The natural attitude is also called animal faith, it is a state that precludes doubt and instead toys with a vague scepticism. Doubt would be a necessarily traumatic because undesired and un-called-for breach in animal faith such as would be the precondition for any enduring realisation. To be worthy of deep doubt, that would be resolution worth making.

The only thing you can do or not do is to take the phenomenological stance towards ongoing experience. And if you do take it up the terms of reference are no longer obvious, there are only different possibilities to explore, so that if the question arises as to whether you have done anything at all other than afflict your mind with a sort of psychic cross-eyed-ness, this cannot be answered on the basis of the assumptions of the natural attitude. You have entered a peculiarly watery medium where subject and object are not distinguished but flow into each other, and where certain concepts remain but with unfamiliar faces, looming like obstructing rocks in this weightless world, obstacles that can be gotten around if you can only find the way. The test of all of this however is in letting go of the gesture that constitutes the reduction and seeing if you emerge in a different nature to the one you started from. This never happens, but the gesture becomes so habitual that it even the boundaries of the natural world with a shimmering refractive fringe.

It's not a matter of finding out the solution to some mystery, a solution that can meet all challenges and hence a completely different kind of knowledge from any hitherto, but rather a belief that the basic topology of experiencing can undergo a complete change into something that does not give rise to or depend on the same kinds of singularities, such as the idea or phenomena of a self and its metaphysical difference to that of world, or the notion of something behind or prior to experience, or time and space and causality - the kind of thing that is well-described, but not exclusively, by Kantian philosophy say. This way or organising the totality of experiencing is idiosyncratic, is of its time and culture etc., but is of the same family as any known from history. And what about that belief? It's not without some evidence, but does it go too far, or not far enough?

Seeing is like nothing else but seeing. It's not what is done or enacted as a result of or through seeing, it's not a computation or a signification, it is simply sight, the appearing in light, requiring no seer. Same for the other senses, as if each is its own god and can never be other than it is.

Not much has changed, you were seeing it clear just this morning. First a heart seething with bitter passions, lust the best of them, at least it isn't ice cold, incorrigible the lot of them though, then the refraction through two social masks layer by layer cobbled up over years and just as frayed too. The outer one, the consummate hypocrite, the Tartuffe, and the inner one, the way you go on parade when you're home alone, the cynic and ironist with the wide-eyed act, and a thousand variations you play for amusement or disgust. It was something to hang on to, negative enough, true enough, to keep its form for a time or two and now that's gone too. Must have been something you ate. Watch it go, leaving you back at this non-place. Just shut up and get on with it.

The distinction between happening as arising in the causal matrix of reality, that is, of objective thing-ness (which is the very much greater part of the experienced) and happenings that arise from you, or from will, and so are experienced as warm and wet and close to home, that is, ineradicably stained with 'youness', subjective, so that their causal consequences belong to you etc. There is an idea that if the (small in measure but high in significance) part of experience that is of the second type could be entirely mapped into the first type ("seeing is happening...", "thinking that you are seeing is happening..." etc.) then this would do away with that nuisance, the ego, the 'I', or whatever it is called. This whole way of thinking is predicated on that distinction, on different kinds of happening, some more and others less real. The problem with this is that the first kind of happening is a useful creation of the second type of happening, while the second type of happening is only what is not the first kind, or is only the error or unsolvable part of it. Does happening even happen? And if so, where and how?

Self, the 'I', or will, or affect, or whatever it is that is unavoidably central for the experiencing in which you arise is only the expedient, like staining medium, by which the question of being can arise. The fact that it can be approached along so many different pathways, often entirely incompatible ones, is another indicator. But none of these pathways goes all the way through. There is after all no subject to be conveyed. It's more a matter of making a display of the impossible, the most attractive possible display so that a bee might come to pollinate it.

The being of consciousness, of the knowing 'I', is entirely different from the consciousness of being, which is a particular care of that knowing, of its process. The being of experiencing, however, is just experiencing. In either case what is called idealism is ruled out.

Rather than you experiencing, experiencing is you-ing, and what are you but experiencing? But while your experiencing is via the senses and an interpreting mind and hence plays o the division between say, subject and object, experiencing has neither sense nor division, is neither individual nor general, is unqualified and cannot be squeezed through the apertures of a mind. Transparent, evident, seamless and unthinkable the only clue that mind has of it is its own insufficiencies which it treats as philosophy and virtualises as metaphysics. The latter is not a disease of the mind but its signature and symptom.

Is it real or is it only in the mind? Or put another way, does getting to the root of the mind also, and necessarily, get to the root of reality? Surely the answer is yes, because the distinction between reality (as the ultimately determining instance) and mind is itself in the mind and so the mind cannot be resolved in its elemental being without at the same time including what is taken to be other than mind, the real, and so destroying the very possibility of a mind. The invention of consciousness was a great defeat, the wilfull assumption of a sealed-off layer, a mirrored prison, within experience and the placing of a captive within it. It was perhaps a response to the invention of matter, but thenceforth you would would have to spend lifetimes finding the hidden gate through it and into the primitive open - without ever having left it.

It's not about dissolving the belief in a separate self or in free-will but about the absence of anyone to hold or ever have held such a belief. Which means that there may be such a belief but it isn't held, there isn't a place where it could be arrested, it just passes right through. What you find is an anchoring of a worlding, but an anchoring is not an anchor, is the exact opposite of an anchor. Nothing actually dissolves, but dissolution is the nature of crystallisation.

The notional split of experiencing into subject (or witness) and object, or of intentional atoms into noesis and noema, is oddly ungrounded. It seems to be justified only as a way of modeling experience in a finite scheme and of aligning this with the affective centreing on an exposed 'self'. If you look closely at any of the senses, seeing, hearing, feeling etc., then no grammar can appear since any such appearance would only be a reflection in an adjacent sense What you find instead is a need to subtly personalise experience, a need driven by a fear of falling into groundlessness. That fear seems to be all there is of ground, as if, even if there is no person or self, the fear of admitting this can substitute for it. 'There must be a self to be afraid of there being no self.' But just like the senses there is no anchor for that fearing, it is just the functioning bootstrapping in the void.

Dreams are mostly a rapid succession of undeveloped situations. The natural fecklessness of the mind splinters the objective into fragments each of which could be a world in itself if you were fast enough to grasp the leading thread that it offers. On occasions this happens spontaneously - actually everything in dreams happens without premeditation, although conscious priming might play a role - a situation opens into a story with a well developed scene setting and one or more intentions in the dreamed mind of the dreamer. When this happens the dream becomes more vividly coloured and the periphery of scenes better articulated. At the same time a latent awareness arises that you while for the most part identified with the dream protagonist are also scripting the dream. The dream world has a peculiarly elastic quality. This encourages the dreamer to pursue a definite goal, as if to arrive at the answer to a question or attain an epiphany. Now the dreamer and the metteur en scene are working at odds to each other, the purpose of the latter being to withhold not so much the sought after conclusion as the circumstances that would force it according to the narrative logic. It becomes a contest and what wakes you is when the dream-creator gives up and peevishly upsets the board and scatters the pieces in play.

Will is inherently dualist or better pluralist. You will against something and for something else. At the same time it is without a subject, since the order in which a the subject emerges is a representational order, both imaginary and symbolic. Idealism of any kind must be premised on the position: let there be a subject, then... . Furthermore you can't say that one arises out of the other, the discontinuity between them cannot be bridged from either side. This poses experience as a question or a telos. It tends inexorably towards some omega and everything is to be drawn up into that destiny.

There is no knowing without an element of will, and no willing without an element of knowing. What you are is already implicit in will but is unknowable to knowing. Since they are so closely intertwined you would expect to find some original kernel in which they are as one, the hand and the eye, but try as you may no such place is revealed. The two elements are opposed at every level. Out of their opposition infinitely many different worlds can emerge.

C. S. Peirce: "Experience is the course of life. The world is that which experience inculcates. Quality is the monadic element of the world. [Its self-sufficient firstness not consciously recognised as such.] Anything whatever, however complex and heterogenous, has its quality sui-generis, its possibility of sensation, would our senses only respond to it." The immediate actuality that you are aware of is a surprisal, some impact and resistance against what is passively expected, and therefore a twoness, an excitation of will. But in so far as you can think it is yours, possess it in time, it is a kind of knowledge, modeled on cognition, and accordingly a threeness. The phenomenological forms of consciousness are indefinitely plural but are built up out of recursions and reapplications of the fundamental triad, equivalent to feeling, willing and thinking.

In mood there is temporalisation as the proto-narrativisation of feeling, that is it extends feeling which as inchoate sensation is purely in the present, to a cloud of expectations and recurrences necessarily in time without specifying any particulars. This pure propensity could be expanded into histories and justifications but in doing so would become too specific and miss the peculiar oppressiveness that is its hallmark. What the narratives would cover over in allegory would be the interdependence of impersonal and personal subjectivities, the way that there is no individual self without mythical collective selves of various registers all twined together like strings in a rope. There cannot be a you-subject without they-subjects to demand of it and there cannot be any they-subjects without the energy of will drawn from you as the embattled individual. The effect is orchestral in its harmonies and dissonances, like some demonic concerto.

It is as if there is a tuning dial that can be jolted up or down and thereby resetting the metaphysical texture of experience, the existential formulas of everyday passages in a remarkable variety. The odd thing is that despite all of this change of genre the protagonist is always identical. The events accumulate like stray papers on a desk for which some sort of hopelessly overdue synthesis is required. Nothing serves to do away with that inconvenient fellow who is neither a notion or a will, neither secondary or fundamental. He is perhaps no more than a name on an office door, or just a title without a name. To do away with the office, to make it redundant you'd need to apply to another level, or perhaps just dynamite the whole building.

As in most instances you only have one idea, have only ever had one idea, and no matter how you twist it and turn it, no matter how blind you are to it, it reappears down every path you take. That's not a problem, just as immediate experience can't be a problem, your loyalty to it is a kind of virtue: you are the destiny of that idea. Or one of its destinies since it is hardy unique, an insignificant fiber of a decadent time and place. Only that it happens to be a pretty foolish idea and you wish that it were not. Is the wish integral to the idea? Is that what makes it such a bad one?

Ideal intentions are in ideal time which is no time at all since it can be restarted indefinitely. Experience is perception-like because it is only in the mysterious now, which is always passing and never changing. This actual or living now is unknowable because it is not the sum of its possibilities and projections, has nothing to do with past and future, does not support the constructions which are made out of it willy-nilly. Every idea has a bad conscience because it is unable to be knowingly placed in living time which is the only time it has. In other words every truth or meaning that depends on ideal time can be dissolved back into living time and surrendering itself completely. The elsewhere or else-when that is coded into every experiencing.

In studying a picture you can switch your perception to the 'negative spaces', the spaces between things which until then seemed to have merely a supportative role but can now be understood in a positive sense, as having shapes and movements of their own which contribute in an important way to the overall aesthetic effect. A similar effect is present in music where you can pay attention to the intervals of time and pitch and intonation between the positive melodic or motivic elements. In modernist music these easily assume equal importance. The same reorienting of perception can also be applied to thought and more broadly to experience itself except that here it is the very mind that can effect this alternation of gestalt that is made subject to it, and of course also here the trick is so much the more difficult to sustain. It amounts to another approach to what is otherwise referred to as the background consciousness.

Through the cycling days you play your assigned role, insignificant in the scheme of things and with no space for improvisation, as the character you are you are played out, nothing up your sleeve, fully converged on what was set out before you started. As that one you have arrived. Only in certain moments set aside, this other one, diffident, detached, wondering how it could be that you find yourself in such a time and place, in any time and place, the sojourner, gently expectant.

The subject as feeling, this resumes both the subject as ultimate experiencer and as subjected, but leaves little room for subject as witness. The depth of involvement in experience is unfathomable. All of your ideas are there to model feeling, but then the ideas are charged with valences which in turn give rise to more and different feelings. This is not to say that ideas do a particularly good job with feelings, they are such a different kind of thing, but they limn consciousness and so render the greater part of feeling unconscious. An unconscious feeling is an oxymoron, but perhaps only because there is so little understanding of the nature and degrees of what is called consciousness.

To have both phenomenology and structure at the same time. The phenomenon, experiencing, factored over structure, and structure invested with the irresolvable agony of its oppositions. Is the ultimate unity of the subject anything more than a postulate? You cannot experience the split of the split subject except perhaps as a kind of suffering. But as suffering it is protest and the desire to draw worlds back together again. The split is without any feeling, it isn't noticed, it is being too much with the worlds. You only think of it it when it has gone too far.

What if a paradigm for mind were the emergence of a hive mind in an ant colony? In this there are two layers, the rudimentary mental world of the individual ant, an unfocused contingent will driven by incomprehensible urges and the collective mind evolved to respond purposefully to a range of effective conditions or pragmatic realities on an entirely different level. These two layers of mind are each generalised responders to to immediate conditions and hence proto-conscious but their worlds are not and cannot be in direct communication, even though indirect communication is essential to them. It is the nature of this indirect communication, both the top-down and the bottom-up that is interesting, representing a kind of noumenality or action of the unconscious. The individual seeks to fulfill its wayward desire without understanding the logic of its motives. For the hive the individual is both essential and indiscernible, without identity, its 'I' merely instrumental.