Granularity of experiencing is bewilderingly lacking in any underlying continuity when it comes in at a certain low pitch of affective attunement, in which case it is of the nature of suffering. If and when attunement changes, then, as the clouds dissipate and the sky is again visible, the continuity of witnessing is restored and tension is released. Everything depends on that affective pitch over which you have little control. That you are the seat of affect, which can indifferently be called dukha or jouissance - positive and negative valence amounting to the same - is another prior enablement, a setting of foundation. It is not a ground because it is not conceptual, feeling is rooted in prior feeling with no beginning. You see it only from the side, your seeing is to the side of it as centre.

Tidal movements of affect embodied as domains of reflection, urgencies of thought which are more significant for their chains and cycles of excitation than for anything they are about. But the subject in its dual sense is a function of their enchaining and forms the enabling link to the experiencing affective ground. It is the feeling of feeling that is immediate but it is just this that can never be pointed to and yet it seems as though trapped in these recursions, weighed down by them. It is precisely because there is no point of view from which this can be observed that it is so important to observe it, to arrest its inevitable churn.

Landscapes of knowing continually unfold and open in unexpected directions. There is no point of survey from which all possibilities come into alignment. This cannot happen because the known and the known are not separate, the further out you seem to go the closer in you find yourself. Every system of systems turns around on itself, maps into itself. Or perhaps say that there are two entirely interdependent but completely incommensurable forms of order, evolutionary embodiment which is time and knowing-being which is timeless.

It is a certain quality of sense and the sense of being that gives to certain moments, will in abeyance, that timeless sense of a calm questioning, of an open gaze that is both your eye and the eye that sees you merged in pure cool transparency. These moments belong to the in-between times, to anticipations and nostalgias, and of a perfect unity between birth and death and drawing light from both.

Truth cannot be attained but since falsifiability is always possible truth must remain as a limit point of any system of meaning. Such a point must be unique since if there were two they would be relative to each other and neither could be a limit in the full sense. At such a limit, then, mediation must be reduced to zero - falsifiability and mediation being equivalent, and again the zero would itself be a distinguished point of the system. The possibility of becoming identical with the truth limit in a sort of collapse of all systemic meaning also cannot be ruled out.

Nothing is more varying than the point present but its being-present remains absolutely fixed. This is strange because the being-present is a kind of content, it has particular flavour and feel to it and in as far as you can recall this presence-quality in past moments - and this is something which it seems can be done to a high degree - it is paradoxical that presence itself can be known of as past. Experience itself always seems to be on the way somewhere in its perpetual shuttle of states and stages and in that sense is always nearer or farther from some unattained and changing position in time. The diegetic distance is continually changing which the ontological gap remains absolutely constant. This means that in terms of the latter all experience is equal, that every recalled moment is of precisely the same significance. Put simply, if you go along with the representations all is in motion, but if you are looking at how these representations come about, if you are attending to the screen, nothing is moving at all.

The purpose of subjectivity, if it can be expressed that way, and here subjectivity and awareness of subjectivity are the same thing - subjectivity is precisely that which is identical to awareness of itself - is so that the mind can correct for it in order to get better objectivity. We are so used to seeing the failures of this process as to forget that it actually works hard all the time and is essential to the most basic functioning. On the other hand it is natural to mistake the successful first order effects for an ability to deal with second-order effects in which we would be able to correct for where we are in the entire tapestry. This is much harder than expected, and perhaps made worse by reading too much in to the assistance gained from art from the multiplication of points of view. Any degree of detachment from this 'tapestry' is bound to be a surprise as the blind-spots of position are exposed and their effects on even the most objective of the objective.

The further you go the wider the scope of something like a reduction of the key elements of experiencing to what is effectively phenomenality. This is perhaps a slightly dangerous magic, but is it really a reduction? Is anything changed? It is digging into certain assumptions which appear to have no more grounds than themselves. They are circular and therefore not anchored to anything. You can push them, these categories that have always been taken for granted, a little out from their normal course. The light falls differently on them, they no longer mean what they used to. But nothing has changed, everything is merely more itself.

It's impossible to conceive of consciousness or experiencing or anything like that without something like Kant's transcendental consciousness behind, setting up the space, as it were, for any phenomenon from the most basic to the strangest 'wild essence' to arise. What this is exactly can never be either conscious or unconscious, but it must overpass the realm of experiences in such a way as to grant them objectivity and so also, subjectivity. Indeed, the self is just such a transcendental 'category', but of a peculiarly intermediate kind since it is never present and prone to cycles of withdrawal. If you think of the operations in the brain as like the thing-in-itself, and the corresponding experiences as the representations, then it is clear that this transcendental organising must belong entirely on the experiential side - even if, as may well be the case, categories of space and time also map to brain states. This way of seeing it accounts for the inherent geometrising of consciousness when it is forced into unwonted self-exposure as in certain psyche-delic experiences. These are like a temporary overlap of phenomenal and transcendental consciousness.

There is a sense in which there is intent, that is, will, in intentionality, but to see this you need to assume a will to will. It is as if there is a little deliberate push in every movement of the mind. This seems strange because these movements are often involuntary and because desire as an instantiation of will (desire is specific, will is general) is generally not satisfied. But say that the tiny flutterings of mind are willed too quickly for you to fully recognise them, instead of recognition you experience a little spark of feeling, perhaps against the grain. These feelings are the natural termini of the correspondingly minute intentions. Intentions so understood always terminate in a moment of pure feeling, that is how they are extinguished, and these pure feelings are how you recognise yourself. The self consists entirely of these - and of their condition of possibility if you want to get metaphysical. Everything else that you think of as the self are just conceptual abductions, bits of theory meant to tie them together. In a similar way it is not hard to recognise a desire to desire behind even the most frustrating of desires.

There is a golden doorway behind experiencing. It is there for you to go through, but you precisely cannot go through it. Perhaps you passed through it once the other way to come into this experiencing and now it is a persistent mirage; it means that you are here. Everything you know is what prevents you from approaching it, your unworthiness which is real as anything here is not the problem since you must leave it behind. It's gold, it is a blessing, there is no obstacle, light shines from it; it is a persistent mirage, a product of the light, which is everywhere, the light by which experience glows.

Going from a diverse collection of observed facts to an hypothesis which combines then under a single principle or motive is called abduction, a useful and therefore ubiquitous process. Meta-abduction would be to go from a set of experienced abductions, or simply cognitions, to that which underlies or unifies them, what makes them possible and gives them their knowledge-like character. The usefulness of this is less evident, in fact it may be dispensed with and all of your energy be given over to the creativity of abductions. There is no motive for this second kind of backwards leap, and yet once you have sensed its urgency you cannot let it go.

Whatever is seen, done or experienced already contains the hidden presumptions of seeing, of action and of bare experiencing, all of which necessarily appear like nothing at all, like an empty field, in the naïve accompanying understanding. And yet through all kinds of logical friction we have gained the idea of preconditions, of certain positive contents, of an a priori, the preconditions for that appearance action etc. This move, from X to the preconditions for X, has us intoxicated. In its true metaphysical instance it is hard - the genuine hard problem? - and almost impossible, the opening of a crack in reality. In its debased instances, within the understanding it continues to wreak havoc on our world. It's the genie out of the bottle. It won't go back in and it won't be tamed. It must be pushed until it devours itself.

To break out of an impasse it is not enough to dive beneath the presuppositions and imitations that maintain its circulation, you need to make those same moves on the pure surface of things, in the turbulence and contingency of the moment. You can never repeat an action, it must always be the first time. Actually there is no repetition, its is always the first time and you don't know what to do. But this goes against everything you have learned.

Thought goes forwards, striving to get better, closer, more predictive, whether by dialectic or Bayesian updating, the arrow progresses. The alternative is to go nowhere, zen style, thesis, antithesis, thesis - not even a return but you can think of it as a rediscovery, if you want. Or best of all to go backwards: what is it that makes both thesis and antithesis possible and partakes of neither, allowing the very distinction and its supposed ground to melt away? It was never there, the whole mechanism with all its epicycles belongs to a dream. The step beyond is the step back.

Theories of the mind necessarily miss the point, no matter how operational they might be in given contexts, no matter what new and fascinating structures they reveal - and all those structures are essentially two mirrors facing each other, variations of that - or how well they project into the sublime. That is why it is best to treat them as no more than games, ways of killing time. And the point? This is elusive, you can't get it in your cross-hairs. It's one of those things like the question as to whether everyone's colour qualia are the same, that you either get or you don't, or even whether consciousness 'exists'. If you do 'get it' then there is no blame attached to not doing so, but if you don't the absurdity of the question will only annoy you. A slight shift in focus is needed, that's all.

The stream of consciousness, otherwise the product of the default mode, is as if a sensitive medium is responding to a bombardment of random excitations. This thing gives them a rough sense as they rush by, and it is that loose sense-making that is automatic and yet a subtle strain. It's the same process that makes dreams, but tighter and damped and hence more staccato. The intensity of it can go up and down, louder and softer, and in the same way as you are unable to moderate your immersion in it, you cannot affect this aspect of it either. From 'inside' what is most salient is the randomness, but from 'outside' it would seem, like dreams, to be entirely in the style, in the timbre and odour of your self.

The mind knows only the process of symbols and images and in this way it dates and places itself in a web of histories. These define limits which it cannot cross, the limits being itself as attributed in this web, its embodiment. What is unexpected is that these limits are themselves processes of symbols and images. The anomalous identity of the now which cannot be resolved is the thing which upsets the near perfection of this display. It is in relation to this that everything else reveals itself as appearance.

The successive thoughts emerge out of unknowing but are always familiar, as if you've already thought them in some other, past or parallel mentalisation. This distinguishes them from the furniture of the world whose otherness is reliable. Looked a more closely the distinction breaks down somewhat, your thoughts are somewhat alien and even places you've never before visited have a hidden familiarity, a slightly spooky quality as if there really was a proleptic life-review. Its madness to do away with the distinction but perhaps the point is to seize the subtle identity behind it. In a lucid dream the most fascinating thing is that you know your mind created all this solid-seeming stuff - you can bang your fist against the wall and you'll feel it, or feel something. Isn't that the same as waking life, mind made and with the otherness too, mind made?

As for the imaginal and symbolic dimensions the distinction to make is between determination by the exterior, and particularly by the other's knowing of you, and purely internal determination. It's not a simple distinction because the external is determined by the internal and at the same time the internal is determined by the external. It's the distinction itself in all of its subtle turnings that is rooted deep in being, losing its quality of twoness as the truth of both sides. Isn't this already acknowledged by the use of 'you' instead of 'I'? The slipperiness of the thing: you are both sides but can only operate one of them. Thread the filament of will through the hyper-dimensional loop that identifies inside with outside.

Slow cloud-like movements of dull grey masses, involutions, turning away so that you are always behind them with your poor threads of thought that rise with faint protest fall away into the sadness of eternal afternoons in the provinces of the mind. So where is your famous experience in this? It is something about the whole of life, not just this stranded moment, you can't make it out, but for its sadness and sweet defeat.

In the sensory field you can switch back and forth between the 'ready-to-hand' and the 'present-to-hand', or more accurately, the sense as incorporated with its objects seamlessly in the flow of living and the same sense as isolated, immobilised and signifying only itself, or say between the web of life and the molecular qualia that constitute it. This difference is exploited in music and the plastic arts. When it comes to thinking however this difference is not available, or it is recoded back into the fields of meaning. You can observe the immediate data out of which a sense of self was precipitated but not without an additional act of will carrying a new and inaccessible sense of self. The process can't be immobilised, you can't get around the back of thought. Or if you can it is not available to ordinary consciousness.

Will does not possess its being, it is the opposite of this in such a strong sense that it would be intrinsic to being if such a thing were allowed, that is, if being were to have a will. It is within something prior while also bringing about the life that spans space and time. All of which is to say that it is not the background consciousness, and has no part in it other than in putting forward the misleading metaphor of a background. What that is is whole and complete in experience without being any kind of experience. Perhaps better to name it the foreground consciousness and experience the background.

Intentionality is a fibre of will, like an individual fibre come free from a length of twine or a twisted rope, loose, a cloud of them spastically pointing in the same general direction but attached at only one end. Fine enough and free enough to respond to the vibratory fields of thought and feeling which crackle around it like static electricity. Without this moveable splinter of will these remain ghostly, unable to be embodied, to belong to a purpose. The larger currents of will are too strong to embody a recognisable self, they are instinct with the raw stuff of self, undifferentiated, unquantified.

Imaginary and symbolic span the same realm of being as feeling and thinking. What is missing is not quite equally described as the real or as will, but mostly is will. It is this that is known intimately but darkly, hard but not entirely impossible to represent. Its elements are fibres in an obscure topology, every identically at different scales collective and individual; it is you and it is others, ancestral and national, personal, impersonal and contemporary, immediately understood and inexplicable. The elements are joined in intemporal and temporal webs; they are rhizomatic, there are crossings, saddles and decision points; you also go down every road not taken. The rest is so colourful and so weak, bathed in qualia, kaleidoscopic, it might as well be epiphenomenal.