The moments stand unchanging in a line and the now passes from each to the next illuminating its features and making them glow, each in its time. There is nothing more real than the now and the moments accommodate and assume that reality imparting it to their visions and predicaments. And so the way the world looks and its subject seem for that golden moment to be as real as it can be and then a moment later just the opposite. If there is such motion its frame can be reversed and you would be stationary within the now and the shining faces of the moments would glide monotonously by.

There is that-for-the-sake-of-which and an 'I' only as a moveable token for it. To view things in this way is to have silently taken up certain assumptions about the kinds of things that are real, about the being of phenomena. Under slightly different assumptions the 'I' is beyond question but misunderstands itself by objectifying some phenomena and subjectifying others. The way things are must be supremely simple and grasped before any thought. is applied.

The self doesn't experience, it lives. But you in living place all the weight on the future and none on the past. The self, standing on the border of time, is otherwise and that is why you have almost no connect to it. It is your drivenness that will perish without a trace, this consuming fever.

'This is my pain', but you can't say this because the 'this' refers to something in shared reality. You can't point to your own pain, but since you can point to your tooth the issue becomes confused. Insofar as what is here is a plurality of interlocking experience streams, yours is the only one which contains this pain. That makes it your, but only via the premise, which is long stretch. Similarly, within your stream of experiencing, of world making, there is a pain linked to the phenomena of your body in a non-contingent way. This way of claiming the pain also relies on a complex posterior construction of the conditions for a world. What is lacking is any sort of clearly defined 'you' object that precedes the pain, and to whom the pain is added. No, when the pain is felt you cannot separate yourself from it or say rightly which came first - except under the spell of a certain working model of reality which carries no ontological weight.

The self as a discrete entity, or a kind of functioning as if of a discrete entity which were it to exist would underpin and motivate all self-reflexive events, an endlessly qualified and qualifying quasi phenomenon is the only system which regrets its own absence. It cannot be done away with, since it was never there to begin with, but the associated systems and cycles can be de-activated at which it is found that a great burden drops, at no cost, and everything is at ease and perfectly positioned.

There is a fundamental distinction that only consciousness can make. One it has made that distinction a general field becomes a field of actions and consciousness can withdraw until needed again. Is that distinction an act? Does it take place or take time? No, it is not an instance of consciousness as we know it or claim it. It is the ancestral consciousness, the grandfather of 'your' consciousness and not bound by life or death.

Experience needs to be grounded in a subject, the grounds for serving as a subject are broad. For the most part you function with a local and provisional subject - it is suited to what is of concern, contains the relevant motives, histories and connection to larger aims, but is provisional in that it refers all questions of being to a deeper and absent layer. Hence it is easy to conclude that the realities encountered in experience are themselves provisional constructs around a deeper reality etc. There is no telling how many such 'layers' there are, in fact the play within the layers is itself a dimension within experience, nominally existential. The ultimate or original question of being hovers over this, as does that of the original subject, without being engaged in any way by the dazzling play of worlds and layers.

Some of the most poignant moments in music, as say the descending bridge section in the slow movement of the Hammerklavier sonata, occur when the leading notes seem to gently protest against the direction of the music, of the current in which they are embedded. If on one side the unfolding of a performance in time is always implicitly saying 'yes. yes, yes', on these occasions it is also saying 'no, no, net yet, please stop or slow down'. This is a rare event and cannot be artificially added on to a piece through style. If it is a kind of erotics, it must be stressed that it only works in a single voice. Perhaps it if found most often in certain songs, but never against the accompaniment, which at such times merely holds the singer's hand. And where there are two or more instruments the erotics of consonance and melisma would easily overwhelm any such subtle effect. The delicate protest at falling while falling is a hidden sublimity of time.

The world exists only because you exist, but you know as little of the world and its limits as you do of your self. But the world nevertheless exists in a way which you do not - you are the more contingent, the more of a construction.

Modeling of reality is what you do and it is endlessly digressive since it reflects a view of the self as an agents trying to make sense of an infinitely complex world in which it finds itself. The alternative is a recognition that begins without an agent-world dichotomy. A recognition by no one, knowingness awake from its long passivity.

The forgetting of being is not be overcome by prodding your memory; it's not you who have forgotten something, like your password or where you parked your car. You are there just because of the forgetting of being, the self-conscious subject is what attempts to make up for it. Perhaps it is more like forgetting the steps of a dance. You stumble around trying to find an entry point that will let you back in but self consciousness blocks you in every direction. If you were to suddenly re-enter the dance the flailing self would simply vanish, and awareness would open onto a completely different world, although your body would be in the exact same place.

The functioning of awareness requires that there be a a theory of awareness, it needs to be explainable to itself even if such an explanation is rarely or never called for. Such a theory is constrained only by the functioning of awareness and obviates any connection to the truth of awareness. While such a theory stands for the truth of awareness it does so only within its own terms. It's limit is that it is able to grasp the fact that it has no grasp on, no picture or model of, the truth of awareness or of the experiential reality which it serves, in short of the thing-in-itself.

There are certain kinds of evidence that support the identification of self-consciousness as an essential component of consciousness. One is that you are abl to form a clear picture of whatever it is that have just been doing, whether you were deliberately watching yourself or not. Another is that in the presence of others to a greater or lesser degree your awareness is doubled into a sense of how you are for yourself and how you are for the other, and these two faces can echo back and forth. Yet another is that you can tell stories about yourself, stories set in the past or the future, stories in which you are a character, stories that you can creatively modify with certain limits. None of these is a primary self-consciousness, where what-is-aware is turned back on itself, instead they are all mediated by representations and must be interpreted as self-consciousness. The case they make is that without primary self-consciousness they could not be as they are. This argument fails as it tries to use representations to point to what is prior to representation. In the end you do not know if you are self aware or not!

There is nothing that stands for being in any description of the world, so that the closer such a description becomes to a locally complete model the more likely the complete amnesia in regard to the separation of map from territory. In fact there are countless descriptions but only one instance of being and it is always hidden in plain sight in the eye that sees.

The only significant notion of a self is the inquiring self, the self of the question. This self can wonder and plan for other selves which do not share its particular posture in existence. The subject changes so much according to the occasion that every attempted summary is filled with gaps, gaps between overlapping leaves. There is a reality where the self ought to be and a self where reality ought to be.

At death you cease to exist. But what is it that witnesses your non-existence, or, as it were, continues to assure your non-existence, places you in the correct column of the book of life and death? This is the background consciousness, the 'field' in which foundational logic can prevail, in which the yes can be separated from the no. Take that away and you are left with a void in which anything and everything is not only possible but must take place continuously and discontinuously. If the 'cost' of existence were reduced to zero then all forms of existence would explode in and into that void. Does this happen anywhere? How would you know one way or the other? But your view is certainly from a place where existence 'matters'.

Always doubting identity, always concerned to construct it, shore it up etc. This plays on many different levels and is a fuel for the mind, although not a clean one. The only part of this that is avowable is the concern with metaphysical identity. What is avowable or not avowable is itself an issue about identity. The relations of subject to subject where both sides remain fully subjective is not in any way analogous to that of subjects to objects - which is essentially that of objects to objects. Subjects proper don't 'exist' - they are perhaps more like fields of coherent propensities. One such field can pervade another, knowingly or unknowingly.

Representations are not without force, but they are as the logarithm of raw sensations. As a relation of inside to outside this key distinction can fall either way. Seduction is only possible because the increase in arousal is is much greater than the increase in stimulus, in fact its rate is determined by how much arousal is already in place. Hence in this case stimulus is as the logarithm of arousal or active desire. One's expectations are merely linear, and hence the surprise that 'it just happened', etc. Pain may also be an example of this inverted dynamic. In these cases desire or pain, directly experienced are the real, and their occasions the representations. It is not just will that is the real, but will subject to this loop of self-intensification, or 'self-shattering'.

What you perceive, what enters your awareness, is the second moment of the act. What is taken in, if that is the right term, is set forth as to be known within the frame of the known world in which you as subject are found. It is knowingly the second moment, it acknowledges, even is deferent to the original moment, which is but does not appear. Instead there is a theory of perception, a diagram of object and subject, of taking something in from outside. The diagram is cognate with the rest of the theory of the world, but there can be no direct experience to back it up. How the original moment of perception takes place is a mystery, at least to any conceivable theory of the world.

The passions are existential, they draw their strength from deep roots in the question of being. This is why a passionless existence while possible, always seems inauthentic. But then that points to a kind of existential question that is mainly in performance. The most private consideration of existence, the soliloquy itself, is on stage, is framed by the attention, real or imputed of others, your being in a situation comes before all else. This is infuriating, is itself a matter for passionate protest.

An image can serve as object or stand in for a subject. This is the endless play of images shuttling between two positions which are finally indistinguishable. What knows is neither particular not general, has no face, no image, and no need for them. The craving for identity exists only in a world of identities.

Individuation is more than an ideal or axiom of the subject in experiencing. This subject is a production and hence by nature mostly ignorant of the forces and realities which have formed it, and yet at the furthest pole of sensory experience this subject is unique and not merely in relation to other subjects. Pure sensory experience, pleasure or pain, is a kind of worship of that which grounds so-called consciousness.

The experiencing falls between what you are and what you are not and partakes of both sides of that polarity without expressing the character of either. It may be that what you are and what you are not are identical, but not in a way that is expressed within any experiencing. A knowing that is not an experiencing only seems paradoxical before the realisation that experiencing cannot stand alone, that it is a secondary arising.

The idea that this reality can be investigated by inquiring into 'consciousness' is an error with many consequences. The error is the implicit assumption that amongst the many wondrous things that fill the world, the most wondrous of all is consciousness, since the world appears to appear 'inside' it. However respectful of the mystery this may appear, and 'mystery' itself is already a give-away, it turns it into a technical problem and calls for a technical 'solution'. How to get from that framing to the right place to begin remains unclear.

Impossible to say what pain is, who feels it, where it comes from and goes to, but it dominates consciousness by tethering it, by drawing out the will to the rough and frayed surface of time where it jitters ineffectually. Affinity with fragments and broken things, disharmony.