The shame at existing is creatively misread as shame at your own well-being in the face of the other's misery, it is moralised in this way so that it can circulate according to the symbolic. But are you ashamed because of your secret satisfaction at how undeserved and unearned it is, or are you ashamed because of your secret abjection. If A triumphs by humiliating B, then B is made to bear the burden of A's shame, which A is then relieved from. But B's humiliation has nothing to do with A, it is over B's unavowable satisfaction in being humiliated. Unavowable feelings arising from unavowable desires - the desires you are aware of are never your true desires. To encounter your own deep shame is clarifying, is itself a relief from the burden. This is the stakes in the games of torment. Shame at being a 'thing' which is what you are concomitantly with being a subject. The many symbolic forms of thinghood.

Have there been cultures free from a pervasive shame at existing? Yes, but only if it can be displaced onto spirits, gods or rituals... or scapegoats. Eternal recurrence in its affirmation shelters the negation of the the death drive. The sublimity of the cosmos inseparable from its terror.

Experiencings arise as relative to certain structural invariants, categories or archetypes, as when you see a life as the exposure of certain core moments, possibly ignored by the individual self who only pilots them. These elements are themselves ideas belonging to a different but coincident subject. Consciousness is such that multiple subjectivities, or auto-affections can be overlaid on the same flow with different organisations of time and different questions being asked, different mysteries entered into.

Experiencing knowingly experiencing - it's not just that there 'be something that it feels like to be that' but that there be the potential for it to feel like itself knowingly, that is to be a centre of consciousness or a point of view. But an experiencing doesn't truly know itself, since the possibility must also be that it prove to have been a different kind of knowing all along - as in the analogies of waking from a dream, or that on 'waking up' there is the 'realisation that you've always been awake', etc. If everything is consciousness then if an experiencing A comes to be understood as produced or caused by an event B (say, the unconscious, or the brain) then the experiencing can transform (without necessarily changing in its essential qualities) into the experiencing as B, where B becomes the point of view. Without something like this there is no justification for asserting that all is consciousness. But if you, as A produce something C which is subject-like, say a work of art, or even a child, do you consciously inhabit C? No, although there can be a fantasy of it. In any case the idea that all is consciousness goes against this most basic experience of difference, that your creations make their own way.

Functioning as a more or less independent and autonomous centre of consciousness, in effect as what's called an ego is to incur a kind of debt towards consciousness, from which you have borrowed the materials of a life. On a materialist view your temporary abrogation of the law of inertia is both a wonder and a violation of the way of things. This primal guilt for existence haunts the mind and needs to be resolved. This is the tragic view of life. It can be, but not through the satisfaction of ego drives.

A kind of shame at existing, sometimes visible above the surface but mostly repressed, sometime expressed in its positive (that is negative) for but often in reverse as a sort of bravado or performative insouciance, seems to be the endemic driver behind so-called identity politics and much else, both identification and desire. This once would have been called original sin, or causeless dukkha, and it seems that it can only be resolved or alleviated via religious belief. It is the earnest attempts to put quasi-rational systems to work against this core malaise that have ended up doing the most harm. A formless malaise prior to pride, envy, lust or other sins, as a transcendental condition of waking consciousness.

Consciousness is not identical with waking consciousness which is rather a particular relation to objectivities. When waking consciousness fades a myriad of subjective phenomena become salient and when these are no longer linked to the waking world then dreams arise, which represent the action of a different kind of object. Dreams nd as well and a different kind of conjoined pure feeling is experienced. The characteristics of consciousness do not resemble are of these modes of object awareness, but are what is common and unchanged between them. This is one of the things you know without knowing.

Turning towards matter, its mystery, how to approach it, you immediately see the harm done by metaphysics of every kind, nominalist or realist, materialist, naturalist or idealist, by every kind of correlationism. But at first you only have metaphysical ways in to the things themselves. From time timing to the singular moment.

The problem not that mind is losing its sovereignty to matter, that materialism is eating it up, but the opposite, that matter is dissolving into mind. It is the mental body that is the work of the gnostic demiurge, compared to which, matter, if we could only regain a true sense would be understood as the site of incarnation and hence that which recalls us to being.

If you inquire into what kind of thing this thinking and feeling thing is, about what of it must be real once you have put aside everything that can be exposed as an imaginative projection, then, however far you go, you can only be contributing to the objectification of the world. What is strange and forgotten cannot be the object of any inquiry, it is the actual precondition of the appearance of appearance, that, into which, experiencing is planted.

You can gain an intuitive but indirect awareness of the enabling structures of the sort of knowing-experiencing that you are just through the everyday changes in states of mind, a sort of parallax view of the enclosing limits of mind, which turn out to be surprisingly easy to express in a sort of poetry, or at any rate an evocative language. There is actually no reason why these glimpses 'through a glass darkly' should not also be convertible, under the right conditions, into a 'face to face' view - without this in any way impugning your fundamental scepticism, your grasp of the limits of experience, of any possible experience.

You have an innate and absolute conviction of your being as timeless, spaceless, and of unbroken continuity, etc. Unfortunately this conviction, or call it a credit, is in a currency that is not accepted here in experience. There is no official exchange rate and no reliable unofficial one. The currency here is not granted, although it has a distincly 'fiat' flavour, but needs to be earned somehow, it is measured in effect and acknowledgement, in other words, it circulates through others, its entire value is exchange value.

However far you go in idealism, or non-duality, there is always a form of materialism or dualism, albeit these terms may be stretched quite far, that overtops it, and is at the same time freer and more joyous. It's not that idealism is necessarily nihilism, but that the idealism that isn't nihilism is no longer the idealism you started out from.

Experience is understood as experiencing, is always inseparable from an understanding of itself, but even though it is impossible to separate out something like raw sensory data, since to do so would only be an operation of understanding, that which is understood is more than the mind which is doing the understanding. If consciousness were a continuous illumination or exposure then this would make no sense, but see it instead as continually exploding up out of nothing then the other of its objects arises with it. What you fail to notice is how rough and discontinuous this 'process' is, how the very notion of process is what blinds you to the discontinuity at the core of the event.

Experience as a stream of positive contents, body, mind, world, the whole wheel of life thing is not itself the source of suffering, even if suffering is its content. Anything can be experienced centrally, fully and thereby expresses the perfection of stationary event. But if it is not experienced centrally then it is suffering, the difference being a certain twist far upstream in the mode of experiencing. The twist cannot be untwisted, but can it too be experienced centrally?

The worlds of knowing are endless mazes which turn in on themselves endlessly. In relation to this consciousness seems like the ultimate form of mirroring, but never without an accompanying feeling. You can always surrender every knowing and sink back into pure feeling. This happens every day at the onset of sleep when all referential layers dissolve back into their substrate. Pure blind feeling without desire is he quality of consciousness, and is the aim of desire.

You are not the experiencing but the experienced. There is an uninscribable hiatus between the various guises of the subject and the consciousness in which it is exposed, but at the same time this subject is no object, its being is entirely dependent on the consciousness in which it appears. The various subjects are one in seeking acknowledgement, real or imaginary it is an endless and restless desire as if it could coincide with its own condition.

You always know what you are doing, but you don't know you know. What you are quite unaware of and don't want to know is that you are doing it. This is what gives everything that strange half-dreamed and unsatisfying texture; there's always something left out of the picture.

Under idealism the individual thing or event of the experiencing of the thing being internal to mind, say mind-at-large, is identical to the idea of itself, the complete idea if you wish, where 'complete' can be used to fill all holes. Even so, this means that if two events have the same idea then they must be a single event - this is in fact the deeper rule of mental reality, namely that the metaphysical location, address or index of a thing is determined entirely be its idea. The idea of a thing, however, is its abstraction from its concrete existence, so either this existence, the event of the event, is lost, in which case the gap between mind and reality is unbridgeable, or existence is itself an idea, in which case the very idea of 'idea' is meaningless. In either case the result is that reality is outside of anything that can be understood as mind in any meaningful way. Idealism is the 'cheat code' that collapses any understanding of the system.

You might think in words but your thoughts are not significations because there are no signs, no matter as sounds or markings which are thereby invested with thought. It is a process all in one, and not an appearance, not a staging. What seems like consciousness, the awareness of thought, proves to be another thought. It is a web of relations in motion with no separate levels. So that every thought no matter how trivial is a reflection of one thought, the only thought that you are the work of, a piece of a larger and quite unknown picture, a motion or operation elsewhere. The more you inquire, the less you know.

The mind is in love with the body and the soul is in love with the mind. The soul hates the body but the body fails to recognise the soul. All joy is of the body and soul, the mind is left wondering.

The now is perfectly real, that's obvious. A little while ago it was a future now and perfectly unreal - how did it become real? Or else what makes it seem that we are talking about exactly the same now? It is not the now continually upwelling freshly that endures, it's the unification of the field of experience which seems to be the work of the 'I' which endures just because the 'I' is the sort of thing that experiences time and so is not bound to time. It is perhaps no more than an idea that has become attached to memory, as if memory could not do its job without it, like one of those parts that you can remove from a machine and find that the machine works perfectly well without it.

The now is an ever fizzing source, bit is time itself only in the very centre of the moment. Durational time depends on memory which is a power essential to living, but memory cannot hold the living present, not even an image of it, only a 'representation' of it. What there is is a peculiar certainty that the present 'I' is identical to the 'I' of a moment ago, and of any past time. This is an unwarranted and unnecessary inference.

Personal identity over time is never directly observed but is always and only a way of taking experience. As if you opened an account with the world when time began.

For something to be it must be preceded by its condition for being. This principle might be another way of summarising idealism. One way to think of it is as metaphysics: every being is a limitation of the infinity of Being; the limitation is a series of distinctions and choices of distinctions which carve up the unlimited. The space of all possible distinctions precedes being. Another way is epistemological: what makes a certain kind of event an event of knowing (something) is a context or frame of possible knowing. There is a circularity in these notions. How is it possible for experiencing to not be any kind of knowing that would be subject to this kind of circularity?