Consciousness is only possible because intrinsic to it is the possibility of the question of being (which is sometimes called awareness of the background consciousness). But this question is almost never asked, and even to begin to ask it aright takes immense restraint. There must be no move towards supplying an answer, or even a context.

The situation is always entirely personal and that is what makes it a situation and moves it forward. And yet whatever results from it while not exactly impersonal is independent of anything specific to the person. As if the latter acts as the catalyst for whatever movement has been elected to take place. And what is most personal is the knowledge of this very fact.

Impossible to say it without the appearance of paradox, but the whole waking world, its claim to complete causal priority over experience, to reality as it's known, is perfectly fine, is exactly what it does what it is there for, but doesn't alter in any way that it appearance in mind, that it is made out of the stuff of mind together with all is laws and mysteries. It is of a certain 'stuff', a being-ness, that lies disclosed. You cannot name that greater thing out of which it arises, but you feel an unmediated kinship with it.

Certain musical works, Bach's famous Chaconne being an example, have a structure in which intense passages come in more or less widely separated waves, like a series of rapids in a waterway. The energy of the work seems to be contained in these portions of it and calmer sections between them could be heard as re-groupings in which frayed ribbons of sound are knit back together so as to gather the momentum for another descent. With more familiarity you are able to perceive the rippling and overlapping forms in these quieter interludes and to realise that the greater interest of the work lies in them. The descending portions are causal, while these delve into the energies that are prior to cause.

The content of the debates is of no use, but only that they show how immediately and unthematically we are aware of depth of being, which is the same as clarity about the question of being. It inspires more envy, perhaps, than any other possession but this expresses itself in unexpected ways. Much of what is ascribed to desire actually belongs to this envy of imagined proximity to the question, which is also the answer, of being.

Certain kinds of change like the inexorable progress of metaphysical individuation and atomisation take place at a level of abstraction beyond even that which was formerly called spirit, that is of an intellect that devours itself. They can only be approached as if they were an action of unknown gods, and even in those terms they can barely be grasped. And yet the distress they cause is widely felt.

The intensity of pain that you can experience seems to be without any limit and so to exceed experience understood as mental representation or as in that way symbolic, but to be a direct encounter with reality. Intense intractable physical pain is the body's pain and not something that arises in association with a body image. The fact that pain has no 'ceiling' reinforces this impression. And yet in spite of this certain drugs acting on the nervous system are able to neutralise the pain, at least for a short time. In other words, the sharp distinction between the real and the imaginary/symbolic in enacted entirely within the latter's structures.

The background is not stationary, it is moving too.

The idea of experience as a flow of isolated moments, infinitesimal bursts of now-ness in pre-established harmony or succeeding according to inflexible dependencies is a logical imposition that presumes and underlying uniformity a blank field of perfect recurrence. An idea like this cannot explain time since it presumes it, time being that uniform medium. It is a way of describing a continual and continuous forgetting. If time is anything it is not a forgetting but a spanning without recurrence, every moment unique in the context of every other moment.

Experience is just the pursuit of one intent after another you pursuing these and at every junction you feel a little of yourself as if you are satisfying something. This goes on incessantly without any thought of its provenance. How is it given that there should be this? There is a 'this' to it and how can that be? It does not come out of itself and what it comes out of is the sole reality and unchanged.

In whatever world you find yourself in the things of that world are already there with you. You can call them 'events' n order to stress their temporal nature; they emerge, unfold and recede but ever completely disappear. Every event has become a part of you, of your indelible history, which is, like you yourself, not an event, or perhaps an event in another unknown, uneventuated sense.

Experience it too rich, multi-faceted and portentous to have the experiencing subject as its reason for being, as its ultimate 'what for...'. This line of thinking however leads to the abstractions of spirit or the world-soul. Experience is meaningless apart from its ownership by that most imperfect and evanescent of beings, the experiencer. The latter's role is a strange one, the unworthy and unprepared heir to a kingdom, but nonetheless the sole heir. Everything is there for you and almost all of it will pass you by bewildered and bereft, its gifts unopened.

The phenomenological ontological exposition of experiencing fails to net the ego-drives and the various related social drives, the erotics of power in short. These seem to play a large role in everyday 'psychology' but one which is very much historically and culturally mediated. They doubtless melt away in the face any genuine existential crisis, and that probably accounts for their role which is that of a decorative 'hedge', a floral and zoological embroidery with both an aesthetic and a toxic component.

Everything is act, is purposive action. Purpose implies choice and choice a projection of possibilities and a frame or map or model to hold them. These are not separate parts but integral to the one event as is the time and space and world in which the correlative objects appear. In this the subject is just another kind of object since the actor is an essential part of the model o the action. If there is a self it does not resemble any synthesis of such subjects and so does not occupy a position as it were 'behind' the action. This picture however leaves ego and egoism unexplained. Why is there so much energy invested in the surplus of subjectivity?

Everything occurs in time and in space, subjective reality inside objective reality, but time and space and objective reality are themselves 'inside' of something else which is neither subjective nor objective, has no inside or outside and is the sole reality. That is the light which reflected at the extreme edge of things.

You look in a mirror before going out to see 'how you look' or 'what you look like' to others, to arrange things and correct any errors in presentation that are correctable. It is for others and also for yourself it might inform you of a mood that you are only half aware of. You don't see yourself you see an image, one which can be conjured by this simple exercise, a reproducible proxy for the always invisible self. In the same way and thought or inner perception or intentional reference to yourself is made via a convenient image, in this case a compound of certain fixed ideas and some constantly updated feelings, a familiar synesthetic compound, but also merely an image, a proxy for the ever invisible self, what it is that sees and can never be seen. The two are of entirely different natures and should never be confused.

'What is is like to be an X?', a bat say, is entirely the wrong question. The 'like' should be enough of a give-away, by assuming that there is a basis for comparison. But the audacity of the question is well-placed, as if it presumes that somehow you ought to know, or could know. But again this presumes that there is some fact in the world that it might be possible to discover and the fact is 'there' even if you'll never uncover it. No, the better question is 'Does an X have a world?' Does a bat have a world, does an ant, or a housefly? How about a computer, or an automobile? If someone is tempted to say yes, then try disentangling their own world from that of their beloved object.

Watching an ant or a spider, any insect or similar kind of creature you are immediately aware that the same life is present as there is in you, a life that deals in matters present before itself for the sake of a future and whose precise patterns of behaviour express both an ontogenetic and phylogenetic past. This issue of whether consciousness is present or not is immaterial. It might be or might not be, but only as something potentially emerging from life itself. The question of consciousness, seen as determining personhood etc. is somehow entirely the wrong question.

The dreaming process is seemingly always running, like a twenty-four hour movie theatre in some dingy street. You can slip into it in a moment with no sense of shock and emerge, slightly dazed almost as easily. It's not as if there are two different selves, but the same self engaged in very different tasks. It is clear that even the most objectively consistent world is a kind of achievement, the result of complex intentions. The exact same intentions are found in both the dream world and the waking world, but they are developed very differently in each case.

To have insight into the nature of experience is to be oriented and attuned so that experience is self-revealing, so that it opens itself to be known from out of itself. This can never answer the question of the being of experiencing, it merely makes it possible to raise the question, by clearing away all that could never answer it.

An experience comes about in relation to its experiencer. The experiencer is neither a part of the content of the experience nor a wholly independent ground. Practically it is a kind of inference made within the flow of the intelligibility of experiencing. Hence the same experiential content can lead to different experiences according to different experiencers belonging to the same self. This is possible because the experiencer is an absence, a certain kind of absence. Because you can re-experience the same event with a deeper subjectivity the boundaries and horizons of every experience remain translucent.

Nothing more everyday and unremarkable than to as 'How are you?' and yet if you take this as a perfect expression of something implicit in out being here together with each other then it has hidden depths. It is an existential question that doesn't ask who or what you are but how, in the sense of 'what quality is your being?' - it is asking for a quality or mood or feeling, and if the response is typically banal and conventional, the one asked is also presumed to know exactly 'how' they are even if they cannot express it. And this 'how' is not to be deduced but observed and is a matter of the moment, or of the immediately preceding interval of time. 'How do you find yourself (to be)?' You look, you find what is there, that is your worldly 'thrownness'. And again, that this formal question represents the opening to a person to person connection, as if it prepares the mutual ground, an opening to see and to say what is seen.

Time as the ever-presencing self-overflowing moment, the lively stillness and time as the strictly finite duration of a life that is consumed until its end are one and the same. You are not in time but are made out of time; it is not a substance but its nature is your nature. And so surrender all desire for permanence.

Consciousness or caring begins with a world not an other, but the background against which this world, any world arises is the consciousness itself, of which there was no awareness prior to that moment, but which was 'already there'. That the world is such that the consciousness or caring is in the world in another matter entirely, it is enough to be the background. Consciousness fulfilling care to the furthermost extent must return to itself, passing beyond its world.

Care as a name for the unnameable ground of existing is perfectly poised between love and desire, the sacred and profane forms of care, you ight say. Care cares about all sorts of things, but as a ground it must care most of all for care itself. The same circularity applies to love and to desire. While mostly these fall prey to the shattered and refracted forms of object-formation, they each have an indelible core of truth.