The course of a life never strays far from its central myth or ruling character. Even the rare turning points evolve out of the same key materials. Its particularity is infinitely detailed and yet it has within it something of the universal, something true for all stories, all myths and which is not itself a myth or a story. But that it is so constituted, as a fact about that life, is entirely of a piece with its myth, is perhaps what gives it its fantastic consistency.

The simple feeling that it's strange to be here, strange to find yourself existing. If it is a feeling it is fairly commonplace ingredient of a great many other functional feelings, not all feelings even insofar as they all include 'being here', but a very respectable subclass. If it were just a feeling it would be spice, but it is something more, an intellective feeling, something like that. All true intellect has some deep and complex feeling tone, the kind that hasn't any at all is not real intellect at all.

In early childhood there is a balance between the strange mysteriousness of being here and the fear and fascination of all that shows up for you here. The developmental push is all towards the latter, to uncovering your powers, to finding how well matched you are to the world. The mysteriousness then remains only as a counter current, an opposition to development, something which could only possibly be retained as the most private of possessions, since it is not generally recognised. Mostly it is lost and forgotten, or retained only in the ordered and refracted and prostituted form of art. And at this the garden of the world slowly begins to wither.

The mood, context, tenor of the moment to moment projection of life changes so much in the course of a day that you can mistake it for an existential change. But the question of being is always at the same remove, and only lends its light in order to maintain the possibility of possibility. There can be only a single driving force and it is the difference in being.

Whatever your experience it is always an apparition, you in a certain world, with a certain tone and participation and a certain amount of more or less useful furniture. This is so even if these categories bleed into each other, or if the meaning of the world is just it relationship to another world that it succeeds or explains or exists to the side of. In all of these the experiencer is never included in the experience and that becomes a structural fact which still begs to be resolved. No experience can resolve it, but that does not matter in the least.

You turn attention to some objective, something in your own flow of experience, a certain quality in the thoughts that pass, say. Your attention questions the phenomenon and the answer is before you. In some sense you must have already known, so as to have been able to rightly direct attention. Matters are brought up from the fringes and made central and then go back to the fringes. All of this knowingness and purposive action is intrinsic, is already there before any objects or theory of objects. This strange transparent and living knowingness.

Experience focalises around notions of a self without attainment. The notions themselves pivot and flow with impersonal currents. They are structured by concepts such as inside and outside, real and imaginary, present and absent, time and the timeless. All of these are purely conceptual and cannot afford any grasp on a reality beyond concepts. Hence the self with all its cunning of return is no more than a figment.

The world is a domain of the imagination, being-in-the world is a power of the imagination, You live in and with the imagination but are not identical with it. The old romantic distinction of primary and secondary imagination is valid but the two are not separate, every ripple in one sends eddies into the other. The passions are affections of the imagination, they remake the world in its foundations as well as in those parts you take hold of with purpose and provision. Reality cannot be reached through the imagination, although it will insist otherwise, its nature is endless spin.

Is it the case that ownmost being ultimately prevails over being with another, over the demand of I-thou? There is a kind of dialectic that weaves between them. Every ownmost position is also a position in relation, and every position in relation is a deferral or intervention in the ownmost. It is perhaps a false dichotomy - too many contingencies in every relation, and an odd tendency it has to take on the position of anything deemed 'good'.

Consciousness is dialed right down, is little more than a night-light. But at the same time it is all there, its quantity is not diminished, only that most of it is absorbed in dark inner processes. Just as with a night-light, a different world appears, one that is full of strange and evocative shadows.

The self projects the assumption of completely pervading its own conditions of possibility, in other words of authoring itself, as a necessary and future attainment. As long as traces of this idea can be detected in the self's reflection then it is lost in a fantasy. Whatever you are you are not your own creation, and this is not a deficiency that can be corrected by meddling in the future. You are here according to conditions are never your own. This is a mark by which the sense of self must be adjusted.

Experience, being one, every physical object encountered is more than a concrete universal, it is itself in an infinite degree. This is what is necessarily masked by the screen of thought through which all is made to pass. Partial exceptions are made for the numinous, but the condition these point to is the condition of every and any insignificant thing.

As soon as you think that there is more than one consciousness you have objectified it and hence are thinking of something else entirely. There is only one consciousness and this is it. Only the 'one' isn't meant in the usual way, not a unit for counting. Consciousness can only be as one, everything else is a misleading analogy.

Consciousness is a continual boiling over, irrepressible springing forth out of itself, without any reference point or fixed point to push against. This is the pure form of time. The all-embracing background and abyss out of which consciousness emerges is not temporal, not in time, nor in stasis. The two are parts of an inseparable whole but their relation is not in the least dialectical. There is no intemporality or eternity prior to time, time gives birth to itself, yet the other is there, a kind of witness, lost in wonder.

The terms 'experience' and 'consciousness' are used loosely here and sometimes conflated, but they ought rightly to be clearly distinguished. Consciousness refers to the waking intentional life, it is focused and centred, although it also takes in the existence of a fringe or horizon consisting of a vague and uncentred version of itself. The 'I' is at the centre of consciousness and is behind everything with which it is concerned. Its nature is to be concerned about things, but always in order to somehow come back to itself. Experience, on the other hand, refers to the total context in which something like consciousness can occur. It is the world in the most general sense and embraces everything that can possibly appear or be relevant. It has an odd correlate in brain theory, since if one accepts the idea that all experience is constructed by the brain then its action must extend far beyond consciousness to include everything apparently objective which needs to be in place so that consciousness can be and act within its world of relevance. The problem with this way of looking at it is that the brain is a thing within a putatively prior world as well as being the container of that world. That is why you must do away with that idea of the brain. Experience is not however like any sort of full-field anamorphosis. I does not correspond to any analogy from the world of the senses. It is not a 'space'. Trying to imagine the true shape of experience is no more or less than a sort of koan.

What you seek to know is the you that seeks to know. This is not circularity but identity. The only true object of the knowing is itself, the only thing truly worth knowing is the knower. The sense of identity meant here has more to do with the puzzles of personal identity and with logical identity than it has to do with identity as a definition, with defined social identities or personae.

No matter how caught up you are in 'what is going on' there is always a part that is perfectly detached and out of the flow of time. In fact is how there can be a something 'going on' at all, that it can be the experience of a somebody, namely you. It is not something that befalls you but the very nature of this peculiar kind of being. And so the detached self is no more true than the caught up one - they have equal weight, metaphysically. Not seeing this balance is the source of much error.

The idea has always been that there is a simple saying of how it is, a direct opening onto being which comes forth in words. Of course this never actually happens, but as you try and miss, or more generally evade the possibility and quiet imperative, then at least your failures will be marked by that at which they fail. The energy largely comes from somewhere else, an urge to display, a dandyism, however reserved and deprecated. But what you always wondered about was how it would be when that energy was gone and all that is left is the simply saying or not, with no one to tell about anything, just the innate and original process, the unceasing moment of birth, and of death.

Finding yourself in a condition deeply out of your former routine it is the newness of it, regardless of what it is in itself that evokes recollections of all former periods marked by the same sense of newness. An ever-early quality, the discovery that you are more than you thought, the awareness of the web of solicitude that surrounds you.

Mood is not something external that happens to a neutral mood-free subject. It is the key and the timbre o your being where and what you are. But you are always half-outside of your mood, which is a kind of restlessness that hinders the full blossoming of the mood that is. Music was supposed to teach that but has mostly forgotten it.

While the narrative can become quite noisy its condition of possibility is always calm. Condition of possibility is a hopelessly logically entangled term for something known the way that it is. It is the knowing that sets knowing on its feet, the knowing that has no need to communicate itself. It does not hide but it acts without any showing or expression. What does it mean for a knowing to neither show itself nor express anything?

Awareness, or experiencing is not built up out of atomic or modular pieces. That is logically clear since everything we know as awareness or experiencing would go into the synthesising of these putative components. Intuitively, however you tend to think in that way since that is how experience becomes amenable to such management as you can afford. What is it like then? Something like emanation, perhaps. Not out of the bright sun of full being, at least for you, but out of the infinitely deep abyss of pre-consciousness.

Fear, that which is fearsome, turns out to have been known before, it is that which is most unhomely, being exposed to what is most unhomely. The symbolic layers fall away and there it is, indifferent reality. And the craving arises for its opposite, the homely, the cozy, that maximum retreat to what is safe and familiar, a mimesis too surely, but you seek to imitate yourself. To snuggle up into the smallest space possible, to attain a pure circularity, to defy space.

In everything requiring a self-reflection you are represented by a symbol or gesture of general agency, a momentary image of a person-like thing. This is entirely natural and conversationally functional, but the kind of thing that is in view could in reality have any of the attributes and powers f the self. It would be far more correct to see all of the contextual factors that make such a stand-in subject possible as the subject, as mood and time and space - things that don't think, are silent but full of all the life that there is.

In some sense all desire is mimetic desire, that is, not a desire for something but a desire to be something. Therefore it is born of the craving for identity. That is one version of knowing who you are, but it is defined entirely within social, or worldly parameters. This is not easily let go of, perhaps you cannot let go of it since what you are is the holding on to it, but it can sometimes let you go. That is the moment of grace, because without it everything is renewed in unsuspected ways.