The logic of love is both and..., while that of relationship is either or.... The two are never independent, but deeply involve and evoke each other, and so the contradictions that give reality its tone are inevitably born. This is true of many other phenomena, where a finite and an infinite. a particular and a general are yoked together.

The notion of an enduring core self is apparently a fiction that appears to be of some usefulness of comfort to... who or what? Whatever it is that cares enough to take up this idea surely qualifies as self. If no self is the reality then it is hard to see how or why such an alien notion as selfhood could arise. If it is a fundamental antinomy of mind, then the question remains as to why just this line of cleavage, why should it matter so? Put another way, you could say that there is no phenomenon of auto-affection that is not as readily based on no-self as on self - an actual self as self-sufficient microcosm is in no way needed to ground such phenomena. A no-self may be just as selfish as any self, or more so.

In soul the primal phenomenon and anti-phenomenon are unseparated, like Siamese twins before being born, or perhaps fetus and placenta, while psyche is marked by a cut, a choice, a determining that you experience as will. Psyche then is entirely historical, while soul is outside of history which can appear as the multiverse, the non-location where all choices are simultaneously enacted.

Looked at from the direction of psyche soul is an individual person, is the true source of your identity as a self and of your deep subjectivity, but looked at from the direction of pure awareness soul and all-soul are but one single vast and paradoxical event. Some turbulence in water produces rich rippling eddies and currents inward and outward, that seem to have infinite detail and variety, turbulence in the field of pure awareness produces analogous phenomena of vastly greater complexity since in this case the medium itself is generated in the same original act. All-soul can be thought of as this event in a sort of original presence, and so is without any identity or true subjectivity of its own. It conceives the very duality by which it appears to appear.

Between psyche and consciousness or the source and true background of experiencing there is the region of soul, which appears at first as something like the negative of psyche. Where psyche is wounded there may be a crack through which soul can begin to speak to the day time self. Psyche attempts to build a home, to create a habitation or cocoon for itself, but the energy of soul is free structuring without allegiance to any in particular, its kinship is other than with the world. To come upon it, it would seem an angel or a god with the power to recklessly destroy you. So it is absent even from your dreams, and you live in a small place beyond ts shadow.

Transient experiences that seem to overturn or destroy your semblances of equanimity do not do so out of their own 'intent', but only in terms of the reception which they are afforded. They carry with them obscure and rare gifts which they will not yield but to the host who can welcome them without reserve. In these gifts lies the opportunity to replace a portion of semblance with a modicum of a reality that requires no further support or attention.

There is a kind of 'cogito' that is implicit in feeling, a 'sentio' which traces back to being as its precondition, but not in the same way as for thinking, terminating not at an idea of being, or being as idea, as logical necessity, but being as embodies and embodying ground. Nothing in this has any kinship with logic or thought, it is a dark and immediate beingness that remains entirely within feeling, but retains an indelible affirmation and identification.

Once you take on a purely experiential perspective on what is then the dissolution of all metaphysical entities, external or internal, and the distinction between them becomes inevitable. Every layer of individual identity naturally falls into this, even if at the outset it seems to constitute the fulcrum of your inquiry, and paradoxically while all of this is going on, this infinite reevaluation, nothing needs to change at all. It is the presumed bases, the grounds of experience, its location within a system of reality that changes, while the contents in themselves (but what are they after all?) remain as they ever were, are, and will be.

The ego's myth of specialness, which is not to be distinguished from its project of anti-specialness, requires every known event to be split into an esoteric and an exoteric side. The former is arrayed in a strange collage of diverse and colourful pieces designed to fascinate, seduce and mislead, to suggest far more than it can ever deliver. It is the latter however that you believe, and in which every important selection and election takes place, in a fog of inattention.

You can only be grateful that the same forces that enabled this self to meld together and defy every circumstance can, by a slight twist, become the very forces that rend it apart, while you look on in calm dismay. The ego is a Quixote, its hero's journey discovered to be merely the fool's errancy.

The constant colourless awareness that underlies every experience could count as the origin or precondition, but it has no self and doesn't care. Regret, care and hope are the declensions of fear and pride and a kind of knowing precedes them and makes them possible, a knowing that embraces every alternative at once, and it too has no self and no preference, is unable to engage. What is the self is conjured out of these two as if it were real, or were on the way to become real, or had once been real, but only in the great imaginary.

The dreamer's every thought, feeling and perception are filigreed expressions of his sole desire which is to remain asleep, to keep on dreaming, and therefore he can never awaken. Even the transitions between sleep and waking are dreamed. The only clue that something is amiss is a shadowy despair that haunts every changing scene.

What is prior, condition of possibility (as if it is clear that possibility precedes actuality, and what is eventuating is necessarily the actual), the origin upsteam of the phenomenon, all of these are attempts at what it is you seek to bring into the light, and without questioning the nature and position of that presumed and understood light. But step by erroring step, in a sort of zig zag, something comes into focus regardless, but what is thus revealed could only be how it looks from here, where what is here is only so because of the freedom of what has granted it. So what we see remains only our own reflection, a mirage before the ineffable.

Strong and undesired feelings confine your mind in the body and in the situation and to the role of questioning them. Are they such as your understanding can enable you to alter or dissolve? And the answer proves to be no, then what is their source, what their legitimacy? Is their source more in you or in the situation you find yourself in? What would be an authentic way to separate these alternatives, to assign the true weight of each? And are they a call for some action, and if so what sort of action do they call for? These thoughts are not separate from the feelings but are like a net of veins that both nourishes them and holds them in the shape that they have. And are they really undesired or are they the shadowing forth or unavowed, unavowable desires?

The original concealment against which the revelation of true being is taken to be unconcealment cannot be thought as a contingency, like that dark side of something already extant in an illuminated clearing, as for example the moon. What does not choose to show itself may be contrary to all showing so that what emerges in light has been wrested from darkness in a singular event. What seems from here to be the background is in reality the deep, a black hole or a teeming chaos.

The only power of the mind alone is interpretation, and so the situation becomes only interpretation of the situation, which ought to be a death spiral but evades that fate by its weakness at interpretation of interpretation.

Every thought is also a thought act, you are doing something by thinking this thought and what you are doing is not the same as what you are thinking about. On both levels it is a matter of a kind of meaning and so these can only come into effect within a context that determines the field of significances that turn event into intent. Mood does not account for this, even though it seems to, but you can in fact free the mood from any thought content so that it becomes a static field of feeling. As far as the content of the thoughts are concerned there seems to be a sort of menu or table of values in play, as changeable as the weather, but accepted immediately as if handed down and never questioned. Where thought are stale it is this menu of values that is to blame, that is lacking in variety and true nourishment.

An organism, a family, an organisation, a mind all of these are determined by the possession of an immune system. They need to identify what it not self and to find ways to exploit it and reject it, and they have no similar need to identify what is self. Defining the self, if it occurs, is only to serve as a further means of dealing with the not self, such means themselves forming a bewilderingly diverse array, with perhaps its own immune system. This is a somewhat positive spin on the Heraclitean insight of nature as pervasive war. As in history anything that emerges as a being has emerged out of war.

Does human reality serve to bring forth the hidden possibilities of being as life, or does life exist to realise the hidden possibilities of consciousness by way of human reality? In either case consciousness or mind in its human expression and the life in which it operates, as it were, are two different things, two different absolutes.

Autoaffection as an activity in the service of self, as constitutive of self is a kind of whistling the dark, making a noise to prove to yourself that you are still there. Terror at the image of abandonment is one of the last veils separating the self from its groundless nothingness and so is preferred to its admission. If you are frightened or anxious then you must have or exist as something it is natural to be terrified for, the last resort of care. The nothing does not threaten anything, it is simply nothing, indifferent to life or death. It is not the removal of a guardrail but the realisation that there isn't one, and never was.

Suffering seems as though it is a proliferation of a certain kind of qualia, but that is like saying that night is caused by an infusion of black air, rather it is a way of functioning of the self, crudely thought of as attachment or resistance to what is. And the self is no real thing but a holding pattern of energy set against the natural flow of mind. It facilitates a vortex of auto-affection and does not need a belief in its own existence pr any belief at all. If it could be observed from the outside it would appear as an extraordinary phenomenon, part order, part chaos, a sinister gothic aurora.

The welter of perceptions, imaginings, intuitions and interpretations that constitute the present and aimed at discerning the markers that hindsight will reveal of the future, the urge to this is what is most concrete about your immersion in time. Where does this urge come from? Not from the future nor the present but from the delayed agonies of the past and the desire for their repetition.

Consciousness appears as if it is an intermediary between self and world, but on a more fundamental level there is no distinction between seer and seen, knower and known, experiencer and experience. This would make consciousness a sort of declension of that non-duality and perhaps the closest point in understanding to it.

The ontological figure is act and response, but to what, and within what? It precedes mind naturally since it lays out the regions where mind is and isn't, where you are and aren't and all the correlative knowings. Where you are not, nor mind, where the unknowable shadows the known is no less act and response than every other region. So mind cannot be an expression or representation of this primary act, and neither can anything in any case taken as 'you'.

There is a kind of abstract ontological figure which belongs to the (mostly latent) constitutive level of every experience. It exists in 3 or more dimensions, and it announces the various lines between what is revealed and what is unrevealed. It changes over time over both long and short durations, but at any one moment it expresses the permanent or invariant background against which events flow. When you achieve a degree of inner freedom the figure endows this with an enduring ground in your being, beyond ego, the latter being merely one of the things that pass before it. This is why you are so bewildered when like a cat's cradle it transforms and your freedom is obliterated, as if (your) being itself has changed and lost its depth. But it may be that it hasn't changed at all, but the illumination has changed and it only appears to be different, the deeper dimensions being now in shadow. Phases of the moon may be an appropriate metaphor for this kind of all too frequent loss of light.