'Why is there something rather than nothing?' the core question of metaphysics should be asked with respect to experience: not what is or why is consciousness in a factical sense, but why any experience at all, and so ay world at all, rather than sheer nothing. It may be difficult to focus on this aright but it is the question most suited to consciousness, as if a first answer would be 'so that it can inquire into its own being.' Everything exists to distract from this but also to point to it, so that never stops haunting every occurrence, every presentation and situation.

The trouble with all of the classic idealist arguments based on an appeal to the de facto priority of consciousness and its internal meaning making in any kind of knowledge or experience is that they rely upon the 'there-is-ness' of consciousness, requiring that it have the sort of being as what we only acknowledge for the legitimate furniture of 'reality'. This assumption already throws the argument in the opponent's favour. If you would get behind this objection then you have to surrender 'consciousness' and every other term that would ground an idealism - you have to give up idealism in favour of a sort of supra-idealism inexpressible in ordinary language.

What you call consciousness only occurs within a certain range of durations, say from one tenth of a second to a few seconds, and a slightly broader range accessible after special cultivation - a fact which reinforces its dependence on duration. Experience, however, goes on is a plurality of ranges outside of this spectrum, from the instantaneous to the entire life-span, and possibly still further. It is marked, in particular, by the inner relations of multiple spans, and this is why the self is an indispensable category for experience, providing a sort of (virtual or real or both) pivot between spans.

Consciousness is experience considered as a kind of substance, considered, that by itself. As such it is subject to many kinds of strange internal relations, like causality but so much more general. The category of causality is an abstraction from the inwardly known co-arisals of consciousness. And it is closed in that the only things that can affect consciousness are consciousness, and necessarily the 'same' consciousness, although sameness and difference have a different a different and more original sense too. Consider, for example, how the other's consciousness appears to affect your own, how for this to happen there must be a common substrate beyond any theories of mind.

Waking consciousness is a continual interpreting, reading the word and the body and the self in other terms, with other goals, but always with a residue, with paths not taken, with alien possibilities left unexplored. The reality experienced is this infinite open-endedness and path-dependence - or say that experience is a reduction of a path that extends from and towards the unknown. Only in dreams and in fictions does there ever appear a perfect passage to a transformed state.

The cunning of desire is the way that it refracts the fundamental tendency towards nothingness and oblivion, the pure white light of desire, into the multicoloured rainbow of motives and myths, persons and purposes, that make up a life. You experience this zero state at all times, it is the constant, 'is that all there is?' which you mistake for that which you are urged by time itself to avoid at all costs.

No experience can ever be self-validating even though the subjective sense of incorrigibility can increase without limit. As experience there is always a fringe of doubt in its implicit horizon and even when that fringe is entirely exposed and reincorporated within the subject, other forms of validation remain open. Only something which is not and can never be an experience could participate in a certainty without lines of fracture, and what this is must then be without effects in the shared reality.

Non-duality is not a metaphysics, and not is it a state or experience. Perhaps it could be described as the end of seeking, of the very root and branch of seeking, but then you must ask what seeking is, that is out must seek out seeking, which is itself for the most part a venture or option towards its own questioning. In trying to say something about your own action you are caught in a trap from which you cannot escape by going forwards or backwards.

In the sublunary world, the world of separation, of asymptotic fulfillment, it is impossible to locate the thought that lies t its origin, the founding error. On the other side, from unity, there is no such thought and no such separation, ad no founding thought, no initiation of a fall is conceivable - it is no more than an incoherent mythology, apparently believed by an apparent subject. These are not successive states, not even simultaneous, but identical. The difference only appears when looked at from one side, if there were one who looks. Wat happens, happens only because there is no resistance or preference to prevent it.

Although you might conceivably live a full life without ever once turning attention back on itself and activating a reflexive consciousness, this ability is nevertheless intrinsic to consciousness. Initially it might appear to be an addition, an extra that is artfully constructed but in the event it is revealed as belonging to a prior stratum of awareness, as merely the activation or isolation of this prior and ongoing action, and in this way it reveals the potential accessibility of even deeper 'events' located in the same general 'direction'. Refinements of letting go seem to be limited only by your ability to actively-passively remain submerged.

The belief that experience in being what it is at all is for the sake of some end which is ultimately intrinsic to experiencing, to consciousness, is doubtless no more than a distant reflection or echo of egoity, or of that primal narcissism that gets us through the early trials of life, and so must on attaining maturity be given up. However, the giving up of this belief of every last shred of it, is itself that for the sake of which there is experience at all - like finally waking up to being as ever beyond the human.

Every reflection of experience takes it as made only of presence of the invariant present moment, but this is an appearance based on a complete implicit understanding of time in its many dimensions. The wat that the source of experience appears within experience is as this total phenomenon of temporality, of being in time. In this sense it is true that you are time and that there is no such thing as time.

Another thing about consciousness: it has nothing to do with the Cartesian cogito, which means with that particular mental form of self-remembering which is an operation wholly within a certain formation in consciousness of no special kind. Consciousness, does not say 'I am' and indeed does not say 'I' at all. The 'I' depends on consciousness, and is something to do with its human form, but not with consciousness in its fully ontological sense. The human however in all its forms is a striving for a realisation of consciousness, but possessing no special relation to it its striving takes on all sorts of wild unguided forms.

It doesn't 'feel like' something to be conscious, or more like to be consciousness, because consciousness is simply the feeling like, not the feeling like feeling like etc. But it does have some characteristics: it is ontologically central, that is it is not a kind of perception but our exclusive mode of being, so you couldn't say which come first, whether consciousness births being or being births consciousness; it is exclusively taken up however with what it isn't; it has a very strange relationship to time in which it appears to be momentary but also extended, and that duration is present and presence duration. You don't make yourself conscious and whatever does make you, or require you to be conscious (because another characteristic is that a question, a requirement, a calling is always latent in it) the mother of consciousness, must be nothing like what you experience as consciousness.

The thing exists in a web of relations as does the idea of the thing, but the idea of a relation is not the same as the relation of ideas and so a continual slippage occurs between these intertwined webs. This gives rise to a cloud of eddies and parasites which, when the thing is real, can be periodically reduced or purged entirely. If the self is real then this ought to happen for it too, a succession of reality-checks that maintain the stability of its environment. But this is just what we don't observe, or at least we observe it failing as often as succeeding. The self is therefore an entity of the same kind of semi-virtuality as say, the State, or any other useful cultural abstraction, and subject to similar kinds of changes.

Under the premise of no, or emptiness of, self-nature, the belief in an independent self is not only an error but is utterly absurd: no-one 'believing' an inconceivable object to be real. Such an object, in fact, never arises, is never seen or touched or felt, rather, what it amounts to is relations of priority between various passing present and absent experiences. It is a matter of 'this is more of the self than that' or of 'this is to bring about a result favourable to self' and so on, a whole web of this stuff seeming to have a depth dimension, to allow for parallaxes. Under no-self the whole thing is utterly flat, things relate to each other, apparently causally, but none is more true to the underlying reality than any other, all are equally products of the same depthless process, call it what you will. If in spite of this a depth dimension were to open, would that now entail something like a self, or Self, after all?

A law or limitation of being which is discovered as 'just how things are', that is from the outside, might be or at least seem inexorable, but can never be necessary. One would immediately begin thinking of ways to get around it. For a law to be necessary, like the Kantian categories, it must have been freely chosen, and thus be contingently necessary. The choice, however, might be an inevitable one, given a true knowledge of one's own nature, a result of certain prior choices, or decisions made before there was any possibility of knowing that you'd chosen, so in that sense the contingency prior to necessity would itself be a necessary one. All of this is playing with levels, is it therefore entirely without purpose, or is it an 'operator' of consciousness?

All of the means by which thought changes the context of things in order to gain a little freedom, rewriting or recollecting are means by which the dream perpetuates itself. The main theme of the dream being always how to get out of the dream.

Empathy appears to be no more than mimetic suffering and so to belong to the family of demiurgic mimetic powers holding the world together in its fascination and cruelty. Compassion, then would be something else, although also derived from a thinning of the boundary between self and other. Such thinning is not an unmitigated good, rather all depends on the accompanying wisdom and penetration.

Where does this idea of 'making the world a better place' as a maxim for a 'meaningful life' rather than as a guide to ethics come from? If from religion then it is a distortion of the idea of righteousness, and if from humanism then it is one more guise of original progressivism. In any case it accords ultimate reality to the world. For you this appears to be a heresy, the world being rather a particular ordering of experience wherein the reality principle can fully awaken and transform consciousness.

There are certain singularities in the surface of waking consciousness, when the will is corralled into willing its own destruction in a moment of self-shattering in which a tiny and unconscious opening to a different level of being is brought about. Passing a message across this gap might still be possible, in which case you are able to explore action outside of conventional causality and temporality. But any such project must also entail its equal and opposite reaction.

Unless you have open access to all of your desires, or to the sphere of desire in general, you cannot begin to filter your true desires from the many refracted, reflected, mimetic and otherwise distorted and inauthentic desires that you also harbour. Obfuscating desire is also the result of a certain desire, it is not only a matter of internalising a version of the social world, but also a reluctance to face up to the sheer contingency and absurdity of the sources of desire, the triggers of a lifetime, whether in certain events or in adventitious predispositions.

If you knew that your every wish could be willed to accomplishment without yourself being known as the agent or in any way connected or gratified by the results, and also not subject to you own rational regrets, then the set of wishes immediately to hand would be very different from that which you are able to admit, even in dreams. This little thought experiment reveals the degree to which your instinctive urges are curtailed by various layers of reflexivity and mediation, in other words the ego and shadow dichotomy, or the Jekyll and Hyde. Functions of the superego always appear as secondary and negative in their action.

That things have a nature and are finally instances of law is the inevitable result of inquiry, but what is lost is the being of things. No amount of law, of patterns causes, dependencies, relations, formulas can ever reach the being of what it is that is expressed in this way. The missing factor falls more and more into question, and invites qualification as mind or will, or simply being of being - all of these are only analogies. It is as much at the beginning of inquiry as at its end, after all words have failed.

If you focus on an object, say your breath, then you must first hold the field in which both what is breath and what is attention are known, but then this field of knowing, which is not the same as your attention is where the experience actually takes place. It is a field of relations in which mind and object can appear as the relata. Otherwise mind could not know anything that was not mind, that is, if the relata were independent entities they could never come into relation. The same hold for the relations forming the field of relations, these must already be continuous with each other. If this is called mind in a larger sense then it 'thinks' in a way that bears little resemblance to the self-understanding of thinking which makes up your individual mind.