Experience is not made up out of experiences, and yet what you look for is an experience of experience. Experience like an ill-fitting suit of clothes. Sartor resartus!  If experience suddenly became that of another, would you know? And how would you know? It is never entirely your own, the experience of others is woven into it. And yet you are uniformly spread out over the woven field of experience, you never find some element becoming experience from a prior state of merely being at hand. But in the ongoingness of experience what has been is continually cast off. You are constrained to be within experience but you do not inhabit it. There is a gap which might be felt as a bracing freedom, as if you know yourself to be superior to your experience, but also might be felt as an unsatisfactoriness, as if you are oppressed by the narrowness and conditioned nature and inescapability of it. The latter is perhaps truer to the essence of it; it has a sort of historical substance, heavy, evocative, and stale, blurred in time.

There is an absence where you are supposed to be Better: presencing can only be as against a prior Absence and that is how it can be presence. And if you look to see where you are in this what is you can only be on the side of the Absence. All this in so far as presencing remains an adequate description of your endowment in a world. It certainly counts for a lot, just showing up, that you keep showing up, or that the world with you in it keeps showing up at the start of each day. The almost imperceptible sliding into place of a world from out of the otherness of deep sleep. However it arises with whatever intensity or urgency of engagement there is always a 'fourth wall' - the discontinuous space behind which the audience is located. Where you are is always behind that fourth wall, and that is the closest you can get to naming it, making no attempt attempt to objectify it. It is an intimation more than a thought, and it can be held steadily without falling into tail-chasing, or capture by salience.

Identity as distinction, as 'there is an x such that for all y ... ', a representational pattern itself represented and enacting the global dominance of representation so that it characterises what it is to be any and all speakable matter. This has become the world we inhabit, habitation only another form of the same, by an increasingly urgent logic, by the recognition of nothing but such logics of the speakable or thinkable. All of this accelerating until the dawning awareness of it as a kind of super-contingency, the contingency of contingency, and it begins to become possible to question of the underlying necessity. A question that that resists all formulation if it is to remain true to itself. The system devours itself, the systematic devouring the systematic, and cracking open. The possibility of not of knowing this or of passing through the cracks, but of surrendering all such ambitions so that the time- and spaceless silence can be heard, for the first time, perhaps.

An 'event of appropriation': a magpie is seen pecking at something in the grass. A second magpie flies in squawking loudly and alighting close by. The first magpie retreats and the second magpie bends over the find. It raises its head and it is holding a small mouse by the neck, its long tail hanging below it.  The magpie holds it up triumphantly and takes a few small steps. The first magpie stays at a distance silently watching. After a short time the second magpie carries the mouse to a more distant spot drops it and commences working on it with its beak. Every actor in this three-part drama is singular and surely feels its position keenly, but the dominant bird seems to do so in a further sense since it its interest is in the display as much as in the prey. There can only be one dominant actor in a play structured by dominance, and this seems as if it is at the very origin of ego consciousness, its prototype in a sense. Since the first magpie is the intended audience of this display we could say that it internalises the ego-ity in an alienated fashion, just as the second magpie must also internalise the first's internalisation, etc. All of the participants, including the mouse and the human observers are individualised figures in the event considered as a whole. From the point of view of awareness, however, there is no difference between these positions, all arise equally but in their own way within global awareness. is this also what is meant by Heidegger's  'Ereignis'?

But what about an othering that came up out of your blindspot? And the mind's blindspot is surely much more than a spot, it's more of a black hole. The aberrations of thought, perception, feeling, of context and situation are surely familiar enough, all the machinery of the 'unconscious' that you can't set yourself up against, because it pervades all capabilities. You don't know that you are affected by them until, perhaps, it is pointed out, or after a deal of reflection. There is no sense that any of these represent antitheses for your dialectical ascension, they are merely confusions. Still, no matter how lost you may become in such mazy ways, they all go into experience and are only possible in respect of it strange unity, a unity that doesn't look out onto anything if not itself. It looks _through_ the uncertain instrument of the mind and its possibilities and is never identical with them. it is identity that efuses everything identical.

Ever dawning knowledge of the world's great process embracing you at every level and now cajoling, now commanding attention, seducing and threatening; all of this upending all self-certainty and arousing dim currents of alien desire is itself no rescinding of primary awareness but its illumination in complete displacement from the personal. What opens before you and beneath you, unfathomable power of the real is at the same time the very power owning and owned that releases and shelters what you are, the unexperiencing of experience, disturbing force of unknowing awakening.

That experience is what it is, and you don't know (yet) what is or what it could be(come), because of what it truly is, in such a way that they belong inseparably together, or else it bears only a secondary and childish, folkish, fabled, relation to what it truly is? It is not a matter of settling this question according to the side you happen to favour, or even alternating between the two sides, but of seeing that this uncertainty is the very expression in this time of what experience truly is. The tension in this uncertainty is what pushes every kind of mere or totalised experience beyond the limits that it has set for itself. What experience is passes necessarily through the self, through selfness, without thereby proving or being limited to the psychological self, so that whatever experience truly is takes in and features this twist of selfness. That is the underlying insight of panpsychisms, but these offer only a way station and not an end of the inquiry.

If you think 'all things arise in awareness' and take this as privileging the subjective over the objective then you have surely missed the point. You might do better to note that whatever you take to be the subjective is only a subclass of the objective, and so you would do as well to meditate the enigmatic encountering of things in the world as the peculiar nature of the 'I'. In either case there is nothing you can think out, although certain framing thoughts take you a certain way closer to your goal, before twisting around on themselves and collapsing like a bubble. It is just this behaviour at the limit of the thinkable that you can be mindful of in restraint from thought. You gain an intimation of certain configurations without a clear sense of what they are configurations in, what sort of space-time, or 'it' that gives space and time. Any notions you might have about this 'it', such as being peaceful, vast, and of a soveriegn stilness are importations from old poems that can no longer be accepted second-hand. What you are called upon to do is to allow the intimations to reveal what they may.

This unbounded particularity is lived through the soul as the pathos of the gaze. To be picked out, chosen by a pair of eyes produces a deep quivering. This was noticed especially in childhood when you first came in contact with other children. After that one learns that there is a contingency to such an event, that it can be used lightly or cruelly, and from there a never ending dialectic arises, since the original experience is never completely erased. You can experience the world as a way of Being ot the Infinite gazing back at you, and you can turn it around so that it becomes a self-enclosed intimacy where it is your sole gaze that caresses the world. And you can recognise or seem to recognise that gaze in another and seek to be embraced in it. This infinite particularity is transcendental to the soul and so while it can never be resolved it gives rise to endlessly changeing wonders, discoveries and acknowledgements.

Experience as a flux of qualia, while qualia are 'what it's like...' - no, because if you want to speak of qualia these are precisely what cannot be 'like' anything at all, the notion doesn't apply: in being experienced they are absolutely unique because absolutely particular. Experience is absolute particularity, exactly this incomparable. You can seek to get behind appearances by inquiring as to what 'gives' experience, what gives this life you are living, anything and everything is possible, but that you are living it is absolute particularity. This is the only meaning of identity and yet it has nothing to do with anything that characterises identity, as if it is pure and unconditioned choice. It is identity without being identical to anything. You cannot ask if identity now is the same as identity then, it doesn't exist that it could be put side by side with any other instance. Existence doesn't exist, and you are that.

World names the sphere in which all objectively regarded events take place, and so is itself akin to an event taking place in a larger sphere we might call galaxy or universe, or space-time manifold, but even this last is thought to be an event of its kind, a big-bang, say, taking place in another super-reality for which we don't yet have fitting concepts. The metaphysical principle here being that every kind of arising is inside of its sphere of possibility, the Being of being. Of course all of this could equally be viewed as taking place in Mind or Experience, names for another way of proceeding along this principle. And these two directions represent rival actualities, even if 'actuality' is ultimately only an experiential concept, an ultimacy. According to the way of Experience the proceeding does not end with Experience, this too arising within a larger sphere: that in which Experience itself arises. If you would call this 'Life' or 'Space' that would only be a weak analogy, its 'actuality' is dizzyingly abyssal; emptiness or Dharmakaya or Nirguna Brahman, neither dizzying nor abyssal, the no-ground of ground. You cannot think this but you may be mindful of it.

It is equally misguided to treat the now and more real than past and future, since the now is only defined as the point where future crosses into past. The terminology is hopelessly corrupt and together with many of the other terms you commonly use to locate and designate experience can only deliver a vicious circularity. Try calling it being-experiencing, understanding it to embrace temporalisation without being limited by this term and its conceptual matrix. Then you can see that being-experiencing, including the seeing, has historical thickness without reference to duration or temporal seriality. There is another deeper toplogy which hold ineffable diversity in multivalent proximity. What you would call 'event', such as the entry into time and its progressive unfoldings as meanings, has a corresponding nature in being-experiencing for which no names are adequate. On one side such 'events' mark divergences which cannot be recuperated, creations of worls, but on the other side these are not divergences at all, the surface of being-experiencing being without marks.

Hedegger's Gewurfenheit, thrownness, is more evident in relation to time than to space in respect of finding yourself within worlding. This is because in time you think of yourself in duration, or in an overlapping series of durations, but you never experience a duration, only the present moment, now. It's true that you also only ever experience here, but since you can travel and retravel over what conveniently appears to be the same span, there is a freedom in space which is unimaginable in time, although, novels, memoirs, histories strive to do so, with a pardoxical kind of almost success. If you anticipate a pleasant experience, say a concert, it always seems in retrospect to have not quite happened, no matter how elated you might be afterwards. It was only a series of nows, and looking closely these form no sort of continuity. It is as if you were dropped into time, but there can never be a moment when that happened. The intimation of timelessness that belongs to the present moment never goes away and cannot be reconciled with duration which only exists in memory or anticipation, in other words, in pure imagination.

Unseen colours also play a role in experience. Indeed, they do so like everything subliminal or latent; experience is marvelously and endlessly inter-related, it includes the mind's understanding and by that exceeds it, but you are not limited to understanding. To come into right relation to experience you must become it. To be experience rather than imagining that you have experience, although such imagining is itself nothing but experience. The gap between you and experience is experience and hence no gap at all. This is so strange that it is fittingly called emptiness.

No matter what your notions of the reality of the experienced world it cannot be doubted that every feature and quality of that world belongs wholly to experience and its reality a projection from that experience, which also ultimately remains within experience. All these wonderful colours and shapes, these magnificent lures are, if you grant that mind is a product of the brain, entirely constructed within the brain. There is not even a question of what things in themselves 'look like', every kind of 'look' is a mind creation. If noticing this produces no jolt of unexpectedness, then see how the one noticing is itself something in the experienced world. To get to what is so startling you need to move the point from which you are seeing further back behind whatever is seen. It is not of the nature of a point, however, this seer, but closer to what you call space, pervading the context of your seeing, without any optics or geometry.

What you do has become a habit and a duty. What has become of the original motive? Well, that's just what has undergone such changes, although these are more of emphasis than nature. You persist in order to encounter your motive for persisting. Sometimes it seems no more than the higher nostalgia, not exactly an attempt to stop time by entering a picture: first rediscovering that particular and very specific picture that has haunted your dreams and to a lesser extent your waking life since you first set out and then becoming the very figure in the picture in an infinitude of telescoping meanings. Not so much this as finding what or who it is that took on this peculiar task and why. You can't let it go until you have realised it, fully and completely. It is the recovery of a realisation that was strongest in early childhood. That would be the way in which every seemingly lost time could be recovered, and then the step beyond, the one and only thing you had to do.

Behind the self a deeper self, and on and on until you reach the soul's core which is formed around certain basic attitudes and evaluations. You might start following the track of knowing and perceiving but in the deeper regions the frames are ethical, expressive of fundamental evaluations and expressions of faith. The soul is not the end, it is an appearance in awareness, and it is  bounded by death; the meaning of the soul is death. Awareness being deathless is not at stake, but also, being deathless contributes no form or energy. The soul is destined for death and if this is transcendence it cannot be known prior to the dying, to the being forsaken. So all of your deepest intentions are moved by soul and form part of its eternal drama. Everything of interest belongs to the soul's drama, its passion. That this seems so very Christian does not necessarily imply that Christianity yields the best approach to it, but it may be inescapable at a certain level.

What an extraordinary mirror maze the personal mind is, peopled by projections of everyone you know, a complex of scenic intentions, 'I'll do such things to show him/her as will make them see this and that again...', '...because surely they were thinking that I thought they meant me to think...', '...and I'll do this because I promise myself that...', '...and how did he do that, I wish I could something like it, the poor fool, who? well, one of us at any rate... and what about them, who saw the whole thing...' etc. etc. Interspersed with little flashes of perception, now this, now this. The views changing instantly from one to another, from involvement to detachment, expectation to regret, resorting of priorities in a blink, and without the least surprise or unexpected estrangement as if drawn from a bottomless well of substance.  All of it like falling, yielding, yielding to forces of circumstance.  Even going against is factored in, has its place, nothing disturbs the party.

The self is a phenomenon of frame, every frame having an outside and an inside. But the inside of a frame is the outside of a deeper frame and so on. What holds the two sides apart is a fundamental anxiety, a need to assert something against fundamental groundlessness. Erving Goffman eloquentlly describes what happens when the distinction is short-circuited and the current frame suddenly dissolves: "Whether the character that is being presented is sober or carefree, of high station or low, the individual who performs the character will be seen for what he largely is, a solitary player involved in a harried concern for his production. Behind many masks and many characters, each performer tends to wear a single look, a naked unsicialised look, a look of concentration, a look of one who is privately engaged in a difficult, treacherous task."

Intentionality of consciousness is usually taken to refer to its 'aboutness', that every moment of conscious experience, whether perceptual, conceptual or whatever other modalities you care to name, is always about something. This is strange enough, since consciousness seems to think of itself as a power of pure transparency, independent of any object, but it also elides the more conventional sense of intention, as deliberately willed, intended as distinct from unintended. The latter sense is close to the idea that experience necessarily expresses a self, that every thought reveals and produces a thinker, the intendant of the intentions. This self is never directly present but is the evolving temporal reality behind the iterations of experience - this is what you get to know when you get to know someone. That too is just an idea, of course, but a peculiarly indelible one; if you 'see through' it then it is precisely what is seeing through, and so there it is all over again. If the object is not the separate reality that you take it to be, then neither is the subject. How many ways are there to say this?

The nature of awareness being outside of thought can only reveal itself in silence, in a perfect surrender of the mind, and renunciation even of such lofty concepts as truth, beauty or goodness. This is not a means, and so must be without purpose or expectation of any outcome. If such a 'fasting of the mind' can only be imperfectly realised, nonetheless as a background to experience a frameless frame, the disturbances of experience take on a very different colouring, now in the absence of any anchor, a strange equalisation and seriousness.

Awareness is always singular, while concepts are irremediably plural. So awareness cannot be conceptualised. Even, singular is a concept, but one that abolishes itself.

Your non-dual awareness might not dissolve the distinction between the available and unavailable sides of your experience, between its day and night, but it is intended to soften it, to make it more a matter of degree than kind. Whatever the case may be internally, this awareness does not soften or override the distinction between your experience and that of others, and so it does not do away with ethics in any sense at all. Compassion or empathy might be thought to assist here, but the problems of mirroring, projection, projective identification and more generally of confirmation bias render these means far less effective than it would seem. It is not that you might learn to see into others, but rather that you might gain some access to a broader perspective that includes both you and the other that will enable you to see what you know, what you should know, what you can't know and what it is that you hold concealed in your heart, in regards to your actions, both past and present.

To realise that the sole reality is pure non-objective awareness is not to call on a reserve behind experience but actually to do away with any such reserve, with the possibility of any such possibility. Your objective existence, which can only be your existence for others since you cannot be your own object, is just such a reserve, a sort of option on immortality. That there can be nothing but experience abolishes this, and it is a sort of irony to refer to this realisation as emptiness. Whatever it is empty of was never there in the first place, was only a kind of thought, or not even that.

 The spontaneously arising feeling of self opens to deeper possibilities than the discursively clarified or questioningly opened conception of its underlying (metaphysical) status. Put simply, feelings can take you for a ride while thoughts act as the brakes on any such translation. It is as if the entire history of that feeling is concealed within it, or not even concealed; it is already a motion identifying its source with its current blossoming and it draws you in by abandoning conceptual limits on possible experience.