The 'stream of consciousness' for all its self-referential complexities is a completely flat network, linking together past and future, dream and awakening, broad and narrow perspectives, but without any underside or hidden depth. That is the trick, 'there's no there there' because it is all here here. Again, all the modalities are merely thoughts.

Time and space are conceptual constructs that make sense of the complexity of what's going on, out of them comes experience and the experiencing subject. None of these correspond to the reality, but they serve to make it coherent according to a certain pattern. They are not imposed on you from the outside, from some unquestionable other of the spirit, from history or the divine. You actually do them, but can't bring that act to openness because the only self or agency you can understand are creations within that frame.

Experience fails at the generality this concept aims at since it implies a certain detachment - do you have experiencing? or are you immersed in experiencing, or in the experiencing? This works because you can in some degree reflect on past experiences or anticipate future ones, but what is actually going on - not now, but always, ever - there cannot be a now it is an invented idea is never experience, never experienced. It's true that there seem to be exceptions for certain peaks, high (or low?) ('I had to pinch myself...') but on closer examination they confirm and reinforce the rule. But simply reducing the gap inherent between experience and whatever it is that is happening is desirable.

The ego is the executive not for acts but for potentialities to act, it does not rule desire but the desire to desire. This is one way in which it is elusive, it keeps one or two levels behind experience. It has a kind of thing-ness but not in the same way as natural things, a stubborn coherence born entirely out its functionality - isn't that the definition of emergence?

If you pointed out his error to the beetle mating with a beer bottle and suggested he find a lady beetle he might reply, 'that's interesting, but I prefer this, it is exactly what I want.' In this sense desire creates its own truth. You might then ask, 'don't you care about the future of beetledom?' to which he, 'yes, that is my greatest value, but my desire is stronger than my values.' Values retain some obligation to reality, but desire is its own reality. It might even force values to change, so the beetle might respond, 'what's beetledom to me? this is more real, I am not my genes.' So it is with us as well, we prefer what is real in this sense to us to what is 'really' real. We have some control over our desire, over its intensity if not its object. No desire at all feels as bad as too much desire and so we seek an optimum, but we are fundamentally estranged from our desire in spite of its power.

Intentionality and desire are different things and of the two it is desire that is prior - you can get to intentionality from desire, but not the other way around. There is no evolutionary creation of desire although desire is shaped by evolution which means that its forms are mediated by that which is subject to evolution. Desire is the great gift, the very spark of life. As a purely bodily phenomenon desire has no access to the being of its objects, it is lured and triggered by signs. There is a certain beetle that prefers to mate with old beer bottles. Only mind links desire to being, but the two are not in harmony.

That it appears all too easy for those who think about AGI to jump from the idea of a generalised response engine to that of an entity with its own emergent and inscrutable goals and intentions, already says something about the debased theories of mind which our sophisticated thinkers are caught inside of. On their premises what would it take to concretely care about something enough to act on it? There must be some sort of hierarchy of values, and some notion of the world and of ones place in it in which these values make sense. What is a value? Can it still be a value if it is known to have been imposed from the outside, or must it rather be held as coming from one's own self? But if a sense of self is needed then there also needs to be a distinction between appearance and reality. How could these emerge without something like our sense of embodiment? Could there be a desire that was purely cognitively motivated? One can perhaps imagine such a creature driven to find and merge with an alter image of itself, or would it fall into an endless philosophical abyss, being endowed with everything except a higher mind or soul?

Situational awareness is perspectival but a higher order of such is multiperspectival by 'mapping' other salient perspectives according to generalised theories of mind - which may include the 'minds' of objects, machines, animals, plants etc. If you know too much in this way you become overwhelmed by the fallacy of mistaking what currently is the case for what can be or will be the case, and so action is greatly inhibited or entirely paralysed. The guide to action in the context of an expanded awareness cannot pass through conscious decision making processes, but must involve some kind of surrender of foresight, planning, modelling to entirely unconscious processes, to some kind of higher self, or other.

The same in every being and phenomenon, one element that pushes forward beyond itself and another that pulls back to render what has become permanent. And these not merely, like yin and yang endlessly cycling and recycling but each in its way becoming more comprehending by the very force of the emergent real.

Thoughts and feelings and the will that ties them together are as much a part of the appearing world as trees and skies and cities. They are as or more opaque to awareness because it gets entangled in them like seaweed or sticky webs. You imagine that they belong to you, that they are you, that you are made of the same stuff. The notion of maya attempts to express this, but fails to capture the supreme innocence of what is at work here.

- The unknowable thing-in-itself is as much the reality of your inner world as it is that of the outer world of phenomena and indeed it does recognise the distinction of inner and outer, nor that of phenomenon and noumenon. It is not hidden behind phenomena or the phenomenal, rather it is them. It is as close as can be but you fail to recognise it because you do not have the concepts, because there are no concepts for it.

Consciousness is merely a high level abstraction used to explain the roots of experience and serves in a context that includes other abstractions such as body, self and mind. Since none of these can function on its own none can reach deeply enough to attain the root of experience, which is without self or mind, or even 'experience' in any familiar form.

Neither enduring nor merely arising and passing away, but to release each being-phenomenon to be as it is, eternising itself in the moment and consuming itself without any residue.

To say that you are immersed in time implies that you are a timeless entity subjected to a regime of continuous flux, but this insight could only be expressed by saying that you are time, but even this does nothing to correct the essentially mistaken character that you lend to time as subject to the distinction between being and becoming. Music perhaps is the closest you can get, and not that it embodies or expresses time and its powers, but on the contrary that time expresses music, being not a neutral medium but an ever blossoming origin and assertion.

If the universe somehow was shown to support consequentialist ethics then that would prove that we are living in a simulation. That is, if the Being of things were calculation or computation, then the highest expression of alignment with Being would be a 'spiritual' expression of this principle. Hitherto this has not been the case, but it may appear in every way to become so in the future, at least for a brief moment before imploding.

Single mood, single taste, colour, sound, bodily feeling, without arousal in any direction. This is normally rejected as a kind of boredom, what you want to escape, but it is a way in which the background becomes apparent, thick and out of time. In the core of this monotone without seeing or falling in any direction.

An opposition can be resolved, or rather dissolved by a change in the ground upon which it was based. I this case there is a loss of any narrative continuity, the shift cannot be described, everything about the former situation is cancelled as if it were a dream, only some vague recollection of the earlier context remains. This naturally escapes dialectics or any other kind of schematism. The intimation that this is always a possibility is only based on the understanding that no state of experiencing possesses its own ground. What serves as ground was always posited in some other time.

The idea that every foundational opposition can be reconciled by some kind of 'transcend and include' synthesis, not easily found but imposing itself by the power of the hidden nature of things, or else the understanding that such oppositions can almost never be reconciled in this way, that they converge on a mutual annihilation of themselves and their common ground were one to attempt to do so - these express different pictures of how being is at work, and of its relationship to the understanding of being. But one of them, however vast its concomitant reality still leaves behind an irreconcilable difference in relation to the other.

Consciousness is the appearance of the world and so within consciousness the reality of a state of affairs and the appearance of that state are not separate. This does not of itself imply that the world is within consciousness.

Consciousness is in direct connection with the entities and forces that affect it but it can only understand them according to its own 'language' which means as filtered through a certain categorical metaphysics which it cannot but produce out of its own nature. It can know enough to sense the uncanny nature of these untranslatable forces and to face up to the abundant evidence of its own secondary nature. At tthis limit of language it knows a strange pregnancy, as if it would give birth to something entirely new, but can find no way to bring it about.

Past and future are driven by the urge to get beyond the moment, to get beyond the self in that moment. You can't arrest this reaching forth because every will including the will not to will is just carried on the same waves. If this moment was you only one, if there were nothing behind or before it then the forces you embody would be naked, exposed in their most mysterious countenance.

If all light is light of the mind and all desire derived from the mind's reservoirs just as all knowledge only what can be restored from the oblivion that infects the mind, then, the sense of self, as much the grey and fuzzy presence behind the eyes as the diamond sharpness three feet behind the head are only the the effects of the solar energy passing through the constricted valve that is the individual, superfluous friction and turbulence.

The metaphysical frame behind everyday reality consists of a series of antinomies: freedom and determinism, real and ideal, being and becoming, etc. All are irresolvable and in particular do not yield to any kind of three-valued synthetic logic or to hard-headed commonsensicalism, all of which only transform the terms of reference but leave the essential oppositions intact. All of these are false dichotomies but this cannot be grasped by starting out from any of them. It is something else again, as if suddenly projected into a space perpendicular to all of them at once in a movement that shatters everything, including the very one who would experience such a shift.

Just as it's always possible to add an 'I think' to any ongoing, so it is always possible to add a 'there is', or 'it gives'. The priority of the subjective position is only apparent, a sort of parallax effect, because in the same sense the objective is equally prior. It finds itself among these happenings and is itself a happening.

The question of being is your birthright but it gets overtaken by a myriad of interests and desires. These are not entirely different because the original question shines out from behind them without being recognised and is what ultimately constitutes their allure. The forgetting of being is an active and ambiguous process, something like the return of the repressed.