The core consciousness or being makes no distinctions, has no preference, no subject or object, is a great unknowing. That everything that presences does so in relations of distinction, preferences, accords and disaccords etc. is of no moment; none of these being phenomena are ontological, they do not affect or compromise the core consciousness which is nonetheless their substance, all the substance they could ever have. Will does not reach to being, or have its proper seat in being, and that is why it is will, why it is will in purity.

Experience is formed around a focus of concern; consciousness without such a focus belongs to no one and does not produce a world, it is mere event, worldless event. And why should there be a world? Once started it goes on. As if matters ripple through consciousness until their own contradictions destroy them.

The kind of reality which underlies your experience can change from moment to moment as from dream to waking and back to dreaming. The reality is given and you do not question it, feel no need to do so, and yet to attain the ground of experience would be to have an unequivocal account of such changes, an effective theory of ignorance, as the one who escaped Plato's cave returns with a full knowledge of the mechanism of the shadow world. That this knowledge is in the form of a theory however is not enough, theories and theorisers themselves belong to a given reality. To be irreversible it needs to be a direct showing integral to a wholly different kind of knowing and experiencing.

It ought to be as evident as a mathematical proof that as there is truth so there must be freedom but everyday reality is precisely such as to obscure this equivalence because of how it takes truth and freedom according to certain concepts that it subjects to endless equivocations.

Lacking a limit situation there is only an inauthentic questioning - but then there is an authentic inauthentic questioning and and inauthentic inauthentic one. Perhaps the best that can be expected is that in the rattling on of the default mode there are occasions when the utter strangeness of it all descends on you.

Experiencing is such that at the limit the question as to who is experencing can be realised.

The experiencing self is a something in the world. It is either like the other things found in the world whose every dimension is to be found within the world, (or in the old sense, these things are appearances) or it is another kind of thing altogether. If the nature of your experience forces you to the second alternative then you must acknowledge that what you are as experiencing self is an unbounded opening onto the world which also transcends the world. This alternative however places an essential mystery at the heart of things. If you don't like this conclusion then one way around it is to assume that there is a more comprehensive theory that embraces what is behind appearances, a theory of the noumenal which includes the kind of reduction that produces both the appearing and the appearance, the experiencing and the experience. The transcendence would then be merely an artefact of this reduction. In this case there need be no transcendence within the noumenal as it contains all of the extra dimensions needed to resolve the mystery of the experiencing self and the experienced world. But isn't this exactly what is intended behind all the vague talk of mystery and transcendence?

What is taken to be knowledge is produced according to certain criteria, and what you accept as knowledge determines what you are as the one subject to that knowledge. This is the inverse of the paradigm represented by the cogito, or perhaps its unintended consequence. As the processes by which knowledge is manufactured become more transparent a sort of existential confusion results since it become clear that these processes, by their nature, have no ground. The implicit existential demand is not matched by an equivalent demand for truth, only by further processes.

The treating of life as experiencing misses the essential relation between life and truth, the way that every life, willy nilly, is a position in regard to what is true, which it embodies beyond any position it might also have in regard to what can and should be believed. In this sense there is no experiencing as if somehow it were a product of its own. Whenever there is talk of experiencing there is a more or less implicit critique of experiencing, an expression of dissatisfaction with every way of encompassing what this is.

What fills the gap of absence of ground for experience is a pragmatic and hierarchic theory of the material world in tandem with a theory of the self, also largely pragmatic and hierarchical. These theories are 'not even wrong' since they are entirely incapable of addressing the question; they succeed instead by misdirection. This is also why alternative theories, such as idealism or panpsychism also fail to do the trick, they are basically modifications of the theory of matter, of the primacy of what matters. It remains strange however how elusive the insight into the failure of such theories is; they are like dreams which in spite of their strange content serve only to prevent you from waking up.

A clear mind enjoying its own creative powers is one the most desirable things that there is, but it can also hinder awareness of the background consciousness. Such a mind delighting in forms is always ready to discover new forms or recondite relationships between forms, and it need never stop. But it only when the mind is balked, when nothing occurs to it, that there is any chance of the nothing occurring to it. This can't be brought about and so is far from the innately active inquiry, it requires an involuntary, but still open passivity, a releasement.

Desire and drive are quite different things. Drive always leads to action of some sort, it always follows through, while desire might exist precisely not to produce any action, its purpose or aim could well be to induce a sense of frustration. In this sense desire is humanised drive. Will may be understood as something in between.

What the next thought will be is not known, neither is it known where it will come from, but when it as come you immediately recognise it as your thought together with a sense of its provenance, which you could expand in most cases quite considerably. What is clear is that you are the type of person who would have such a thought. Whether you were also this same 'type of person' a moment ago, and whether you will be so for the next thought that comes remains unknown. at the level of such 'types of person' there may be considerable discontinuity in time, the range of possibilities being very large in spite of a certain family resemblance. There is apparently no faculty for monitoring continuity or discontinuity at this level. All of this seems essential to your condition, which entails that you can disavow or detach from any thought that comes, as if the place where freedom acts is in the choice of degree to which you take up each passing thought or reflected piece of experience. So, while a large part of your mental process involves these unconscious processes, the now being far to small to accommodate all the ancillary mentation, nothing belongs to experience unless it passes through this same now.

If will and hence desire as downstream of will is the most subtle form of matter then it is expressed by the most fundamental laws of matter. Since these are all laws of interaction, of forces, fields, particle exchanges and so on we see that there is nothing corresponding to the monadic, or autistic, will to will. What appears that way is only the action of a certain set of relations to persist as that set of relations. In more simplistic terms, there are only variants of the erotic drives, including negative eros, and no independent will to persist in being.

Desire is mediated by memory so that it acts towards a repletion or a recovery of a prior state that appears as a paradise of sorts. As memory is a floating world of appearances so desire is without a core of truth, but is a divergent motion spawning further refracted desires. This is a way of being in time, a distinctive temporalisation without history. In spite of its dependence on memory it is always in the present, always in the moment of gratification, even if that moment is never realised. The temporality of self is quite different being an intersection of timelessness and time. The self is a completion of history in which the meaning of experience is revealed through its fulfillment.

The drives, that is the distinguished ministers of will, are formed out of the coming together of elemental intentions, but are they truly unified? They seem so because they belong to a self which has unity in its essence, but otherwise they do not require it. In other terms, although the motive forces of experience can be understood as the various drives, they are never directly experienced. All desire is unconscious and the identification of self with desire is all on the side of self, while desires are legion, their voice always a chorus. From a dualist perspective will is the most subtle form of matter, of prakriti, its inherent draw towards kinds of order. So, will can exhibit itself as the solution to the combination problem of panpsychism, this says nothing about the combination of consciousness. The fascination of consciousness by will, the misplacing of self, is the great error.

Will is not the same as goal-seeking, or some hierarchical assemblage of goal-seeking, and so is not amenable to simulation by program. Its relation to the order of things that proceeds by formula, the representational order if you like, is irreducible. It is not consciousness but life and beyond life to the most basic kinds of complexity. The way that you know and experience will is through the drives which are mental in that they function via representations - the drive to continue to exist, to assert yourself, to reproduce (or go through its motions!), to explore, to sleep, etc. All of these have an enigmatic form and complex inter-relations. Do drives give rise to desires? To other and different drives? They would not be as they are, however, without being rooted in the silent fundamental drives of life, or what has been called will in the most abstract sense. This is a concrete example of ow a mentality can be a coalescence of 'intentions' that exist on a primitive level prior to recognisable experience. It points the way to the solution of the combination problem for panpsychism, while not fully redeeming it.

As much as experience includes a intuition of recollectedness as a transcendent inwardness there is an equal and opposite intuition of of a stepping further and further out into strangenesses that shatter all inwardness. The reciprocal movements of concentration and dissipation are not to be reconciled; each has its own valences, its own kind of absolute, its own necessity.

The restless quality of the psyche whose law is 'I am not what I am, and am what I am not' - or is that better stated with 'that' in place of 'what'? - runs deep but is nevertheless superficial. This superficiality being itself another law of the psychic - 'I think therefore I seem'. None of this would be possible without something serene and unmoving from which it draws its forces and to which only systematic negations can apply. To enter through the narrow gate of appearance you must split in two.

The various human types that you can recognise are the words of a spiritual language and their histories are sentences or sample sentences. What you seek is a poem that expresses the hidden forces of that language. But what you mostly have are known through fictions and so are already interpreted or better, accented, in a certain way via hidden stories. In spite of that you can already sense the music of that immemorial and future poem.

Purposive action is to care for a certain outcome and to facilitate changes so as to bring it about - this pretty much characterises all of life and imbues it with a future orientation. To have a purpose and to fail of it or to fall short, to lose it seems to belong to higher forms of life, or where the purpose is to find a purpose, or to evade it. What is meant by 'higher' then is that the life process itself become optional. You require a consciousness and all the machinery of reflection, so that you can fail of life, or so that life can fail of you in a meaningful way, to conquer new pathways of doubt.

It is commonplace to read of 'the invention of the self' at such and such a time as resulting from the rise to prominence of a certain cultural formation, as for example Shakespearean drama or Romantic poetry, or any one of numerous other instances. The evidence might show a historical change not only in the ways that the self was figured in discourse but also a host of other cultural formations such as religion, fashion, food, architecture etc. With a slightly different interpretation of self these same evidences might be used to show the persistent constancy of the self one component of which is a restless and always unsatisfied search for its own nature. The appeal of such arguments is in their promise of further freeing the self from its various cultural accretions and limitations. The wish to discover the self by undoing the self is nothing new, but the fashion is in the particular tools deemed most suited for the undoing.

But you think you know who is doing the experiencing, you are! And you? Well you are something real, in time, therefore with a moving point-presence and in space, a discrete position somewhere in or about the body which itself is a certain kind of thing in this world of things. This is the framework from which you interpret everything and it works because everyone else has more of less the same idea as is clear from every kind of action and concept. It is enough to see that this has no basis apart from an appeal to itself. It exists in a space of axioms and is just one among them. This 'space' is not a space like physical space, however, it's more like an idea that defines what kinds of nearly impossible leaps are possible. Possible, all too inevitable, just because it is impossible!

The matter of materialism is an underlying outsideness, since any instance of a material thing, a table, a cup of tea, a truck, a raindrop, is eminently changeable in form and even in composition - what makes it objectively real or actual is that it is outside of and independent of the mind, and that which belongs to it and makes it so is - well, is nothing more than that very independence of mind reified to pure abstract substance. In the same way every content of mind is changeable, protean, without any fixed essence but that it belongs to the experiencing, so that it is the pure subjectivity of mind which is its underlying 'substance' or the empty background out of which it arises. These two kinds of substance are mirror images of each other and neither has a claim to reality that can be preferred to the other. Both seems to be products of the same error, an error in the way that experience is taken to be.

It is redundant to demonstrate the non-existence of an enduring self etc. on the basis of the 'I' that occurs in present-time waking awareness, together with its associated roles in memory and expectation. These are necessarily evanescent and discontinuous just as most of everyday purposiveness is without consequence. The texture of moment to moment experience, lived experience, Erlebnisse, the home of the qualia, is indeed something remarkable and impossible to explain in 'objective' terms, but it is not the open door to the self which exists in an entirely different kind of temporality, incompatible with the series of passing moments. Where these two intersect there are phenomena of meaning, but again mapping this meaning back into passing time looses its essence. The self is enduring because it is found in the enduring, something which cannot be measured or quantified.