The question of Being might be imaginary, as of a simulation persistently troubled to know how it stands to what, presumably, it is a simulation of. That speculation is perhaps incoherent, but it must be allowed as a sign of the times, an index of collective madness. That aside, the question of Being is not one which can be taken up or put aside contingently, as a curious option to be explored, it is not a subject matter. What must be the case is that everything that takes the stage of experience is a response to it without being explicitly so. Since Being is regarded as the purest form of generality this might appear little different from the most neutral kind of happening. Observe rather, that when anything is, it is as something resolved, like the solution to an equation, in an ever so subtle way it is a relief to have it there. Not being Nothing is the vocation of distinct and thing-like arising.

You can neither be aware nor unaware of awareness. To be aware of awareness, as it is happening, you need to shift the angle of incidence to be almost identical with the grain. That never happens, it is a complete misuse of what ought to be a useful instrument for living. But strangely the potential is always there and there could be no everyday awareness without that tiny displacement, that excess over itself, that curious artifact of embodied life, the knowing you know the knowing you know.

To ask 'what is it?" without 'what or 'is' or 'it'. Just as every experiencing is rooted in background consciousness, every individual physical thing is rooted in 'what is it?'

That experiencing needs a ground because of the nature of experiencing, and what follows from that, is essentially the same as the idea that the question of Being is intrinsic to Dasein. As humans we must seek ultimate causes, must philosophise. Does this only apply to waking consciousness? What form does this inquiry take in dream consciousness or in deep sleep? If a consciousness has no more questions can it still be a consciousness?

Insomnia is the unwanted persistence of the waking subject, of the mental homunculus usually identified with but now stripped of most of its powers and thoroughly de trop. It says 'I' naturally enough but is revealed as not a personage in its own right but a mode of activity; it is not what is addressed by your name. What failed to occur was the coming apart of this false unit into its constituents and their resolving back into the surrounding spatial consciousness. If some awareness can be retained at the point of transition you notice an expansion in depth and wildness, and a sense of returning home.

Events, qualia, in the flow of experiencing are presencing because of the fine root extended into the background consciousness, but their character as presencing is not drawn from this ground but from their relations with all the other events in that flow, some of which are near and others far in time or space. The background does not have the character of presencing at all, does not even favour this. Experience is thus not limited to the conscious; the unconscious is what is related but not in time.

The stream of experiencings that is what living is draws it being from an underlying ground field, in such a way that everything that is most 'real' in that experiencing and which goes through layer after layer of reference and association is ultimately rooted directly in the field. Even if this is a purely intellectual conviction it reorients basic awareness in such a way as to become a imperturbable certainty. And thus the fear of death is strongly mitigated, but only the fear of one's own death. The death of the other, of others, is even more sharply and tragically felt, irrespective of whether you believe them to share the same understanding.

In spite of its endless variety and fascination all of embodied and in-worldly experiencing is essentially the same kind of thing in multiple permutations. The self, the not-self and the inexorable flow of time, experiences on after another, that's it. On a more subjective and abstract level there is expansion and contraction, rising and falling, opening and closings, will and obstacle. There is nothing wrong with any of this, just how easily and unquestioningly it's accepted as all there is, all there could be.

The aesthetic is an experience of the being of beings within time. The being of beings is not within time, if anything time is within it, and so aesthetic experience, when it is real has a timeless quality. The action of such timelessness within time is an essential but fragile component of the ongoing experiencing.

Embodied ongoingness; what is it that you do, but elaborating the world imago. Elaborating means unfolding and exposing and also embroidering, adding more or less wild connections. But all of this is done in relation to already accepted and socially mediated paradigms which are themselves slowly evolving in response to all this ongoing activity. This process and the reflection on this process are themselves part of what is responded to, in seemingly ever more conscious way. We are more and more conscious of the fabricated nature of our world to the point of imminent crisis, but no more aware that this consciousness too is a fabrication.

In solitude the ties that hold the parts of the self together are loosened and you assume a rippling watery existence, but this is natural since you do not do the self thing very well. Perhaps its more correctly called persona, it's something like what you need when with others, a certain consistency and point of view and also ground for leverage. This persona, or simply person, is a largely mimetic structure, either others are the masters of it and you merely emulate them, or they are unable to do it and look to you as a fellow pretender to set the pace. This venture is not generic but of an historic specificity which it is your privilege to embody.

There is no subject in the world, there is only in-worldness of awareness misunderstanding its inconceivable uniqueness as a subject-object. You disengage by moving further in so that the gap disappears and you are the world in which you walk. Only then you and world can reveal who they are.

The shame at existing becomes conscious as you become aware of the choices that you've made at key moments which have brought you to your current place. There is no limit to how many of these key moments can be found as you learn to recognise and acknowledge them. The choices endure as more than memories but rather as the sedimented substance of your distinct being; you cannot recall them unless you can reawaken the moment of choice itself as a kind of non-negotiable presence - although the understanding of the stakes in each choice can change dramatically. What is shameful is to be tied to such an immovable cascade of choices, and more than tied, to have almost completely merged with those acts which initially may have seemed only provisional.

For the self that emerges with the world every key drive can be understood in existential terms, but for this self being is not a concern since it its own existence is a useful fiction, a stringing together of reflections. The existential world of the self, however is stark and beautiful, being just that, an existential world, a theme park of being. All the while the true question of being applies and is essential to the appearance of anything at all. This has nothing to do with a subject or a narrative, gives rise to no issues, and has no answer, or better, is its own answer.

There is no first moment of mirror reflection but a graduated series of understands at different levels of interactivity. You put on self-consciousness and it seems like the best thing ever. Once you are in there is no way to get out, but did you ever really go in? This is something that occurred inside original unreflective consciousness which was never left behind, there is no thing that could have left it behind. In order to maintain its ongoing experiencing it must continually fall back on original consciousness and consistently misrecognise it.

Thrownness: suddenly you find yourself ... etc., with no memory of what went before. Exactly because what you were thrown into was time and memory, before and after. Something was prior but the moment it starts time is reinvented and there can be nothing prior, certainly nothing of the sort you now are. It grows like a plant, drawing material from its surroundings to express what is hidden in its seed, to be responsible, to overcome resistance or be overcome. Everything is made of time but for time itself. How does time appear, how did you recognise it?

The knowingness within experiencing is experiencing and the encounters and transformations it undergoes, reactions, ricochets and sublations serve the inner development of the experiencing. There is an element that doesn't fit, a break in the harmony that never resolves, that may be temporarily submerged in one mood or another, but always re-emerges. It is abject, ugly, unassimilable - without it the promise of the system to close on itself in final self-consciousness might be realised.

Everything just as it is, but that is to include your mind which is both that for which everything must be what it is not and also the very idea of everything as it is, of everything, of it, of is! You can laugh or cry about this, declare it impossible, or always already done, either way...

The usual engaged immersion in the life-world is thick qualia but the thinking self can always detach from it, either naturally or pathologically. This comes about whenever there is a big shock, but also by choosing to think about experience in a certain way - imagining that this is meditation. You imagine that you can detach from thinking itself in the same way, except that detachment itself is a kind of thought. You can be alienated from what you were thinking a moment ago, as if thought were some thing that has attached to you. These are games of thought, ways of playing with the you inside of the thinking. That's all the you that there is, an optional accessory to the life-world thinking experience.

Sensory experiences, even of the most abstract kind, happen in a figure and ground inter-relation and hence easily suggest the idea of a background consciousness. Thoughts, however, as cognitive fragments, as a flow of detached discursive elements or precursors of such elements, do not share this figure and ground pattern. It would be easier if they did, and so you might think of something like an underlying process of signifiers, a whispering sensory matter of thought, but these are only fabulations. The structure of thinking, if it has any structure at all, has no sensory analogy, being neither like seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling or feeling. That is perhaps why it is sometimes treated as a distinctive kind of sense. It is laminar, absolutely flat; it can refer endlessly to matters of perspective while masking the fact that it has absolutely none itself.

Consciousness as the ground by which mind can come into effect as reflection, doubling, mirroring, inversion, projection, splitting, negation, etc. As a subject you are at the apex of a sprawling web of othering relations, but if all that was peeled away only original awareness would remain. What is the taste of coffee without the name and concept of coffee, without a whole personal and social history attached to it? Just as you drink, without history, this warm smoky brownness streaked with soft black lightnings that momentarily washes over the front of your presence and disappears. In a reflex you summon words and the free-floating thing melds into words and reflections and a thousand fading references.

Consciousness as the inconceivable place of mind does not mean that being-conscious-of is not a major root of mind's activity. The unreasonable effectiveness of existential psychology long outlasts ay form of existentialism. To know that you are known as knowing etc., makes a difference at any level. It's the most basic kind of applied consciousness, but that doesn't entail that it exposes the essence of consciousness.

The anthropomorphism of consciousness, no the 'hypokimorphism' or the idea that a consciousness necessarily is that of a subject, or is even nothing more than a name for the general field of intent of a physical subject. Every consciousness must belong to someone, it would seen, because it enacts a gathering or unification of significations into one house. But when you investigate these subject centred apprehensions you never can find the conscious point, its location in the cycle. Understand consciousness instead as having no centre, no self or subject, as being something like a pure selector, a continuous unmotivated choice - these are only metaphors. It's not shaped like you at all, for all that it's nice to think so.

If the sum of reality were as described by the most perfect of equations then, since the mathematical continuum is ultimately scale free this reality would be so as well. As it is it appears to hint that it tries to be but fails; patterns are almost repeated at different scales but with key differences. The scale is very particular and hence requires some further input to have set it, something more participatory than an initial 'sizing up'. This is another way to come at the hidden action of consciousness: to create reality-out-of-mind by making choices - the causal realm.

Desire projects worlds in which to realise itself but since it also craves realism, or perhaps because it also desires to keep on desiring these worlds never bring it to its final satisfaction. When desire has gone as far as it can with a world it abandons it for a new one. The abandoned world doesn't melt away however, but persists, retaining scattered fragments of desire and interfere in with the newer projections After a time there are so many overlapping ghostly desire worlds that the soul finds itself lost in an endless multidimensional maze. This is the myth of desire and describes exactly the world in which you find yourself. Trace it back then to the first moment of the fall which is not self-consciousness, the first separation or duplication of the self, but the simple game of desiring - to project a world and then to enter into it to enjoy it.