It's the same simple gesture that comes in so many guises, namely to see experience as phenomenal, or to step back and be aware of being aware. There are many ways to map this or to name it and then to draw it out according to the map or the logic of the naming, or to criticise and find flaws with the assumptions of such a characterisation. No way of naming or mapping it is final since any mapping projects it onto the phenomenal plane, and any naming departs from it, but also every reduction or destruction of this gesture misses it (while relying on it.) You seek instead to make it more emphatic but without first defining it in any way. It touches something deep in being with the lightest and most elusive of touches. Enough to caress being.

The simulation hypothesis is not just an end-run against the argument from design, or a way to have your god without admitting any divinity, but a sort of modern myth that encapsulates the ontological condition of late-modernity. That there is something aesthetically as well as spiritually repulsive at the core of this hypothesis can serve to mask its metaphysical implications. You might begin by asking what a simulation is and why it is done. One answer might be that it is a falsification of being for playful purposes. It is done without putting much at stake in order just to see what happens, out of curiosity. It is play that lacks the playfulness of cosmic lila, but instead is done because it is 'cheap', is a toy about which it matters little if it has to be abandoned and restarted with different parameters. Or indeed it could be one of a large series of repeated 'runs' made in a search for statistical regularities. If modernism implied the revival of a certain gnosticism, simulation is a sort of post-gnosticism with flat affect and no initial catastrophe. It is this flat and bland quality projected past the apparent chaos of things and into what is beyond being that seems to characterise its contemporary resonance.

The need for a grounding of experience is consequent on the separation of subject and object. On the subjective side there is the implicitly felt self-certainty of existence which cannot be matched by anything arising on the objective side. To be fully grounded would be for the ontological gap between these two poles of experience to disappear. The self-certainty of the subject is never fully realised or experienced as such but is implied by the gap, it is known as a just-having-been. The split into subject and object brings about this polarisation, and is nothing but this polarisation, presented as an insoluble problem. The illusion is not the independent existence of a world outside of consciousness (which needs to be reclaimed by the subject) but the idea that subject and object are independent, and that consciousness belongs eminently to the subject. The subject is a confused misunderstanding of consciousness in which no separation into distinct poles can ever be found.

It's mostly the chattering elaboration of situations and to say that it is hard to stop short and enter the essential freedom of awareness is to make of that its own situation and story. But you are in the current of a strong wind pushing you along and there is no reason to turn around and face it even if you do so from time to time out of nothing but a kind of contrarian whim. It's not the particular situation, this one for example, writing something every day, it's something about any and every situation, about situatedness as such. It can't be what it's taken to be without a ground, and the most obvious thing is that it lacks one. The blind assumption that you can start in the middle just because it's always been in the middle does not serve at all.

As between realism and idealism a change of belief has no significance at all. If all is phenomenon or idea then this applies doubly so for all the components of your realism, doubly because it is framed by your need to assert it. So if it is not your beliefs that have to change then it is your interpretation of them? No, what is called interpretation is only another operation performed between beliefs - they certainly apply to something, and they and what they apply to have the same metaphysical status, indifferently real or ideal. So if there is any difference, and there ought to be because experience, life itself s entirely different according to the decision made over this, then it can be no more than a matter of intonation, the movement of a comma, not even that.

If the goal of the brain as a probabilistic predictive system is to minimise 'surprisal' then there are times when the only thing that is surprising is how easy this is. This is when you are lost in a field of minor surprises. But experience is inconceivably vast and alive while you are forced to draw your conclusions from the merest atom of it.

Your indelibly particular selfhood can only be a kind of knot twisted into a clear and featureless knowingness, the pure silent brilliance of being. If its complexity seems to extend infinitely turning into and out of itself in every dimension this is only a kind of fractality, the apparent iterations of a simple trope. Take away these imaginary dimensions and you are left with something fully equal to any of its momentary lyrical expressions. So a poem or similar utterance set down is the same as the mind that sets it down, is a perfect crystallisation of said indelibly particular selfhood and as much alive or not as the fleeting recognition in mind. It's not that you impress yourself into the clay of meaning but that you have never been anything than a fleeting impression in mindless mind, just like every thing you see.

You think of all the ways of will and enjoyment, all the scribbled fragments of lives that you hold fast, the digging in, and have any of them sway against the simple and unhindered and surprisingly acephalic noticing of noticing?

It is vain to wish to subject dream to the narrow ways of the will of waking life, rather you wish to learn from dreaming how to merge the waking will and its perceptions into the continuum of dreaming life in which your kinship with everything encountered unfolds into endless resonances.

The idea of the two centres of self sheds light of the two strangely opposite meanings of 'subject', in one you are the Subject, while in the other you are subject, that is subjected. In the second sense you are not subjected to some outside dominant, but to the self that is both other and 'more you than you', with its massive and dark gravitational pull. Neither version of self stands on its own, they exist in a continual yang and yin interchange, the labour both of the negative and the positive. Subject triumphans and subject patiens.

The unconscious is hardly timeless, although its time may not be linear and one-dimensional. There is always something going on in its hidden life responsive to events that originate, that is are retrospectively recognisable as originating, in waking life and that either were or were not parts of conscious waking experience, and in addition it is responsive to events that seem to belong entirely within a sphere of experience that has not passed through conscious waking experience and which might range from continuous dream narratives through some sort of hidden collective experience to outer-dimensional and untranslatable experiences. On waking you are thrown not only into the waking world and its narratives but also into whatever mood, context and affinities are left to you by the retreating unconscious life. In a sense consciousness is radically centred on the mysteriously absent pure subject or 'I', while at the same time being radically decentred in relation to another and more powerful life, that of the unconscious, with its own even more mysterious and inscrutable centre.

Experience is the interpretation of experience, while at the same time being the refusal of interpretation. In paradoxical language you could say that experience is the refusal of the interpretation that is experience. All of the recursions that go with this duality: the refusal of the refusal of interpretation, the interpretation of the refusal of the interpretation of refusal, and so on, are necessarily implicit, and arise as soon as you take on the experience of experiencing. On the one side you only understand by becoming the understanding, and on the other you are always outside of whatever you understand. The moment you refuse to interpret, you are taking a certain view and hence interpreting. By interpreting what is meant is seeing in a certain way, having a position in regard to X, where X can be any activity, including itself.

Every aspect of experience that can be reified. that is, regarded as thing-like, insofar as being consituted of 'qualia', and that is unchanged by being so regarded, can be equated with representation, or seen as essentially mental. Not everything need be like that, however. The consistent causal structure of the world is enactive and loses its effectiveness when viewed at one remove, in a 'dissociated' manner. Since this is often a matter of life and death, in as banal case as crossing a bust street, idealism is seen as a luxury for enjoyment only at leisure. In addition, many of the best arguments for idealism rely on a tautologous understanding of the borderlessness of consciousness. If you take away everything that can be known or experienced about things you are left with a complete void of any relevance, and therefore there can be nothing more to reality than what can be known and experienced. This denies one of the most common facts which is that consciousness is entirely filled up with things of which it has absolutely no notion how they got there.

To ask of any experience, who is experiencing this? is to beg the question of consciousness as necessarily formed according to the subject-object duality. This is far from self evident and appears to be an artifact of waking consciousness as a serial processing variant of intelligence. It's possible that qualia, the sense that there are obviously such things, and with them the entire 'hard-problem' is also an artifact of the same kind. The cure is to reincorporate serial mind into parallel mind and then determine if any such tautological self or subject still arises.

There is a certain appeal in regarding the conscious mind as an adaptation created by the intelligence of life to further its ends, an adaptation that has gone wild and come to regard itself and its virtual centre, the ego or the self, individual or collective, as the originating force and goal of the entire process, and to regard life, or the unconscious, as the ancillary function. And out of this comes not only all theology and metaphysics, but concomitantly all psychological self-hindering complexity and neuroticism, as rationalisations of this primal usurpation. That such usurpations tend to be the rule rather than the exception in evolution does not make this one any the less an obfuscation.

Two minds, but not quite the same as the Freudian topology. Rather than say one is unconscious, say instead that only the other has qualia or the luxury of self-reflection. The working mind and the playing mind, perhaps, the former being taken up with myriads of parallel tasks from bodily maintenance to the drafting of representations, while the latter by nature serial. The former is huge while that latter is tiny, a little pearl suspended from its matrix. Two independent beings that were once merged and which have been drawn apart, except in sleep and dreams. If the conscious thinks of the unconscious as a threatening place, like a haunted house, this is pure projection. What is more to the point are the feelings of the unconscious towards the conscious for which it has made and continues to make so many sacrifices, adoration mixed with disappointment, like a parent. So, to try to bring them back into a mutual acknowledgment.

The body has its own mind, as it were, a highly intelligent and complex unpredictable reflexive and responsive process which is not conscious, at least in the same way as the waking discursive mind, or what we normally understand as consciousness. It does not have qualia in spite of its neural complexity. How do you know that it doesn't have qualia? Because of its intimate relationship with the consciousness that does. It gains qualia at one remove through its relation to this aery spiritual substance we think of as the conscious self. They are partners, the air mind and the dirt mind, or the proletariat and bourgeois of the soul. They are separate but interdependent. They join at birth and separate at death. Strange to think of it that way, and the light it casts on sexuality.

You aren't born into and die out of the world, it's that a world is born and a world dies, and in between it separates by stages into two parts that perform as if totally different from each other before blurring and merging back together at the end like a picture left out in the rain. The initial wonder, the wide-eyed gaze into the open, is because the separation was still only hinted at, and later when it momentarily breaks down - because there is nothing essential about it - there is poetry. The correlate of the world is soul, the totality of responsiveness, while self is its most punctual and fragmentary reduction. The self looks around and can find soul nowhere but in its own unease, a guilt perhaps, imagining it has killed it. Worlds are geometries that appear like bubbles in the spaceless.

It's not enough to unpick representation as long as there remains any idea of the world. What a strange notion that is, world? The coherent totality of everything appearing out there? A totality however is a kind of mirage of reason: there are all sorts of things, and there are finite totalities but why an unbounded totality of things? But the vernacular world also is the people's world, the world you are born into and die out of, inseparable from consensus. You think of it that way as a special kind of place too, remembering the wonder of discovering it, how far you ventured out to embrace its promises before turning back towards life; the world of the world, the flesh and the devil, rather than that of the world, the soul and God; one realm among possible realms, dream worlds, fictional worlds, historical worlds, or indeed simply of possible worlds. The peculiar senses of in the world and of the world, of being worldly or unwordly, a man of the world or a woman of the world - what different connotations these have? The order of the world or the world order; the world as verb or to be without world. A mystery as rich to explore as the self, or richer.

You have senses and a body more or less compliant to a will that you know from inside, and a name and a history, a location in space and time - all of this belongs to the world that you are experiencing, you who have no face, no name and no identity, who are merely an eye without an 'I'.

The knowing of the world that is necessarily not in the world is also known as absolute being. You cannot arrive at this as the outcome of any procession of understanding, or according to any logic - it is not an idea, has no 'propositional content' whatsoever. Without it there would be no understanding and understanding is peripherally aware of this dependence without being able to formulate it. In the same way, if it seems to be a kind of knowing, it is also unchanging and so not like any knowing that you recognise. In so far as it is called present, it is constant and unmodified. The only thing that can 'happen' is that understanding, the whole system of understanding, falls silent - and for no reason, simply because it can happen so.

Everything in the world has a location in space and a position in time. That ought to be a tautology, but then abstract ideas of various kinds come up as well as thoughts as events in experience aside from their abstract content. Abstract ideas are either general terms which embrace an indefinite collection of concrete instances, so in that sense they stand and fall with worldly things, or else they are pure abstractions like numbers. Pure abstractions are identified with the thinking of them and as such they belong to the same instance as thoughts. Where is a thought? Whenever you think a thought you locate it in the same place as you locate your mind, they are as if they are inscriptions in the mind. So where is the mind? You commonly, lazily take it to be in your head, but this is something of a mirage. Where it is in the appearing of what appears is outside of anything that appears. Hence the mind is outside of time and space.

What it feels like to x, as the characterisation of consciousness, or for there to be something that it feels like etc., implies a response to a question. There is only something of this kind in response to being asked about it. An unanswerable question certainly but needing to be asked all the same. You imagine someone asking it of you or simply asking yourself. Nothing feels like anything until you stop to notice and silently question, interrogate, and hence there is a self which is precisely the responding to being elicited. And so no consciousness without a self, not a permanent or continuous self necessarily but that response to being summoned. The situation of consciousness as an interspace, a relationality. A purely private self is an impossibility except insofar as it is a turning away from one relation towards another.

If you step aside for a moment the day will seem like a noisy and colourful parade or triumph in which you are caught up, see it now with a brass band and majorettes, floats with exotic scenes in tableaux, and barkers, confetti, enticing smells of food and coffee from smoking caravans painted in arabesques, fakirs and fortune tellers, snake charmers and a wheel of fortune, dancing mimes, harlequins and skeletons - you've been totally caught up in it, audience and actor and impresario, all your work - and the same every day. The illusion is tawdry, it dances you, feeds on you. And even these moments when with a mild shock of sudden quiet you shake your head lost in the strangeness of it are a curated sideshow, you pay your penny to sit for a moment before a tarnished mirror.

It is perverse to identify as consciousness as the empty container of all experience devoid of any character or selfhood. Philosophical thinking pushes in this direction following its notions of logic and truth, and paradoxical thinking and bad poetry finishes the job. Even if such a realisation were achievable here is no point in it if is not at the same time deeply subjective, if it doesn't take up and complete what we know imperfectly as ego. It would just be to cancel yourself out, to take revenge against life. So what if the self is without inherent nature? Better that it perish in refusal than to accede without protest to universal neutrality.