At the core of all negativities lies abandonment, from the distress of an infant left too long alone to Christ's last words on the cross. What has abandoned you need not be something or someone in particular but the very framework behind all events and acts of willing, call it Being or the gods if you want, it is that element in actions that makes them more than what they seem, that enlists reality itself to swerve towards some kind of ultimate positive outcome. Without this everything is only just what it is and leads only back to the very place you now and forever find yourself.

Mind intended as what is cognate to experience, its container, source and destination all at once, must include heart as well as the thought box that we generally mean by mind. What shows itself in this way depends on the kind of language that prevails, which means the kind of theory of language implicit in the language employed for receiving and piloting happenings. While the language in the sense of English, French, German etc. stays the same language in this other sense can vary over a wide range. One might for example consider the minimally large or broad language in which Anselm's Ontological Proof holds true. If someone goes to the trouble of refuting this argument they are doing nothing more than 'dialing down' the scope of the language, or of the peculiar language/meta-language nexus. The heart, even though it does not speak, or only speaks by silence, is a part of this.

You think and there you are at the prow of thought, or else, you think and the thought is there before you. How to tell the difference? There is never only thought, but there must also be that which thought must respond to and that which answers to the venture of thought, often in unforeseen and unwanted ways. In one sense you are necessarily engaged, even fatally engaged, in the other sense you are always disengaged and could not enter the game even if you found a reason to do so.

In thinking the meta-thought, if it arises, that which embodies awareness of awareness of the thinking, is immediately displaced from the site in which it has arisen into a forward attentional site in which it takes on a form, even if that form is not yet expressible in words. In this way thinking always 'maps the meta-language into the language' - inviting paradox - and at the same time travesties itself. The main source of oblivion, in culture as in thinking, is the translation of a content into a different and lower register. A form in understanding that is native to a 'high energy' realm cannot exist at a lower energy, but nonetheless must be translated by this reflex of embodied reflection. This process, inseparable from self-awareness or what is called consciousness, gives rise to numerous monstrosities.

It's not so much that your theories of the world are twisted to become mirrors of the one who is looking, as that your theory of mirrors and the one who is looking becomes twisted towards your theories of the world. Constraints are in play either way, but they are not simple, nor simple to undo.

It is the simplest and most natural and accustomed things and states projected into the space and time before you that raise the deepest questions, that bestow the greatest mystery upon you. It may be glimpsed first in silence but it is not a creation of silence but of apprehended ordinariness.

So much of metaphysics comes down to attempting to mediate your gut feeling about the reality of the world versus the reality of you in the light of your imminent death. As if the world expresses its own 'cogito' as if you were its thought, or production - and then the two cogitos go head to head, like two titans in a fight to the death - in which perhaps the best you can hope for is mutually assured destruction. Your gut feeling about this comes from deep within and precedes all speculations.

In dreams some of the oblivion of broader awareness is lifted because there is less anchoring in the body, and waking narratives are rerun in a confused way within a wider field. The individual ego self is an effect of the absence of a broader causal and relational context. Whether is broader field is forgotten or simply tuned out is not clear, but it seems as though its absence serves a necessary purpose, for otherwise there would be nothing to dream about.

"Consciousness" in the cluster of different ways it is understood today strictly corresponds to the late-stage and troubled ego-self, both as analogy and as metaphysical opposite, and while the latter indefatigably seeks and brings about its mirror images in the culture, the former does so in thought, in intellectuality and in the relentless technologic imperative. It is a matter of forcing these shyly non-existent elements to expose themselves.

Sufficiently complex cybernetic networks naturally form sustained boundaries between an inside and an outside and so form autopoietic cells with de facto unity, consciousness then emerging when it does so after the fact and riding on top of these effects of mind. Something like that would be the alternative account of the phenomena of phenomena. Is this coherent? Does it square with your experience? Or is one more of the tortuous ways in which conscious strives to mirror itself? And is not this apparent drive for self-reflection, or self-allegory, merely a mark of the epoch in which we find ourselves?

Consciousness is aware or its own being aware of something. Whatever the faith ascribed to that something, the awareness of the awareness seems indubitable. It flashes out from the background at the slightest movement, it was always already there, and whatever certainty there can be in consciousness derives from its quickness. This is why centres of consciousness cannot be disconnected; disconnection belongs only to the object, the something, which is always a synthesis, to be immediately superceded by that flashing apperception which is unitary. So, 'transcendental unity of apperception' is a double tautology.

Is a consciousness without a subject possible, a radically unowned consciousness? If you imagine discrete disconnected instants of an awareness this does not fit the bill since each the instantaneous nature of the awareness does not preclude in any way it having a subject, it fails to address the question, and the discontinuous nature of the succession of such moments entails a space in which this diversity is registered as such, which then is effectively the underlying consciousness, the moments now simply variants within it. You might instead coming at it from the outside, imagine a compresence of some variety of existents which achieves a transparent self-representation, that is which becomes a situation, achieves internal differentiation and wholeness, but does so in a way that each distinguished part has an equal claim on being the centre, or subject. In this case the subject-object distinction is done away with before it can arise. This might be conceivable and were it realised would lead to a very different topology of world than that which we have assumed.

The onrush of thoughts, no matter how involuntary as to velocity and timbre, is imbued with the quality of original willfulness, as it was discovered in early childhood along with language. But this skin of 'I want' that what must now be thought through wears is just as must to divert attention away from the equal or larger mass of 'I don't want' and that it how it can come to seem so like mental debris, just stuff that no one wants blowing dustily through the same empty place.

Your experience, in its keenest and most personal aspect, the existential distillation of fronting, as it were, a lifetime, is both entirely yours, is 'ownmost', and also belongs not in the least to you but to the unknown being, the absolute event, of your life. In its former truth it is only a function of memory and mind and is soon reabsorbed into the world, but in the latter it is outside of time and a unique facet of the nameless.

Conscious moments in their experienced fulness seem to be a togetherness of smaller and more discrete conscious moments and so lead to the question of binding. How do these original free-floating moments come together to form someone's experience? This way of thinking seems flawed, but if it were so then there would have to be a different kind of discrete moment that functioned as the binder in a one-to-many relation. What would cause such moments, and what form would they take if they were not filled? It is almost as if a certain kind of conscious formation, a pure self vortex were to be continually emitting these empty binding qualia which each pulled in a number of the smaller saturated qualia. And other bunding moments bound these, and so on. The negotiation between owned and unowned qualia is impossible to conceive. The idea seems to follow from an overextended metaphor or analogy.

In the initial moment when a feeling sensation arises, either perceptual or emotional, it is unclaimed, it doesn't belong to you or to the other. You might say that it is not yet resolved whether it arises from primary or from mirror neurones. It is in the world and the world precedes you. The only exception seems to be physical pain which is for that reason not merely isolating, but worldless.

The core of the individual is a virtual self, virtual because it never directly comes to presence but is known as the place of willing, feeling, and thinking, both directly and in memory and anticipation, the place from which and to which these continually refer. In every one of these cases there is a disturbing reversibility at play. If you can will, can know yourself in the acting of will, you can also be the object of another will, can be willed, subject to the power of another so that the originating position is precisely not-you. In the same way as you can be the one who feels you can also be the one who is felt, can be subsumed in the other's feeling, and as you think and know, so you can be thought and known. These dualities are the spice of life, but they can also be highly unnerving and uncanny. They are why the individual subject is always a work in progress whose outcome remains essentially uncertain.

Whatever happens is silent and unexpected. If you can hear yourself thinking you are not thinking, if you can anticipate it it cannot arrive. You cannot invite, you can only welcome.

It's not enough to have a theory of value or valence, as if those represented something stable. All values deliquesce, not because they contain hidden contradictions but simply through the weakening power of repetition and habituation. Consciousness is not a thing but a seeking of new saliences, in which newness is in the more important than meaning. The universe driven by the flight from boredom.

The problem perceived as the 'binding' of distinct moments of consciousness refers to the same question as Kant identified with his 'transcendental unity of apperception', the former seeming viewed from the outside and the latter from the inside. In either case the question remains unresolved, because not fully stated, in either terms. This is because in the mere statement of the question a view is already presumed in which these 'moments' belong together. There is no flux of proto-conscious events, nor is there a world in which these atomic qualities first arise. It is all or nothing, or better, it is all and nothing.

You swim in shared knowings to the point where your adversarial individuality is itself shared in every respect of form and function, and so the transcending of this individuality, which is the task at hand, is already implicit in its setting forth, oneness being at the attainable limit, as it is at the origin, of the common way. The grounding of such knowing is something else again and must pass through the very extreme of the isolated self, which is why it is the most remote of attainments.

The density of the ordinary world is not maintained by thought but by the conceded attunement to common sense and its foundation in the everyday practices of the natural man, with their attendant joys and sorrows, and their active roots in magic. The world of thought and its own magical creations is the stepchild of this all-embracing matrix.

Music speaks directly of the possible experiences of different kinds of body, of embodiment, by way of energy patterns in time. Mostly this is of the physical, mental and emotional bodies or some combination, recognisable by a distinctive relation to time and the enunciation of phrases and units of meaning, but there is also music of the subtle body which has an entirely different structure and is recognisable by slowly overlapping waves of intensity without a clear beginning of end, and which compared to the more familiar kind seems to be utterly disembodied and predominately spatial. Once you experience this distinction it becomes apparent that no matter how far out the first kind of music is its efforts, by way of breaking up and permuting its meanings, at transcendence of form are doomed to failure. One has at best portentious analogies of transcendence, but these cannot on their own effect any kind of breakthrough, and only make it less likely.

There is an effortless, spontaneous, impersonal and very fast consciousness that simply lays out the diagram of what is, and out of which what appears and what appears to you and your situation is abstracted. What happens as your thoughts is at first actions made within this living diagram - pick up this piece, turn it and put it over there and the doer of these actions are all at first merely given. But even this giving is an abstraction from the never fully illuminated totality. It is this spontaneous and thought free consciousness that you want to steer back on itself only it must be of its own accord, doing without a doing or a doer.

The psyche's relation to time is entirely magical, its wishes are palpable and autonomous forces, the past exacts its revenge upon it. Its house is haunted by immemorial tribal fetiches, merely seeping beneath a veneer of decay. Even its much celebrated freedom is only a parole, a few words whose power vanishes in the dark.