Feathered attention, light and tremulous, minced, and in play of currents that go from nowhere to nowhere. This neutral dissolving state so empty of desire that for its very insignificance, its velleity, you would to test it by some velvet mischief, if only there were some in the garden, if only there were a garden.

Ordinary mind would not make a world if it were not ontologically thick, if there were no differences in degree of being, say between the knower and the knower of the knower and other similar or quite different instances. That some places and situations have more felt being than others is what makes for place. When you look closely at any instance of this it is revealed as something like a trick of perspective, a trompe d'oeil. It has to be like this because it is something in experience and all experience that conveys any sort of meaning is transient and shaped by structures of meaning. But this doesn't mean that there is no ontological depth - you can only be tricked by trompe d'oeil because you really are in three-dimensional space. It's only that you can't get a hold on that depth, it isn't about meaning at all. These structures arise like foam, they are in depth without fixing it. Depth makes experience possible but can never be in experience.

What is being experienced as distinct from the mere fact that there should be such experiencing at all, is for the most part (like) the action of a poorly functioning machine; it gets roughly wherever it was intending to go but by the most meandering and shaggy path. It's more like a computation than it is the gelled remnant of of a series of vital decisions. The Berkleyan subject is happily freed from being the sole author of his own absurd situation. The idealism here is subtle. Next to it the Cartesian ego as well as that of later idealists is the Pierrot of the thing-in-itself. This characterisation also fits the peculiar gnostic-like emotional tonality, more or less latent, of our current nihilisms.

Computational, or perhaps even just relational theories of mind or of fundamental physics are essentially Berkleyan idealism, since in them to be is to be perceived, where the relations may stand in for the perceiving. That accounts for the being of beings, but what about the being of the perceiving? Somehow this must be left out, the aperture is to small for soul to get through, so that such theories cannot account for the difference between formal relations (or computations) and 'actual' ones. In other terms what this line of thought brings you face to face with, if only for a moment, is the forgetting of being. So much dances around this ontological difference without being able to touch it. The closer you get to it the more it recedes.

There are so many natural dualities of sense, such as subject and object, consciousness and experience, awareness and consciousness, noesis and noema, for-itself and in-itself, appearance and reality, phenomenon and noumenon, will and representation etc. Each has its own distinctive virtue and flavour and each falls victim to a kind of dissolution of the binary wherein the dividing line is lost or reappears inside one or both of the poles. That is not as important as the possibility of sharpening the distinction as far as possible. You only draw the distinction from a certain range of possible experience but without knowing the full range of possibilities of experience. Or say you start from awareness and consciousness: what is the most extreme form of awareness? That you are barely entitled to use the word is not because it is conceptually fuzzy but because you do not know its absolute form.

The primacy of Subject in a suitably non-dual mode is essentially the idea that consciousness in some larger sense goes all the way down to the very root of things, that what is opened or brought to light or truth in experiencing, or Dasein, is original being. Opposed to this would be a view say of consciousness or as emergent out of some massively complex rule based network structure of elements whose being is a pure positing, and so a sophisticated metaphysics. The problem with the former view would seem to be that it can only clumsily account for the persistence at all levels of complex networks such as the brain and whatever underlies subatomic physics etc. The problem with the latter is that it cuts off any deep connection between reality and truth, or equivalently that it leaves the inner nature of being, which is the being of beings, entirely dark. That these two views seem to exclude each other is a limitation of understanding. It's not a synthesis but a unification that is needed by pushing each to its respective extreme.

Do you have a mind or does the mind have a you? And who wants to know? The mind has a mind of its own, but it's the only one you've got.

Understanding an object is sufficient in that the object itself forms a department of the experience of the object. This certainly fails when the object is an other, an alter-ego, when the object has a hidden side which can never be known. An other subject is unknowable in principle, by the very nature of the subjectivity that is your own, unlike the merely contingent hidden side of objects that are or can be understood. Mind or consciousness as experienced here is inseparable from the striving to master this problem, to get outside of itself in a way that breaks down the barrier of other subjectivity. Everything that goes on in one way or another answers to this without ever succeeding. There is instead a continual divergence, endlessly branching detours, all of thought, in the name of an impossible and apocalytptic convergence.

In this world of rocks and trees and skies and filled with many sorts of things there are certain objects which contain within themselves a shadowy double of the world together with a complex and evolving mass of abstract contents closely tied to this double and which imperfectly dictate the behaviours of said object. Isn't the picture something like this? These abstract contents do a pretty good job of modeling and predicting the parts of the world that don't include any behaviours akin to themselves and a progressively worse job when it comes to modelling and predicting behaviours more like their own, including their own behaviours as much as those of certain other objects deemed to be of the same type. Actually, there is only the shadowy double, which isn't the double of anything, and there are parts of it which model so well, so reliably, that they are taken to be the basis for everything else and a tireless striving to subsume the parts that are poorly modeled into the parts that are well modeled. Although this striving always falls short it is repeated incessantly and in many different ways.

What you were was fundamental estrangement strong enough to defeat any repetition and bring it to a shattering edge of keenness. It turns out, however, that even estrangement is a gesture and like every gesture is fused by repetition into into an edgeless mass with no distinction between waking and dreaming. It's not that nothing happens anymore but that all happenings are at the same potential, understood before they start, fading scribbles on the same pearly ground.

Intentionality is targeting. To do so you must be capable of responding to every way in which the target changes, moves or transforms, or responds in turn to your intent. Your degrees of freedom must match its degrees of freedom, and since it is no longer merely a target but the entire situation including the way in which you are included with more or less naked intention, you must also target yourself. This is why it has to be consciousness, that peculiar opening on itself. But something strange happens in this evolutionary bottom-up picture: it flips and becomes top-down. There is more consciousness here in the self-knowing than there in the targeting. Then you strive to emerge from the sticky and embryonic nature of the latter. This is when an exuberance of imagery of divine beings emerges, these are the first indications of a new birth.

 As a character in a dream you can rehearse the cogito: "I think..." - but is it really thinking that you are doing in the dream, or does it only seem that way since logic is suspended? And can you universally doubt with sufficient irony, since you really are at the mercy of an evil genius, or alien biological process? - "... therefore I am" - This is the kicker, because even though on waking you might agree that the dreamer existed in some legitimate sense, the 'being' that his "I am" was pointing to was utterly fictitious, was precisely not being. Granted this, doesn't exactly the same argument apply to the cogito in the waking state: you "I am" is correct in some abstract sense, but the being it points to is imaginary. In other words, all your thoughts drift around in a shadowy realm since they refer only to other thoughts and can never complete a circuit, and so it is absurd to claim that a certain thought or thought of certainty crosses over to truth. As an individual your consciousness takes place between one degree and another on a scale that extends further in both directions. The scale itself is subject, but the being in which it is grounded is inconceivable. 

 The primary subject is not self-reflective but gives rise, in some time-like dimension outside of time to a folding and refolding which at some point downstream emerges as a consciousness that is cognisant of itself, or seems to be so. The latter ought to be impossible because of its implied infinite regress but it closes the gaps on itself by sheer illusion. It is only here that a self can appear, and when it does it explodes in a kind of celebration, the original festival. This is not algebra, there are tremendous forces involved. Thereafter, even if this sense is lost it remains as after-impression giving to consciousness its peculiar pathos. Neutrality is only a mask of consciousness, at its core it is warm, full of feeling, and that is how it can exert such a centripetal pull on experiencing. Next to it, primary subjectivity, if it could be experienced as such would be impersonal and ice-cold. 

 Every objectively based theory of reality including or not its subjective doubling in consciousness (viewed objectively) incurs a dual theory which is its critical or idealist doubly and which simply traces every concept and mental move used in the first theory by way of its 'condition of possibility' as concept, its necessary appearance in thought prior to its application to the world. This epistemological move can be transposed into a metaphysical one since if the condition for everything knowable is that it first be knowable, why not simply say in the interest of parsimony that that's all there is or need be. The idealist dual theory, however, is just as much an objectivist one as the other, the mind that it presupposes is posited, deemed as present, to just the same degree as any primary elements of a naturalist theory. The true move to the subjective 'viewpoint' would take you out of theory altogether since it is to the subject that is you forever here and now. Here it can't be a theory but at most an 'understanding' - but in the same way as before, any such understanding has a dual (mis-)understanding which is more like a theory and generally goes by the name idealism.

The underlying form of consciousness is witnessing, as if to say: '...this is, this is, this is...'. Also as a continual fresh upwelling, so more like: "...and this is and this is and this is...' (Unpunctuated, but then the punctuation can go anywhere. ) Temporalisation is the 'and', clearing, not just in the sense of a clearing in a forest, but also clearing or refreshing the screen. This isn't exactly effortless, what rises up is initially too big to handle and the work of consciousness in the particular sense is to render it down, draw it into smallness. That's where the utility of the self structure comes in, it is a reduction filter, and personal identity probably has no more purpose than to catalyse that process, otherwise it appears to add no value. It is simply irrelevant whether some sort of numerical identity holds experience together except for the purpose of speedy categorisation and disarmament.

Your medium is time, you are in it and of it like a fish in water. That thing about standing on the bank and watching it flow by doesn't apply. You flow with time in a kind of ecstatic plunge. If there is something oddly unchanging about it all it is hidden away in what has been identified as retentions and protensions, or better as temporal ek-stases. These are invariant but concealed. Movement within time is the condition of experience, only what changes can be salient, but this can't come about without a fixed structure somewhere, quite heterogeneous to the freedom or unconstrainedness in every other way of what can be experienced. This unchanging element is glimpsed as structure but it is the only site in which the true subject can dwell, or rather not in it, as it.

Before you acquired all of the ideas of past, present and future, of memory and expectation, the ideas of flowing unidirectional time there was a deep and thick and intimate experience  this inner extension, rippling in place, which was identical to what later became separated as a sense of self. Nostalgia for infancy is the attempt to re-enter this other temporalisation, the sense that it was never lost but only obscured by individuation and its discontents. All beauty invites you to re-enter true time.

No matter how many times you pull it apart you still find yourself caught out by being for an other, playing to an audience or to the place of an audience which happens to be filled by imaginary personages living or dead. You can't just stop doing this, as in doing so you would be doing so for a witness. In just the same way taking the position of pure subject is always done with respect to some objectivity. This is like all the people trying to 'prove' the existence of consciousness via arguments drawn from science or philosophy. Every form of anti-reductionism is absurd since it seeks to justify the prior by the posterior, but you can't help doing it, nonetheless, no matter how many times you've stopped. It's like the old joke about smoking: abandoning metaphysics, ()or duality) is easy, I've done it lots of times!

Knowledge of an objective reality by whatever science it is developed and extended cannot prove the existence of things apart from all the relations by which they are known. This is like saying, in the case of physics, that the only reality is that of mathematical equations, a view which gains more plausibility as the attempts to imagine kinds of 'material' things which anchor these relations grows more and more incoherent due to quantum phenomena. In other words, naturalism inevitably parts ways with materialism. This differs little if at all from saying that mind can only know mind, and that the respects in which physical reality is unlike our contingent mental reality are of no weight compared to all the respects in which it is mind-like in a larger sense - structured by abstract laws, non-local etc. This argument has its purely subjective version as well: that your world is made entirely out of the meanings with which you understand and engage in it. Whatever is assumed to be left over, unaccounted for, by such a view is only further reaches of meaning. It is mind but not limited by your contingent sense at any time of the bounds of mind. These bounds are always being pushed further out anyway, so there could be no reason to grant them any metaphysical priority. Experience pushed far enough leaves metaphysics behind.

If you inquire into the background of experience, or its preconditions, what experiencing already had to already be 'there' so that experiencing can 'take place' then you are treating it as a concept. It is concepts which necessarily have antecedents out of time. The alternative is to isolate the being of experiencing from all thought and all feeling, from causes and purposes, and discover whether and what it demands apart from itself. What is the world native to being?

In a movie or story which ends a chain of catastrophes with the twist that it was all a dream certain formal constraints must be adhered to. When looking back you notice numerous 'tells' that revealed the dream nature of the presented world. You didn't notice these on the way in because you were expecting a pay-off in pity, fear or vicarious enjoyment, and so had no wish to un-suspend disbelief.. The narrative has to justify its facile ending by making your complicity its real subject.

Pivoting back onto the subject is called for by the dual nature of experience, and while here this occurs in the mode of a knowing and hence of a question, and again in a passive and aesthetic mode, in other cases apparently, and perhaps more commonly, it does so in terms of a doing and therefore in ethical terms. in a sort of political imperative. Each is emphatically an 'ownmost'. In so far as these represent fundamental attitudes they are deeply at odds. Each is a jealous principle that will brook no rival. Each seeks to devour the other. Reconciliation is impossible, but perhaps a sort of alchemy.

You do your best to spin out some metaphysical romance sincerely, but also half-aware of your own contriving, and uneasily aware that someone privy to your motives could resolve your paradoxes with ease. There is nothing here that Occam's razor couldn't shear off. That's all very well, it's fine to accept the most minimal version of what it is that is arising, but it can't stop at the view from outside. This 'explanation' must still be taken to correct the inside view as well. And the inside of the inside; the subjective knowledge of the illusory nature of the subject. These still must be granted the same priority as they had before. And as soon as you do so the question returns as fiercely as ever, arising out of the shredded remnants of the self who first posed it.

There is always, in every instance, a way it is taken to be, a most general staging of reality, that is both utterly free and inevitably chosen, as if at a point of maximum steepness that you can't help but descend, in a timeless suspension prior to time in every instant. And in every such staging you are not alone in that you are exposed to another gaze, that is, to a world. It's the only way that thoughts can arise, even the most private and intimate of thoughts. When you want to know who you are you seek the ultimate other to define you. The solitude of the subject without an object therefore cannot be conceived, you'd have to give up every world and every way of bringing about a world.

Who is doing the stream of consciousness? And who seems to be both within it and at in the same instance just outside of it, looking on in dismayed surprise? It is as if the observer collapses it, and it collapses over him, imprisoning, until it melts away into oblivion. Who witnessed that? Where does it go? The new moment destroys the old one. Not the re-echoing thought but the thing itself, the never arrested and timeless falling into time.