There is a kind of personal identity that is mediated by memory, by the intricate interrelation of mental contents, by the ability, by confidence in the ability to pose questions and to respond to them. This kind of identity makes a meal out of time and the different states of mind that it brings with it. There seems to be another kind of identity as well, that the mental stream on which the positive and reflexive form of identity is carried but which could just as well carry different and disassociated streams, is in some profound way the 'same' stream. This kind of identity seems to be needed because of the strong belief that reality consists of many such originary identity-conferring streams, running in parallel and entirely cut off from each other, so that a different kind of metaphysical relation is required to mediate these different streams. It may be enough to point out that these deeper notions of identity do not match with the level of reality on which they are supposed to act, but are a kind of mirror projection of basic phenomena on the level of positive experience, of questions and answers and memory.

That out of which the experiencing arises must be more of experiencing than experiencing and yet cannot itself be experiencing. Say that consciousness with no centre has no features in common with centred consciousness, which is a fringe of openness and unknowing between two poles of unquestionable, unquestioning certitude, sometimes called life and death, presence and absence, emptiness and fulness, being and non-being.

If there were a direct knowing of reality then it would be entirely incommensurate with spatio-temporal experience and its language, dialogue would be impossible, so that even describing it as 'direct knowing of reality' would be a confusion. The problem is partly that the idea of such a knowing, even if unrealised, is essential to the constitution of any systematic understanding of ordinary experience. Further, language is such that it can immediately address its own points of failure so in its elf-understanding there is no question or relation that cannot be posed. Language seems universal in a more extensive but analogous way to computability. Language's thoughts about itself, however, necessarily have no power to legislate whatever is beyond language. They cannot even constrain it. The considerable amounts of ground gained historically by metaphysical attempts to think, or point beyond itself, amount to exactly nothing at all.

You cannot identify with physical pain. It is experienced as a persistent companion, somehow just to the side of where you are. It has no will or intentionality, is not personified or even personal, and yet it is intimate and deeply isolating. It seizes hold of your attention, is pure sensation but apart from certain synaesthesias, colour, shape, sharp or dull quality etc., it does not register as a perception since it has no objective quality of being. You could draw a picture of it in relation to a body image but only as a sort of fictional representation. It is purely present and forces awareness into the present, elongating time into a pure ordeal. You cannot imagine an end to it other than complete oblivion.

If subjective, centred awareness is fielded by a background consciousness, then that background consciousness shares little of its phenomenology. It is not like subjective awareness only bigger, as an over-soul or super-ego or Self etc. This is because in relation to the subject it is both light, as in more you than you, and dark an opaque other to whom the subject is subjected. This idea is already implicit in that of the unconscious mind as the matrix of the conscious mind. You cannot 'identify' as a kind of consciousness that contains both of these elements seamlessly. You are biased to the light and can only identify as light, which is itself a kind of blindness.

Kant's antinomies precede Gödel's incompleteness theorem by exactly 150 years, and are perhaps more profound and less widely understood. In knowing that you don't know you might take a step back in dogma but you also take a step forward in intellectual hubris, so that the idea of a method, a universal method presents itself. Such a method may never be fully carried through but it appears to contain the potentiality to resolve all questions. To show that the method itself, in its strongest and most developed form will inevitably founder on certain fundamental questions which it is incapable of resolving either way, is an immense step beyond this hubristic faith. Unlike Gödel, Kant's incompleteness proof does not invoke phantoms of self-reference. This makes it more thorough, but historically it left the door open for various spectres of self-reference in German idealism to appear to bridge the unbridgeable gap revealed by Kant. Perhaps computational theories of consciousness purport to do as much for Gödel.

For experience to be parsed as events in time and space there must be an element of the experiencing which is not in space or time. This is something like the potential for experiencing - the potential for experiencing plus experiencing is what is called consciousness. All this might all still be a special kind of event in 'real' space and time, but to be so would involve some fancy topology. Consciousness spontaneously gives rise to just such topologies, and that is the source of much of our psychological and even spiritual riches. Whether what is in play is something very simple but beyond space and time, or something very complex entirely within space and time is an irresolvable question, a fundamental and founding uncertainty.

Wanting to understand the experiencing as an event in time and space - not a physical event as such, but arising in the same framework as the physical. Every strategy for insight pivots on this version of what it is to be an event. But consciousness is not an event since the world of events is a projection of consciousness, acknowledged in the impossibility of understanding, of the imposition of any point of view on what can never 'happen'.

Each day's newly minted personal self, strutting around like an absurd dictator, a Caliban hungry for affronts so that it can leave its mark taking possession of every future in its ragged island of time, comedic in its tragic disproportion. Unable, however, to see the joke.

When a line of thinking is suddenly lost in random mental static the transition by a hypnagogic image arising as the equivalent expression of a thought. This is because thoughts are more complex and structured than they appear, they are a kind of complex action and the image that replaces them is an embodied metaphor of that action. Every thought is a push or pull or twist against a resistance, it emerged out of metaphor and returns back into it when the personage at hand weakens it grip upon it. Personages are convenient binders for thoughts enabling sequences of them to perform a useful function. The intensity of identification of these personages serves a purpose but is also excessively strong.

The default mode of attention is light, continuously roiling, sub-vocal and always personal, it neither tires nor refreshes, but can be experienced as pleasurable after some event that forces its absence. It is a sort of home state, not of degree zero or of degree one, but something like degree one-half. Deliberate attention on attention, no matter how passively (how in the passive-voice) it is effected is tiring and therefore prone to breaking off. When it does so there is a sudden transition to a hypnagogic kind of state reminiscent of tuning a short-wave radio through a range of frequencies. The contents are impersonal, vivid, always in medias res and seemingly entirely without psychological significance, visual and aural, with characters in scenes that seem utterly familiar although entirely strange. The transitions are not noticed and such that short-term memory is not engaged. This is perhaps closer to zero-degree attention and marked by a complete absence of the personal self. In retrospect it seems extraordinary how easily the latter is switched out. Dreams seem to be formed by a ghostly version of that self reforming in the midst of this quite pleasurable turbulence and steering it into psychologically coloured developments.

The nature of consciousness includes the demand for a ground, not in consciousness but of consciousness. The demand for a ground does not entail the existence of a ground, except that in this context existence cannot mean anything understood as existence in consciousness. So a ground may be impossible to doubt, but again this does not entail that such a ground is the exclusive ground of 'all' existence. It may be one among others. This correlates to a sort of polytheism of unlimited scope. If you admit the transcendental leap, then also what cannot be ruled out must be.

Experience as the intersection, staged in the nody, of an objective reality with a subjective one. Both sides are imperfectly known, but on the subjective side this is felt as a kind of projective incompleteness, as if an element of a story which will only be understood when completed. Against this elaborate temporal construction consider the perfect completeness in the moment which includes the feeling of incompleteness but surrenders all need for resolution, every metaphysical declension of l'esprit de l'escalier.

The ground of experiencing embraces life and death, the drawing forth and the plunging back in an ever-present unity without any need for unity or the idea thereof. The individual is not ontological but a sort of function whose exercise is fully aesthetic, it includes the soul amongst its subjects but presumes no continuity, and having many careers or destinies, but none of any enduring significance.

You cannot point to the background consciousness by using a descriptive term - such a term being necessarily somewhat metaphysical, as eternal, omnipresent, or negatively, spaceless, timeless, etc. The background consciousness has no attributes at all, not because it is eminently transcendent, but because it is the background to every attribute or attribution. It is not some glorified nothing or emptiness either. look instead for the unacknowledged common element in everything that can be thought or pointed to, and it's precisely not that.

The notion of experience as a stream of raw sensations which are filtered and sorted by rapid pre-conscious mental processes and then constituted into personal experience by higher order functions already contaminated by language and metaphysics is hardly true to life. For anything to qualify as experience, no matter how raw, it must be taken as already belonging to a personal point of view. To be known is to be known by..., to happen is to happen to... .There is no fixity or constancy about these contexts of experience, and there doesn't need to be in order for them to be projected as belonging to the same higher-order identity. This is either because there is no witness that could discriminate or identify them, or because they draw equally upon a deeper matrix of identity. At any rate, this is the reason why 'who am I?' is always an available inquiry; there is always a who prior to every what.

The phenomenal self swims through time stretching and propelling itself towards its future. Time flows for and from the self, as if it were out of time, but what you recognise as that self is a multilayered structure of care which is entirely, or almost entirely, temporally local, made out of current and ever changing concerns. That there are long-term memories, and long incomplete scenes, which serve as distant resonances adding depth to the narrow field of the present only serves the illusion of being outside of time. What you call self is ever-changing in its unchangingness and unchanging in its ever-changing. You do not have time, time has you, you cannot step out of the river.

If there were a feeling associated with the background consciousness that institutes awareness it would be a kind of boredom with the overfamiliar. You are not aware of it because it is constant, and in that it is like your most constant zero-degree of self, what you still have when you have nothing. There is nothing to see because you've seen it all before etc. So you don't notice that this boring accompanying awareness has the peculiar property of being self-grounding, a flat gray layer so that everything else can be built on top of it. It is not to be awakened or changed but appreciated for its radical strangeness.

Once you've fully made the case against the existence of the self, or its having any enduring nature etc., then certain paradoxes nevertheless remain. The arguments are fine and refined but they apply only to a phenomenal self, if such a thing were to be, one either side of any paradox. They do not apply to the noumenal self, and their failure neither proves nor disproves this one, being outside of temporality and causality. But in another sense the failure of the phenomenal self is the noumenal self, for certain values of is.

You can wonder about the nature of reality, is it 'really' real or is it a peculiarly self-consistent kind of dream? Is it enough that it is 'real for you' or does it need to be independent of you? Questions of this kind tacitly assume that the questioner is the reference point or touchstone for the reality in question, as if what they are asking is 'is my reality as real as I am?' Even if you flip this around and take the questioner as the doubtful element and ask whether the self is 'objectively' real the same game is being played. Of course the questioner is deficient in reality since it can never be fully exposed, of course objective reality is deficient because it is a product of memory. Take away the idea of reality and the idea of appearance goes too. No words remain for the event, which neither is nor isn't.

Is shame the predominant social emotion? Perhaps, if you assimilate it to rivalry. There is another route that can be followed, that of ambivalence in dependence-love. When the loved object frustrates then you destroy it in imagination. Later, when love returns, you experience shame at the overkill and seek to make reparations etc. As this cycle repeats the self is forged out of the way that time forbids a perfect undoing. The origin of self and other in an intense field of force, a sort of black-hole which creates and destroys distinctions.

The personage, the metaphysical correlate of personal names, appears in relation to the tellings and retellings of narratives and the careful nesting of frames. This is so much more stable in respect of others than in respect of yourself that in fact much of what you take to be your own 'self' is derived from that imputed to others. In other words the reverse of Husserl's idea of intersubjectivity is more true to the matter: it is because you are so impressed with the being of others, with their mysterious core and enigmatic consistency, that you take yourself as being similarly constituted. The project is never quite satisfactory, there are more threads you have to bring together in your own case and when a few of these are out of kilter then you feel lost, can no longer 'find' your self.

To know it is to be able to describe it, to put it in context, to communicate it, to produce a recipe for it etc. But that's exactly what misses it, it is invisible when looked at from that angle.

Ongoing thoughts and every kind of auto-affective making of meaning is carried out by putting a covering, a sort of costume over a native impulsion that is itself naked and formless. You can always step back from the forms in which this meaning appears, but only be grace of that formless energy and its supreme generosity.

If there is one who has questions, who pushes the inquiry, that one is only an element of the scene, a catcher of stray disjunctions. The whole thing is a mystery to him, a hidden mystery which he's rather proud to have unearthed, at least some of the way. The actual mystery is not hidden at all, maybe isn't even a mystery, but just simple being.