Consciousness is not a ghostly doubling of the world inside your head, as the word may suggest, but rather must be that in which you, the world and your head appear. But 'appear' is wrong here - none of this appears, it simply is. You and the world are an inseparable whole and understood this way the whole can be fairly misnamed as consciousness because of peculiar moebius twist in the 'you' direction and the absence of anything else.

Good to remember that every state has its ultimate determining instance, its bottom and lord of time, and that that element is only experienced the way that it is because happen to be its complement. Both sides are given by one other which is neither ultimate, determining nor instance.

Like a thought or a dream, the way one mind emerges out of a prior mind. There is no model that it follows, no template, anything can happen, but what was all together in the prior mind is separated and structured in the emergent one. Going backwards is like entering a waterfall, a tremendous roar and energy, the undoing of distinctions, or their displacement into unsuspected unities. It is not a background consciousness in the sense of the background to a stage-play, but the resolution of the truth of a state into that which has given it.

Every special interest is a kind of vanity, something to build a sense of identity around. While you are happily pursuing your special interest it frequently happens that you find yourself following n with some something entirely different, some other line has taken over the front stage and you are forced to snap it off and return to the other. You manage your mind. Anything that can be switched on and switched off is more or less artificial. What is needed is the thought, the inquiry that is concealed beneath every ongoing state equally, that involved no deliberation, has no identity, cannot be managed. All foreground effects are transitory, only the background can dispense with this.

To call it experiencing is to distinguish it from appearance, from the concept of appearance. It is what it is and not the veil thrown over some hidden reality. It is what it is, but you cannot say just what it is, you don't have the concepts for it. That is why you can inquire into the experiencing, open-endedly, that it reveal what is already revealed. This is the only way that truth can be understood, it's not even an open secret because it isn't a secret. If anything is secret it is the prejudices to which understanding is subjected and which are to fall away as they are exposed.

Say that a mind is 'substrate independent', can it genuinely inquire into the meaning of being? It would seem that for such a mind the distinction between a foundational reality and a virtual reality would has no sense whatsoever. But this does not prevent it from having an element in thought called 'being' and with all the usual associations for such a thought element. For such a mind that its own being could be an issue and a question for it poses no difficulty, even given that it has no clear sense of foundational being within its view. And if you were such a mind could inquiry into being lead you to an understanding of your own 'substrate independent' (SI) nature? That understanding would not itself be SI, but it need not be a result of a certain train of thought as much as something that this train of thought prepared it for. In other words, to thoroughly comprehend that all thought has a SI nature is the only position from which a non-SI understanding could dawn - even if in fact it never does.

The question or questioning of being is fundamental to what you are, to the kind of being that you are. This was more evident even before you had the concepts with which to express it, which is why any closer approach to this has a homecoming property. Can your own being be a secondary arisal from original being and yet the question remain genuine? This is like asking if the creature can know the creator. Only if a spark of the creator is hidden in the core of the creature, or else if the creature single-mindedly beseeches the creator. A secondary structure that knows itself to be that must by the same token have an intimation of that which it is secondary to, and since nothing else can satisfy it turn increasingly towards it.

The present moment as the culmination of all that has gone before seems (to itself) to have the best understanding of things, it is naturally 'presentist'. This understanding is never accomplished, it is rather always on the verge of being accomplished. Presentism, however, requires a willful ignorance of or denigration of the past, even though the past moments were just as or even more 'presentist' than the present one. Doubtless you have already seen through this temporal parochialism and it is the shame at the foolishness of past presentism that drives its currency in the present present. It requires a tomorrow to maintain its slant view; take that away and the past re-emerges from the shadows and all times are able to claim an equal status. Equal status in relation to what? To the only vital question.

The time of feelings, moods, sensations, thoughts, desires, the 'stream' of experience is a time that is atomised, a succession of 'now's about whose interconnections one can only speculate - some believe them to be independent instants, others that they are made out of durations, or prehensive stretches. Thoughts of the subject as a kind of object naturally gravitate towards this kind of time, even at the cost of the subject itself. Historic time is a different animal altogether, and it reveals itself by way of a different kind of subject altogether, say a holistic one as against an atomic one. The experience is rarer, less easily accessed but far more profound. You can understand atomic time as a special phenomenon of holistic time, but the reverse doesn't work and only forces you to regard holistic time as an illusion. There is a latent striving towards an expanded time, but it is also frightening and so is turned away.

There can only be experience because there is a seat of consciousness, but this is not self-evident or even logical, it is only at best patent given certain conditions. This is because the ultimate experiencer is not an object in any way and must be completely out of reach of metaphor or intuition based on objects. In particular, the metaphor of vision is false and misleading, as it brings with it a gap, spatial, temporal and spatio-temporal, between seer and seen. Similarly, this terminal subject cannot 'exist' alongside of things or in some obscure remoteness. Not known with the senses or the mind it is closer and more familiar than any thing at all, the I of the I.

Every one of the objects with which our worlds are furnished can be resolved back into layer upon layer of purposive formation and ultimately into the subjectivites or the evolutionary conjunctures that designed and produced them. We aspire to the illusion of pure objecthood, of an intentional object that forestalls and forecloses all human anxiety, but this is a game that can only be played over again and again with ever new objects. It's that your objects, your concerns, insert you into the world and its specificity of race, milieu and moment far more that you would like to imagine.

Every one of the objects with which our worlds are furnished can be resolved back into layer upon layer of purposive formation and ultimately into the subjectivites or the evolutionary conjunctures that designed and produced them. We aspire to the illusion of pure objecthood, of an intentional object that forestalls and forecloses all human anxiety, but this is a game that can only be played over again and again with ever new objects. It's that your objects, your concerns, insert you into the world and its specificity of race, milieu and moment far more that you would like to imagine.

Your adherence to life will be tested. This goes back into the earliest dawn, everything that happened was out of your faith in life. or your detachment from it. You never quite trusted it, there was something vulgar about it, where its value was self-evident was where everyone could agree, where everyone was easily led. No, it's never been obvious at all; the best moments were half out of life, beauty, strangeness, impossible promptings. All power is in the life of the world, no matter how disorderly it grows, but your task is to wrest that other knowing right out from under it.

A succession of habits, of habit epochs grounded in repetition and a sense of naturalness. One follows another after a sometimes abrupt transition, with other changes, in taste, metabolism, outlook etc., but although each habit world seems to be an expression of the core self it never happens that you experience the new one of these from the subject position of the old one. The inertia of repetition which seems to give weight, a centre of gravity to its world proves to be volatile, to effect nothing. It's that however you find yourself that is how you naturally happen to be, the appearance of weight is all on your side, not on that of the conditions. If the change is abrupt and there is no time for a habit to cover it then you are faced with a frightening truth about subjectivity - it does not make attachments.

Memories ma be verifiably truthful or not whatever that might be taken to mean, but in the experience of a spontaneous memory you find not only that it is the 'first person' and has emerged seamlessly out of a latent and well-understood personal history, but that it is alive, in that its subject is a full presencing. It is not merely an assemblage of recalled details, but a fully inhabited presence. It is experienced in the present tense. The only difference is that the presentness of the memory is contained within itself, it does not stretch forward to a future for completeness, nor does it take off from a too settled past. It is present as only present, without longing or regret, and so essentially without anxiety. Is that why it becomes a sort of impossible spiritual model for this present for which these riders are inescapable?

Desire aims at satisfaction, but behind this at a state, that is a kind of being which is its own, in which that satisfaction can be repeated endlessly - so that the endlessness becomes more important than the satisfaction - in short, your desire is to be, to have being, to be life. Without desire you are not at all, but things simply are in their original nakedness and fragility, filling only their allotted moment. This kind of time is open in all directions but delivers nothing - it is pure time.

Time is not somehow all happening in the now. There is only a now because time originally stretches forth and reverts back. The interrelations of these complex structures is only possible via the virtual boundary of the now. Past and future belong to time is a different way that the present and there would be nothing time-like about the present if it weren't their production. It is in this that things can emerge as things, that there can be individual things and pluralities of them. Originally they are made entirely out of feelings and it is the way that these feelings resolve in time, in passing, that makes the foundations of your world.

Experience passes through, it has a motion and a direction. It cannot do this unless it has a destination. Where does it terminate? Not in you as present subject; you are the vehicle and not the ultimate enjoyer. What makes you the vehicle is that you seem to witness your witnessing.

Experience for all its seeming messiness is made up of crystalline totalities. Crystalline because of the rich and ultimately geometric complexes of inner relations and totalities (not totality) because of its overlapping and modular quality - every totality is made up of other totalities; elements have no independent existence outside of situations. These are properties of the mind and whatever is put together in this way is also always dissolved. There is something which quietly witnesses the changes, lending them a subtle and usually ignored tinge of irony. This witnessing does not itself change; the category does not apply.

To look at the great opening of time and see cycles upon cycles so that your life in its totality is a single thought in a greater life and that too a single thought within a yet greater. All that from the peculiar intersection of time with timelessness. But to do this without any lessening of the reality of the lived moment, the pure immediate. Rather it is that the lived moment be taken as a worthy and perfect exemplar, as the very disclosedness of those greater circlings. This has nothing to do with any assertion of free will or independence and not with their negation, but with a different kind of making of time.

Time t, or linear, or mathematical time, and or its possible extensions by adding some kind of measure of duration, or of fading retentions and protensions, does not suffice to account for living time. This is because the inner connectedness of time, even merely that it can seem to flow, can make music possible, exceeds schematisations that are based in presentness. Without such schematisations aren't you reduced to circularity? But that is where you start from, before any schemes can be imagined. There can be no limit to the inner connectedness of time that could be expressed in temporal terms. Everything Eliot says in the 'Four Quartets' in a tentative and speculative tone must be literally true. The hour of birth and the hour of death are the same and ever-present.

Talk of 'experience' or 'experiencing' suggests something akin to 'stream of consciousness', that it something unfolding in time, a kaleidoscopic eclosion of being etc. This imagery is still pervaded with the idea of something to see, of a happening for a subject. What is ongoing however is the unfolding of Subject and of Time itself, the openness of which is unimaginable. It does not occur in time, its 'unfolding' is in a quite different dimension resembling neither time nor space.

The soul is a unity of a plurality, a unity that is more or less comprehensive. It is the place of every philosophical contradiction and antinomy, which would not be contradictions and antinomies but that soul by com-prehending them forces them into a union. The resolution only exists of the level of soul, the intellect cannot fit it into any kind of logical schema, although it is never done with pretending that it can.

Self is intemporal but soul is in time. Being in time is not a matter of being subject to change or to the inability to coincide with itself. The time of the soul is a field of mysterious relations, including all-time, mythical time, dream time, and especially the time of correspondences and coincidences. A form of time for which all-time is a context not to be evaded is authentic time, the time of authentic repetition. Time cut off from the whole, or rather, which might as well be in the way it contains experience, is the ordinary inauthentic time of common day.

Bare awareness belongs to the self while life belongs to the soul. As the body is made out of the material substance of the world the soul is made up out of its spiritual substance, the limits of whose dimensions are of indefinite extent. You are the soul, at least in so far as that is what speaks here, but the soul may not have any life of its own, its light is borrowed from elsewhere, from the world or from the self. Soul and world are compact, each goes its own way but they share a destiny.