A self is an integral of intentions, that is what gives it voice and salience, and intentions are a claim on the future born out of motives which are necessarily only partly revealed within the complex or conclave of intentions - which may be large or small, broad or narrow, fleeting or stable - it makes little difference. This is to view embodied experiencing on a political model, and what better model can there be since they arise together. But who are these intentions for? Or better, who does this voice speak to or for? What is the people in this analogy? What is the state? An intention is instrumental, it is not persuaded or impressed by another intention. Actually, it is, that's all it does, but not in the way you mean. Again, if politics is theatre, who is the audience?

You lose yourself so as to find yourself again. But first you must be thoroughly lost without a clue. Only phosphorescent traces of desire like fireflies in the cave.

Self-awareness as unconcealment is yet representation and hence is a signaling. Every signal or sign both shows and deceives, since it can be imitated or else be interpreted beyond its intended recipient. It can only deceive because it shows and so even for the sake of deceiving will signal its truthfulness. In other words, a sign always signals its truthfulness in addition to what it shows or exposes, but is unable to warrant in any way the truth or its meta-signal. This is the persistent deconstructive portent and cannot be shouted down against its undesired consequences.

Every motive is an intention is an intentionality is a subject. But not only don't you, the self-aware, self-knowing subject, know all of your motives, you cannot know them even in principle because they are drawn from impersonal flows of intelligence in many different temporalities. There are flows that function like final causes, and perhaps they are final causes, but you have no cognitive grasp of the different kinds of time in which they unfold. An awakened state that could perceive all of these must be a contradiction in terms, unless, unless it undoes all temporalities, in which case it is an unknowing.

It is motives and goals that are most easily concealed, from others and from oneself. How often are goals consciously formulated and consistently followed? Even when this is the case there are other vaguer goals behind the conscious ones, all the way back to instincts. This is where the conscious and the unconscious become inextricable and is the hidden opening in the seemingly self-enclosed consciousness. The model of this is nothing like perception or feeling, or even thought. It is will only in its future directedness and its force, but the sense that it belongs to a subject frays out into ambiguity and uncertainty. On the other hand, expansion of consciousness is often no more than the illumination of larger fields, and their hard logics, of motives.

The past is nothing, but the future is everything. A future satisfaction is never discounted, you'll never let it go even when you've no future left. How this reverse nostalgia unbalances the present. What you are: imagined future satisfaction.

The negative way, everything goes, deconstruct everything etc, becomes a principle of no principle or a no principle of no principle, with no limit to the twists and recaptures of itself. It's an importing of the outside to the inside, and so only a further consolidation of the inside view. And a certain disingenuousness as if there was nothing at stake. That's not how it is at all, don't turn it into a game even if you need something to while away the time.

Experiencing cannot be pointed to, much less can it be done or known or even felt. Like every idea that shows up in it, 'you' are a sort of half-formed thing made of critical absences, a pursuit without a pursuer or a pursued. And yet it is only truth, beauty and fulness since there is nothing else for it.

Energy is time and time is energy. But to escape time takes energy and to escape energy no time.

'The only thing you can be sure of is that you exist', this address for existence has large burden placed upon it as the fixed point in a turning world, but it is no more than a conceptual kind of existence. It offers no more than a co-existence with space and time, or with the 'there is' of space and time and these 'being' entirely conceptual so is their cognate being. What the concept points to cannot be conceptualised and is free from all the attributes for such conceptual existence.

The intermediating self is not merely a formal term whose absent presence or present absence, like a pictorial vanishing point, enables the illusion of a world independent of consciousness to continue. Perhaps that is its ideal role, but functionally it consumes so much energy and has such a strong distorting effect on the global appearance, that something else must be going on as well. If it is said that the 'ego' fears being confronted with its own non-existence, this explains nothing since the having of such a fear is a back-handed way of asserting its existence in spite of all. How is such a sleight possible? If consciousness were a space it would be a knot in that space.

If thinking, feeling and willing imply the existence of an animating but off-screen self-object, desiring does not. (The same might be said of loving as well.) But to say this is to distinguish between authentic desire, which 'just happens', and the other kind, call it mimetic desire, ego desire or desire driven by fear of missing out. These are all pretty much the same thing, except that in the case of mimetic desire there is an implication of a free-floating desire which must find an object to attach to, while for ego-desire, that the ego already exists and seeks consolidation, and for 'fomo' desire that desire itself is brought into play to alleviate a prior anxiety. In fact it is the oddly ego-less nature of desire which makes it so desirable.

Experience, or just experiencing, either way it is too definite, it is more like a stream of latent possible experiencings within which certain strands are highlighted, picked out by a process that feels like choice, or that produces the accompanying feeling of choice. This is not like multiple parallel worlds, since the latent experiences are embryonic and largely formless. Even what becomes the main current is not fully distinguished, is never separated from its accompanying cloud. There is, as it were, no collapse of the wave function, every 'lived experience' is only traced out and can only be what it is relative to all the possibilities which it is not. The choice, like the choice of thoughts, is not made by a self, but self is the unavoidable theory of choice itself another strand in the bundle of fibres.

Thinking, feeling and willing, each of these happens as if from a self, as if it is for some-'one', and this structure is part of the present-time process of these modes. But a self does not just represent the fulcrum for each type of motion because it only works as such if it comes with an understood unity, that it is the same self in each case and each instance of each case. Of course this understanding is not borne out by any evidence at all, a failing which oddly is taken to enhance the self since it makes of it a quest and a destiny, a protagonist of adventures etc. The other side of this inquiry is that it is easily seen that however the self appears in any occasion it is a thought form dependent on other conditioning thought forms. This is the basis of every sort of 'deconstruction', but useful and useless or worse. The 'inverse limit' of all such steps back is what is called the background consciousness.

By carefully altering the focus of your gaze a 'magic eye' picture pops into a three-dimensional gestalt in which a figure seemingly cut out of patterned paper stands out from its equally cut-paper background. Concentration is needed to stabilise this but the trick once seen is easy to repeat. The illusion of the self seems to be the opposite of this, it is the spatial gestalt which is the recurrent and stable one and the perception of a flat plane which is hard to maintain. Consciousness does not split into subject and object but into subject and background subject. The subject however is oddly insubstantial, it defers and retreats from inquiry, but as long as you are sure that it is really there, distinct from its mute witness, then, in spite of all its vanishing tricks, the illusion persists.

An identity is an experientially stable position within the field of all possible human experiences. That means that the frame, all possible human experiences is intuited and so is as much in consciousness as the unstable subject posed as in search of identity. Desire belongs to the frame as much as to the subject, and indeed the frame itself is unstable and changing. You are offered so many possibilities that the frame is forced into view, is forced to expose itself. The message is that nothing can be final, that the entire system cannot coincide with itself, that consciousness has no reference point outside itself and hence there cannot be an identity. The turbulence is in the resistance to this decentered realisation.

Dislodging beliefs by inquiring into their foundations even if the inquiry initially set out to strengthen those foundations - the idea of seeking the phenomenological preconditions of the matters that constitute experience - this is shared both by spiritual practices and by everything misidentified as post-modernism (misidentified because it is implicit in and necessary to modernism) and now pervades the culture. In spiritual practice it is supposed to be a precision tool, but as part of the zeitgeist it is a sorcerer's apprentice type of catastrophe. These two aspects are, however, not separable. The name 'wokeness' is then, no coincidence, it is indirectly sustained by 'mindfulness'.

Consciousness has no object, it illuminates mind ad mind naturally has n object, or rather it has many objects, a system of objects. Mind simulates consciousness by way of objects and their contexts. The space-like quality of consciousness is divided in this into a foreground and background, or centre and periphery, or subject and residue. It is the capture of this apparent background of consciousness by the contextual aspect of mind, its so-called unconscious, that makes for the thick and turbulent quality of identification. It seems as though the spatiality of consciousness, its open sky, is contracted into a narrow and enclosed 'ceiling'. All of this is laid over consciousness due to its confusion with its own simulation in mind. To fully accomplish the simulation is to be free of this confusion.

What makes experiencing consciousness is that it is not just what it is but how it is, it is both focus (what) and frame (how). You don't see the how because the what resists, is carved in opacity, while the how is perfectly transparent and extends infinitely like the sky. It seems as though consciousness is fighting for its light, is of a knowledge steeped in doubt is of the nature of science. If you put the how and the what together and see that is what is called consciousness, the science, the struggle for knowing dissolves in a strange oneness, where the dark shines lighter than the light.

Is it thinkable? No! And saying that this is because it is prior to thought is only device to render it thinkable in a back-handed way. And saying that you have to bang your head repeatedly on its unthinkability when you know it's right in front of your nose is another such device. And yet, and yet... (smashes fist on table) there it is! Ha!

Qualia are abstractions from feelings, sensations and perceptions, but none of these are what would be called qualia because they are signals, signs, representations or quasi-representations. For example, if an ant has qualia they are indistinguishable from directives. What makes the qualia abstraction possible is the massive and complex referential loops of mind. It's loops within loops within loops etc., mirrors facing mirrors. Noe of this, however, detached or not, can account for identity, since they are essentially formal. Loops are the best way the mind has to point at identity, and without success because that would paralyse its operations. The failure of formally determining identity does not disprove identity, but the contrary since such failure would be meaningless if identity was not already in place. It isn't formal, but what makes formalism possible.

Stream of thoughts is a stream of motives, hence its discontinuous nature. Motives need a way in and a way out, to be taken up or dropped according to the priorities of the moment, which are themselves motives of a stickier and less optional kind. The taking up and dropping gives the field of motives an algebraic nature, it brings with it the idea of the negative, the inverse. A motive is also a kind of identity, and in each case there is an identity associated with the dropping of a motive. Identity, like motive is relative, is context dependent, but the cancelling of a motive, less so. Hence the idea of an ultimate identity that is relative to the detachment from all motives, all context, to nothingness or death.

Scent is signal and at the same time it is pure quality and the door to memory and imagination. Everything needed for representation is already here without the split into subject and object. In the pleasure that dogs draw from interesting smells there is already the seeds of the aesthetic. It is like a reentry to experience, a wormhole in the space of possible and actual experiences. It is possible that even identity is just a variation of experience, a kind of experiencing.

The distinction of the being of 'there is' and its unsubstitutable beyond is the ethical difference which underlies all systems no matter how ostensively materialist, in particular utilitarianism. It is seen in their attraction for extreme and paradoxical demands. As such it is treated as another form of 'there is'. Perhaps that is what the ethical is, at least in this era, a sort of return of the repressed, an immanentising putting to work of the outside.

For all its lightness consciousness confers a unique identity, it is choiceless choice apart from the 'there is' which is the mark of mental modeling. This is its peculiar 'otherwise than being'. This understanding of consciousness is neither dark nor light, and not a process, not in time, but colourless, inactive and timeless in the deepest sense. This is consciousness as closer to you than your eye or your nose, too close for space.