At the culmination of time, when all the frames have fallen away, it will have mostly consisted of this inner talk that calls itself thought. Without any judgment, whatever is real is in this, is the real of this, already complete but unrecognised. Without ever having encountered itself, it is errant among mists and mirrors. Any state with 'propositional content' falls short of thought, but is effective since it calls on thought, lives on the fading trace of thought, without ever touching it.  You are not yet thinking, and perhaps only at that end will the thought that you have been finally come to itself, uttered into its destination. The thought cannot be completed until it encounters its addressee who is not other than its thinker.

You emerge as a striving, from out of a striving that precedes you, and you persist in spite of knowing it to be futile, and that the very quality of your striving is shabby enough to forestall beginning. Any success would be a way of evading this futility and that would be to fail completely, to gain something would be to have something to lose. In the same way you can't make a success out of failure, you must keep failing sincerely. Only in this way is there any chance of a moment of estrangement from yourself and its essential futility. This is the via negative in an age of endless self-actualisation, the only way to realise that there is no such self, and no such actuality.

To think of intentionality as a digest of commitments and entitlements within a social context including answering attitudes and responses goes a long way towards the sense that it is not you living through the day but the day living through (or en-living!) you. The lightly queasy sense of self that accompanies this is exactly what it feels like to intentionally undertake such a criss-crossed field of responsibilities and conferred authorities. That the broader context in which these are embedded has undergone a sudden, radical and enduring change speaks to the way one only half recognises oneself at this time. This intentional world is however an overlay upon another wholly non-social and non-discursive intentionality, one which doesn't employ or require a turning back on itself. This other one is wholly alive, in contrast to the former.

The feeling that the true life is elsewhere, that there is something to be sought, something that eludes you, etc., but not something other or out-there rather it is what is beneath you, what the roots of your mind, your entire living, are sunk into, roots that go so deep and spread so far that they are indistinguishable from the soil. If you see it this way it is easy to see that nothing distinguishes waking life from a lucid dream, except that in the dream you are filled with wonder as to how this marvelously articulated world came about and you feel a mysterious kinship with the unknown source. And of course nothing but your habits of thought prevent you from having just the same feelings about reality. No reason they shouldn't be even stronger. The problem is that you confuse causal priority with ontological priority. The experiencing is ontologically prior to the experience, but the cause and the effect are on the same ontological level, they both belong to the experienced. So if you mess with your brain your experience changes. Fine, but your brain is just something you experience in a certain (indirect) way. the same goes for the whole weight of causality, whatever it is and however far it extends. The experienced needs norms, and norms need to be pretty firm. The more you chase them up the firmer they become. None of that has the least bearing ontologically, there is no conflict, nothing that need shake the other, the softer and sweeter kind of certainty.

Intentionality is consciousness by day, it's what you wake to. That there is non-intentional consciousness ought to be clear by the experience in every night, in sleep and perhaps not even only in sleep. You don't know it because you can't report on it, but giving a report should not be the necessary condition for consciousness.  Who says it is? To think so only begs the question. There are states in motion in which there is no distinction between subject and object. It's the most ordinary thing, more so that the waking self which is so arbitrary, so randomly assembled. To call it sleep is to treat it as if it were an exception, it is what lies beneath, extending without limit, and waking life only the turbulence and friction of its inner surfaces.

The avidity of waking consciousness ensures that it remains utterly shallow. Avidity is to desire without any sense of why you desire or even properly what you desire, you only strive to get out ahead of yourself. Or again, it is like a tic of definiteness, collapsing every wave function in order to go on to the next. This in contrast to the mind in dreaming, of which it is not accurate to say that it is experiencing. Here events, things, happenings, are not split either internally or externally. Dreaming mind is without limits which the cult of awareness fails to know. All of this must pass into language as well. To not be played into a corner but to allow words and grammar to soften and unfold, to extend strange tendrils into the strange.

Experiencing as a global term, still retains time and space as part of its cognitive background. It is a gerund, a verbal noun and brings with it the tense structure of language. It implies a corresponding understanding of empty awareness as presencing. The first move in thought is to go into the harness of this Kantian style preconditioning. You might also consider hat can't be experienced in this way, and how this too is in play. It is as if you are tilted in relation to what is real, the presencing being only a certain cross-section giving rise to false separations. You are confronted by a puzzle that can't be solved because you are unable to see the missing parts, the parts that are outside of what you are convinced is the sole reality. The parts you can make out bear no resemblance to what gives rise to them. One of them is you.

The only world we have with which to understand experiencing is the experienced world. However well we might do at this task, any result will only be at one remove from what it seeks to know. This is a gap that can't be bridged, only ignored or wished away.

Experience is not like the perceiving of a field, however vast and multidimensional, it is not the real reality that would correspond to so-called virtual reality which interactively feeds the senses with synthetic contents, or in other words it is not a stream of qualia. On the other hand all of such examples are experiences, they are simply not experience in essence because that is primarily intelligibility, even if the terms of this intelligibility are wholly implicit. Animals clearly live their lives in an intelligible world; we can recognise this without knowing the structures and limits of that intelligibility, but it remains always in question for us. We are nearly as foreign to ourselves, despite the efforts of psychologists, but we swim effortlessly in our intelligible world without recognising it at all. The is why it makes sense to say that experience is ungrounded. To be grounded would be to comprehend its own (conditions of) possibility. The question hangs unanswered for the intelligibility that we are, and this bothers us. Every striving seems to be ultimately an attempt to know ourselves, but the self is irrelevant. The only answer would be to achieve grounding. And this is so even after you have 'proven' that no such goal is attainable.

There is no object of experience, only experiencing. And so no need to look for experiencing, this is it. And if it is experiencing the intention towards what is not experiencing? Well, there is nothing outside of experiencing and the road to it is paved with good intentions.

If you must model pure awareness don't use seeing but inseeing; it's not like (the idea of) perception but like the purely intelligible insight. Is insight conceptual? Does it produce understanding articulated in concepts? It does, but only as coming down or unfolding from a timeless flash. Concepts give rise to and regulate other concepts but what ties them together are immediate relations, inferences with a lively necessity of their own. This cannot derive from further concepts, the conceptual derives from something non-conceptual but of the same nature. This can't just be assumed naturalistically as the way of things without begging the question. Something more like pure intelligence is required. This is how fundamental decisions, far upstream, determine the nature of experience.

The distinction between the perceptual and the conceptual belongs, of course, to the latter. How would you identify a pure perceptual datum? The force of objectivity, of objective reality as what you are up against, is traceable to direct perception, to intuitive immediacy, but such immediacy is an idea which can only be cashed out by way of an asymptotic series of validations, or in other words by an even more abstract conceptual operation. This is just to recapitulate certain idealist arguments, to encounter them again on a different path. The kinds of sensory experiences you have in dreams, when recalled and reflected upon, can fairly easily be reduced to concept-driven fabulations - it is almost a cliche that the actual sensory content they are formed around bears no resemblance to what they are taken to be. The sensory qualities met with in waking life do not yield so easily, although we are told by researchers that this is only a matter of degree. The same fabulation takes place, but in under a stricter verificational regime.  In the end it is all conceptual, or noetic, and even if this is only true in a weak sense it is true in respect of any work that you wanted immediate intuition to do.

There is cogency to putting the ultimate experiencer in question when it is a matter of sensory experiences. Where is it that you actually see or hear, or taste or feel or smell? Always somewhere further behind where you can hold them in reflection or just consider them. This is because the knowing that you are perceiving is already a knowing and so is keyed into the entire conceptual apparatus. Or to say it in a more positive way, there is always room for getting closer and closer to 'pure' sensory experience, to the point of 'becoming' the experience, and even beyond - it is asymptotic. The problem is that no such intrinsic separation is there with respect to conceptual activity, which means with respect to the entire interconnected complex of knowing and knowing like engagement. Since the agent of any such distancing is a phenomenon or epiphenomenon of this knowing there is simply no effective fulcrum in which to plant a wedge. This is why a lot of what passes for meditation is the systematic attempt to reframe the conceptual or noetic dimension as a subtle kind of perception - of qualia, or arisings or dharmas or whatever terminology is used. Perhaps what is missing is a different way to enter the penetralia of the noetic without recourse to the metaphor of distancing.

What you are is experiencing. No, experiencing alone, you are experienced, and only fitfully. Quickly, where is experiencing? Not here, you are here, here is you. Every idea is inextricable from the complete tangle of ideas, of askings and answerings in which you are a crossing point., and not some uniquely privileged one, but an effect of every grammatic and pragmatic crossing over between subject-subject and object-subject, distributed over the messy whole or hole.

Belief in a Simulation Hypothesis is not unlike a belief in a God in that the 'real' reality is transcendentally other to our life-world reality, and is responsible for it as its creator. What differs is the motive and interest this creator bears towards and the fate reserved for the creation. In either case there is also the idea that we are somehow in the image of our maker, even if this seems absurdly trivial in the former case as based in a common curiosity, and somehow sublime in the latter, but always a matter of externals, of behaviour. The creator's interest is in what is done by the creation. The notion that the supervening reality is mind-at-large, or pure awareness, or pure Being is not entirely removed from this childish paradigm, but in this case what is at stake, the ultimate identity, is entirely inward. It is a matter here not so much of creation as of emanation or reduction, as if we are projections in a limited set of dimensions or 'degrees of freedom' of an unlimited reality, and where the limitation is internally, not externally imposed. In this case it is the archetypes such as birth, death, time, and otherness that are the limited adumbrations of the nature of the senior reality. The truth is concealed behind the inescapable limitations of our experience, veiled by their very character as limitations.

Idealism is an allusive error, an unsalvageable category error gesturing helplessly towards a truth that cannot be enunciated. Say instead that experiencing is suspended and extended in its swerve in being, and that the metaphysics out of which the habitation worlds were built are what fall from it in ecstatic necessary contingency. Being cannot underwrite experience because it is experience, onefold and so untouched by any and every sense that you can make of 'is'.

A lucid mind can always find reasons behind its every act, and reasons behind those reason, delighting in its own transparency. Delight, fascination, originality promise more of being, which is a promise of groundedness. This remains a promise, however, undone by time with a perfectly equal hand. But you know somehow that there is more of being behind or within this glittering surface, some sort of gravity, a pull towards a centre which only keeps you circling. This is frustrating, but also perfectly fitting. It feels as if you were being tickled by being itself.

The sense of agency, of being wholly invested in purposeful, if mostly quite trivial, action is so pervasive that it seems as if awareness is purely in its service, as if it has nothing better to do that be the appreciative audience for endless mental puerilities Or in other words that it is a neutral medium, like light, bringing what is independently established into the light. Doubtless the mind is unable to appreciate them, but awareness, to give it one of its names, is rich with what could be miscalled properties. It is actually the agent itself whose discoveries are entirely modeled on the structures of awareness, but appropriated and distorted. For example, the cogito is seen as underwriting the existence of the agent in a particularly strong way. Well, it does do something, this momentary turning of attention on itself, but certainly not what you think it does, and not even describable in the same language. Existence, you say? No, surely you jest. Look again!

For the most part you perceive va predictions, shorthand, and rapid glosses, so that the perceived world is pervaded by your own mind and seems dulled, lacking in true objectivity. You naturally assume that the true objectivity is concealed behind this imaged or represented world and can be located by a sort of perspectival projection from the different degrees of freshness you can gain by various estrangements, derangements and renewals. This objectivity, however is merely a different kind of notion belonging to the same mind-contaminated perceptual process. If you were to encounter any object in its fully individual self, without names or preconceptions, the entire subject-object, real and representation, paradigm would be shattered and all that would be left was pure perceiving without any distinctions - neither empty nor full, neither self nor other, causeless, unconditional, unqualified.

On any assumption, even the most reductive, consciousness has a destiny. If it is something that has arisen then in its not insignificant interventions in the way things go the question of 'how it plays out' is a worthy one, even if the 'it' has only a secondary status to the 'things' that go on. If, on the other hand, its arising makes no sense, since arising only happens in and for consciousness, then its destiny, the revealing of its latent possibilities is even more in question. In any case the current form in which it is known is only a provisional one. It is significant that its blossoms into a peculiarly original relation to individual selves, but that would appear to be no more than the cutting edge of its reach. This need not be understood in developmental or historical terms so much as the caprice of its auto-affection. If, as some like to say, it is the universe awakening to itself, then it is the nature of the universe that becomes more strange. At any rate, this social and mental plurality of individual 'I's in no way exhausts its essence.

Thoughts and other affections with propositional content are a special sort of contents of the mind to be distinguished from immediate, perceptual and proprioceptive streams which are a matter of pure qualia. This sort of distinction doesn't really work; the significance of all of that dimension of experience lacking significance is precisely that it appears not to signify anything but itself. It is deliberately non-signifying so that it can ground what is more properly signifying. And if you imagine some primitive form of life embodying a mind without significance then it would seem that the smallest touch of the latter anywhere in the system is enough to instantly contaminate all of it. Again, a bit like waking in the morning and instantly reframing every minute sensation into the waking world, from out of its prior, and otherwise meaning-filled, dreaming frame. The simple point is that there can't be a distinction between meaning and unmeaning as long as that is what the distinction is to mean. This is not to say that your whole world hasn't crystallised out of some primeval conferring, but that you can recapture that moment from where you currently stand.

You breathe, you are aware of breathing in and breathing out, even if you pay no attention. You eat and drink and you eliminate and you are aware of gustation, of the digestion of your food, of its progress through your body and of your digestion, the felicity or otherwise of your belly, liver and guts, you are aware of energy, of appetite, of solids, liquids and gasses etc., and again with or without attention. In the same way you are aware of the circulation of blood, of the state of your muscles and skeleton, of the work they do, need for rest, health or illness etc. Where your awareness is at best deficient and certainly more than a little misled is in the metabolism of thought and emotional feeling. This is a peculiar ignorance. Do you ingest certain ideas? They come at you from your engagement in the world, charged, more or less salient, and often they disappear just as quickly, only to emerge briefly, sea-changed, in dreams and intimations, before emerging some time later, excreted by your organs of thought and rattling around in your forebrain before being washed away by the next wave of preoccupation. This process is so mysterious that there is not any clear picture formed over the years of the structure and layout of these mental organs. The analogy breaks down, whatever it is that occupies your mind it is no kind of stuff.

Dreams are as if experienced through a single sense which only subsequently self-divides into sight, sound, feeling, thought. In this respect they are in some ways like a movie or novel. Every fictional character, no matter how realistic the world they are placed in is a dream character experiencing a dream. The wall separating them from their creator is porous even if it is pretty much invisible. This is all quite unlike waking experience in which tracks diverse in their source are combined in a posterior act - sight, sound, body feeling, contextual awareness etc. What makes it so real-seeming is the way these conspire. Experience, not a flux of discrete events but a divergent polyphony of infinitely extendable meanings and meta-meanings. Any attempt to impose unity on these is no more than that, an attempt, itself yet one more divergent track. An artificial synthesis imposed by the mind and its latent metaphysical presuppositions. Artificial too the attempts to 'overcome' this.

It's not that life is a dream, but that the distinction in the way of putting the world together is waking life and in dream life is only a contingent one. The choice as to where to draw the line is a cultural one and a personal one and it can be freely changed. You might say that art is the presentation of common reality through the lens or apparatus of dreaming mind. It offers many small revelations, but whether these serve to unlock the latent potentialities of waking mind or to confine it more tightly within its compartments, by giving it a safe and defined place, is another matter. You might also substitute madness for dream here. The aim however is to undo the distinction, and only the distinction, tout court.

The dreamer, like the wakeful self is a kind of locus of doership, rather than a pure experiencer. It's not that the doing serves experience in this case but that experience serves doership, even if the purposes and the goals are no more than contents of experience. It is experience counterposed with itself and a little out of phase. The dreamer however it not held in as rigid a geometry as the waking self, but is fuzzier, is smeared out to the very ends of the dream world. So in waking from a dream there is a displacing of the virtual centre, a sudden jolt backwards into facing a world of not-self. All of this takes place within the total field of experience and is not necessitated by anything outside of it. So, to be aware from the total field of experience is to dissolve the distinction between dreaming and waking worlds. It's not that they aren't different, but the difference is inessential, an imaginary alteration in the texture of doership, which is itself imaginary.