You are always so far ahead of yourself, lacking the words for what is simply here, which is not simple and not here.

All the mysteries arise from the experiencing being included in experience - all philosophical questions arise out of this too, questions and venturings which themselves belong to experience. Hence the idea that history is a project of metaphysical self-understanding. If the collective mind plugs away at this for long enough it must converge, given enough time, on the truth - and despite all of its errors and detours which will ultimately be incorporated, become parts of a symmetry. But it's too early to tell which way this will go, and in particular whether any of the short-cuts via an exclusive focus on consciousness, or the experience of experiencing, are of any value, are valid anticipations of the final truth, only that they necessarily take themselves to be such.

The map not being the territory is a truism belonging to the world of mapping, but it remains true that the map is precisely the territory when you realise that there to map too must itself be a kind of territory, and in fact it's all territory, there is only territory. If something is taken to mean something else it is first itself a thing and so is the taking it to mean; it is all a matter of ways in which what is is taken not to be, intricate evasions of as - subjective genitive. Perspective is a mirage, there is this phenomenon and nothing else, no changes even - no objects receiving illumination only pure light directed strait into the eye, or 'I'.

Networks of hierarchic and symbolic neural feedback loops are mot enough by themselves to 'explain' consciousness since presumably there are many structures in the body and brain that are not conscious, but if you add that it is gated and serves some kind of information reducing purpose and that it involves a heterogenous crossing over of sensory circuits and epistemological or model-making ones each with their different internal timings this seems to come closer to what such an explanation would require. The sensory becomes abstracted and the abstract becomes sensory and lo, you have qualia. What this fails to explain is the wilder phenomenology of consciousness, how disproportionately rich it becomes when things get strange. But then, things never get that strange for you, unless you want to say that everything is strange.

The Now is an ideal modification of experiencing which is distinguished by it peculiar concreteness and absolute constancy - as the point through which time enters and departs it is outside of time and therefore outside of phenomenality while appearing as the indispensable condition for any experiencing and hence identical to the self. All of this is no more than a sort of poem, an extended metaphor for the unchanging ground of any and all awareness.

It's easy to imagine states of mind more of the luxe, calme et volupté kind than this present round but they cannot be desired because that would mean a surrender of the now, or the reframing of its unique question which is nowhere more keen than now. It is the identical pivot and there is nothing else but the way all this mind dances its evasion and approach. There are no occasions only this occasion.

Ongoing experiencing in any instance, and it is mostly just everydayness, is built upon a framework or canvas that gives space, time, body, connection their scope and range of associated valences. This can change in surprising ways when something extreme is in play, pain or dissociation, or derangement or enjoyment aesthetic or somatic or both. You shouldn't be taken by surprise, not any more, but have practiced the framework as if it were another mind of its own, as if it were that very minds way of thinking of being in its own unaffected state.

To get back from threeness to twoness, all the wonders of the world are in twoness and most of all the mind experiencing the wonders, how can that be? There are too many ideas about this, the mind trying to prop up the drunken subject who retains the innocence to inquire, and who slips into oblivion in the face of the other's assistance, the too much, the thing of it. You never listen, you just want to keep snoozing through the sweet afternoon, untouched.

No matter how far you paddle the current always draws you back to the place from which you started out. There is something strangely comforting in this futility.

Certain, or perhaps all, stubborn psychiatric conditions owe their existence simply to that of consciousness, in their intractability they assert the existence of consciousness - in a context where it could well be denied in favour of purely behavioural criteria. The same could be said of all quirks, failings, parapraxes - the evidence for the Freudians of the existence of the unconscious is now all we have as evidence for the existence of consciousness. It inserts itself into the metaphoric equation as the factor that prevents it from being resolved, and so anything in a literal equation that does the same also points to consciousness. This is more than humanism, it goes right down to the shape of things, to the failings of structure, if you let it.

Emotion, excitement is for breaking up the surfaces of experience, dislocating its planes. There's no point in recollecting it in tranquility, when it is the opposite you are after, recollecting tranquility in emotion in order to discover its hidden passages, or better recollecting emotion recollecting tranquility in tranquility.

One of the vanishing points of experience is 'it's happening here for this one' and another is just 'it's happening completely and so nowhere and for no one'. Put them together and they eat each other.

All the depth and detail of the world, that which you discover and that which you only could discover belongs to the world. You are not here as a tourist and don't get to take any of it away with you, no souvenirs or snapshot, your selfies will all be reclaimed at the border. So what is it that you contribute? Nothing of what i see, known or felt, only that it was seen, known, felt.

Awareness of being or being of awareness or whatever you want to call it is morally neutral, does not form a habit, get better or worse, easier or harder or make any particular contribution to the issues of life. You can live well or badly, be wise and skillful or gauche and clumsy, in the former case you'll spend more time at home base without the tangles of unfinished business that will claim your attention in the latter. These are still immaterial to that other kind of knowledge whose key gesture can be made from anywhere in the circle, in spite of what you think it ought to be. There is never a moment when you can't wake to it, but that doesn't mean it isn't vanishingly rare. The point is that it has no valence and it not bound to most everything else which does.

If it is not the background consciousness dreamless sleep is very close to it. What is needed is not lucid dreaming but lucid dreamlessness. This applies to waking consciousness as well.

The threefold of experiencing, feeling, will and understanding (or thinking) are a Peircean, first, second and third, trichotomy - corresponding to spontaneous, oppositional and mediating. Feeling here refers to immediate sensations and presencings, or roughly what falls under qualia in its original sense when it hasn't been expanded phenomenologically to embrace all of experiencing. Most meditational practices such as breath counting and interior body observation emphasise feeling and willing, as if to correct the ordinary hegemony of thinking. (Willing is the persistence required to keep going.) For Peirce thinking is a process directed at the resolution of perplexity and so would correspond to meditation as inquiry. Thinking in the invidious sense, while still a mediational process and so a genuine thirdness, is passive and circular, neither of which is useless per se.

Experience is in feeling, willing and understanding and each of these has its distinct kind of self and world, of reality and temporalisation. By the same token each has its own truth but these are not distinct but flow into each other. This connection can only come about at the level of truth, never through that of subject or object.

What distinguishes reality from dream, its way of hitting back, its unrecoverability of time, the brutal clean cut of events, all of this precisely addressed to what is real in you which cannot be projected as an object. The world stands against that in you which can be stood against. But in that you are at least its equal and more. That every object no matter how insignificant is being itself embodied in form is a peculiar pervasive grace. Wake up once and everything has been singing this very tune from the start.

Your body dies in the world, its self-sustaining homeostatic circuits fail, it becomes inert and decays - this happens in the world. Your body was made out of parts of the world and resolves back into the world, the parts taken up again by other circuits. It is different with the experiencing that you are. If that were to be erased from the world, from its connection to the world, then it is just as true to say that the appearance of the world and the mode of experiencing associated with it has resolved into nothing, and that in this sense the world has simply ceased to exist. In other words your experiencing was never in the world, but your world was in experiencing. And suppose that the experiencing remained blank after that? This question only makes sense relative to the world's time and space and these are completely gone too. Similarly with any notion of continuity that you might raise - this is gone, but the experiencing has never died - death is only relative to the world.

Conscious attention is thermodynamic, it does work or requires work, burns food, it increases entropy. It is not this kind of attention that witness experiencing and the void of experiencing. That one does no work, needs no energy, is outside of thermodynamics, which is what makes it so hard to achieve. If you move towards it you overshoot it, if you tax attention on its behalf you leave it behind, even though if you were to translate its discrimination into a mental distinction it would be one at the very limit of difficulty, or a little beyond. The two kinds of attention and their differing objects are not incompatible, they are as they say, orthogonal. The mental one is naturally the only one you can work on, so if you have to do something you might as well.

But then there is the truth that strikes at you at 4am, a psychological truth the borrowing against which provides you with the miserable living space for affording each day. No world can be constituted with out this singular function necessarily oblique to its subject.

While there cannot be an individual will to truth, truth can exist at the telos of a community of understanding. From this perspective there is no individual either except as an incident or sinew of a larger process.

The will to get to the truth of things is a dilettante game for the most part arising as a sort of unreliable mediator in the stalemate of conflicting desires. The will to healing if and when it appears is a stronger response that eventually subsumes truth, otherwise the token truth is a function of deferral or appeasement. As was long ago pointed out hat an innate drive for truth makes no sense, mistaking the nature of drives. If it appears at times it is a rare freak of nature and if it is found to be hailed far and wide something entirely different is being sought for. Truth claims as motive are the best disguise for concealing lies. It's messy, but may be all you have to work with.

The nature of experience is that you are responsible for experience. If you are surrendered to the ontological background then by the same token you are surrendered to the practical background and the two in uneasy balance. There is no self without psyche and no psyche without self, each with its own necessary transcendence, but everything you do or respond to retains its force regardless.

If there is a container of experience it is not being but human reality and it is human reality that it contained in being. You say container but the nature of these relations, which may indeed be somehow analogous is not to be understood. It is outside of all categories of relation. In fact categories of relation is a good name for what you find yourself in.