There is no greater hindrance to clear seeing than any concept of enlightenment whatsoever. It is almost as if it were invented by the demiurge to sow confusion in the mind's natural urge to seek clarity about the ground of experience, a sort of poison bait. It's currency is an index of the forgetting of being.

Experience is relational before it is intentional; it doesn't arise for a subject but into presence, as if the boundless screen on which it falls is itself aware but without  centre. For anything to appear there must be this complement which does not appear, but from which every feature of appearance is drawn. But to say it this way confuses the kind of being that belongs to the site of appearance with the kind of being that belongs to appearances. There is no way in thought to get to this.

No doer is observed in the midst of sustained willing, it has nothing to do with stale arguments about freedom versus determinism. If leans one way it would be towards freedom. Determinism, like the typical 'no self' views one encounters everywhere, is moronic. Of course there is a self in that how else can you understand others and by that understand yourself as well? If 'no self' is discovered it does not deprecate the practical self, or purposive action in any way, quite the opposite. It is about undoing a subtle metaphysical distortion, a putting of the cart before the horse, an inefficiency - indeed a distortion that gives rise to metaphysics altogether.

Nothing is more obvious than the perspective that opens in any sustained intentional action, in willing some end, and which separates you as the doer from the thing to be done. For this opening to be a valid evidence for something, say loosely metaphysical, then the difference of doer and prospective deed ought to precede the engagement in the act. Indeed seen hastily it seems to be that way, but if you look more closely it is the other way around, the action, or whatever it is that brings about the intention comes first and the doer, the one here who has willed the act comes after, is a normalisation of the event. In fact you find that it can be dispensed with completely, along with the perspective that frames it. It turns out to be no more than a sort of friction, the action proceeds more easily without it.

The question of being is the sole essential question, rightly qualified as 'ownmost', but at the same time it is not obvious. As if to ask, out of what does experience emerge? but not in a way that could require an answer apart from what is already know and effected, what experience already knowingly rests on and out of which every self-notion diverges Next to this every other question is displaced, rendered off-centre since an answer is possible from out of what is not known. Other questions are perfectly legitimate, or even more so, and rightly burn, drawing one's entire being into them. It is wrong to take the displacement of questionings, of philosophy say, as something essential to thought or language. This only happens in relation to the question of being which they do not address. Even more unwise to turn the general displacement back onto being and consider it as negation or error. Because being nihilates does not make of it a nihilism; to take it so would be a category error.

The kind of subjectivity that you express within a stream of experience, what is worthy of response, what constitutes the past in turn constituting the present and the future, the horizons of possibilities for purposive action, for modifications of experience and of milieu, the cardinal points of transcendence and immanence, the mud and the stars etc., all of this is as it were a historical dispensation. It is only essential within a frame that is itself contingent. The mind's incessant chatter is a cacophony like the multitude of voices on the internet. They are expressions of the same destiny. Any attempt to step outside of this is necessarily futile ('you' as subject can never escape) and yet it is the only thing worth doing.

The truth of being is the only driver of experience but it would be a mistake to conclude that a pure affirmation of what is as it is is the appropriate disclosure of this condition. To do so would be to assume that the bearings of ordinary mind are true, and to excuse the forgetting of being just because, well, you have forgotten it and become so caught up in the unfolding dream and its details. To bring the faintest glimmer of truth to bear on the moment is a work very much against nature in spite of the fact that the truth is simplicity and the mind's operations are exhaustingly complex, an unending dance of preludes and preliminaries.

So much of modern thought is an attempt to escape Hegel by taking up an antithesis as attitude and then loudly insisting that by this you have escaped sublation. The labour involved in establishing this 'escape' proves to be endless, naturally. What perhaps escapes notice is that this very labour is the sublation. But it leads to something (or to a special kind of nowhere) that is nothing like Absolute Knowing! Well, that's only because you never had the least idea of what that Knowing is like or rather, precisely because you had the least idea. Indeed, there may well be an escape, but you can't get there from here.

Even if you are not separate from the world experiencing it as from a remove the idea persists that you could find a boundary, at least locally in any given direction, separating you from your milieu. This idea has a certain convenience for integrating the discourses that make up an increasing fraction of daily life, but it fails under closer scrutiny. You concede then that where the boundary was thought to be there is something more like a gaping wound by which you are fused with your world, a mutual contamination. But this is to stop too short, the edges of the wound recede into the distance and dissolve in a no longer flat space without and limits, only anamorphoses, strange compressions and concentrations, and singular points which expand and then vanish as you approach them. You are the world more strange.

You cannot pick meaning apart, or the source of meaning which is yourself, so that it dissolves into pure impersonal events. This would be contradictory and even the intention to do so is perverse, a sort of abdication. You can however change the parallax of meaning by playing it against its event-like dimension. This would be a cousin to phenomenological reduction but with fewer assumptions. The point would then be to see how far this can go, to see how far the roots of meaning can be dug out so that it hangs free in a wholly other space.

Thoughts, like utterances, are a kind of thing that means or represents something else. If you ask how that is possible you have to reject the idea that the meaning is curled up inside the thought like a snail in its shell. But if that's true then where is the meaning and how does it relate to the thing, the particular fluctuation in mind-stuff, that is the thought? Again, as with utterances, the answer seems to be holistic, that it is the entire context that determines the meaning effect. It is the effect, the sum total of what the meaning does or can do, that is important and not some free-standing vision belonging to the thought. This seems neat enough, and it dissolves the distinction between the thought as pure event whose chief attribute is simply that it is, and that other matter, the meaning or ideal of the thought. It's a bit too neat, though. There is either only one thought (as thing) repeated endlessly with different inflections - in which case it is the inflections that have meaning and are the real thought, or there are many different kinds or shapes and figures of thought, intrinsically meaningless, but fitting together like a complicated puzzle (or program) to produce the effects in question - but then thought amounts to the discrimination of these shapes, which is rich enough that you might as well call that thought.

Magical thinking, and all of what are known as defense mechanisms are typical of this, is a belief in thought acts, which like certain speech acts bring about their result by the fact of their having been uttered rather than by any persuasive force they contain. It is not wishing or praying for something since to do so would be to address whatever it is that might grant or withhold the wish or prayer, but instead the very presence of your thought as a thing is what rearranged reality in the way you desire. Hence magical thoughts can have a ritual quality and lack any obvious connection to their intentions. Of course when you look at any thoughts closely enough they appear magical.

There is no particular truth in present experience in the details of its phenomenology since if your circumstances were to suddenly change the quality of experience would be completely different. A state might define itself as the very absence of a certain quality which a pure contingency might bring about so that that state transforms into the absence of the absence of the same quality while remaining the 'same' state. The energy is in the pivoting which transforms the experienced quality. This is like saying that the true life is always meta- to the life you happen to be experiencing, or simply that you have to change the quality of your experience to know what the quality of your experience really is. Of course just describing your experience with care and detachment is enough to induce something of this change just because you have surrendered all desire to change it. If external circumstances bring about the change you feel cheated even as you enjoy the result: 'It was that simple?' How to awaken to where you determine experience at the same time as you are suffering it?

It's not that you are either the sender or the receiver, but rather that in the two distinct interrelated functions of sending and receiving, of submitting to interpretation and interpreting, there are associated distinct subjects which being incommensurate are only formally identified as a single 'self'. In your thoughts or actions as utterances you hold the context of reception as a fixed point outside the vanishing subject who brings the words or actions up out of nowhere, while in your reception of novel experience you hold the event in its novelty constant and shift around the receptive stance according to the needs of the vanishing subject. There are the ways this subject appears to appear, but it is not one subject, is two subjects and within each of those many more differentiated instances. This hiatus is what it taken to be evidence for 'no self', and the evidence is low-hanging enough that you can 'prove' it again and again, ad nauseam. Actually, if a subject is called for by these schemata it is not the vanishing points but what it is that in each case you mistake for that subject. It is what gives you the idea of being able to treat them as if they were the same thing. It's an impossible knowledge which you nonetheless possess but which no such functional 'self' can ever come close to.

The thoughts that jostle in the noisy mind are often propositional fragments, that is, inner speech or otherwise directed significations. As far as the speaking part of this is concerned you do not do this so as to listen to your thoughts but to utter them as if to another, they are utterances rather than voices. As such they have an addressee, and while this might be 'yourself', as when you are trying to shape an idea, but more often than not they are specific others, either ones you know of or vague remembered faces in a nebulous mist. So, you could say that what floats up into the distracted, default mode, mind are disembodied others, a crowd of faces out of a personal cinema. The hint of an identity being enough to trigger an utterance. Other phases of mental noise may be more specifically addressed to you, but these are not utterances, not sub=vocal speech, but feelings and emotions that are triggered by other elements in the phantasmagoria. The default mode is thus a low level prosopopeia in a swirl of fragments out of time and out of space.

In the end it can only be about fully and completely being just as and where you are. To get yourself out of the mud, stand up, alone and on unsteady feet and to open your senses. Everything else, the knowledges acquired and abandoned, is just for balance and to gain the courage to do so.

If there were just relays and circuits of differential figures, embodied and reflexive so as to appear at some second degree as meanings and knowingness and life, couldn't you then do away with any need for being, that is for a knowing of itself as an instance, a 'this', beyond all meanings? Yes, it might be possible if such a structure were built around a void, an unthinkable, a black hole that cut across the circulation of reflexive figures; in short an unthinkable thought in a system that can think anything. The trouble is that you couldn't create such a system without an appeal to being. You need a meta-theory to in order create a system that appears to have no meta-theory. You can't have a functional black hole without something that isn't just function to hold it there.

You can reflect on seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting, inner-touch and thinking, each in their turn and in limited syntheses, but there is only the pale word 'being' for what it is prior to abstraction that you are 'doing', combining all of these and whatever else it takes, in existing as this that you are. As if it names a master sense with which you plunge into and transform reality into living. There is no good analogy for this except the senses and only in respect of its absence of self-grounding. What this points to is not an existential condition (that would belong to the same experiencing) but something like another barely awakened faculty, an opening into that in which all experience itself arises.

There is the moment, each moment embedded in the ongoingness that you rarely consider all that must be accepted so that this can rejoice in its mute acceptation. That you see these objects as they appear and feel this way into the day, everything has its history, its adjacencies that hold it in place, other openings and each of them held in circuit by other moments until you reach ones of genuine perception orbiting distant suns. All the real and imaginary preconditions, and there is no difference between the real and the imaginary, it is all possible preconditions that could terminate in this quietly living particular. Between what you are and what makes you possibly lies everything, all myths, all other minds, all time and passage of time. The finest filiations are the most salient, that it is almost a miracle that you are so uncreative.

Understanding which takes its rise from subjective consciousness and its objects, from phenomenological consciousness exhausts itself in the functional forms and ends by coming up against the problem of its own subjectivity in the form of a 'hard problem' or of (a type known as) qualia, or the need for panpsychism etc. All of these solutions being somewhat unsatisfactory, bearing an uneasy conscience, since it can find no concrete difference brought about by experience rather than say a 'global workspace' or some such functional addendum. Step back a moment from this and it is the will to power or simply the desire to desire, which provides in outmoded language, the prime mover of all this functional machinery. The problem which insists on being posed at this level has no solution at the same level, and this very lack of a solution it its most important generator of fresh forms. As against this it is proposed that phenomenological consciousness can only arise within global consciousness by a filiation without any ratio. In respect of global consciousness or experience in its widest sense there is a tremendous tension with Being, like the charge that exists between two infinite parallel planes. It is this unworldly stress that, transposed onto the level of consciousness is the force recognised variously as will to power or desire to desire.

Experience in the sense of ongoing experiencing is to be distinguished from consciousness or awareness as these being the local form of what it is the global form of. You might say that experience is consciousness together with all of the context which makes it possible for it to be your consciousness. Experience is uniform throughout and without a subject - even if you sometimes incorrectly invoke an experiencer - as that in which consciousness and its subject arises. That's why it is also not quite right to speak of the content of experience since there is no boundary to it, but also not entirely wrong since it is richly itself, has distinctive suchness. Being applies to experience only to consciousness as a part of experience. Looked at externally consciousness seems to be an attribute of something that behaves. As desire, and all emotions, feelings, sense of life, are modalities of desire, must consciously desire. The desire ascribed to something that acts desiringly is only in the observer. So you can only desire when you know you desire. Subjectively there cannot be unconscious desire, so the insistence of desire is the insistence of consciousness, and this can only be the being of experience. This isn't clear, just reaching for an intuition through a knot of slippery words.

The 'I' of experience is much more than a hypostasis of a discursive shifter, it is a inescapable structural invariant of any field of awareness no matter its contingent shape or texture: there is always a vanishing point from which everything experienced is captured, maddeningly outside. Focusing on this element, however, only leads to a sort of emotionally toned and recursive swirl of mirrorings which can never perfectly straddle intention, unless that intention is to see how far down the failure of intention can go before exhausting itself or breaking. On the other hand since whatever the content within experience the experiencing itself is in being, regardless of the chasm between the experienced world and the place of that being. The question of being thus opens a gap of pristine ignorance which experience cannot fill.

Feelings, complexes of feeling, stubborn patterns of contraction all have their logic, their propositional content caught up in a web of discernible and mostly indiscernible causes. The shape, the sound, the stress of it. In the keenness of this you are aware of being chaff in the winds of time. When you are least intelligible, when your paltry intelligence is prised open you are more aware of something like the stirring of the world spirit. It is oddly bracing, as if you were finally being spoken to.

A shift in awareness from being centred in a subject within experience to the source of experience in its totality has nothing to do with dissolving the ego. A strong sense of self is required in order to go your own way, as you must, and with this desire, attachment, love are all integral to health of the soul. It depends, however, on how you define ego. If it is taken  as correlative to the family of attitudes and affects centred on envy then it's certainly no help, but an endlessly draining deflection of energy. Two different readings of 'standing in your own way', perhaps, but however it is it is better to work with what's given than to attempt to fix it.

The identification of events and their causal relations are what they are, similarly the continuously transforming interplay of the evident and the hidden, persistences and innovations, the sublime and the ridiculous, are what they are, the only difference is a change of perspective so that there is not a subject in impossible confrontation with an object which is wholly other. Instead the source of experience is equally the entirety of experience and you, the experiencing subject and your world are equally co-arising elements within this experience. Everything is the interface and even the notion of interface with its two sides is in that too.