Personal identity is an expedient means for creating experience within the sheer intensity of the disclosure of being, in modern terms, a feature not a bug.

This experiencing is yours, you are the one for whom it is, each new moment as it comes up. This idea is so wonderful when it first arises that you can spend a lifetime unfolding its extraordinary sequels without noticing that it is groundless, a sort of strange loop in infinite emptiness and that as it returns and returns again it is always only a fleeting mental and physical object that stands in for, representing at second hand, the timeless and spaceless principle non event, the ever welcoming and unchanging host.

The language may be imprecise but they are not the wrong questions, or perhaps it's that they are only questions without fully questioning the questioner. You pass and repass before a wide open door and fail to see it, or to just go through, or to discover that there is no door and no one who ever goes though.

All experiencing is in the standing now and would not be possible merely in the flow of time as it appears. Only under unusual circumstances can this become apparent, there is not meant to be experience in the identical now as it truly is. Its only inhabitant is the witness consciousness. If all moments are equally present in this sole substance then why are past and future cut off from the present? Its openness is not your openness nor can it ever be, just as its notion of thing, event, time, space, self and other have nothing to do with yours. It is the same world and yet entirely different, a miracle of pure immanence.

Feeling, when imagined on the model of sensation, received via the senses, is not recognised. Feeling and will belong to a single complex, feeling might be called the derivative of will, but there is no feeling without a reaching out to action, to acting on something or somebody, or on yourself. Rightly the two should be of roughly equal intensity but more often the action is a vestige, and imaginary or fantastic action. The formation and dissolution of self takes place in this as a structural necessity so that the feeling can be accomplished at it needs to be. The adventurousness of feeling creates the world out of basic dream stuff.

Your opinion of yourself acts like a lens through which your experiencing passes. It is made out of carefully concealed beliefs each with a ready response to any flat out challenge and it runs by itself with no need for constant adjustment. When, in spite of this a passing injury is sustained your perception in its mental pole becomes distorted as if under the influence of a magnetic field. It is the distortion that leads to the belief that the centre of awareness is inside that core opinion you hold of yourself, or what is called egoity, in other words the identification of ego and self. The illusion is tightened in suffering and loosened in joy, but both constitute traps in their own ways which prevent the illusion from being overcome but simple disinterested observation.

The phenomenal world is a creation of the mind but with something else added to give it content and to regularise it so that it is discursively coherent and resumable and endowed with a high threshold of stubborn strangeness. That 'something else' is taken to be not the mind because everything mental is taken to be in a kind of potential contiguity and accessibility so that any externality based on it would dissolve into dream-like self referentiality; any otherness it projected would wink and tip its hand. Essentially, because the conditions that make for the feeling-idea of reality are alien to the self-understood properties of mind. This true otherness then communicates itself to the mind and impresses its nature upon it without actually revealing itself. The relation is imagined as causal, but this cannot in fact be so because causality is a property of mental models. Put simply, the noumenal is not the cause of the phenomenal - however the experiencing world is in relation to the being which it regularises and this relation could only be exposed on the side of being and not of the experiencing world. It is the experiencing which must be newly understood, not the noumenal.

One thing that dreams show you is that your psyche is fully equipped to create a world reality, it just needs some basic inputs to work with. In the case of dreams these are memory fragments and kinaesthetic elements from your sleeping body. The same mechanism is employed for waking live and our common world, but now the inputs which appear - in the projection - to come via the senses are such as to build a coherent shared world. What the 'actual' nature of these inputs is is impossible to say, but they do their job as well as they ever need to. This is an understanding based on the nature of the waking world and its ontology, but all of that of course is part of the same construction. It tells you nothing metaphysically, but points to wards certain indelible questions.

The two strongest form of desire, perhaps they are the only kinds, are mimetic desire and desire for oblivion (or sleep). In each case you are driven to escape yourself, either in space - to become that image of satisfaction over there - or in time - to end the succession of empty moments. Every other kind of desire seems to be no more than an amalgam of these two.

Scientific understanding used to be directed at controlling the phenomena studied while now it seems dedicated to being able to simulate them. Studying the details of behaviour at a fine enough resolution and with a large enough number of variable according to only operational criteria and there seems no reason why a simulacrum indistinguishable from an original cannot be produced. It is not so much about the copy but a different way of framing the original so that the very idea of originality is dissolved. This is no longer about 'technology' but something else, unrestricted or general mimesis.

That which is unchanging in all experiences and which grounds them cannot be identified with, cannot be brought into the circuit of the 'I' and yet is itself of the nature of I-ness. To be cognisant of this is to loosen the identified 'I' in every experience so that it melts into passing forms of thought. Identification recurs, is the enduring lure for experience, drawing it out and evading it, as if its entire purpose were only to give form to the formless.

Experience in the world world experiencing is so rich and varied that it surely has something about it that it beyond the world, as if when you complete a loop and should have returned to the same point you always find yourself rotated in a way that you cannot explain other than by concluding that your trajectory was in a different space with more dimensions than ever appeared. Experience must contain a hidden pathway beyond experience and the attempts to find it, to secure it are precisely what constitutes experience. The outside of experience cannot be reached and certainly forms no part of experience. The only way, that is not a way, is to refrain from all paths, all ways, all promptings of experience.

You can turn your attention to anything, say from the foreground to the background, but then the background becomes the foreground which defeats the exercise. But you must be aware of the background or else there could be no attention. It doesn't move and yet is the origin of attention. What kind of awareness can it be which embraces that which can never be attended to. If attention is only an idea, a kind of inner object, then what is it that it attends to, what kind of idea is it? How are you permitted to wonder about this? Who are you, anyway?

The obstacles to clarity and the ne for whom there are such obstacles, the project to overcome them and the one who nurses such projects, the expectations and the inevitabilities, the stories and entitlements and inversions thereof, the one who looks and the one who looks away, all of these arise in perfect clarity. Just this.

The chain of being is an abstract paradigm that sets basic orientations in experience. The ancient and medieval version ran vertically down from a high transcendence to mere matter and possibly even further. The naturalistic version is essentially a cybernetic construction bootstrapping from the bottom up. The phenomenological chain is the closest to experiencing as it happens and runs from inside to out, or it would only that the distinction between in and out is already downstream. It is directed in a further and nameless dimension and runs through the very centre of the soul and all knowing.

Being human is something like a branching multiverse in that the choices not taken exist side by side with the one that was and continue to exert their interference upon it. These other branches no longer branch, only the reality retains the open future, which again in its own way exerts a strange magnetism over present and past. All of this is a crude metaphor for the most basic temporalisation meant only to point to something obscured by familiarity and the lack of an appropriate language. The point is to find the intuitive understanding of most proximate being and replace it before all other topologies of thought and reflection, all other theories of mind.

That characteristic inner feeling that identifies you, as if given a dozen such feelings from diverse individuals you could immediately pick out your own? And yet it can change or become distorted under the effects of fever or drugs and you know that immediately, you feel 'not yourself'. No other sensory content is as private; there is nothing else in the world that resembles it in any way, or perhaps there are certain rare musical passages that seem to evoke it, and seem especially striking for that. Only in sex is there the illusion of bringing your inner feeling right up against that of an other. It requires a body but is unchanged when body perception is as in sleep or in water. And it is not a matter of particular qualia, not a mental object, it has a kind of spatiality and temporality, it decrees directions of thought and motion, of presencing. Feeling is its outer shell, it is what is meant by 'feeling like', but if it is not a feeling what is it? What is required in order to grasp it as it is?

It's not an 'I think' which accompanies all experience but a certain distinct and constant feeling or taste without any associated I, but which in a question filled world demands an 'I' to answer for it. The 'I' never fully appears but the demand for it is always there, which becomes a demand for recognition, for acknowledgement which stands in for the absent 'I' in day to day commerce. The questioning branches out into endless tributaries but mostly fails to deliver the only true question which can only arise from the bare and silent situation of mere being.

It is not the mirror images and their substitutions that confer an identity but things in general on which you depend and which depend on you. Even the movements in and out of dreamless sleep define a grounding in a core of being, everything else as ornament and improvisation over that, dream following on dream endlessly in which you can neither be lost nor found.

Melancholia as a black sun, as if blackness can be dazzling, just as extreme cold can sometimes feel hot. It carries no pain, no feeling or explanation, beyond any colour or sound and yet you can't bear to face it, only wanting to turn away, to lose yourself in the crepuscular but charged and mythic worlds surrounding that centre devoid of all connection to the known, but you keep turning back towards it, to its unmoving and all-encompassing refusal.

Desire, love, ambition, envy, tenderness, all of these human motives respond to the existential conditions of transience, fragility, thrownness and so to contain a veiled knowledge of being. In so far as this is recognised as a pseudo-being you express gnostic rejection and in so far as even in the pursuit of pseudo-being you are driven by a response to the withdrawal of being itself you express the affirmative rejection of gnosticism. This duality is inextricable from the turbulence engendered by the erratic and endless ways of the culture.

The dualism of matter and mind makes no sense since there is no essential distinction between the two. The true dualism is of mind and consciousness, matter being a particular formation in mind. What distinguishes these is that mind arises from constraints, it is high but finite dimensional, while consciousness is infinite dimensional. They are not separate, the constraints being self-imposed, but there is also no commonality between the two, which is just what enables ekstatic mind to be conscious.

Whether you start in seeking the origin of your own consciousness from a physicalist world or from a mental one in terms of a mind at large or universal consciousness there is a problem of individuation, since the only for of consciousness known to you and generally agreed upon is the particular individual which you are, in each instance, and essentially particular as well. All of the most characteristic psychological dramas that go with being-a-consciousness are also directly derived from this indelibly isolated particularity. All of this hinges on a fundamental misrecognition of the nature of consciousness, and indeed its confusion with the cogito as pure intuitive self-revelation. It is perhaps sufficient to note that whatever that illumination is nowhere does it pretend to reveal the nature of consciousness. It is only the flashing of a luminous and inscrutable idea before consciousness.

You believe that you existence is a discrete aggregate in time and space but you have never properly considered what is time and what is space. The only way to approach these questions is with perfect naivety, realising that you don't know. The door to the cage is wide open and nothing stops you walking through it, but you persist, like a fly, in banging against a closed window.

Experiences do not exist in isolation but are as parts of a life. The life is not defined by the experiences that are crowded within it, but just as much by experiences which are possible but never occur and even by experiences that are impossible but might occur to a certain other life or lives. A life has a core or seed which is only partly brought to light by the experiences which are given to that life. Its intimate relations with other lives and essences are more constitutive but remain mostly concealed. Life, which appears to be everything only realises a fraction of being, of the being in which it is embedded.