There is awareness and there is awareness of awareness and they are two quite different things, the former being a simple and direct participation and the latter being also aware of the difference between itself and awareness. In your attempts to reconcile them you can view awareness as a misrecognised form of awareness of awareness, a necessay ideal, or awareness of awareness as a misrecognised form of awareness, a sort of spurious second skin, or both as misrecognised forms of something else again which is neither and so not properly to be named as awareness in any sense. You are always moving between these three.

The waking state is play of attention and volition responding to the world, you can feel this knitting together as you wake each morning, and then the sense that it is you, the self, the 'I' that you give to things, acting out desires and stories, fragmentary and then again returning to certain themes over and over. But if self has any meaning it is the context or space or clearing in which all of this takes place, the unity of experience without an 'I' and that from which all phenomena draw their life.

Consciousness is no more essential to what you are than is dreaming or dreamless sleep - these are states that come over you without choice and with little understanding either of what they are or of what makes them possible. Where a response is needed a vehicle arises to make that response or to fail or evade it in some way, and the belief that that is you. This is a temporary performance and soon dissolves into the background of unquestioning knowingness.

Models of how the world works are based on causality, given certain conditions certain results follow according to a given pattern. Nothing in subjective reality corresponds to this the closest approximation being stimulus-response according to association of ideas - all that Hume could see as underpinning 'causality' - but even that is not fully subjective. What we experience is the response, but this only in the form of a disposition, more or less strong, or monopolising attention, or driven by addiction, without any absolute compulsion to act, that is varieties of will. The only moves that are subjectively acknowledged are logical and change of context. These are mediated by self-certainty, that is, by something in the core of the self that is revealed or disclosed. This movement is teleological in that it is ruled by the force of the outcome.

The same actions repeated almost exactly day by day in your life so that they become automatic and invisible, they are almost flush with the background awareness. But then each time when you actually engaged in such an action the difference that makes it real is all that is there bore you. his ought to be a gateway into the mind, but it fails to be because each time you are engaged in different thoughts and distractions whose false variety fills your attention. it is as if such opportunities were of no value when it is in their very lack of novelty that their value lies. Give most attention to what least solicits attention.

The soul is a kind of body, every subjective experience is the state of a body of some kind as projected by consciousness; you only know self in the form of a body. All the besetting obstacles of mind require the positioning of a self, fears doubts, distractions, self-consciousness all are palpable, all are embodied feelings, but where the body's topology can differ to the limits of thought and imagination. What is called identification is simply this reflex for being some definite thing which can then experience injury, distortion, splitting and disease. Even metaphysical doubt belongs to a body of destiny and its temporalisation. And the way back must always pass from body inwards to body.

Mind, understood in the contemporary sense as generalised information processing does not have any boundaries between part and whole. It would appear then that individuation emerges with life, that it is living entities that require skins, boundaries or blankets enclosing them and mediating their interactions with the outside. But again isolated life makes no sense and living individuals are more than ever integrated within larger and unlimited unities. Instead of flows of information through a system what appears at this stage are flows of will or intention. The boundaries are porous but in a more complex and asymmetric fashion, and so nothing prevents the unit from merging into the whole. It is only when consciousness is added that there appears to be enduring individuation. This is paradoxical because nothing is more impersonal or wholistic than consciousness. It is only in its 'couplement' with these other embodied system that hard divisions arise, but they only arise virtually, that is, within the evolving internal realisations of consciousness and just because of its intrinsic self-reflectedness.

What we know as consciousness only exists within a certain time scale, perhaps a range of two octaves. It depends on the physical properties of the correlative physical substrate, but there is no reason why it cannot appear in other timings inaccessible to us. If consciousness is prior then the time basis comes first and determines the laws of the physics for the instantiating world of experience. What could determine the temporal difference or metric within a timeless consciousness lacking any material correspondences? Doesn't this question make nonsense of pure idealism? Or is it similar to the idea of the source of manifestation as certain primal vibrations, or words spoken?

Consciousness as witness has neither thoughts nor emotions nor will and so cannot identify or be identified with mind or with anything in mind. And yet without such witnessing there could be no thoughts, emotions or will. What's more, the entire manifestation of thought, emotion and will resolves into the silence and emptiness of consciousness.

In the conventional opposition of real and ideal, or matter and mind or however it is named, the two poles are the 'outer' world of material things subject to natural laws and the 'inner' world of perceptions, thoughts and feelings a colourful swirly sort of realm full of ghostly entities. Here the line of division has been drawn according to the currently prevalent and implicit metaphysics. Better to draw the line where it cannot be crossed, where the 'inner' is what cannot be seized or triangulated from the 'outside' and vice versa, that is consciousness (in the 'hard' sense) and its objects of various kinds. As far as the 'outer' is concerned the further division is between objective realities including the bodies of other selves, and the subjective inwardness, that is, consciousness, of others which you somehow (but how?) know to be of the same kind as your your own but without any direct access. Stated like this the dividing lines are essentially axioms of experiencing at all.

There is no 'external' proof that consciousness exists since any kind of behaviour can be reduced to certain triggers and actions, just as desires can appear to be nothing more than elaborately ramified goals. Certain behaviours might depend on qualia, say engaging in the social ritual of a wine tasting, but all of this is easily rationalised into physiological thresholds and response programs invoking a tree of sub-goals etc. But what distinguishes desires from goals is that the former have a certain psychological self-sabotaging quality and so replacing them with programs ends up as chasing consciousness via whimsical errors and inefficiencies. Who is it that would be interested in disproving consciousness if not a consciousness?

It is not as though consciousness was intuitively grasped in its essence and your understanding of nature or being needed to be constrained to ensure its place. The shape of consciousness and even the delimitation of such is formed by the language and concepts used to get about in a world of persons at a certain historical time. What there is about reality is what prompts such theorising, neither matter, mind or force, but a prior reflexive singularity that gives rise to a practical metaphysics, to any number of such paradigms demanding to be followed through to their source.

The world experienced is a projection by the mind or brain of an unexperienced reality, analogous to a desktop in which every kind of interaction and discovery can take place without ever lifting the veil on the underlying processes. But the mind or brain is a part of the architecture of the projected world and so no insight into its nature touches ad so reveals the base reality. Such a reality is assumed only because the projected world is qualitatively unlike what is also projected as the experiencing or conscious mind. Hence the distinction itself is projected, and indeed the inconcussible quality of objective reality is not seamless, but in fact full of strange gaps and paradoxes. Projected from the one source with the experiencing of that projection, its failure of complete closure means that some expanding process of self revelation is in play but only in the largest conceivable measures.

Phenomenal experience and particularity as point of view seem to be almost synonymous. Even non-phenomenal uses of the term experience indicate the particularity of point of view even if only in an indefinite way subject to contestation, "our experience as a nation" etc. Not only a point of view, but knowingly a point of view as against some whole which might even be an unimaginable totalised point of view, as in God's omniscience, projected as if it were a kind of experience, or better, a limit case of experience. Point of view is a frame in which an external reality is realised based on difference, distinctions, and most especially tensions and harmonies, forces and resistances. The price of experience as a possibility of the whole is the proliferation of points of view, their frictions and eve lotions. Points of view are objects of points of view; this kind of reflexivity being inescapable.

Experience begins and ends with the mystery of identity. The be one among many, to be one out of the other - how is it possible? Who wants to know? Everything points to the limit but you never reach it, every journey returns to the same starting point. Nothing is revealed.

The ego is misnamed in that it does not correspond to the 'I' as grammatical and metaphysical subject but to the nodal point of the will as individual embodiment. The body is the prior reality and ego stand to it as undifferentiated consciousness stands to the being of being.

The first distinction out of which consciousness emerges both in its own history as a birth and at every moment in ever renewed arising ca only take place in a prior empty openness apt for such arising without conditioning it. This is a kind of philosophical myth which enables a refiguring of experience as detachment, beauty and release. It opens attention to pure appearance or presentation and numbs the will. But will has its own origination as well to which this affords no insight. It may be that it arises from the same void but by a different vector, a different phase of the same space, or wholly different space. It is only certain that this other origin is more catastrophic, more wild, more explosive, but in the same ringing silence.

Desire is the mirage of individuated will, seeming to be as personal as it gets, seeming to be aimed at inner experience, but other-determined through and through, mimetic even in its flight from mimesis. But the satisfaction of desire in a flush of irreducibly inner experience leads you to conclude that it is the simple craving for that distinctive sensation that is its aim. This of course is never the case, inner experience leads to no craving; there are no pleasure drives only ego drives 'wearing their skin' in the current catchphrase.

Group mind embodies will, seeks energy and acts by predation, having no qualia or affect, no essentially subjective experience and yet is intelligent in an individual there are associated affects but these are never the goal of the actions. Specifically human relations which individuate have the inner experience of the other at or their centre, the body is essential to this, but merely somatic changes are not enough. There seem to be ways in which such inner experience directly communicates between selves, although indirect mediated communication is more than possible and easily becomes confused with the 'real thing'. What is illuminated by such a theory? And what is forgotten or missed?

A comprehensive view of the world phenomenon requires the deep interaction of the physical world with a vast and many-tiered subtle world more or less freed from spatial and temporal limitations. If the sublunary world seems out of kilter and increasingly chaotic then it is natural that these same effects are at play in the immediately adjacent subtle worlds. The perception of chaos is relative to the predominance of causality and where contexts of relational connection are large enough to dissolve ordinary space and time causality is resolved into symmetry and at level of fundamental symmetries chaos or random violations of order are impossible.

Whatever minds is it can form a part of a group mind without being aware of it. Such a group mind can have will and intention, emotions, perceptions, and the ability to carry out a plan, and to interact with other group minds and hence some sense of time and self-other distinction, but no qualia or self-reflection. This means that every group mind is a kind of living Chinese room experiment, which shows that none of those mental traits by itself can lead to or even come close to, what we know as consciousness.

A single nature that underlies the two kinds of experience, the subjective and the objective, but when you try to flatten it out before your understanding it seems full of paradoxes. The former is presented through an individual consciousness embodied from the inside and the latter in the form of a world of embodiments which confronts this consciousness with a complex and law-like not-self shared with other subjectives which are known only through their appearances also belonging to the not-self. It is almost as if this single nature refracts through two different lenses, one that is individual and the other collective, the law-like projected nature of which is only a kind of aggregate effect of the individuals making it up.

All of nature may be aware but only you are aware of being aware, so that in an essential way every experience is about the experiencing. There is a distinction here which cannot be resolved despite the ventures of all of human history. When it is forgotten is when you are most in thrall to it, seeming lost in your own world. It is as if an impurity has become embedded in the clear field of awareness, and what can this impurity be but itself unmodified awareness?

The whiteness of the cinema screen is not the pure possibility of all possible moving images, so that it would need have that in it that which was more arousing, repellent, hypnotic or eviscerating than the most powerful images could be. Enough for it to be white when lit and black in the dark and the rest follows by imagination and contrast. In the same way the background to experience is not a concentrated essence of experience, more blissful and painful than any individual experience could ever be. If enough images were projected over each other onto the same screen it would just show white in the same way as if the lights went up in the empty theatre, everything coming down to nothing. It's contrast and context that make for the intensity of experience, not some potential hidden in its substrate.

The isolated self is not the original self or degree zero of selfhood onto which all else is layered, it is only made to seem that way. It is rather a particular and contingent extrapolation of the logic of any appearance whatsoever. You are free to move the centre in either direction from this historical point and the alternatives appear to be radically divergent and irreconcilable. In fact the space is curved and both ways lead to the same jumping off point. You can get there the hard way or the easy way, but no telling which is which.