What is dream-like about waking life is not its failures of logic and form but precisely the imposition of logic and form, its categorial matrix of near and far, personal and impersonal, mind and body. All of these mask the direct reality of experiencing which is free of all such frames, more effectively than the fabulations of dreaming. This is how the real can be hidden in plain sight, can be out of mind without ever having been forgotten.

That world is not mediated by data, or by what could fairly be called data is clear from the fact that the ground of knowing world is in being, and being can never be a function or result of data, of the it is given, but only of the is. This is an obvious fact or face of experience and if thought through undoes every kind of modelling of presence, even that component which is inescapable in the world as we currently know it.

Thoughts passing in a stream are your own but decidedly are not of your being, regardless of whether they arise as voluntary or involuntary. This is not so with feelings and emotions and also with perception of a world. These latter are apprehended as if through your very being, you are them, and detaching from them while possible is an achievement of thought. Does this say something about such feelings, or does it speak more of what you take inseparably as 'being', as presence, being centred in the body in time?

Consciousness remains the model for knowledge in the sense of what can be directly taken in, worn from the inside, embodied, but it is just in this sense that reason teaches us that consciousness is deficient, that the event of experience exceeds any model of self-transparency, this being the only kind of knowing that consciousness purports to be. And indeed, the findings of scientific inquiry exceed the results of reasoning in the same way. Consciousness however puts itself forward as still being able, in rare moments, to inhabit models of itself embedded inside a structured unconscious, something wholly other to itself. It strives towards that in the belief that if only it can get it exactly right a hidden door will open within, as under an 'open sesame'.

That the thoughts which arise, no matter how disconnected they may be, how much they seem largely somatic and chaotic have the consistent quality of being 'your' thoughts, of spiraling up from your very heart, even if you immediately repudiate them, is perhaps a developmental achievement, hard won, because without this short circuiting ownness, they would simply interpellate you and hence limn your sphere of ownness in a yet more intense way. The ego is a factor of control, a negative feedback, lodged against wild energies, but also complicit with them, a velvet madness.

The idea of a dark background consciousness out of which the experiencing arises serves to displace the rigid illusion that that 'you' are the sole source of your experience. The latter is incoherent but nonetheless forms the basis of ordinary life, it is a sort of local minimum hard to escape. Whether there is a background consciousness or not is immaterial, the idea serves only as a lever. There is a kind of knowing of what is prior to experiencing, but consciousness is not the right name for it.

Experience is both momentary and extended along the axis of time. These two aspects are independent but interacting realities. The same could be said of consciousness which cannot exist without its hidden dimension parallel to time and as much a consciousness at the other. It is only certain conditions of experience which lead to the sense of their separation.

Being for us is will, the pure and blind force of happening, history and fate, of what we must accept as events. Is love then a modification of will, a kind of will, that goes counter to will, that detains it in its onrush, or is it something else alien to will, or what was left concealed in being when we took it as nothing but will? Is love will refracted through consciousness, bent around by something that remains, or is it the other way around, is consciousness and all that results from it, will refracted through love, its prior?

Of all of the attributes and categories that apply to things, their whatness, thatness, how, when and why, their identity and modality, we can gain an awareness of putting them forth, and so they cannot be applied to what puts them forth, an act which therefore cannot be known as an act. All of this would seem to make of this source a somewhat less real, something imagined out of misapplied notions, when on the contrary it must be the sole and entirely unknowable reality. This intimation troubles reality but also constitutes its gateway into uncaused felicity.

Everything that accompanies existence is not existence and has no necessary connection to it, it is not bliss or consciousness but pure neutrality. This is why there can be no will to exist, it cannot be an object of desire. What appears as this will is the will to be loved, or to be love, and that is the only source of the consciousness and bliss, of the eclosion of the world.

It may be that the schemata for acquiring and consolidating beliefs are formed by and for evolutionary survival and not for truth, but these same goals also make it necessary to freely abandon some or all beliefs under various kinds of prompting. This makes truth a salient possibility linked to such negations and identifiable as such, especially in the experiences around disillusion and disenchantment so that under certain perverse conditions truth itself may become a goal. Truths that dwell on the impossibility of truth are an immature stage of such a development, as are truths too neatly summarised.

The early acquisition of a set of latent core beliefs which define yourself in terms of your basic relations to others and the world, and of the world and the various others in relation to yourself, may be a mechanism which has outlived its utility in a world of ostensible pursuit of individual truth. These beliefs quickly sink beneath the surface and like buried rocks influence the currents of the stream that flows over them. That you can to any degree bring them to light and alter of dissolve them may be your only freedom, your only possible achievement. And further still the impersonal and historical matrix out of which they crystalise.

The sense that your thoughts are the free products of your own motivating authorship, or that you are the investigator initiating your own inquiries is an explanatory fiction that covers a strange gap in the linking of thought. It is another inquiry altogether to focus on this gap carefully putting primary and secondary assumptions in their correct order - it is as difficult as it would be to trace the exact border between dreaming and waking.

All psyches, human and otherwise, are linked in a vast and dometimes tenuous network. This has always been so, a noosphere, even if more apparent now. Does this form a kind of entity, a gaian egregore, the Other behind the Other, our passing ground and giver of all meaning? And if so, what is its state? Is it a chaos, a kind of hell of transmitted and endogenous pain, or does it float serene, all things being well, if unsuspectedly so? Both would seem to be true. We cannot measure it or seek its response, but perhaps find our own place in it, from time to time, now here and now there.

What you came here to learn... the life abstracted to a figure or two in an unknown language, a sort of close-reading by a critic who both is and is not yourself - and forming a part of some larger work or treatise... again to be read, abstracted... your expanding personhood, rather than the source of all error, being the lens through which some intimation of its true contours, its true dynamic can be effected.

A human life is not equivalent to a letter in a scroll, or a word or even a sentence, but something more like a poem. Which is not to say that a life richer in experiences makes for a longer of better poem, it is not an epitaph, but that however simple it seems it contains checks and contradictions, oblique non sequiturs as well as its own unmistakable music. Every life is special, but only in a special way. It is because an individual life is the only container of contradictions, of impossibilities failed or overcome, that mind can have a vehicle, that its great drama of ideas can be played out.

The problem with consequentialist ethics is that you cannot know all the consequences of your acts. Any rule that it applies to a specific case can only have uncertain outcomes. Indeed the rule itself will be arbitrary depending on the horizon chosen for projecting forward in time. So, it is better to choose a rule that is determined as good in itself, that is a deontological one. If you were able to see through to all consequences of your action to the limit of time then you would naturally be a consequentialist and your deontological rule would stand exposed as an heuristic for dealing with the in-principle uncertainty of the natural stance. In a theistic universe God could function precisely to inform the conscience of one whose faith was open to such a communication of what the best action would be if all consequences were revealed. In this sense God would analogous to knowledge of the solution to the halting problem. As a corollary such a God, who can only be known by faith, would underwrite personhood. Trans-temporal wisdom is sufficient for drawing the same conclusion.

If the thought experiment of jumbled qualia goes through, that two individuals in perfect conversational agreement regarding qualia, due to consistent cultural and life-historical associations, say for colours, could nonetheless be experiencing different qualia, what would this say about consciousness? And what would it say if it failed, due to the anchoring of such experiences in quantitative and geometric invariants? On the one hand there is a solution of continuity between the world of things and that of experiences, on the other the latter cannot made up entirely of qualia as if free from all context. The concept of consciousness breaks under such questionings.

Qualia are often spoken of as if they were independent things, tokens of a given type. This may be a consequence of their confusion with Buddhistic notions of instantaneous atoms of experience without a unifying substrate, or else it is a linguistic artefact - we have a shared and more or less effective language for sensations and feelings, although the intended meaning of qualia is precisely what this language does not even pretend to reach. In fact there cannot be a single quale without an answer to 'whose quale?' Almost everything that is encompassed by attention to qualia belongs to the one who is experiencing and is hidden in the foreground experience. No qualia but qualia in person might be the correct motto.

No being that is not being for the 'I' and yet the one reality that is not in being is that very 'I'. Beginning with body being streams out of the 'I' and nothing would be amiss if it was not compelled to turn back towards itself, the swerve that makes a world.

The rich consistency and inevitability of local minima, their history and acknowledgments can make them seem more real than the local maxima with their febrile and quixotic entitlements, but both are entirely contingent invitations to act. They neither speak of you as you really are nor of someone in general. They are simply options which can be taken up or let go of at will by an experiencing without needs of its own.

Awareness is mostly absorbed in the outermost layer of mind, the actual. Of the inner layers which drive it you cannot say that they are conscious nor that they are unconscious but are as if always a striving to become conscious, to awaken. The deepest layers are intimations of being and somewhere in the passage between is where you place yourself as a sort of persistent hindrance to the flow of simple creation, as a disharmony, a resistance that nonetheless insists on being resolved, a someone and a no one.

Subjective experience as distinct from the engagement with objective states of affairs and situations, which appears as if made of thoughts and feelings consists of layered and hierarchically related fields each with its own pull in a certain direction, so that you can let go of one and divert attention to its 'senior' field. This simple and everyday capability, about which language has much to do, is what suggests the idea of a detached awareness. That you can go from absorption in one setting to consideration of the setting of motives, to that of motives of motives and so on is a reminder that you are homeless even in your own mind - or that mind is another term for this fundamental homelessness.

Or if it is not the particular state or situation itself that aspires to eternalise itself it is its principle. So, if you would champion the ephemeral small things of life, the very fact of not needing to think beyond the moment in its mitigated fulness. This is a kind of categorical imperative: experience as if the principle of your experience were a worthy part of truth.

Every coherent state of mind or attitude or situation fails to become absolute and eventually breaks down into it diverging components, a sort of entropy of the mind. But this assumes that every such attitude or state also aspires to be absolute or to find its place already prepared within the absolute or unchanging truth. Humble as it may be every assertion would like to be true. And even more so the fragments, elements of pure wish, shards of certainty floating in a chaos of shards.