It's not just that your desires and fears, your most existential turnings, literally tropes, are not what they appear, your entire experience is not what you take it to be, and you've always known this. It's that it requires a 'being taken to be', an 'it is like' and the one, the agent of these operations is not outside but inside the scene. The whole thing is a sticky web held together with the glue of doubt - doubt being the same as faith. For some this seems more apparent than for others, and indeed too much loose doubt is crippling but not as dangerous as too much loose faith.

The circuits of the stream are mostly epicycles. They don't encircle an existential singularity but only form part of other cycles apparently said to do so - by whom? Everything might look good from a certain distance but up close it is all fake; no desire to be found, for example, but for a desire to desire or to occupy the place of a desire to desire, to block the time in which the void of desire could be known, and just for the sake of time, of obedience to time. If there are inauthentic desires then presumably they are aping authentic ones, but what if it is inauthentic all the way through? A product of necessary and incompatible mediations? To see that clearly for once would be worth the sacrifice.

There are loops in the stream of consciousness that are starkly existential lops around singularities, perhaps, loops that can't be shrunk to dimensionless points even though every part of them, every snip such a path goes through abstract space, deconstructible or reducible chains of words and images of no weight at all. Actually everything in the stream has existential significance, it is multi-dimensional, full of branching allusions and deep hidden effects, it all matters tremendously, your life does depend on it even if you aren't aware of it or are only doing it to avoid it mattering at all. But nowhere will you find a single moment of existence. You can't, existence doesn't fit inside it. It wouldn't be life without being pervaded by death, but life and death is not exactly the direction in which being shines.

The drive for existence for recognition is historical and social, as is originality or status; in the past it might have been for righteousness or justification. In whatever form it takes these drives point to a kind of core of the self as what it is that is weighed or measured, as the object of account. This point or spark is located within a spiritual continuum or collective soul or essence, and is only what you are as a stream of consciousness say within this larger flow. So, to be is to bring forth an enduring mark within this flow. Whatever appears within this flow, however, no matter how 'original it might be, belongs entirely to the flow. The most original moment does not carry the stamp of original being but only passes through such being which is ever-present, undifferentiated and utterly without need of proof or justification. What is saved is only an aspect of the stream and is saved only relative to that stream. What you as being 'are' is outside of that, necessarily neglected in its unfolding flowering.

A structure could be programmed to act as a map, or as a language, or as containing or involving a map or language. This is fine but 'acting as' is not the same as being, and at least the first utterance of that comparison implies that there really is a map or a language, with the full implication of a firstness corresponding to the operational subject. This is what the cogito ought to be, even if you can't get there by thinking about it. You might put forward the 'pre-reflective' cogito, but what exactly is that 'pre-' trying to say? It's not temporally before, as if firstness was first in time, or logic and logic were temporal. Time is a secondness at most. 'Pre-' then in another sense, which is just what happens to be in question, so it contributes nothing. But sometimes you see it see the need for it, and other times you simply don't: the opening vanishes, sealed up. This is not an accident of the mind, although you usually take it that way, but is why the very oblivion of Being is a pointer to (or of) Being.

Subject, experiencer, ground are concepts belonging to the concept of experiencing, and insofar as the latter is a historical construct full of latent presumptions so are these pointings to some sort of source or firstness. The peculiarity of experiencing however is that while the firstness cannot be known a peculiar necessity connects it, without any limitation, to its concepts. You could say that while there is no subject, and while every idea of such an element or term is subject to inevitable destruction (a process not foreign to the mere conceptuality) there is nevertheless a place that is the firstness of this evanescent subject - it is unnameble and unthinkable, has no scope or weight, does not exist but insists.

When an insignificant moment from the past is suddenly and vividly recalled it appears to have been something like a missed portent, as if reality was gently tapping at your shell and suggesting that you question it at that very point, asking that you notice the tiny crack. The moment is recalled as one where desire overrode and took the changing light or texture or quality of self-consciousness to refer to a vague promise of future gratification instead of what it was, something entirely in the present, an invitation to a particular kind of doubt. All you had to do was to nurse this small and kindly doubt, your only inheritance, without any desire to trade it up to something else, to something seen as useful, as serving will, or the idea that you could have your cake and eat it too. What must be cherished is what has no use at all, what doesn't get you anywhere or move an inch from where you have always been.

Being empty, having no idea or seed of an idea come up, why not? Why shouldn't it continue like this, after having cancelled out every possible starting point? Every idea is extraneous, a sort of distraction, or something expressed in order to be rid of it. The basic state is this blank, this unenchanted nothing or extended pause at the end-middle-beginning of things.

Experiencing things, states, objects, contents in the widest sense is the same as experiencing the experiencing of them. This is not because awareness is the exposing of the immediate, but quite the opposite, there is nothing that arises that is not already a re-echoing through the mind, the secondary is primary and the primary is not at all, or only virtual, the true index of the opacity of consciousness.

Experience is consciousness agitated. It is such strange stuff that when set into vibration it creates subjects and worlds, self-luminous sparks. All of this against a background of stasis. How deep would the silent non-existence go without any irritant, turned in on itself, placeless, timeless? And where does the initiating swerve come from? From outside, or from within? The question is the swerve, the swerve the question.

Besides whatever state you happen to find yourself in there is a map of possible states, a very large map embracing states known, states imagined and states imaginable, states common, uncommon and extreme and each of these while not identified with everyday realism is continuous or consistent with it. Everyday realism says that time passes, matter endures, other selves are real but unknowable and these are the foundation of all experience, and you are your body and will end with its death. The desire to escape this framework is a component of many of these states and fits seamlessly within the map. In this case it is true that the map is not the territory.

You always have the thought as itself as its own dream or intention and at the same time the thought as its kind, as the kind of thought and dream that it activates. You can move between these two with relative freedom, be the thinker believing the thought or be the subject to whom such a thought arises and who believes it. Only these two options are available although, apart from piling them on top of each other in telescoping ironies others might be possible: the naïve and the sentimental. And of the two the latter is more true but the former more real.

An other or alien subject is initially scouted as a threat; it is filled with content both for itself and for an indefinite field of third parties, but this is alien content, superfluous to the self, in completion with it's own substance, somehow noxious and taboo. But then on the assurance borrowed from those other others, you venture it may be safe to drop your resistance and to admit yourself to this content. Suddenly you discover a passion for it - it is precisely what you were missing without having known it - if only you had realised this earlier. You become a champion of the new contents, but purely on its own conditions, your loyalty is uncritical, is a voluptuous surrender. This can only go on for so long before a sharp reaction ensues from the reawakened super-ego who deplores your feminine giving way. You are then shamed back into a somewhat stiff and world-weary rectitude, defenses remounted and prepared for the next iteration of the cycle.

Everything that is relatively constant in experience such as the metabolic hum of the body, gravity, breathing, the way time flows, both falls into the background and gets counted on the subject side of the ledger. All of these things can be picked out, brought in from the periphery, with some effort in certain cases, at which time they cease to be components of the subject and become simple objects. Hence the presumption that much of the subject remains hidden, or that the subject is hiddenness itself without anything to hide.

Consciousness is coessential with time, it doesn't just appear in time but is of the nature of time. Time too, may be of the nature of consciousness. This is to say that the gap between the experiencing and the experience is temporal, whatever you are conscious of is always a moment after the knowing of it, so the knowing itself can never be experienced. In other words there is no consciousness of consciousness. If the experiencing is a true being then there must be a mode of it dependent of flowing time. This could not be consciousness in any way that you know it, but something else 'known' is a quite different way.

In the case of an emergent phenomenon although there ill be no clear demarcation for when and where it begins relative to its substrate you can expect there to be a transitional band where the complexifying phenomenon on the lower level is doubled by the first adumbrations of the emergent one. If a stream of regular clicks is sped up you can hear the peculiar crossing into tone, and in the same you can hear jumbled sounds from an obscure source cohere into that of a voice as you approach. Nothing like this seems to happen with (waking) consciousness despite regular the experience of the mind regathering itself after sleep, but this is because you can't recognise consciousness except by way of consciousness. As a literary trope this effect can be pulled off precisely because the letters on a page can appear as lost fragments of possible words. The same emergence can't be mimicked with the moving image or via sound.

The subject is taken to be what always and exclusively confers meaning, even as you live submerged in polysemy, so much the more work for the subject. So it seems that the ultimate matter of experience is a rubble of entirely empty sensations, grunts and gestures, proprioceptive twangs and strokes, a stochastic music out of which you force sense, or rather out of which sense fizzes simply be your attention and proximity. Some of it may be crazy but it all comes from you and your crazy unfathomed depths. It may not be like this at all. What if the confetti of fragmentary participations comes ready-made? Or mostly so, and merges seamlessly with your own productions and their sense of being produced by you alone? This is how other subjects are interwoven with your own. Words on a page, for example, are squiggles of pigment that you make into words, pictures, voices, but at the same time they originate from someone other. What is you blurs out into an ocean, a hive of voices, of eyes, of living realities.

Anything that could be said to be is so out against a prior being of which it is a differentiating difference. If you take experiencing then this may be so against a pure diffuse and undifferentiated body sense, and that too however diffuse and deep-sleep-like stands for against a nothing of all possible sentience. It is what grants the free grace of being. And such difference cannot be of alien stuff, they are of one taste with what gives them. This is the logical derivation of the true nature of things and all objections to it are there only to be dissolved with or without effort indifferently.

The way that the various dimensions of memory are locked together and keyed to expectation, all of this which is ingredient to the function of personal experience would seem to require an equivalent self outside of time, to be present, to have been present, to about to be present. This ought to be the case, but isn't, it is somehow known that the implication doesn't go through - as if the sense of being above time is in time, is what time actually is, without any metaphysical separation. As if the opening of time is not itself temporal, and isn't even an opening, but something else of an entirely different grain.

Consciousness seeming like a means to some distant end, or existence as sketched in, largely and to be filled when all the components, knowledge, mastery, compassion have been completed, all of this is part of the background to ordinary mind. It could place a scale and put itself somewhere over on the left, and note the resistance offered by too much thinking or ego or whatever, and strive to use the mind to do away with the mind or other such nonsense in search of a covering agent to be responsible for all the mess. When actually awareness is open and self-luminous and requires no knower, no perfecting, being complete as it is. The trick is that there is no trick, only that you can't believe it, and keep thinking that there has to be something more.

Once the stage is set the motives appear and the actions follow, or not which is merely another kind of action. Living through is mostly the rapidly changing contexts which you learn to identify and to modify according to more general motives. If you look there is no one doing anything, just occasions arising within contexts or stagings that are always already in place, that are there before you before you. This ought to be something you could perfectly relax into but there remains a fringe of anxiety, you understand it but as much as you understand it never quite fits, as if there is always something else to be done, no context ever being enough. To know that simple insufficiency, the feel of living, outside of satisfaction or its absence, resolution or divergence.

Experience is feeling thinking and willing, but all of these can be reduced to willing if we take being acted upon as also a phase of will - you only know yourself as receiving through your ability to give. So feeling is will, while thinking is either in anticipation of an act or reflection on an act, you plan, you set out terms etc. Experience cannot be reduced to perception and analogies of perception in this way, the engagement, the embodiment is what is missed. Hence there is no problem of reality since the real is always the counterpart of will - this is probably another way of describing pragmatism. The experiencing is nothing like contemplation either, it is immanent to experience and not transcendent, although entirely separate and disinterested. This may be what is meant by the phrase 'pure act' - the essence of action once time has been entirely abstracted. Pure act and will, this is why they fit together so closely, why no act or angle of approach can separate them.

It is an inescapable fact that experiencing and the experience are two incommensurable components of ongoing experience; experiencing cannot experience experiencing and experience never shows its being-experienced. In spite of this both a as real as it gets, only the real of the experiencing is somehow prior and more vital that that of the experience, although, since it is absent from experience, always overshadowed by it, if not even doubtful, relatively speaking. You can't get rid of the experiencing, neither can you experience it, so at best you can maintain it in a sort of peripheral awareness. This maintenance has a calming, soothing effect on the experience which otherwise tends to either run wild or to dull down into an uneasy homogeneity. Other than that it is not clear if there is any greater value in either one, value being something else that belongs for the most part in experience, one of its many fascinations, and hence is largely absent from experiencing, which is in fact rather disinterested and empty.

It all comes down to the relation of experiencing existence and time, in that every essential form of this experiencing, everything which points silently to what it is, thought, desire, feeling, mood, love etc is a mode of temporalisation. But there is no such relation as if there were two thing facing each other, existence and time - they are not two. What it is is time, what time is is you as the very possibility of experiencing.

All the houses, rooms, apartments that have been home at one time or another, by fading into the background they defined a sense of presence and a context for feelings, desire, possibilities. You don't think of them as if you had left something behind, but if one were to reappear in a kind of vivid dream it would be more than a déjà vu, marked with all the pathos of an epoch. Memories are unreliable but strange returns are possible you are determined by contexts and these are built by the imagination, not given. Consciousness is limited to the interior of the worlds you are able to imagine, but you are the dreamer of the dreaming of worlds.