world is structured around the impossibility of impossible goals in which the striving for and the knowledge of impossibilities are simultaneously and incommensurately in play. It is a complex ramification of asymptotics embracing desire, existence, value etc. But if there is an intimation that the impossible is not at all impossible, that the infinity of one world is a simple evidence in a more encompassing world sharing none of the structure or meaning of the former, then all cultural goals and values are suddenly drained of their generative glamour. it might seem to parallel nihilism, but is a wholly different flavour. Such an intimation can't be attained by any sort of striving or logic, it simply dawns on you one day that it is real and has always been present, near at hand and out of time.

The idea that this is the life of some kind of inner self or soul, something located inside the body, here in the head perhaps, or here in the chest, and who has desires and reasons and goals, a certain outlook, a series of usefully nested identities and an ever growing store of memories, and even a distinct and abstract character beyond a random set of traits, a character which your friends recognise more easily than you do and which it is generally pleasing the receive in reflection, a self then, for whom it is of moment to determine whether it survives death or has free will and so on and so on. All of it a wonderfully interlocking set of metaphors and ongoing adventure and history, the only weak spot of which is that you have no idea what you are, what the ultimate source of all this engrossing narrative might be, because when you turn around to look you find only the trace of a ghost no longer on the scene, an empty knowing of emptiness. And you are troubled by the knowledge that if one part of all this proves to be nothing but a flimsy and merely opportune fiction then the same must be true of all the rest it. And it isn't really troubling at all, in fact quite the opposite. The more the structure dissolves the happier you seem to become and the more solid and incorrigible the sense of being on which it was once (never) apparently inscribed.

The ontology in experience is extraordinarily rich, there are so many different kinds of things that are comprised in it and the list is itself subject to a kind of evolution - new kinds arising and old kinds dropping away. All of these are however made out of the same basic stuff, necessarily so, since that is the condition of experience and hence they are unlimitedly interactive or intermediating. This has no sensory analogue, the senses being rather almost uniform and almost exclusive subclasses of kinds of arisals. But if you want to think of them as a whole they are like a palette or spectrum out of which experience is composed. What is interesting is that there is no perspective; nothing is further away or closer in, nothing in front of or behind anything else. All are at the exact same 'distance' from the witness, which is of course no distance at all - the concept does not apply even as analogy.

Thinking about metaphors is how you think about the hierarchical processing that is your mind, and so the metaphors are themselves hierarchical, and the conformity between them and the emergent world is almost perfect. You can't do more than tinker with this structure, it works too well, and there is no need to do so. What it provides is a way past the dominance of any particular metaphor, such as vision. Rather you can find the seamless inherence of the all experience within the experiencing by attending to the action of the metaphoric. It's not the seeing of a world that arises but the entangled blossoming forth of metaphors in which 'you' are smeared through all the way, without insides or outsides, without a doer and a doing. It's only a first step so treat it with infinite gentleness.

Experiencing as ongoing accomplishment in the body-based field is always accompanied by a latent sense of the most trusted foundational self. This appears to be a role, like that of prime minister, say, or pontiff, rather than a clearly defined character or putative 'small self'. It is a role that is filled by various different metaphoric originations of attention which change episodically during the course of each day depending on salient cares. The point is how natural this feels, as if the chair it occupies is labelled with 'doubt stops here', and how much on this purely structural basis it radiates a convincing but illusory sense of unity. You might not like it, being as it is often enough invested in negative affect, but you really don't care to question it, preferring to set it to work in search of remedies. Surprisingly the ability to observe its comings and goings with its gimcrack retinue of notions does exist, a witnessing which it cannot lay hold of, and which lies just beyond its reach, and to which it has only an incidental relationship. Loosening the hold on it is a matter of attention gaining its 'sea-legs', the ability to stay upright while everything else is moving around.

What sort of concept is metaphor? The word itself is a metaphor; you can't attempt to explain its meaning without resorting to metaphor. And yet it seems like a sophisticated thing, a act of imagination freely engaged in, a higher level accomplishment. But here metaphor refers to fundamental ways of structuring experience in order to bring forth a world, something like the imposition of a topology, the most abstract set of basic relationships, on an unstructured set. Could this be conceivable if the set was not already structured? And of course you can do away with the underlying set and keep only the structuring which is sufficient to supply whatever think-like objects you need as they are demanded. Then you begin with the pure possibility of structurings (plural), a context of contexts for which the notion of a pure unstructured world, the ultimate starting point, is merely a particular ideal, or even a willful denial of an already pervasive and quite inhuman intelligence. Another way of saying this might be that language arises out of poetry and not the other way around, and this being so the nature of poetry is the deep mystery, inseparable from the nature of mind.

What is directly here is the physical world of body and mind and only with some reflective or meditative effort can you scramble in towards the source of it, as well as that can be understood, in the core of your being. But you are dazzled long before you get very far, the inwardness turning white and all features losing any salience as in a snow storm. That's one metaphor for it, but the failure of reach is a feature of the accepted metaphysics with its seconding and support in the bodily ground. All of this actually needs to be turned inside out. It is the source, name it what you will, that ought to be the incorrigible ground and the physical, spatio-temporal being that ought to be floating in a metaphysical abstraction. This seems impossible because the source is infinitely distant in your curved inner space, and so would require infinite effort to be reached. The error however is to draw your contextual metaphor from physicality, and the correction of it is to see that it is only a metaphor. Metaphorical space has entirely different rules, different logic, different affordances - even flipping inside out is only another kind of metaphor. The work of mind and imagination is only a way to acclimatise to this other and strange order.

It seems such a long time since you used to think about the 'promesse de bonheur', that phrase which attempted to indicate what it was that gave life to the art you loved. There is no such phenomenon to wonder at now with its reference to a vague beyond, to the hope of recovering some essential satisfaction. There is still art you love, although less of it, but the effect it has is wholly immanent and does not touch the foundations of your world. What you love you love in a more comradely way. If it is a kind of death then you missed the agony. Have you become coarse or finer? It is hard to say. Fewer things insist outside of the core questions and the air seems lighter and sweeter and to be moving towards the centre rather than away. The joys can be fiercer but they are weightless and do not linger.

If it is a matter of beliefs and the updating of beliefs, then what is a belief? An hypothesis of sorts, held with a degree of belief, or better, a probability which can never reach perfect certainty. Every belief is provisional since it retains the possibility of being updated, is always open to some evidence that might undermine its foundations. Beliefs, then do not map simply onto propositions, but contain within themselves beliefs about beliefs and about the pertinence of evidences. They are nested in complex ways and are pragmatic. Beliefs about states of affairs also include beliefs about the self, about the ways in which they are held, and about priorities. Again they are not static but continually under review, continually being reassessed. The system of the self is no more than a nexus of beliefs especially about the ordering of beliefs. All of these no matter how ossified they may appear remain open. The life of it is not in the beliefs themselves, which are only provisional but in the gaps, the act of their opening or narrowing. 

Thatness is not a quality, despite the 'ness', it is orthogonal to whatness. What you can conceive of it its name is however a quality as of being, so you need to quietly 'boil off' the whatness, until you are left with pure that. That's it. Close your eyes and open them again, the world is there, your seeing, but find it the instant before it worlds. That is the wonder, or just this.

There is no whatness of thatness, no 'beingness' or essence of being, as long as being is strictly understood as thatness. It's not that existence precedes essence, but most of what you think of as being is just essence, that's why you can think you can think of it. It is not a distinct kind of experience, as though experience had two modalities, but is the very nature of experience. The cogito points to it, but in such a way as to make confusion nearly inescapable. It is not known by knowing but only by itself, if you could call that knowing. It appears to be void, to be the perfectly dark background of experience but if it could be approached, if it approaches you, it reveals itself as light. If it could be said to resemble anything it resembles the space between the inbreath and the outbreath, an infinitesimal nothing that as you attend to ever more closely reveals itself as something vast and timeless. It is not subject to the distinction between truth and error, but if it were it would be wholly truth.

In any discrete experience there is always whatness and thatness. If whatness is in answer to the question 'what?' then it needs to be further subdivided. There is a context-free whatness, which is essentially the same as what is meant by the term 'quale', singular of qualia, and which is indubitable, and there is also a contextualised 'what' which may be mistaken and around which all of the mechanisms of reality testing lie ready for further elaboration. Phenomenological reduction is the decoupling of these two kinds of what, the latter being embedded in, or perhaps constituting the natural attitude. None of this has anything to do with thatness, which is always indubitable. Thatness is so ubiquitous as to be easily overlooked, it hides behind whatness, it hides that it is distinct from it. Whatever you experience you posit, you mark that it is, regardless of whatever it may prove to be as an elaborated what. If it proves to be illusory that concerns what it is and not that it is, or was. This is an aspect of consciousness that can be overlooked, it confers being, you might say, on whatever comes before it, except that to speak in this way suggests that it has a kind of being before being, which is not the intended at all. It is rather the mystery concealed in Parmenides' utterance that thinking and being are the same.

Default mode might have been called ego once, an unhelpful term. What are some of its characteristics? A sense of inevitability, an apparent certainty of boundaries, even though they change from hour to hour. It is an anchor for moods and affective weather; it might chatter away but it's not all talk, the talk might be no more than a smug reinforcement of the feels. Moods can swing negative as much or more than positive, but in spite of that a certain kind of enjoyment persists, of a secret and unavowable kind - like smelling your own farts. Highly embodied and temporalised in clock-time, or at least clock-time is its always valid numeraire. Conviction of its self-referential good faith. If you've lost the thread it pretends to search for it, but knows beforehand that it won't be found. It loves the idea of doing away with itself and earnestly studies how to do so - insists that it is the reference for all states, especially those it labels 'altered'. It is extraordinarily shallow yet seems to contain all the depth formerly ascribed to the Freudian unconscious. It achieves this by the use of mirrors - is filled with mirrors. 

You know the object is real because you know that you, the subject are real. But no, you the subject can't be found anywhere, you actually infer your existence from that of the object, or the objective world in which you (fail to) find yourself. So, if the subject is only an idea born out of belief in the object it can't also underwrite the object. What makes you think the object is real then? The more you look the more fishy it becomes - every route to the object goes by way of the subject, but the subject if it has any reality at all lies on the other side of the object! The object starts to melt away - all that colourful stuff out there, it's really a bit belated - if you could come right in to the point when it first appears, its arising, you'd likely find nothing there at all, obviously. The object doesn't melt into awareness, since awareness belongs to the subject. What does it melt into then? It can't have a name, its pure context without content. Like the sound of one hand.

Purposive action has little need for memory, or such need as it has, especially in the short-term is served with maximum efficiency and economy, recruiting adjacent systems where convenient. Of itself we could say it has no need for a record of its actions and 'takes out the garbage' on a continuous basis. This is very different from what you might call the self in its deeper sense whose whole mode of awakening is an anamnesis, a resurfacing of forgotten intuitions and immediate knowledge. This means that the immediacy in purposive action, such as in introspection or thought-free meditation, is not a comprehensive or good model of consciousness. In the ongoing adventures of life there is no excuse for incurring the overhead of a detailed sensory and ideational memory, you happily dispense with this, until perhaps 'in tranquility' you choose to recollect the events. And yet, there is tremendous pleasure and even a kind of spiritual significance, in a good literary description of such an adventure - as if protagonist or narrator or some combination of the two, actually commanded the excess of psychic energy needed for detailed recall of vast amounts of ancillary detail. This is pure aesthetic value when done well (which is all too rare) and insofar as it tickles anamnesis is somehow also spiritual, evoking the system behind, meta or contextual to purposive action.

And at times the peculiar perfection of all things becomes apparent, is it perfection or something warmer? A secret smile, a kinship barely concealed, an opening of the heart. As if the very thunder has something to tell you, a whisper in the moment just before it crashes, an invitation to to take you along, which you laughingly accept with tears of joy you drink up with the parched and sun-warmed earth.

The sense of embodied presence is the harmonious meshing of exteroception, proprioception and interoception - outer world, your gesture in that world, and your internal bodily states. All of these are dynamic, are continually being updated, achieved and released and attention is actively and subliminally bringing about these about by closing and reopening the gaps. This is what it feels like but none of this actually creates presence, rather they harmoniously crystallise and bring to realisation a quality latent in awareness. Change any part of it and presence doesn't go away, it simply finds itself in an altered world. 

Enquiry is purposeful action in the mind is movement, pursuit, is motion. And where there is motion there is something that doesn't move against which motion is defined. The 'am-ness' is not revealed but is subsumed in the pursuit, as if it belongs to it, as if lies behind the purpose. The purpose moves or is moved, staying behind the pursuit. What is stationary remains implicit, is simply there so that the action has a source and a destination, but the 'am-ness' has no boundary and is constantly there, unmoving, unconcealed, neither pursuing nor pursued and so lies more in the stationary than the movement, the dreamer and not the dream. You can't wake it up, it is never asleep, the watcher watching the watching.

It's not what you are, you aren't anything at all, but the quotidian inevitability of what you are, the inevitable beams and joists that hold open the house in which you never dwell. That's where mind has surrendered itself to frame the room in which you think to find what can't be there, as if you needed something to push against, staring at the flickering light of one candle and the shadows on the wall, the gift you can't receive without recognising the giver everywhere, the giver who is the gift.

How naturally you inhabit a thought. Is that what it is? Can you be coaxed out of it, like a mollusk from its shell? This is thought right now, and where are you, inside or away? And where is the thought, and when? You are in flagrante with it? Behind or before, above, below? Oh your America etc.? Where and when is only a thought, place and space, trajectory, phosphorescent traces, as if you were not watching it the whole time, you, a thought of the thinker, a thinker of a thought. Body, mind you coin them freshly each occasion in the very thinking. And you and all your works, just thoughts too, so alive, the thinker never tires.

Call it the default mode if you will, after the (notorious) Default Mode Network, but you have to admit that, at least when the weather is fine, it is a very nice place to be. Mental otium, just happily daydreaming and entertaining thoughts. You don't know much, the perspectives are limited, but it is so easy, loafing at you ease and floating with each new thought that arises. Can anything be more effortlessly amusing so that you can only laugh at those who would sternly name it identification, or being captured by thought, or the 'small ego'. It is so cozy, such a delight to while away the time, with perhaps a faint memory of green eyes sparkling back at you.

All consciousness is intentional, it is a seer seeing a seen. This is the clearest picture you can form of what is going on here and now, as you are aware of attention and the source and aim of attention. But this is only a picture, a powerful analogy based on the image of yourself as a body inside the space in which it is seen as lying. The more clearly you can make out this picture, the more closely you can track from moment to moment, the more it calls forth the question, 'and where are you seeing this from?', what is the point of view on your point of view? Is it a point? Could it possibly be a point? The further you go the more clearly you must answer no. You can't give any sort of name or form or bound to where you are seeing this from. It isn't even the kind of thing that could be called a seeing, and it doesn't belong to the inferred space of your bodily experience (which is never directly grasped, but only imagined in a peculiarly dream-like way.)

Anything that can become the object of attention dissolves under that attention. This is because reality is in the seeing and not it the seen, the seen being only momentary under such attention. So if you can bring everything that in any sense belongs to you into the field of attention it will melt away, and this can be taken to express its inherently empty nature, but might just as well be seen as an artifact of attention. The entire process can be made even more respectable by being expressed in the language of awareness which brings with it a subtle blurring of the distinction between subject and object. None of this necessarily involves a dissolution of boundaries. A different sense of the notion of inherent nature might be the possession of a boundary, the boundary being over-determined by various largely unconscious conditions. In this understanding there is no dissolution of the object but only of the boundaries; things don't vanish into thin air but are subsumed into a larger whole. This is a stronger sense of emptiness or better of non-duality, but when the boundaries are dissolved then everything that was being kept out by the boundaries is now allowed in and you must be capable of withstanding the inrush from the space of all possible experience.

You are the mind trying to outsmart its own ability to model anything that can be thought of. The better and clearer your models, the more fail-safes are installed, the better it is at playing them. It does so with so much flair and wit, and it never tires of it. At least it is always just that bit less tired than you are. It's a joke, but who's laughing?