The spiritual in that sense, as the achieved absolute spirit is enclosed within metaphysics, already taking for granted the meaning of being a mere presence. It has not so much completed the labour of the negative as simply risen to a stature where the negative has no more to do. Starting from soulful there is the potentiality to go much further although at far greater risk. Only the forces brought into play via the soul have the power to propel you past that seemingly ideal stopping point. This is paradoxical because these forces come from the body or at least from the action of embodiment, but they reach to a cessation beyond the 'body-line'.

In respect of music a (half-serious) system of classification suggests itself, which might also apply in other areas. On a descending scale with considerable leeway for overlap, there are, the spiritual (spirit in the sense of absolute-spirit, nothing to do with religion which belongs mostly in the next level) which is independent of the forms of experience, such as time and space, the psychicl or soulfull, having to do with all heavens and hells and the myriad channels between them, and is embodied but independent of the precise form of body, then the endocrinel, fully embodied in a human body with ordinary human passions, then the animalicl which is bodily but focused on certain parts of the body, then the insectoidl and the vegetablel - which being directly below the spiritual on the spiral can easily be mistaken for it. Everyone will fill these categories out differently, but for example, only Bach and Mozart populate the spiritual, Wagner and Bruckner are psychic and Mahler and Verdi endocrine, or animalic and insectoid, take your pick, American minimalism is vegetable.

Not all cycles of absence, irritation and assuagement give rise to that special degradation of the soul known as addiction, but perhaps all that distinguishes them is the depth or tenor of the solace produced when the missing factor is recovered. Despite the soul's eager contribution to its own enslavement is largely true that the body with its extraordinary capacity for intensities all over the 'valence' spectrum, is the matrix of addiction. Are there then any addictions that arise purely from the spirit? Perhaps the biggest one of all, the addiction to having a body.

The is nothing but experience, but what you experience is always and everywhere its conditionality, its lack of power over itself. What is outside of experience ends up dominating experience, entirely from within experience. It's like that formula, X is not X, therefore it is X. This cannot be undone, only the inner negation makes possible the positive.

What throws you from equanimity to indigence first appears as a disturbance in a latent narrative which forms a part of your working map of what is real. Although what is at stake are private beliefs and passions the feelings have an insistently objective seeming motivation, akin to rational madness. In this way of generalising, objectifying and justifying feelings there is a kinship with the ethical. Is it that the ethical arises out of a sterilisation of such passions as guilt, resentment etc., or is it the other way around, that guilt, resentment etc., ride in upon the coattails of say, one's innate sense of justice?

Say that not only the form or context of experience descends from, or emanates from that strange reality known as consciousness, but also its content or inner structure in and through time. So what is unfolded down to the last and most particular leaf is at the same time infolded in the simultaneity of the origin. This is revealed along the lines of the values you have brought forth in choices and not of knowledges acquired. Where the self is is in that view and review of life in regard to the whole, the residue when all circumstances have been burnt away. It is at the limit of psyche and it too is only preparation to be burnt away in love.

The world is structured through what is acquired, language, experience, exploration, handed down knowledges and practices. Nothing is possible without all of this, nothing could ever be pointed out without the world fist subdivided along conceptual trace lines that prime any distinction. All of this has a certain history and so belongs to mind, and mind is only a certain configuration of the underlying consciousness, which both possesses and is entirely free from every distinction and discrimination.

In the analogy of host and guest, what is also called consciousness is the host which means it responds through representations which it creates from within itself and so is a doing, hence a willing and hence, no matter how constrained must be free, or be freedom itself. And again what is the guest, what could it ever be but a host in an unwonted role. What characterises it is not correlative qualia which are systematisable objectives of a read-to-hand kind of being, but freedom which is a thoroughly paradoxical concept that cannot be subsumed in any system. Arguments against freedom, when they are not the usual stupid ones against 'fee-will' ought to be no more than refutations of their premises.

If the root moment is akin to a doing, will not in the abstract but in act, then it is also a kind of work, creative of change and of a reaction, friction, heat, concomitant undoing. Both enjoying and suffering in the same turning. This is not consciousness of suffering, but consciousness as suffering. Doesn't that sober up your universe rather suddenly?

The terms consciousness and awareness for the context of what is, and their associated problems, introduce a bias towards a passive witnessing, the correlative of qualia - they are consciousness of..., or awareness of ..., and hence intentionality and its baggage. The only way that a ground of this kind can be productive or can overcome the introduced gap between subject and object is though some kind of idealism. Different terms are needed if the core is a kind of activity, a doing without a doer. This opens a window to a relation or response to givenness beyond the circumference of ownness, an other-ownness in whose embrace you have emerged for a time.

It might be said that at base there is no seeing of..., as in seeing X, but only and everywhere a seeing of ... as ..., seeing X as Y - a way of taking in the operation of consciousness more fundamentally that as representation. But then there would be a seeing X as X, which might as well be the simple seeing of X. Or else say that there must always be a synthesis of diverse, even heterogenous, elements, that some syntheses are made and some are given. And where you are, the only place you could be, is where the energy is in the synthetic imagination, far upstream of any subject - which would only appear from time to time as only another putting together. Further insight into this is, however, not precluded.

Going upstream by representations for things which are neither works of art nor of techne may be a different matter altogether. Exiled from Platonic realms you cannot with any assurance encounter the creative or shaping force behind that thing, even if you posses developed knowledge of the intricate systems that present and are presented by it. What remains for the encounter is only its sheer beingness and your own. Knowledge is of no assistance here, but only something akin to artistic creation can hold all of the threads in something like a transparent balance.

You don't experience anything directly, but only appearances or representations. But do you then experience the appearances directly? No, every appearance as appearance is immediately cancelled in favour of whatever it is you experience through those appearances. You hear sounds, but these only translate vibrations of the air at your ears, and these vibrations translate data streamed from the recording, which only translates the vibrations of some past strings and sound box, which in turn translate the pianist's muscle activations, which translate a certain history in their body and mind, which translate markings on a page and so on and so on until you get to whatever the source might have been for the composer's creation, or sheer music-ness - and that is what you experience so directly that it takes you up body and soul. Perceptual directness is a fiction, all that happens starts and ends in the same place, in consciousness, or soul, or whatever name you choose to give it.

In that primal look where the world suddenly blossomed out of the self, there not having been any self prior to that moment, and what there came now was without any mark, and where there was no time and no space because there was no mapped origin point, no reference, no things or boundaries (or everywhere is pure boundary), only pure ek-stasis, outness, and you still had hold of the unchanging presence without arising or passing away. And this mobile now was yet to emerge and spread itself like a skin over all appearance.

The wide-eyed, surprised and fascinated stare of the very young infant out at the world contains no sense of all of this being constituted or staged in the mind, the child is not an idealist, nor is he a realist. Time and space, or rather the density and thickness of time and space are present without being so identified but as pure intelligibility without a subject. When you seek to undo the lostness in the world that has later come over you it is not by further hair-splitting over its terms but as a knowing reawakening of that awed and ready absorption in presence.

The more you insist that all is change, that reality is made up of a stream of minute momentary sparks or worlds, the more the medium of this flowing, the change itself, seems constant and unchanging. Yes, even emptiness is empty, you might reply. But the locus of this observation is entirely different.

A mood will carry over into dreams but the story associated with that mood and which seems to contain its inner necessity is completely altered. The story then, with all its trigger-points and inescapable twists does not reach the core of the mood and cannot be used to dislodge it. You could think instead of autonomous patternings of bodily energy that point to no truth that could ever be grasped through conceptual, historical understandings. And yet the mind strives incessantly to unearth the right story in unbeknowing service to the mood. As if your desire is only to keep the experience of it going, as if the formation in the mood is already a kind of ego.

The real world in which your will is engaged and in which your birth and death are the limiting events is a world in which you as a distinct entity with a mind and a body are the central objects, the matters from which... Your senses do not define you as the engaged perceiver but this is a necessary inference, although subject to intermittences in sleep and delirium etc. All of this functioning structure brings with it the possibility of paying attention to all of your experiences and thoughts as a kaleidoscopic flow of unattached essences, the margin of awareness of awareness. When you do this then by analogy with world experiencing you locate a witnessing self and an accompanying body-like constancy. In this way the detached unchanging observer emerges but only as an analogy of experience. It is not, and could not be, itself witnessed. That this apparent witnessing has no centre and no body-like constancy is a realisation that opens to a deeper mystery in the nature of the being-here.

Almost all of human relationship is mediated by a screen of projections which goes both ways. Any harmony of projections is as much an accident as any dissonance, but the latter makes the screen potentially more visible, but also more unlikely. Primary emotions can cross the screen which is why there can be no real end to suffering, since as one's projections dissolve the suffering of others only becomes more apparent. Whether you have a duty to work to reduce that suffering is doubtful, but it would seem that there is a duty to tacitly show that you can see it.

The unification of experience and its temporalisation are the same thing, prior to self which only emerges out of the moods engendered by this base reaiity, as impermanence, attachment and suffering, or as power and enjoyment, which are their other face. These are the inevitable precipitates of this dense flow, requiring only the minutest point of impurity, of disharmony to crystalise.

Everything is impermanent and weighs nothing at all, at any moment you can start again from zero. All the will and repetition, the grand narratives and enchanted moments, the wonderful and well-loved lies, all go down in the end. Whoever you are, you are a traveler on your own Winterreise, there is nothing you can take with you, alone you wake to a new dawn, a new start.

If there is a single basic form of awareness then it is neither like perception nor cognition, neither external nor internal, neither temporal not intemporal, but such that all these divisions can be abstracted out of it in an attention that seeks clear boundaries, something analogous to measurement. Music is the closest we have to a direct exposure of this kind. as if the very first experiences emerging from the void and at one with the void were musical gestures, unbearably intense and freighted with potential depths of meaning.

The consistency of the world is a result of the notions of time, space and causality, the two former being the conditions for the latter which does the 'heavy lifting'. These ideas are so natural to you that they seem to belong in the world, to be of the world, whereas the world of in fact of them. They aren't just ideas in the same sense as other ideas which come and go in the mind, but are the very substance of what is taken to be mind as if that is a separate thing from world. A similar but faster 'always already' applies to the realm of concepts themselves, not causality but implication, folded-togetherness, and this is what makes the knower-in-time out of the timeless knowings in experiencing, including the one whose recorded musing this purports to be.

Space, time and causality are the conditions of your world and so are not properly in your world - by their relativity to the observer, according not to actual but merely possible experiences, they point to an impersonal subject behind the subject you believe yourself to be. You can grasp this at the limits of your knowing, and so you should be able to answer the question of their original form, that is, what names time, space and causality go by prior to choosing to bloom as a world? Names that they have carried with them secretly within this world.

You are what expresses the care in each moment, but this is made of such changes that you are never the self-same thing, or else you are what wears experience like a glove, known only in the rare moments of transparent retrospection. The secret here is to be found not in detachment, in holding back, but in the fullest engagement with each occasion.