The naturalist version of the being of things is as determined by a net of laws which apply to kinds of things which kinds are themselves determined by these same laws. In this way particularity is ideality, only that the relevant ideas are somehow impersonal; or that the being of things is the being of the laws which is the being of mind. This end of metaphysics earnestly dissolves all particularity such as could only have been the particularity of the self. The self, properly, cannot be made up out of kinds of things, substitutable functional elements, that is just what it means to be self - an absolute particularity.  And if the self is absolutely particular then so are all things else, and laws do not apply, only seem to in a certain declension.

The distinction of mind, or consciousness in a larger but purely phenomenal sense, and self  is that which invites the discovery of illusions. It may be naive but is a strong attractor, a view that you keep returning to after circuitous journeys, perhaps a local minimum of some energy like quality. This view is also continually under attack, either with the aim of expanding the understanding of consciousness so that it absorbs 'self', or attacking self directly as the distorting element leaving consciousness to then correct itself. The methods of such an attack may be largely rational and so appeal to a more inclusive and grounded truth, but even if this is so there is no guarantee that the resulting view is itself any sort of attractor, that it can sustain itself at the high level of that energetic quality that it seems to require. The order of consciousness, and this includes what it normally called the unconscious, is that of being as presence. The self, in so far as it is being, is so in a more eminent sense that makes it unassimilable to mind. It is the opposition of these two sides that is of greater interest than any supposed unification, or perhaps it is that any such unification must be from the side of self and not of mind.

• Consciousness as something like a faculty, an extra, super-added to the self, why does this seem plausible? Consciousness likened to light, the exposure or disclosure of its contents, as well as a sort of activity. The senses and the world they bring before us, outer senses and inner (bodily) senses, these exist to the degree that they are a process, going on, a knowingness, Bewusstsein from wissen, or wit, mother-wit; to be conscious of, or knowing with something, is also identifying it, immediate classification, and revision of classification, an act of understanding. None of this corresponds to the way in which self is known, in so far as it is known, only that as a kind of knowing it is thought to be necessarily like conscious knowing. There is nothing to be understood, the self is prior to understanding, understand is what it is on behalf of the self, in service to the self. Self is at the other end, the hither end of understanding. The self can be with anything but nothing can be with the self. 

Naively viewed, consciousness is a flimsy thing, something borrowed for temporary use. Its quality of expression varies tremendously depending on many mostly bodily factors. It has no identity, it can be lost and then found again and you never ask whether this is the same consciousness in play now as then, a time ago. Self on the other hand is about as solid as a rock. It could be blasted away, or split or shattered, it is not necessarily indestructible, but is generally quite reliable, its chief feature being absolute identity across time. If you ask whether 'you' are there during deep sleep, the obvious answer is yes, as proven on and by your awakening. You were simply for a time deprived of consciousness, that fickle animula. From this point of view the notion that what 'you' are is merely a certain structure or singularity of consciousness seems absurd. Consciousness is too flimsy a net to hold your weight. Furthermore, as self you are somehow not troubled by the duality of subject and object. All these problems arise from assuming that properties of consciousness are properties of the self, and for such a confusion to have arisen the prior mistake is to have lent to consciousness some of your being, an absurd move since consciousness has nowhere to put it.

What is called consciousness is just the idea of intentionality, that is that objects are revealed in transparency, if not in 'reality' then in phenomenologically reduced actuality. But if such an object were revealed then its corresponding subject would also be revealed - for something to be known there must be a basis for trusting the knowing. Since there is no, and can be no, revelation of a subject there is also no object. It is the apparent clarity with which objects appear that is the only evidence for a subject and if this evidence is inadmissable then the appearance of the object must be doubted. There is nothing, not even a cross-sectional adumbration of an object that appears in complete transparency.  Hence consciousness does not exist, it is a myth or a deferral of transparency. Well, you might say, there is clearly something. If not consciousness what is it? Experience without any idea of experience.

There is a life story too, but it is viewed myopically so that all but what is closest at hand disappears in a half-forgotten blur, nothing is sought from it. Instead there is returning again and again to the mysterious identity of the experiencer, as if it was your true love, an obsession you can't shake off, like Dowson's Cynara, no matter how many infidelities there might have been.  And perhaps you think you are safe in this love, that it will not suddenly turn and start loving you back. Not that you search in vain to catch its eye but that it turns its gaze to you. Or perhaps it's more like an unexploded bomb that you can't stop tinkering with, telling yourself that after all this time damp must have rotted the detonator, there is no danger.

That tiny interval in awareness that separates you from experience makes all the difference and yet can never be-held. To be and to hold together what is indispensable and impossible. It is like a vacuum which immediately sucks in some mental chaff and then reappears on the other side with a look of perfect innocence. It is self-revealing and yet exterior to being, and hence perfectly concealed, just beyond the end of a hundred foot pole that you are laboriously climbing.

That consciousness unfolds according to categories, or to systematic extrapolations of the pragmatic, to divine laws or self-given laws and so on, is nothing to boast about. These are essentially random ways at which it pretends to be will, pretends to a kind of sovereignty, since everywhere it looks it sees only itself and not its source. Rhetoric and persuasion is another way of naming this duality, because rhetoric, which is the mind, would have it that it is the art of persuasion, but that is exactly what it can never attain.   

Will's knowledge is outside or discursive constraints unlike the knowledge in consciousness in its normal and altered modes. It does not resemble a faculty or 'way of knowing' as feeling or affectivity. For example will knows death quite directly, as if it were the absence of all resistance. It is consciousness that can't quite believe in it, that divides itself into a realism for which death exists and an unconsciousness for which it does not. Death does not exist for will because it does not posit existence, but is as much will itself as is life. Will has no illusions.

If you set up a duality like will and representation in which one of therms embraces the frame in which that duality is defined then you cannot realise it within that same frame no matter how much it is expanded. The will that appears as the complement of representation is only a representation of will, but the representation of representation is still a representation. If the duality is recognised so that it must be realised then this cannot be accomplished by way of a dialectic. There is no rotation of the axes which lines it up as an antithesis. What you recognise as the 'ownmost' of the entire order of representational being is in this belonging to the nameless that is known in thought, in represented being, as will. You can only move understanding via thinking, but this must be in the opposite direction to the dialectic, a kind of rigorous impoverishment, a reduction of representation to its conative root, say via the normative.

The opposition of desire and consciousness is another way of looking at that of will and representation. Will is not the blind force of life but has an intelligence of its own, deep but not rapidly adaptable. Will gives rise to consciousness as an ancillary function, supplemental and subordinate. It is like the development of the computer as a way of rapidly computing artillery bearings. Every revolution begin this way with a function adopting a helper in order to better meet its goals. The helper however becomes more and more indispensable and quietly develops goals of its own. At some point the roles are reversed and the original function is now subordinated to the erstwhile helper.  Consciousness, born of will, is in its image. Both objectify, but consciousness how regards the object of desire, the patronising name it gives to will, as a hallucinatory one, and its own triangulated object as the reality. If you could access the point of view of desire, that is, of will, you would see consciousness with the same troubled contempt with which embodied minds now view artificial intelligence: blind and stupid, but uncannily effective when initialised correctly.

While there remains a question about the evolutionary utility of consciousness there can be no doubt of that of desire with its ability to mobilise energy and its subjection to a system of priorities and overrides. Desire however is intimately linked to consciousness in that phenomenologically what is at stake in desire is being itself in exactly the same way that at its core consciousness is the reflection of being. Desire brings about (its) object as directly, or more so, than consciousness. And yet it seems that consciousness can separate itself from desire, can become choiceless. One does not wish to separate them but rather than allowing desire to absorb consciousness to do the opposite and have consciousness absorb desire. What prevents this is the tightness of the connection between desire and its objects. Somehow this connection must be preserved but stripped of ontological force.

Every designation or deixis (pointing) of 'that which is experience-experiencing' whether pragmatic or embodied, poetic, psychological or legal or existential is fully meaningful and therefore completely fails to snare its intended target. Intention is far too coarse, but apart from that gaping hole wonderfully subtle. Actually everything you purposefully do or desire is a way of trying to describe it, and so much of the interest in life is in the many ways this fails. It is completely this, utterly transparent and in plain sight, but you will never see it. One can only laugh, it is so delightfully absurd.

Past events remain open and incomplete, not in terms of what happened, but in the dimension of completion. This might seem trivial until you realise where the prevailing reality lies. You can't however merely decide to surrender the happenings since such an act would only be another happening.

Breaking representation also breaks the categories. Why does time seem to be linear? Past and future are aspects of experiencing in which their function is to be the setting for the present. The contribution they make in each case is via features and affinities, capabilities and influences and so their saliences are the best ways in which these relationships are organised. The best way is necessarily the way they are; if they were another way, then that would be the best way. They are ways in which things can move in and out of foregrounds, backgrounds and overshadowings, and the movements are too rich to fall on a line, even a life-line. Ask yourself whether the present is really a point, has it ever felt like a point? So the idea of linear time comes from the same place as all received ideas. Any proof that could be offered would be a begging of the question, assuming the expected answer in the terms of the argument. And that too would be of a certain pattern of saliences. You might say that this begs the question too, but that is exactly what is meant.

The split in the world is not between I-it and I-thou, but between I-thou and I-they. For one, objective 'it's only arise out of a dialogic I-thou. Without someone else with whom you can, as it were, compare notes, you can't distinguish any objects from you own mental projections, from dreamed stuff. For another, 'thou' in English has some unnecessarily lofty connotations from its being conventionally limited to prayer and love poetry; nothing more should be intended than I-you where you is understood as singular, no more than an us-two. Reality you might say is intersubjective, between two subjects. The problem arises however out of a certain incompatibility between different 'I-you's - the world is differently viewed and hence different in being by way of different us-twos, or since the I part is nominally the same, by way of different yous. This incompatibility is interesting and complex in itself and so the world, but the I-they is its false solution, reality by way of the abstract social other, the amorphous and tyrannic Other, or simply the Heideggerian 'Das Man'.

One indicator that you are touching the background of awareness or of beingness is the dissolution of certain philosophical problems in particular that of solipsism or of 'other minds'. It's not a matter of a solution to this but that the terms in which the problem would most naturally arise no longer apply. This is in a sense the same as being outside of metaphysics. It is very striking, but in the initial stage it remains a limit realisation and is of the same 'size' as the ordinary sense of self, or of what was understood that way. Size however is also a metaphysical notion and is tied to space and time, so you know that this too will go, will yield to something entirely wild.

Most of the time it's only an odd conceit of waking life that it is awake. Just because there are colours and sounds doesn't mean that you aren't fabulating as in a dream, only with guidelines. Perception is through the mind and the mind has no senses, is numb, deaf, blind. (Perhaps smell is the only sense that doesn't arise in dreams.) Everything works just as the functionalists says it does. That's all fine as long as you are directed out of the mind - orthogonal to experience. Every way of expressing it however has its metaphysical double who plays interference for the other team. And you've lost track of which are the visitors and which the home side. 

Everyday experience is endless ways of evading or deferring confrontation with your nullity and futility, if only because of how much of it consists of a mad drive to matter in some way. Fortunately these defenses don't always work, and for each in their own way, so that you will be singled out and every strategy for retaining a point of pride however buried under layers of misdirection is exposed for what it is. In all of this only one opening remains to which you can turn once the litter that obscures the way to it has been swept aside. A sort of bulimia of the spirit.

Almost every individual moment of experiencing is entirely as to be expected according to its internal expectations - there is nothing to be surprised about at all and if the thing you are experiencing happens to be surprising it is so precisely within a familiar context - a party to which you were invited. You are that framing familiarity with your experience. It is not a neutral background but a positive thing, something quite particular since if you turn it over repeatedly so that it keeps being revealed it seems strange and nonsensical, like saying the same word over and over again. There is a point, accessible if barely so, from which mere existence is infinitely strange and wonderful. Even if you can only imagine this it is worthwhile, an act of faith, a stubborn resistance.

Whatever discoveries you make in the course of a day they are washed away each night in sleep. The quixotic raising up of self and its projects are reabsorbed into soul which expresses itself in the timeless and fragmentary narratives of dreams. Strangely the soul has life but no desire, having neither distance nor time, neither centre nor end. Desire is of the self and its subjection to and incomprehension of soul.

The origin, or what elicits a thought is outside of the thought as is its destination, every thought is a small piece of an endless to and fro of venture and rejoinder. They depend on something which they have to guess at, in a sense, and so are always doubtful. Thought is either scepticism or an assertion in the face of scepticism to the degree to which it compares itself to feeling which is immune to doubt. A reduction of being to beingness is its reduction to feeling, to pure presentness into which thought cannot enter. The cogito on the other hand is a device that forces thought into feeling - it is not 'I am' as another thought but as a moment of feeling. This can only be done by way of the 'I'-thought, the one thought that opens to a kind of feeling, a rather special kind of feeling. Intellectual intuition would be the immediacy required to not surrender the light in thought to the darkness of feeling.

Discursive mind is like a workshop cluttered and overflowing with partly completed projects. Different ones catch your eye at any moment and you reach for them (upsetting several others in the process) work on them for a little and the put them back still unfinished as your attention goes to another. Each such task is marked by a span of time, between say when it was ordered and when it is due, with various submarkings for revisions. These time-stamps are the index for each such task, since it is the differences in spans that allow for some order in the chaos. You don't mistake one for another because their inceptions and terminals are distinct. These time marking belong to a diagrammatic version of time, an ideal tabulated version of time as in a ledger with only a loose connection to experiential time. Feeling, on the other hand, exists only in the experiential now, only in the actual moment, Hence feelings can have no proper discursive component, and that they appear to is only because what you take for feeling is a sort of hybrid. Perceptions are also hybrid, a yoking together a discursive component in unreal ledger time and a felt component in the punctual now. This is how perceptions can fail to anchor you in the present but slide off into discursive confusion and why you can't know yourself in the present with what you take to be knowledge.

Self inquires, it reflects, is aware, is conscious, or you could say it seeks mindfulness (mine-fulness) or in short meditates. Soul doesn't engage in any of this - soul isn't soul-conscious or soul-aware - rather it prays. You can't pray with a self only with a soul. The self is analytic and dissociative, soul is integrative and wholistic. The two are not in opposition, they are different comportments (of what?). Meditation ought to be more prayerful and prayer more meditative. Self should inquire into its fear of soul and soul pray for self to overcome its headstrong error.

It is not as if the 'I' is an object-symbol (a chosen or imprinted object) appearing within the field of an impersonal witness consciousness so that it can be enlisted to refer to the subject or centre of that field (when taken) as (being) embodied experience. If that were the case then 'I' would be a sort of name, the name of reflexivity. Names however are detachable in ways that I am not. If a request is answered by '[your_name] will do it' that expresses a quite different intention from 'I will do it.' Suffice to say that failure can be shrugged off more easily in the former case. Similarly with making a report: '[your_name] witnessed x' would not be acceptable where 'I witnessed x' was required. You can substitute any other way of designating yourself as some sort of object-like matter,  such as 'this body-mind', or 'this self' or even 'this Dasein'. All such locutions have a slightly repellent quality, as if shirking responsibility. The 'I' exceeds the objective world and cannot be negated away in the same way as every other objectivity.