Objective identity is a matter of discovery and rediscovery. You freely rediscover the object as the same despite differences that are put aside for the knowing. This brings about the wonderful thingness of things, but it does nothing for personal identity even if there are shades of it in awakening each morning and taking a moment to rediscover yourself. It is the assumption of your own identity in time that entitles you to be a witness of the identity of things, although again the gift sometimes goes the other way. What you are is not a factor in experience but the whole of it and since identity is relative to that, is an operation within experience, there can be no identity of the whole presentation. For the same reason, however, you can't grasp that you are the whole of experience because there is nowhere outside of it from which to confirm it. That whole worlds and their enjoyers arise like bubbles in dreams is only suggestive. The only approach to it is in driving meditations on personal identity into a dead end. A 'grown-up' version of saying your name over and over again until it dissolves into meaningless sounds.

There is something it feels like to be you and what it is is of a kind, what it is to be someone in particular. Everyone has a distinct instance of this kind, at least one, maybe more. You can imagine being someone else, first knowing you were, and then getting used to it and forgetting what you were before. This is how it seems, and everyone is fascinated by it, by being themselves and by imagining others, how they are different but similar. As if it were something you could put on and take off, so that for all that, the life in it belongs to no-one, is the same anonymous life in either case, but with an identity nonetheless, an absolute identity with no qualities at all. But having such an idea is an essential part of being you, of being anyone. 

There is an inescapable core to the self or perhaps better called the soul. It is like a knot which keeps its essential twistedness no matter how it is deformed; if you try to unravel it your very moves cause it to reform itself somewhere adjacent. It is character and characteristic, what you have to work with and the limitation in everything you do. If gives your your mastering question and dilemma and the inadequate horizon within which you try to answer or overcome them. You can take a holiday from it but you can't escape it, and you wouldn't want to escape it because it defines everything that matters to you. Whatever knowledge you have of it however deeply it has gone only repeats it, including every projection of freedom from it. But if there is such a knot, what exactly is it that is knotted? You don't coincide with it, are always half out of it, and that's exactly why it is a knot.

A day is like a breath, inhaling in the morning and exhaling in the evening. So there is a time of stillness between the two, which comes roughly in the blue hour at twilight and in a blue-grey season. This is when you are most alone after one party has ended and the next has yet to begin. Evensong. The poverty of spirit is somewhat frightening, you are ashamed of how little you have to show, but there is a kind of sweetness to it as well, the silence, the emptiness, a mood that cancels out the years.

You don't know what physical things are any more than you know what thought is; they have their different ways of being but what they are is not explained by talk of mind or matter. That distinction has pragmatic force but no value at all as metaphysics. There is no reason to conclude that they are different sorts of being. And the same goes for you who are engaged with them. You have your particular way of absence from all appearance; that's a way of being distinctive but no different essentially from that of those other kinds of things. Being you might say is no more characterised by the modes of objective things than by subjective or absent things. Duality is fine but posterior to being. Being doesn't melt away under radical pragmatism, rather, what did melt away was never being in the first place.

While physical things are never completely known but only through a sheaf of adumbrations, things in the mind, that is thoughts, are entirely self-revealing. For mental objects being and appearance are not two. This understanding does not hold up under closer scrutiny, if he distinction (the very definition of the mind) seems obvious this is only because it is tacitly presumed. If a mental objects exist it is only a relative existence, like something you are quite sure of in a dream but when you wake up is revealed to be an interpretation woven around something completely different. Anything you think you have before you is only what it appears to be relative to the world that has been imagined around it. Here it is not the object that is known via adumbrations but the knower, or the putative knowledge. If there is something that it 'really is' that would be what, without changing itself, gives rise to every different thing you think it is in every possible form of consciousness that reveals it. Only in that way could it have complete self-identity without any distinction of knower and known.

Treat everything you think to be truth as if it were a section heading in a new (and unfinished) edition of "The Phenomenology of Spirit". Whatever your frame of frames happens to be is to be sublated. It's not wrong or right but subject to a discursive transformation which will leave it identically the same but unrecognisable.

So much of what the default mode and its proactive derivatives is here for is anchoring, keeping the vessel steady, upright and in one bay. If you start to look closely at what is going on and begin by seeing that your body is not a body, your mind not a mind, and your thoughts never able to coincide with what they mean to mean, then you are overcome by nausea. You have been in free fall all the time. The anchor hasn't been raised, no, there never was one, it was enough to have the habit of imagining it was there and doing its job.

Whether you oppose the mind, studying it to reform it or whether you comply with the mind to profit from its creativity and desire you are always in support of its power of world creation. It is an adventure to try to balance these tendencies but you will fail if your ulterior goal is to be free of it. There only remains a detachment, a neither nor, a scepticism in regard to life and its works. For no reason other than to allow it to be itself apart from you, a sort of internal exile invisible on the outside.

Thoughts as sub-vocal speech are more or less volitional as speaking is a kind of deliberate doing. Such thoughts can be at roughly the same speed as pronounced speech but can also occur much faster so that it takes on the character of another voice speaking inside your head (but with your tone and with a residual sense of accompanying volition). A tune that is stuck in your head is both volitional and compulsive and indicates the way that the deliberate and automatic are not clearly distinguished. When all thoughts of these kinds are silenced, as when in a state of more or less focused attention, there remains a welter of very fast thoughts which are not vocalised in any sense and are entirely automatic. They correspond to the flame-like waverings of attention, and arise as a something like the chromatic aberration at the edges in a photographic image. These are whole worlds compressed into many fine layers, like the entrances to dreams. The wavering of attention is an effect of will since in order to keep attention focused you need to present it with an object and hence you need to straddle it with a certain overview. This entire complex, the will, the overview, the attention and the upwelling of bright parasitic thoughts is what is known as the 'default mode'. Attempting to suppress it only feeds it, you can only inquire as to where it could be that such activity arises so seeming naturally.

You called it 'weightlessness' or else 'a rushed quality'; there was a time when the retreat of being was evident, when it was noticed because immediately felt. Now, it seems as if there is only an echo of that feeling, possibly at times a loud echo, but only because the general cacophony of crossed voices has grown loud. To recall this is to gain some understanding of how naturally forgetting erases that delicate sense of things. Attempts to reawakening it are painful to behold because almost certainly doomed. But again, what was experienced as being was and remains largely aesthetic. You need to go one more step back, past where the foundations lay, into free fall, the groundless ground.

Are there really two sorts of things, that is, things themselves and ideas about those things? So much depends on it and yet it is implausible. It's not one or the other but that they are both the same sort of thing. Every perception is an interpretation and every intentionality is a kind of sensation. They are movements of the mind, ripples and eddies that sort themselves into this kaleidoscope exacting so much faith. Everything is action and object within the same display. The only thought that comes near to getting it is that there are not two.

Being, the idea of being, belongs to aesthetics. Or perhaps it is more accurate to sat that it belongs to metaphysics and metaphysics belongs to aesthetics. Hasn't this been obvious all the way along, aren't metaphysical dispute aesthetic disputes, which is why they are both passionate and trivial? Being is a concept that serves to order other concepts while earnestly insisting that it orders what these concepts refer to. It is exhausted in the phenomenal, in that larger sense in which phenomenal includes its polar opposite the noumenal. This is to understand being as a guiding thread, something that becomes evident as the whole pattern emerges into the light, which is to say, as its efficacy drains away. It is a nostalgia for the non-symbolic in the form of a kind of symbol, a meta-symbol. Once upon a time the beauty of it opened onto the non-symbolic, so in that sense it was the symbol of all symbols. And if it succeeded in doing so it was not through its own virtue but through an ineffable determination of the non-symbolic.

To go back by the way you came means a reverse series of affective reconfigurations. Becoming less individuated rather than more, or better, being able to use, to consume, everything that was gained in that process in order to withstand what it was that differentiation was installed to protect you from. This is why being is not the end but only a pointer for the direction, more sensual, more erotic, more immediate, more violent, the origin and end of life.

With your flawed character and chequered past any talk of a natural state is empty romanticism; any natural state that was yours would be abjection. The ground you stand on shrinks by the day, but then any ground beyond your own feet is presumption, serving only as something to defend. Self-contempt is as irrelevant as any form of pride, what counts is an asceticism, surrendering every false entitlement, every claim beyond the metaphysical minimum. To fail better. The only opening that remains is the only one that is always there, the one that can't be lost, behind every barrier of shame. To push through or under the thinking that never stops.

Consciousness and thought are so closely connected while yet not identical that it is easy to see the former as a kind of formless sentience that contingently underlies the focal intentionality of the latter. It is a sort of genetic picture in which mind is the developmental successor of a pure feeling without distinctions, not so much oceanic as a sort of fog, and intentionality is correspondingly modeled on perception, as of forms emerging out of fog. In fact things are the opposite way around. Consciousness is pure clarity, an illumination of its object while it is thought and intentionality that are foggy. The price of doing something with mind, of its utility, is this inescapable lack of clarity. What you see in the eyes of an infant is an extraordinary sense of wonder born of unsullied clarity, while it is discursive and 'creative' mind that is "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought". Its need to prove itself by adding something of its own.

That all of reality pivots on this here now is not to say that it is in time or space or mind or recognition of any kind. You don't know the source or limits or margins, what passes and why. It is either axiomatic and almost worthless triviality or nothing at all, obscured to your ephemeral knowings. You can't take a single step towards it and neither can you take a single step away from it.

What is it you do other than apply a meta-filter to present awareness? This filter seeks to retain only reality, truth, ground or some such concept, or to reject the objective or hypothetical. All of this is very clumsy although not without a certain effectiveness. Perhaps it is limited to the same degree as it succeeds, since the filter itself won't pass through the filter. If it is a meta-filter then it needs to be a meta-meta filter etc. Or maybe it could be called a meta*-filter, the star signifying that it is the direct limit of all meta-moves. (Better if it could be the inverse-limit.) What is more interesting is when and how it fails. That would likely be the co-meta-filter, a sort of negative capability for staying attuned to the complement, that is the residual failure of all such filter games.

Say your consciousness were a portal through which the creation gains awareness of itself. There would be times such as this when its attention is elsewhere. No one is looking at the monitor, and the totality of your psychic activity is nothing but a screen-saver, endlessly cycling the same dull patterns. Coloured shadows playing on the walls of an empty room. Sheer duration, low machine sounds and a faint hum from the air-conditioning.

If commitments underlie identity these can only exist as having already been accepted or made and hence in the form of memories of of the singular event in which these were taken up. Such memories are linked to the present by means of the abolition of time in completely experienced memories. But memories are rarely completely experienced, instead they re accessed via pointers or addresses which give them in shorthand, 'thumbnails', belonging to a map of experience in time, and which are therefore not themselves experienceable. These symbolic condensations of past experience are the true private language and their role is fulfilled without any need to re-experience the moments they point to. The complete memories need no longer exist, it hardly matters, and even if one carefully reconstructs an autobiography using them as clues their truth to actualities is immaterial and might just as well be 'secondary revision'. In this way the temporal thickness of the self is reconstructed afresh in each moment. It's not an illusion to be destroyed since that would only bring about fresh illusions, but only disengaged.

In those old 'magic eye' puzzles you would stare at a print of small coloured patches arranged in a dense and near periodic abstract pattern and then if you could relax your gaze and expectations it would suddenly pop into three dimensions and you could make out a scene as if cut out of paper sheets of a ship or an animal or a landscape. One you saw it you could sustain it, but with a small constant effort, until you tired and it suddenly flattened again. The real trick it seems is to do the opposite with the enveloping life-world: to have it pop out of its apparent spatial and metaphysical articulations so that you can discover its original flatness. The key dimension that you need to collapse is the metaphysical one, namely the transcendental dimension of subject and object, of self-mind versus objective world. It helps if you can painstakingly 'deconstruct' the persistent illusion of duality, but that's not enough by itself. It needs also that inimitable relaxation of your gaze and of all the buzzing half-formed thoughts about the self - and it is not purely a matter of optics but of being (as a verb).

Take your most general, most inclusive category: being, event, reality, cosmos, life, mind, happening - get the feel of it, its vastness, its embrace of everything, of every experienceable and every beyond. Whatever it is it is your category and so doesn't apply to you, you are outside it. Admittedly it takes a special way of understanding it for this to be evident, but it is just that way of understanding it that it truly means. But what if it seen as not your category but that of an other, or the most generalised other? That question answers itself. What is that most inclusive category if not precisely the sum (the Cartesian sum or tensor product) of all seeings and being seen. The you that is so simply outside of it is not what you think you are.

Not just a proxy for the temporary winner in the jostle for dominance over attention, the ego is also the inheritor of disidentification, it is an attitude of rueful detachment towards itself and its works. It is a dirty job, being spokesperson for so many contradictory agendas, yay-saying, nay-saying and general disdain, but someone has to do it and that faceless one is made for the task. If you want to argue with it it has you before you've got under way, there's no getting around it on its turf. What is interest is the how of it, what makes the role possible. It is profligate with self-awareness, but does it really need it to carry on the way it does, and does awareness really need it? Surely it's tired of so much shaping?

Experience is a kind of object. Every way in which you attempt to make sense of the event is via objects, speakables which include things, subjects, consciousness, life, world, laws of nature etc. Questions arise in the interplay of these objective factors and they are directed to answers which are also objects. This does not exhaust the possibilities of questioning, but only of questions which expect answers. To go to the end of questions is to encounter the first authentic question, the question that belongs to the event and not to the world of objectivities. This is not about inwardness, but is in the place where inwardness was located before all names fell away, at the end of the mind.

Tribal identities are not entertained but imprinted. They go deeper than the ego which draws its flexibility by a peculiar symbiosis from their comparative rigidity; they are the soil from which ego-drives draw nourishment, joy, desire and pain working to the same end. Identities are beliefs while the ego is a kind of free energy at several removes from its sustaining grounds. Conversions are rare and even more rarely authentic. Defense mechanisms are technologies of belief and so are there to protect the underlying beliefs far more than the economy of the ego. Precisely the same facts can be available to everyone but their interpretations differ tremendously. What seems to be an unconscious mind from the ego's point of view is nothing but a mode of interpretation at a deeper level affecting the 'natural' appearance of things, a level whose element is war.