The shape of experience depends on the assumption that this happening in the life of a certain kind of entity. It is so obvious that it goes without question, and belonging to it there is a certain kind of tree-like résumé that snaps into place, from the body to the mind, from what gives to what matters, a sort of metaphysical gearing which seems self evidencing. In fact it is not, it is circular and merely repeats its own assumptions, seeming to be too tedious to question. It lacks a foundation and since it can only promise a foundation, it promises nothing at all. Alternatives are possible, the whole thing could be put together in different ways, but not by you as you think yourself. There is nothing to hold it back, it is amazingly open.

Everything that happens, every event, is just what it is, is entirely patent, revealed, self-evident. But ask it once to fill out that promises, to be not just self-disclosed in the immediate, but all the way from the ground up, and it is struck dumb, it can reveal nothing - whether you are awake or dreaming, who is experiencing this, where it is and how it arises from its background. It is a complete void. Nothing is as it seems, you cannot even ask the question.

Time is change and change is time - but is it possible to have change without time? Every moment is now; there is only a single now; so every moment is simultaneous, but somehow fits within the capaciousness of the now without interference. It is not like the mapping of one set into another, because the now and the events with which it is filled are of a different nature. If there are two distinct natures then they cannot be merely given. One, the temporalising, must be drawn out of the other, the intemporal. How can that be without failing to do justice to time and its absolute sway? If all time is now then the future is already open to the present, but that is just what the future is not. Time is the structural prohibition on access to what is to come.

States of mind, moods, feelings are fleeting are experienced as merely passing events, but with a certain dissonance. Every state must also be as if eternal and timeless. In the alternate topology of experience it is the positive content that is static, is arranged in a mandala like configuration and the unchanging now which moves. In this perspective anxiety, which is the quality of experience of the narrowest now, a frightening state of immediate cessation, that is the steady background to all other states, the grain, the brushstrokes. The background radiation of the moment of birth in its identity with the moment of death, the living screen on which, given time as change, life unfolds.

The meaning of a life consists in certain roles, projects and achievements, those you have conceived and undertaken and those that have been conferred on you by the lives of others. This is a portrait, what you will be remembered by, the mark you left on the ways of the tribe. As such, your life belongs entirely to the world, and to a certain time and place or set of times and places. As for you, you are quite capable, perhaps quite likely, to outlive your life. All that has made up the figure that you are has already been put in place, you look back remembering the moments but knowing that you could not do them again, these things were entirely of a piece with their conditions. The you that is living presence, is more real, is detached from the world, cannot be owned or leave any impression, belongs only to the most distant stars.

This state is the desire to overcome this state, just the will is the will to will. Full transparency would be to be full embodied and in the world, to have overcome all overcoming. This is diametrically opposite to every self-conscious movement of the mind.

There is, and it is entirely a matter of degree, something like a scattering and a regathering of the self, the former being common and the latter rare. When you are scattered, far from possession of yourself, you are not aware of what it is that has changed but are filled with an indefinite urge to retrieve some lost well-being. You can only offer random strategies, nothing in the conditions dictates a path. You might decide to pursue the good, or be true to your desire, or take a holiday, engage with some art, follow an imitation of self-recovery from the outside - nothing is guaranteed to produce a result which you are unable to clearly articulate, and in fact more often than not they produce only a simulacrum of it, just enough to keep you going. And at times it comes by itself, unsummoned. What kind of being is it which is subject to this kind of change, as much altogether in the loss of self as in the recovery?

You repeat almost the same actions, adventures, reflections, day in and day out as if laying one transparent leaf atop another until the form the outline of an epoch. It is done knowingly, you enjoy the sense of being in the midst. The repetition is so perfect, perfect enough, that you could almost step for one leaf into another, so many dozens back. If it were no more than the complete idea of itself this would be a possibility, but it is just the fact that it is not, the pure one-way onceness of this instance, that is what is most invariable in these iterations.

The background consciousness is not merely some forma condition of possibility, it only seems that way when approached via a certain philosophical corridor. It is also dramatic and archetypal, the mother consciousness, the father consciousness, the sister, the brother, the king and queen and all the rest of the arcana. As such as persons, they are not there for the sake of metaphysics but as a demand for full acknowledgment, to hold the gaze of that which is far greater than you. This is what you flee from.

You can't know who is the enjoyer of life until thoughts subside and vital entanglements fall away. How could you have been so mistaken about them when it was never in their nature to be anything other than what they are?

Every state of mind seems to refute all other states of mind, that is what makes it a state of mind, by the overweening power of the temporal present. This must be because each state is more than just a passing mood but is an assertion, a veiled assertion certainly, but that about which it asserts whatever it asserts is nothing short of being.

The world loudly stubbornly insists otherwise, uses every possible means to make its point, but in spite of all that there is that in you which is of a higher order of reality than the world. Death as the suspension and breaking off of all that makes the world real gives you a clue to this. You appear to be made up entirely of contingencies but this is not so, they are insufficient to your being.

You solve a problem by reconfiguring the terms in which it is posed, by casting a different light upon it, by imaginatively varying it. The same kind of strategy in regard to the mystery of life yields nothing at all. Life is not a problem, it has not been posed. But this is the only way we know how to proceed, so much of life is spent in search of new light, or reconfigured terms, for which, it turns out, anything at all can be a clue.

This on-going is parsed by conceptual webs which generate their own questions which have little to do with its intrinsic mystery, obscuring the core state of continuous deepening wonder.

Consciousness is that by which the activity of mind becomes experience. To say this seems to imply that mind exists prior to consciousness and that the latter is superadded to it from outside, as it were. This is basically the naturalistic understanding if we add that the consciousness is itself an 'emergent' property of mind at a certain level of complexity. This explains the phenomena of degree of consciousness, the scale from automatism to fully awake and self-aware. It also allows for mind to take account of consciousness rather than simply be observed by it. The error here is to regard consciousness as a kind of thing, a factor which can be present or not. The consciousness that you would put in place of this, self-grounding context of contexts, say, should not be an improved version of this idea.

You do not take positions on most things since you already have such positions and these are what engages you for so much of the time that they become your continuing and ever-changing sphere. A position is something that you defend, and even if it is possible to trace the associations back to some internal object that is what you are 'really' defending, that is no more than an embellishment. To know of some matter is to already have a position on it; human reality is made out of positions. You don't get to choose, your work is to only to more or less align all the positions that are already yours. To be here is in will, it is to care, actually and potentially, and knowing, such as it is, serves that. This is so on the surface as to be nigh invisible.

Self-referential loops are functional elements, they can be specified internally, in the language of a system. Disclosure, or opening, or clearing is not a functional element. If it corresponds to anything about the system it is to the entire system, to 'what the whole thing is there for' and since this could only make sense from outside the system it cannot be represented within the system. Anything self-referencing is representable, but the totality is not representable, and cannot be made so.

Self-reference and loops of various kinds are integral to mind but have little to do with the sense of a self. There is no privileged point in a loop, they are purely relational, while the position of the self relative to the cycles of mind is absolute, if nothing else. The self is not located on a loop, so it cannot be the unique intersection of multiple loops. Awareness of the ego self is a form of self-reference, but this is a transient and exceptional state which draws mostly on imagination. The paradigm of self must be mind without self-reference, a sort of pure openness, or 'disclosure'.

The spirit of the times errs without correction. It may be haunted by an intimation of its completeness but this awareness can't be formulated does no work but for preserving an uneasy conscience. Only the idea of it is present and its labour is indifferently negative or positive.

The transcendentals, or Ideas, beauty, truth, the good etc. are functionally asymptotic - they seem to be unavoidable since every attempt to put them on a strictly finite basis fails somehow and there they are again. It turns out you can't even have asymptotes unless the limit is always already planted. It's just because they are self-grounding and all your finite furniture is not. But self grounding makes them more real and more alive than their refractory fractions. More real than you think, than 'you think' - actually the only real thing. No wonder you can't grok them.

Your true nature remains a disquieting mystery to you in spite of your apparent success at getting ahead of it, which is no success at all. The mystery is constitutive and is more real than you are.

The peculiar incorrigible 'out-there-ness' of physical reality, its being both the ultimate anchor of the 'there-is' and at the same time over the horizon. In this most natural seeming way of seeing things the subject, the one who sees, also has a 'there-is', a weaker one, but enough to isolate it in a state of epistemological doubt. This is the picture that holds us captive, and it depends on the ultimate opacity of the 'there-is' - but what if this is mistaken, and the place of the 'there-is' is endless transparency?

If certain brain events are shown to be causally prior to certain subjective experiences this indicates the sway that inheres in the idea of the physical at this time. The phenomenon must be seen in the widest possible frame, in the same way that the subject in possession of such ideas is itself no sort of discrete system or indeed anything like an object individual or collective.

There cannot be a 'scientific' understanding of the phenomenon of consciousness because there is no such phenomenon. Consciousness is that by which any phenomenon is possible and so is not itself a phenomenon.

If there wasn't this sense of returning to 'days like this' there couldn't be the ordinary lost and fallen living, there wouldn't be the light in your eyes, in their eyes. And if there weren't these intimations of once having known, of being the knowledge, of the soft golden light pouring across the field, then there couldn't be days like this.