There is awareness and awareness of awareness and awareness of awareness of awareness and so on. The question is where in this chain is your mind, that is, what you take to be the consciousness that is yours? It's not in the first place, and not even in second place, maybe it's third or fourth, or maybe even further down the line - it keeps going on and you can see it receding away in front of you but you don't have very clear perception in the backwards direction. You can't turn around because whatever is in front is in front of you. Perhaps it's enough to know that you are suspended somewhere down the chain and not, as you'd thought, at its start.

In relation to the known scope of human experience this is miniscule and thoroughly provincial, and all the more so in relation to all accounts of extraordinary experience; the centre of reality is far away but lends a certain stable orientation to things while modulating that other centre of reality that is indelibly subjective. Neither of these centres really functions as a centre since they are relative through and through. The centre of awareness is outside of this topology and immune from relativity and limitation, lending nothing to either party. You could say it was absolute unity if that made any sense, which it doesn't, but what would be meant is that it is not relative. You cannot imagine anything that is not relative, that has no prior.

The stream of thoughts, random and inconsequential and at the same time deeply conditioned and consequential, that seem to dissipate attention and obscure its rightful object. Such a notion is itself no more than a thought of that very kind, thoughts goaded by meta-thoughts in endless eddies, but no, exactly the same thoughts might be precisely the rightful objects of attention - it's not in the thoughts at all, but in the way of the light cast on them. The background consciousness has no thought but has something else, a direction like the sum at the horizon. Since you have no control or say in this it appears other, a fixed condition of experience beneath notice. It's all in the turning around, and since this cannot be effected all you can do is throw the windows open wide. Receive, receive, receive.

The phenomenological world is an ontological transformation that results from a certain act. This act is a shift in focus relative to the 'I' as point of view, from empirical 'I' to transcendental 'I', and even if the latter is regarded as merely virtual it holds its place in the ontological or epistemological centrality of self. This is not a frictionless gesture and hence is doomed to fade. What is needed is a different kind of 'shift', one which is frictionless, and hence of the true nature of experience, in its grain, and which therefore also does not pass through or even in the vicinity of the notional self. There is the description, now find it, or, which amounts to the same thing, prove it does not exist.

That which is emergent has as its final goal the rediscovery of that from which it has emerged now seen in its own light, as musical space emerged from sound space and at its most refined seeks merge with the condition of sound infinitely enriched. This has to do also with time: music reveals time so that the pure presence which is sound can be discovered in its latent depth.

It's not the background to consciousness but more like its substance. What is in the background, or at least almost completely shrouded over by noise is the 'instrumentation' that orients the questioning of this. Apart from that any such questioning is at best a matter of doubtful logic. Need there be any substance at all? Isn't is just a metaphysical illusion deriving from misused language? An endless philosophic 'project' with no way of reaching an outcome? Admittedly the constitution of experiencing is utterly opaque, inadequate to explain itself in any terms available to it, but that doesn't mean that the key to it is concealed somewhere apart from a computational theory yet to be perfected. To put aside any objective path is already a big step, to know that is what you are doing and why.

If some phenomenology emerges out of a prior relationality then that prior reality is phenomenological as well, the two are intimately related but in a way that seems discontinuous only from the posterior worlding. It is not dead matter giving rise to life since what is thought of as dead matter consists of natural kinds and hence already possesses all the marks of consciousness. The posterior level may be richer in degrees of freedom but this is only a numerical increase; ontologically is is all the weaker for it and is mostly barred from recognising the prior as mind in a more eminent sense than its own. To recognise it would defeat the purpose of emergence, or in other words, emergence is precisely that break in recognition.

At all levels what is emerges out of something prior the cradle of its being. An inescapably what is prior is more real is what endures when the other comes and goes. And so what is more real in you is the all encompassing consciousness in which you and your world takes place - you are relieved of the burden of self-creation. And so what has emerged is not demeaned or cancelled but fully free to be itself.

Consciousness and being are the same, but respective presence or absence of a connotation of self-reflection makes them appear entirely different. The point is to understand that there is nothing self-referential about consciousness, while everything of life and mind is entirely within the sphere of unbounded recursion. It doesn't need to signify or represent for this to take place but does so by virtue of its constitution in consciousness. It would work just as well without consciousness except that it would be. All the equations written down but with no fire in them.

Mind, on one side a concept engine finding actionable summaries of raw experience by evolutionary learning, requiring a system of goals but no consciousness, on the other side, feeling, goals, values or valences, what could be summarised as will, and requiring consciousness which is somehow integral to value assignment. Witnessing is not the same as this, is pure consciousness independent of the vicissitudes of mind. The two different appearances on consciousness in this are quite different, one being dark and embodied and wild, the other bright, detached, inhuman - and yet they necessarily are the same consciousness which does not suffer division. Consciousness whose nature is detachment is also somehow deeply interfused with life, the very opposite of detachment.

As if to say that witnessing is unalloyed representation, while the intermediate consciousness is pure will, plural and dark, known only by reflected light. Neither of these is quite as expected from such a simple picture. Witnessing, having no identity knows nothing of uniqueness or particularity, it is not seeing from one point of view but from all points of view, and certainly there is no question of qualia of or consciousness 'existing'. It turns out that such notions depend on non-substitutability which is the most abstract form of will. That you cannot, must not be substituted is to exist in the world, it is sexual but only to the degree that sexuality is embodied in difference, this and not that. Is that all of it or only the most of it? Everything in will is dialectical, it goes over into its opposite but only to become more what it is and go around again.

The witness consciousness has no 'I', the 'I' has no consciousness and does not appear before the witness. It is something like a vortex in the dynamic intermediate consciousness that underpins most of experience.

Thinking is moving the world around, free on every axis, while you stay still. But you are nothing other than the world that moves inside your own shifting gaze, the blind spot that sees all.

The owning of ownness or the forum of the for-itself, that which must be to hold this as an experiencing seems to be a question improperly answered by the transcendental ego. The latter functioning like a homunculus to beg the question of unity. Is there even a question of the unity of experience that all of this urgently answers to? It is searching for a content for the containing of all contents. Nothing like this can be. All that matters is the strength with which all such notions are rejected.

If there is direct experience it is an irruption of the real, a lightning strike a few feet away, a crash, an explosion that knocks you off your feet. Anything else is anticipated, pre-digested, buffered and entirely conceptual. It doesn't feel that way though. The distinction between immediate and mediated experience is a concept intrinsic to mediated experience. However your naturalistic metaphysics or anti-metaphysics works it relies on the work of this distinction, that's what maintains the frame. That you can imagine a certain sustained introspection will deliver up little bursting specks of the real proves the point by the very imbalance of the crafted instrument you need to put into play with the presumed naivety of the product. Still, there is some point in assaying experience for its fragments of reality, as long as you know that such reality is only currency.

The successive thoughts could be called threads of intent to emphasise the care and exclusivity with which they are pursued, one after another. On one side they take over, seemingly out of nowhere and drive you along without any apology or explanation, but on the other side there is nothing easier that to break off the thread and take up another entirely different one. It is this power of breaking off that seems like a freedom, but it is mediated by a system of priorities. You easily suspend one line to take up another one, and it is just this that makes a mind so useful while at the same time limiting any depth of introspection which might hinder the continual and responsive switching. It is in the meta-mind with its continuously refigured priorities applied to the frontmost awareness that the self seems to dwell.

Perception of object X is when effects in the organism which are causally dependent on X are interpreted as X. So causality is replaced by interpretation, just as the causally efficacious X is replaced by the object of interpretation X. These two X are both identical and categorically different, depending again on the interpretation of interpretation. The 'effects in the organism' are know directly and not perceived, they are prior to the interpretation and are not second intentions, although being intrinsic to consciousness they merge into awareness of self at a certain level of sophistication. You can't be directly aware of this but you also cannot be unaware of it; it is known in peripheral awareness that is free from interpretation. It is the mind's readiness for interpretation that is active at every moment and supplies the colour and sound and urgency. Apart from that it is a matter of permutations of primary elements, the lowest and most magical level of experience since it arises out of nothing.

The experience is always of finding yourself in an ongoing and developing situation, a more or less spread out and urgent now seamlessly attached to a past and a future. But all of this only because there is consciousness of it, and consciousness implies an immediate doubling: it is because you know that it is. What you know in that second moment which reads as prior is not the same as the situation you are experiencing; it is felt materiality simple and enclosed. As if it is the basis for the situation but of a different kind of reality, like the inked words on the page in relation to the world you are reading about. If you can bring a peripheral attention to that conditioning consciousness you encounter an odd silence a muted world of rearranging elements alien to all meaning. Experience drained of reality - like turning of the sound on your television only even more complete. A ghostly artefact and yet prior to that other world which now seems slightly absurd in its histrionics. And the priority is genuine since the projected reality can be altered from this place but nothing in that reality can affect the essential quality of this oddly removed awareness.

The Kantian transform would be to keep the phenomena just the same but change the noumenon. In other words a high-class version of the geek's 'brain upload' idea. It fails because it would mean that you could be duplicated at no cost - phenomena are already virtual - and if that was to occur you and/or your new clones would immediately go to war with each other, or some other high intensity engagement, premised on precisely the zero-sum noumenon, (as in a certain recent novel.*) Hence the plausibility of will as thing-in-itself. And if you can't just change the noumenon? Then phenomenon is not really phenomenon and noumenon not really noumenon. Inseparable they are not-two.
*L'anomalie by H. le Tellier.

The only motive that can be recognised is towards enjoyment, anything else besides, say for exploration and discovery rather than truth (which is frankly unappealing) is only to serve enjoyment, either to enhance it or to supply motive for motive, or else is plain bad faith. There must be other unrecognised motives since enjoyment is so thwarted, but perhaps they amount to no more than ways of sustaining enjoyment's situation. The choice is less inevitable than it seems and might just as well be otherwise: there is no enjoyment of enjoyment, it is simply an uncritically accepted and ill-fitting habit, and escape from noia.

What you call experiencing falls almost entirely within the semiotic: something means something else - but there aren't two things only this strange operation of meaning, ongoing signification, the peeling away or de-realisation of one moment to throw forth an image of another, but as an event all tangled up with similar events more or less distantly echoing other, significations originating in other realities, recognised and unrecognised. As if it all evolves out of one difference where something is identically being and consciousness, an impossible forking or unzipping of two realms entirely closed to each other. Consciousness is precisely the negation of being, but at the same time it is, and being is full, is closed positivity, allowing no negation whatsoever.

But what is the actual experiencing? It must be something but it can't be anything experienced. It recalls an old vedantic saw: Consciousness is like gold. It has no shape itself but is always found in a certain shape. The shape can change, in fact it can take any shape at all, it can picture anything. But one thing it cannot picture is gold. Gold in the shape of gold, gold whose shape means gold? In fact there are many such conventional shapes, (coins, ingots etc.) shapes that signify, 'this is gold' but only with respect to certain learned conventions, which make it easy to miss the point - like philosophy or phenomenology. But since you only recognise shapes when they are out of gold there must be a recognition of gold which has nothing to do with any shape. It's the substance of what you are seeing in every instance independent of whatever is seen.

And if it was said, “that is you” and your attention was directed to something going on, a brain say exposed, so that you could see each felt quiver of experiencing doubled in its moving processes, but to really be convincing you’d have to go right into it, to put it on like a display in a body and so you let go into that and found as you came into it that, yes, it was exactly you as you were experiencing right now, without any doubling, perhaps like two images moving closer and closer together until they became one, not just accidentally but in their very being identical. And what's to distinguish that from this? And why does it feel so easy as if there is nothing between the background consciousness all light, supplying all the light in the scene, and the embodied consciousness in the scene?

Every single thing that comes to notice in the flow of experience, whether of perception, purpose or ideation owes its appearance to some filiation of will and hence of passion immediately and blindly felt. If the experience is the vibration off the string the passion is the tension in the string. And so you understand each movement of the mind as fleeting and insubstantial because all the mass is lodged in the inner workings of feeling. These lie as the fixed points from which experience is gained and of which awareness is oblique and indirect. However, you always seek the truth of experiencing in this more authentic seeming realm backstage. If it were to emerge into clarity what would be seen but something uncanny like a seething mass of snakes, an involution native to some lowlands of humanisation. And once seen, in the deprived of the ability to stand for the subject, no more native to being than all other phenomena. What then? The structure collapsed, only the author of structures remaining.

A curious fantasy: The self, the ever present central experiencer is hidden behind veils of mystification so insisted upon that they present as logical impossibilities, the eye cannot see itself, and so forth. But what if all of these are misdirections because the subject, who you are is simply shy, is afraid that you won’t like it, will be disappointed in it. You, this great proud thug of a lad trumpeting his dramas far and wide, while the self, perfectly neutral, is necessarily the relative opposite of all that makes up your identity. The moment you take a step it is everything you hold in vague contempt. No need to specify, but see how much feeling is concentrated there, contracted to a point, and how vigorously it defends itself from full discovery. There is an erotics at play in this too, not self-love, which is no love at all but a kind of fear, but its opposite, the real thing…