What you are is the experiencer of this and not the experiencer in this. That is an idea, but one whose effect is to gently undo the definitions of experience within the experience, or more properly the reaching towards such definitions. Experience is of course only one more definition in this, so in the end there could be neither experience nor experiencer. But for now, it is enough to dwell with the experiencer, or what might otherwise be called just awareness. To have any further notion of what this is and where it goes, of the sheer good of it, or otherwise, is already too much.

Individual consciousness is heteronomous in that the source of the 'action' is off-stage. This is to varying degrees; when it's weak you seem to be in control and are happy, but when it is strong the resulting pain causes you to notice it, and to notice that it has always been this way. But heteronomy is itself a concept, a staging of experience in accordance with deeply conditioned beliefs. You can observe it but that doesn't make you the witness of it. It might me more true to say that the conditioning is the witness.

Life is a fever of being, which is to say that it is wholly concentrated in the present moment which is nothing but a continual volatility, boiling off, consuming its fuel in a mad rush to nowhere. But then the point of view belonging to this point-presence has no weight at all, no continuity, and it is as if there is another point of view somewhere off to the side and back a ways, that is interested in how one frame slowly turns into another frame and how this frame sits inside that frame, and how the reality summing up all frames is strangely disinterested. And there may well be no such other point of view, it being just a side-effect of the one you fail to inhabit; it is only the possibility that might have been of being fully and completely present in some final reality behind the last door.

As gimcrack and of endlessly deferring incoherence as individual experience, that is, experience as of a purported (and entirely situational) individual, may be it is certainly intense. That seems to be the point somehow, to have these vortices in experience as such by which all its self-referential capacities can be fully spent, and that included the apparent friction of having it claim ownership, author rights, captaincy, of political sway over the myriad sub-identities. Such rich play, no wonder it is sometimes thought to be for the sake of sheer play. But if this is the ride, who or what is the rider? Well, for one thing it is not by any means or in any way concealed, and for another it doesn't in any way resemble your or anyone's idea of a subject. As if it were to say, please be kind enough not to seek me, just carry on, you are doing perfectly, just as is.

Individual life is theatrical through and through. You might think that your adherence to some ideal perfectly expresses your uniqueness, that it puts you in the first degree, until you see someone else with the same taste. It's not that the other takes something from you but that they confront you with your own gap in sincerity. Just as a Mexican stand-off type of situation leads to a spiral of "he thinks I think he thinks I think..." the same spiral arises internally the moment you try being totally honest with yourself. There is no perfect and self-sufficient intimacy which is later injured by the awareness that others can see you; the other is already there and is constitutive of what you most regard as your own. The gap, or narcissistic wound if you like, extends all the way down, without limit. You can only accept this by failing to accept it. It is another way of seeing that consciousness is impossible and does not exist.

The bewildering goegraphy of discursive concentrations can be resolved somewhat by noting that each expresses an adherence to a latent metaphysics, and it's work or service is always a matter of extending the reach of that metaphysics to a wider range of phenomena, even if this is no more than question-begging, since what counts as a phenomenon is always already determined by that metaphysics - or by the demand for the overcoming of the reverse determination. What is known as 'theory', for example, although overtly materialist, is a straining towards a qualified dualism. Its characteristic gesture is to open towards dualism at the same time as immediately cancelling that opening in a cunning or graceful return to the maternal reassurance of matter. This play is identical to the peculiar force of the demand. There are doubtless far fewer kinds of qualified dualism than there seem to be, and if the forbidden next step into wholesale dualism were to be taken there is the fear that the rich variety of phenomenal possibilities would be lost. Perhaps you have to take a further step in order to restore it.

Feeling, or affect and mood ought to be distinguished but not sharply. It's suggestive but wrong to think of a palette, or scale or perfumery of feelings because it misses their highly intentional nature. Desire, appreciation, hate and anger, for example, all belong to feeling. Mood seems to be less intentional since it is directed back towards the subjective condition of feelings  - in the plural, a mood being a condition for a plurality of possible feelings, which it colours. Feeling to mood might be as taste to smell, but then what you desire is not so much a feeling but a rare mood and entire way of being in experience. The attendant considerations is what preoccupies you, even discursively, much of the time, the active and purposeful engagement with the ever flowing affective condition. In existential terms the whole thing might be mapped in a two dimensional way according to self and other, being and nothingness, but the Samkhya triplet of the gunas, tamas, rajas, and sattva, all eminently intentional, seems to produce a far more detailed mapping. The self then appears as a labial mollusc delicately responsive in the heart of this flow, now sustaining and now irritant. The key point, however, is that such a self is an inevitable illusion arising from the fact of mistaking this for the source of consciousness, rather than its conditionally embodied expression.

There is always a state of feeling, it is a condition of embodiment, largely, but if all bodily sense were to suddenly vanish, that very absence would be the state of feeling, just as, on a smaller scale, a neutral mood is still a mood. To refer to a state of feeling rather than just a feeling emphasises its semi-stable and non-volitional character; it moves slowly so as to be the background against which apparently volitional thinking takes place, but strictly it is still a kind of thought, what else could it be? having no being outside of experience. Whatever it is that you take yourself to be inhabits these pervasive states of feeling; you can't touch their core, you think always from out of them. So, in a way it is a mode of thought that thinks you as the thinker of discursive thoughts, as the free witness of flowing experience, and hence the struggle to read its hidden logic.

What is constant in all experience won't be noticed and can't be sought but by enquiry you can become convinced of its reality and you can gradually turn attention in its general direction. All the colours and sounds that make up experience and the deep non-objective moods that give it value all arise against this background. There is so much to love but that which is truly lovable is this infinite generosity of simple being, irrespective of waking or dreaming, of a well- or ill-functioning mind, presence or absence, evil or good. 

Thoughts are nothing like passing clouds; by the time you are aware of being aware of them they are already receding into the past, being lost over the horizon, and you can't recall how they started, so you might conclude that they just drifted by, but in one infinitesimal moment you were the thought, it sparked with a grain of your fire, a derivative of a sense of self taken only secondarily to be you. Thoughts surround this presumed hearth or heart in concentric rings, like the layers of an onion, and flicker like lightnings in charged air. But it's not a witnessing, it's a subtle participation, out of no centre but of an intelligence alien to every time or location, or meaning, pure unqualified act.

It's not that you mean to paralyse thought and individual experience by focusing on their failings relative to the criterion of verification latent with them, as would perhaps a deconstructionist, no the former do very well in their way and you can only admire the global and historical coherence of ordinary experience, and indeed admire its very admirability. It is more a matter of raising that latent claim to self-evidence to salience and wondering, if experience does nothing to satisfy it, and is not in any way meant to, then what does? If the claim is real then it must be satisfied somehow, that conclusion being the irreducible residue of the cogito once all of its unwarranted accretions are swept away. It is not 'I' (at least in any normal understanding) that necessarily 'am', but this super- (or infra-) cognitive ground.

Most of what goes on, including this, is comprehended within pure conceptuality - you could call it thought, actively structured and in large part without a thinker. It is intent in its unfolding but is only provisional, a current and currency of promissory notes. You are invited to cash out the promises but when you do you only utter more promises, since to really do so would paralyse the whole operation. There is no relation of the meaning to what is meant. The thought itself is a kind of event and directly known would be no more than the empty advent of something as mute as a rippling sensation, and even that is just a finer fiction. It's what 'knows' this that seeks to emerge from the egg in which it has never and could never have been contained.

The experience of time is of identity in flow, the identical being split, separated from itself and unified, rejoined with itself, in the same standing motion, it is at once the splitting and the rejoining. If you take away the timeless identity then all would be flowing together and it is impossible to see how the sense of identity could arise in any but a superficial way. And if you said that it is as if there are two flows at different rates and the identical is a sort of standing interfence pattern between them, then, besides the fact that rate of flow is irrelevant to a fundamental flux, there would be no site within either flow to experience the standing 'wave', unless there were a third flow, and so on to infinity. This kind of infinite recursion is precisely the bad infinity that all such attempts to stabilise an overarching flux fall into. Admittedly the motivation for such a notion is strong because the mind, even as it reaches out towards identity, is repelled by it, since it destroys the very basis for thought or understanding as these are conceived. And besides, 'harmonic' notions of temporalisation make of it a sort of subtle epiphenomenon dancing on the surface of complex motions, but as such it would be fragile, destroyed, like a flame blown out by too much perturbation, but it is rather the opposite, tending to deepen enormously under such disruptions to its basis.

States of unpleasure, or negative enjoyment, or plain old suffering, seem to be deeply temporalised, and since temporalisation has many shapes and dimensions, shades of anticipation and regret, suffering is the same. In the same way any loosening of the inexorable quality of temporalisation is felt as essential positivity, as approaching integration, for example, the so-called 'power of now' - but that the 'now' is still a temporal mode. If you consider temporalisation from the point of view of direct experience it seems to be impossible, but then so does any any movement out of it. The most you can say is that of all the many impossibilities that you come up against it is probably the most essential one.

Layers of the self are sedimented by principled deprivations of the great good, which is not pleasure but a combination of affect, intelligence and power as intrinsic to the experiencing, the missed goal of every desire. Every defect of this core enjoyment, including its untimely or ghostly presence, is a mode of pain and destructive passion. Most of the time you are blissfully ignorant of this, but you can know that is constantly present because your dream life and through perceiving the consistency of character in others and hence in yourself. There is nothing surprising in its intermittent flarings. Permitted enjoyments are so contracted that they bear the traces of an infinite melancholia and regret.

A breath begins with the inbreath. The transition from inbreath to outbreath is smooth, like reaching the top of a rounded hill and then continuing on going down. There is no particular action involved, one movement simply merges into the other. The transition from outbreath to inbreath is more like a cusp, a distinct change of direction, you have reached the basement and could almost stay there but for a decision to go up again. Either way, however, there is a moment of stillness, and because all thought is tied to the action of breathing, thought stops, or the sense of time, which is itself only a thought. That's why these moments of stillness seem to expand indefinitely. The quality of this expansion persists into the next breath. Focus on that moment can be cultivated, mostly, even if you are attending closely to it you miss it because the experiencing is replaced by the idea of the experience, the mind so ready to anticipate, to overshoot.

Desire appears as aimed purely towards a satisfaction, but this is never simply the case. Neither is it aimed at itself, like the will to will, but at yourself as uniquely related to the imagined satisfaction. Hence desire is happiest when its keenness is not blunted by any satisfaction, and hence it is a wound to the self if some other is perceived as enjoying the very satisfaction that you desire. This wound might in some instances increase desire, mingling it with pain which serves as a catalyst to make it burn brighter, but often enough, when the ego component is sufficiently dominant, it destroys the desire and replaces it with another more internalised, 'higher' desire. And of course it is perfectly likely that you'll find in this case too that some other has pre-empted you in the satisfaction of this higher desire, which for them seems to be primary and not an elaborate compensation. And so in this way your defences bind you to an unending cycle of frustration. Structures of this kind are constitutive of the ego, endow it with an 'unconscious' and with a distinctive 'character'.

Not a new soul, still with the musky exuberance and good hope of a newly minted dog, nor an old soul gracefully stepping over the pitfalls, operating the humanity thing for best results and with few illusions, gracefully minimal and just, but one of the vast ungainly hoard of middle souls, thinking you've got the hang of a consciousness like this one but making every mistake in the book and painful to watch doing so, eternal adolescent, a cosmic grimace, honest only in self-contempt.

Untangling the knot of the heart would be endless labour, and likely with every loop undone a new loop would be tied somewhere else, since the very conception and desire for such work themselves are products of the very same projections into personhood and time by which it seems to be so real. The only solution would be to do away with the whole thing, the craggy perinatal landscape and its dependencies in one move. Consider only what it would be like to see it all opened up and emptied of even the possibility of identification. Would you be willing to let go of it, like an abandoned work, the immense sunk cost written off with a shrug, even if the chance was offered?

In the first instance reading yourself and reading an other is the same and only in the second instance do you make the distinction as to whether what is felt is of you or of that other. This isn't quite accurate because the other needs to be a semblable, a character who might be you, same sex for example, and otherwise comparable as well. When what you find is something desirable and the other has it then it is almost as if it has been taken from you, but what you feel first is that the enjoyment is not available, and only then do you find yourself as the excluded one, etc. If it turn out to belong to you then you feel a stab of superiority. The point of this is that on this more rapid subliminal level you as individual or 'ego' do not exist, meaning you are not a distinct element in the resolution in understanding of the situation. Your brain, you might say, does not have a constant symbolisation of yourself, but constructs it rapidly and retrospectively from the situation being constituted. This is a matter of computational flexibility if nothing else, what is 'you' needs to be available in many different forms depending on context, so can't be pregiven. On the neuronal level you are ego-blind. This is what makes social living possible and also what causes it to be endlessly complicated.

You perceive the object and hence, the object is the cause of your perceiving-the-object; object being perceived by you, becomes the subject or kernel of the event. However, object in this sense is pure abstraction, there is no possible relation to the object as such. Hence, in perceiving the object, what it is is the functioning of perception. It's not that you hear the bell, its the bell-hearing, or the object as adverbial modifier of the functioning-hearing. To make this move from object-centred perception to functioning-centred perception, you take the direction suggested by the 'I', as in 'I am hearing the bell' or 'I am hearing-the-bell.' But you don't take ts path all the way because to do so you would end by wondering how it was that you created or conjured the bell-hearing. So you only go part the way, the 'I' is a signpost, an arrow, and not a place. As the functioning the causal being of the virtual object is simply allowed, without further question. Of course, even the functioning is an abstraction but it is closer to the immediate truth to the direct experience, than the formerly believed-in object.

Attention goes from object to object, some desirable, some frightening, some speculative, inferential, conditional or subjectively-toned. It doesn't just go, this going, with the detachment of an aesthete, but it plunges into each with the compulsiveness of a glutton - there ought to be a sucking noise each time it withdraws from one and dives into the next. It's a viscous, a sticky process, and it's in that naive passion that the judgment of reality lies, in the intensity of the way you surrender your self to each new bauble, and the way that the frightening or repulsive ones do even more for the latent sense of engagement in the real than the enjoyable ones. It's the latter, the brief achievements of delight, that hint of freedom and detachment, that complete the work of the former, paradoxically enclosing you in the imagined world of a life. Isn't that the very fantasm of 'bonheur', transcendence though the stabilisation of delight?

The manifold or multidimensional vagaries of the self taken to be individual, with its various modes of reflexivity and alterity has a more than suggestive relationship to a complex topology which, much like a Klein bottle, cannot be resolved in any intuitive space - in part just because the imagination of any such space in an intrinsic part of such a self by way of its free self-consciousness. If you take the position of 'global' awareness, then you might imagine the latter as a space with sufficient dimensions to embed the former, in the same way as the Klein bottle can be embedded in 4-dimensional Euclidean space. Such an intuition, however, implicitly takes awareness not merely as a kind of space but as a flat one, that is, one in which every circuit can be contracted to a point so that there are no paradoxical re-entries. It is enough to accept the connotations of the term 'global'. This is to take things too far. Global, perhaps relative to the convolutions of individual mind, but these are no more than appearances. If awareness were a kind of space then there is no reason for it to be flat or lacking any sort of transcendental self in incomprehensively higher dimensions. But then the same process could be repeated ad infinitem. At some point the notion of awareness as any kind of space will have to be given up, so why not at the very start.

Wrangling about free-will versus determinism is a futile exercise. There is no one for whom either of these could be the case. If you can be persuaded of the necessary truth of determinism you are only being enmeshed deeper into the illusion that there is a subject who could benefit from this knowledge, adding further abstraction to abstraction, quite apart from the performative contradiction implicit in treating the entire issue seriously. There is no position to be taken on this because there is no place for the distinction to exist at all. If you must do something then you might consider why this question cannot be a question.

Perhaps it all comes down to the simple observation that the eye can't see itself. So you could say that whatever is experiencing can't be experienced - to which it might be replied that what need is there of an experiencer when all there is is experiencing? You need to add that nothing that can be known or experienced or inferred can be this experiencing which must in turn be unchanging and without flavour or any other distinguishing marks including the absence of distinguishing marks. From this point on it is not a matter then of waking up but only of the gentle dissolution of erroneous ideas imposed upon what simply is. Experience is then the joyous absence of an experiencer and the still more joyous absence of that absence.