It is possible to see the complex around identity at the core of so much in the culture as a veiled traffic in the question of the self, the anxious admission that one no longer knows who one is, or at least the loss of a stable external framework for providing an answer. But the question can be taken in two ways which have almost nothing to do with each other although they easily become entangled. It can be seen as the need for an answer from the world in order to embody the world, or it can be seen as the need for the question in order to undo, to unmake the embodiment of the world. Whichever is decided, and there seems little choice involved, is crucially determinative - as if there are two entirely different questions confused by the same formula in words.

Asking 'Who am I?' and asking (yourself) 'Who are you?' are identical acts, so that as a 'self' you are as much an 'I' as a 'you'. Only the first of these questions, however, seems to get tangled up in 'self-reference', while the second alludes rather to that which is behind very position. 'Who are you to call yourself 'I'? This is more than a matter of grammar and speech acts. It is very different when Schubert builds a song on the refrain 'my heart' than when Whitman writes a 'Song of Myself' - one converges and the other diverges.

As an experiencing monad your being is the irreducible core of the experiencing, most characteristically expressed in qualia and especially in the most private of these which is pain. The world then is the plurality of such monads all of which are radically equal in terms of experiencing being. Altruism, which is taken to be the essence of morality, is the result of a recognition that in respect of reality every monad is equal to every other monad, units of feeling, of qualia, are objective and directly comparable and every motive that fails to incorporate this understanding falls short of alignment with truth. This metaphysically over-determined morality which can dispense with any idea of Love or of the Good short-circuits the kind of morality which depends upon the difficult and dialectical discovery of the Other.

Transpose the 'hard problem of consciousness' within consciousness and it become the 'hard problem of the real'. Within consciousness anything that is a difference is a functional difference and hence is a signification. A world of significations can get along very well without a basis in a reality outside of or exceeding itself, all the drama of experience is already there, as it would be in the pages of a book. Part of this drama is the insistence on something more, a surplus of experience over itself, or perhaps more precisely, but in metaphysical terms, a surplus of experience as being outside of experience as becoming. So, is there that something more? Or is it just the structural twist in the system that keeps it chasing its own tale?

Not so wrong to say that this is a world made entirely from significations. That some significations point to themselves is not a fact but one more of the matters signified. And as such it rests upon something else, as significations are never free-standing but complexes of thirdness. And how far and of what nature is that non-signifying sub-stance? How knowing?

Conflict is rooted in history, but if history consisted of the intractable past there would be nothing to fight about. What is at stake is the interpretation of the the past which is always open-ended. Whatever is interpreted can always be interpreted again. The past only matters because of its say in future decision.

The experiencer always comes with a story, a history extending back as far as it can go. Stories however are notoriously unreliable, they work, are as useful and versatile as they are because they do not ground themselves. They are always something added on, even if they are also inescapable - their inescapability is added on too. So, is the experiencer added on? Isn't there already a whole world of experience without an experiencer? No experiencer will ever admit to this!

As the psyche has its waking, dream, and deep sleep states, so the world has its equivalent three phases, the manifest, the subtle and that causal, they might be called. And in the same way that the states of the psyche are not successive but simultaneous varying only in proportion to each other, the phases of the world are all always equally in play and differ only in evidence. You engage with the world on every level but mostly without knowing it since what for you is knowingness is also in play.

If the basic mode of reality is possibility then the interaction of things can no longer be understood as simple causality, it must be something akin to convolution, the operation of one possibility upon another possibility. But perhaps it is already too much to speak of one possibility. Again, possibility differs from probability in that it does not assume a pre-given and measurable set of alternative outcomes, the latter could only be a limit case under certain kinds of convolution. Consciousness too under this paradigm becomes a certain kind of interaction, and that notion is in harmony with a certain intuition about consciousness: that it arises from an interaction of elements which are prior to itself, which are in a certain sense consciousness-like but without any of the apparent definiteness (e.g. qualia) which seem integral to it. Consciousness's seeming centrality, where the seeming itself belongs to entirely to consciousness.

You think of reality as being what is, as against what is not. And what is possible is a mental construct needed for optimised modeling of what is in time - time also being an aspect of what is. This kind of implicit account is difficult to think through all the way, but nevertheless is believed, even at the cost of assuming multiple worlds. Alternatively you might see the possible as the also integral to reality and not as a deficient approximation to the sole reality that is, and if you take this position, allowing a third valence to is and is not, then many problems of matter and mind disappear. In fact the is and is not end up dissolved into the all-embracing modality of the possible, which now requires a new name.

What is happening qualifies as 'experience' because it comes with an implicit metaphysical account of itself. The basis of certainty in this account is not something internal, as say the cogito pretends to be, that is self-certainty, but an appeal to what the other would take it to be. Your certainty relies on your trust in the other's knowingness, and where you are equally apt to play the role of the other for an other. Even the cogito breaks down in this way: its conclusion could be paraphrased as 'See, I am!' It contains a safeguard against subjectivity, but that safeguard doesn't really work, it is nothing but a sleight of hand that you choose to go along with, since the alternative is distressing.

Metaphysical beliefs or faith comes down to certain existence claims. It seems to matter a great deal whether you, or your 'self' exists or not, for example. The question can be answered either way, either way it corresponds to some kind of experience or frame for experience. If it makes a difference then you might wonder what that difference is and to whom. The 'existence' itself is only a way of trying to keep some order in the questions that can be asked, and indeed you would be better to wonder whether existence exists.

You can imagine the origin of a world from the frame of embodiment in a brain and a mind, in a matrix sufficient for a brain and a mind, then deeming the first distinction, letting there be light, separating the firmament from the waters and so on, Genesis through a Kantian filter, and then what is prior to consciousness as an instance of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny. All of this however might as well be a simulation since you have already presupposed the 'matrix', which is itself a rather sophisticated or downstream product of that very process. No, you have to repeat the experiment without anything like such a matrix, not even from a nothing which is implicitly only the opposite of a something. Without a frame, but still some kind of event. That is what you have to conceive, if even conceiving were allowed.

The unit experiencing self, such as it may be, neither existing or not existing, is of a piece with the world it deals in, with time and space and present things and relevant matters. This is almost true, in other ways it is the problem child of this world order, beyond pacifying with soul or spirit. There is something else, experience-like but not in time and space, which precedes this order and its subjects, but in a distinctive and untranslatable kind of precedence. There are primeval forms involved in this relation which are both knowing and known, and art in some of its outer reaches comes close to pointing them out. It is not obvious that there are stark differences of depth involved in this field, at least not until you have already seen them.

Feelings, ideas, thoughts, moods have very little meaning of their own since they are ephemeral, but they acquire meaning in the context of a history. An episode goes some way in this direction but it is only as part of an entire life that they yield whatever it is that they contain. In this way events come as the answer to certain questions concealed within prior events, and it is the disclosure of that otherwise inaccessible ontological thickness to experience that lends it significance. You would like to short-circuit this process but you cannot because in spite of narratives and histories there is no formal character to this meaning. This has to do with time and is the proper way to approach the idea of temporalisation.

Caring so about x, y, z... is continual and spontaneous, is the very stuff of life, being aware of such caring is a constructed artefact that is added on to it but misses its essence. What is more significant, then, is the disjunction between the two, the way that the possibility of the latter, its obliqueness in relation to the former points to an unsuspected void. What seems full, is tenuous and weightless, is ungrounded in anything at all, floats free in a mysterious, because unrevealed, substance.

In the end all experience is made up out of one kind of thing which could be called 'matters of which you can be aware', the variety of inter-relations of these (of which you also can be aware) is so great that they form a thick world. But paradoxically, for this to be the case there must also be some thing of which you cannot be aware. If you assume that no-thing-thing is the 'Subject' then you seem to go into an infinite regress of 'aware of aware of aware...', but there is no reason for this assumption. Something like ownership seems rightly associated with this unknown, but that is as far as it goes. An intimation, that stops well short of a 'self'.

Physics and mathematics afford examples of a revisioning of basic material from an entirely new perspective, using entirely new terms which resolves contradictions or incompletenesses at a prior level. These do not appear as 'syntheses' of the prior perspectives even if in some sense transcend and include them, they are rather examples of a leap to a different level of understanding. In these cases the new perspective cannot be reduced of modeled in terms of the old one, and a genuine effort of thought is required to see matters in a new way. In these cases the kind of being that is presumed, the nature of the inclusive 'there is...' does not however change, and is in fact what guarantees the status of the new perspective as a continuation of the old. If a similar leap is contemplated at the level of the 'there is...' these examples cannot function as useful analogies.

All ontological questions are suspended, or even abolished, in pure enjoyment, and this is why such enjoyment 'non-phobic' or free of negativity or guilt, remains suspect. The idea of virtual reality enters Western thought with Plato's cave, but that parable is designed to make the unexamined, unquestioned, virtual world seem as shabby and impoverished as possible. With Kant we get a further twist on the virtual, as if to say that everything you need is already included in there, there is no need to look any further. At least this is almost the case, but for the ethical. The terror of absolute enjoyment is still present. Only in our own time is the reversal complete, although the prospect of the closure of the virtual brings with it a new and pervasive kind of terror as the loss of being comes into focus.

Thesis and anti-thesis do not constitute a good model for conflict which is always a matter of incompatibility of will or of habitus. There is no single formal pattern for resolution of conflicting wills and so no logic that can describe what succeeds (in) such a conflict, if anything does. Furthermore, everything actual is so as a form of will whose target is another form of will. If war is the mother of all things, as Heraclitus reportedly said, then the problem is how to insert intelligence into this playing-forth without betraying the strife-ridden nature of things.

The enigma of death can be the only analogy for the question of being. Death as mystery belongs to everyone and yet the question of who is entitled to raise it, in effect to ask 'who dies?' remains unresolved. Every solution is no solution. Each presumed subject gives way to another until the deepest meaning of self is exposed without ever being fully revealed. The question of being however pre-exists any and all subjects, it is the question of questioning itself. You cannot properly ask it, it cannot be grasped, it must be given to you from elsewhere.

What is most basic, simply being here is what is most question-worthy and at the same time what is known without knowing that it is known. Not known bt able to be recognised, so then, if it has any structure at all, analogies to it must abound, especially in what is spontaneously imagined, but always mistaken, treated in another guise, over-laid with different meaning or the same meaning taken differently. Is that how it seems? But what seems is precisely what it is not.

The object of will or of desire is always a will or a desire, whether of self or other, not just to imitate but also to subsume, to dominate, to block, to subject or be subjected, or else to dissipate, to use it up. Identity is only one moment in this ceaseless play. Memory runs as deep, so that every desire is a form of memory and every memory a form of desire. Is there something that unifies all of these motives? If there is an end to desire it can only be glimpsed in the end of desire.

Unfolding what is true, unfolding what truly is. Truth and being passing on to the other until the maximum resolution of the knowing or knowable is reached, by which knowing as revealing and being are indistinguishable. But then to go even further beyond the knowable, beyond what can be revealed; knowing transformed into unknowing, or dark knowing.

Experiencing is a unity across its own internal time, a single 'thing' embracing every epoch of a life all of which are distinctive and historical. It comes as the 'place' in which the world worlds. As you go further upstream the logic of causes and things, events in time and space gives way to a series of analogies, each one the 'truth' of the one that follows. This relation s not symbolised but is immediately understood. As you go further back the shapes and energies, which are revealed as being the same thing, grow more vast and primeval, more brilliant and shocking in their intensity. All of this is hidden deep within ordinary mind.