The analysis of experience into discrete units is like that of light into photons, a way that depends on how the examination is to be carried out, on its created apparatus. In this case the identity of the wishing to know with that to be known is more direct and should yield a more immediate crisis in which the very notion of a subject of knowing implodes - or opens to what is outside of every outside and inside of every inside.

The belief that you are some sort of thing, a body or a psyche, say, garnering the satisfactions of that kind of being as a substance, or squandering it in the name of a different, wilder substance, is an oddly free-floating thing, a belief without a believer, or that only dreams up its own believer out of the same dream, this can't be done away with through any kind of investigation or reason. By its nature it can only be exhausted, until you lose patience with the indulgence, with the effort of keeping it afloat. It is no romance, none of it makes any sense, but here you are nevertheless in the midst of conditions, burning fast or slow, burning up.

A forgotten face suddenly recalled in memory, or one that simply seems to be mysteriously familiar brings with it an intimation of the strangeness of time, like perhaps no other memory, so that there is dimly sensed a realm of splendour beyond the horizon of time. Without giving this any more weight than it deserves this provides a hint of what all your seeking is directed towards, a compass bearing perhaps. And is it the face of an other or is it your own true face, or both at once?

Reading a novel or watching a movie from an authorial perspective you are able to simultaneously identify with every character in a conflict of incident, or rather, to identify freely and in turn with each character. You do not hold on to a critical distance, you enter fully but are indifferent as to which perspective to take up, allowing the history to unfold or blossom before you in its fulness. In life the same gesture is also available, but complicated because the sought after fulness requires you, at the same time, to play yourself without any restraint or false 'even-handedness'.

You begin with near infinite possibilities which progressively narrow as choices, free and forced are made, but oddly the field of possibilities remains unchanged, it only takes on a different nature, rotating out of alignment with time and into a kind of synchrony. If consciousness is opposed to world, then what used to be taken as belonging to consciousness is deposited into the world leaving only something akin to electric current, the very life of any system, but in itself entirely without any properties outside of its interactions.

The endless silt that washes through the mind, the repetitions elicited and rejected by ever innocent and naive desire, and the flecks of gold you are always hunting for, tokens of the self outside of time, your original companions, now almost forgotten, buried under all those refusals, not this and not that.

What is written appears as if marking a gain, however small the increment, but it as much marks a loss, as something gone past, no longer needing to be discovered. The general drift has been in service to the estrangement effect, anything to get a little critical distance, as if the only true gain is such a loss. You've given insufficient attention to the opposite move, towards and into the thing, although you've lived that without saying much, and with an uneasy mind.

Tectonic shifts in the collective consciousness produce chaotic effects in the background flow of time affecting microcosmic life at every level. What sort of response, if any, is called for in the contemplative, but to silently witness?

In the case of the reality which we are existence and essence are one and the same, neither is prior. It is the same as seeing that the empty field in which consciousness arises is consciousness, only that the former is always split by having a content and the later not so. This reality then differs from that of all the objects which have enabled us to utilise such concepts, wherein being is potentiality and essence is accident. It does however imply that we cannot be encompassed within any definition of the human, only that there must be a going through the human to the other.

The immediate temporal field of awareness, protentions in process of being fulfilled or not fulfilled, retentions, fading but also enclosing the phrases of meaning, is all of this to be equated with consciousness, or with being? That it appears this way makes of it no more than a representation, a working theory of your self in time, but none of the terms out of which it is constructed has any immediate existence in its own right. It is a theory, overdetermined by ideas of objectivity and subjectivity inherited from the culture and covering over a mystery untouched by any concepts.

The waking self is a phenomenon of duration as defined by the immediate short-term memory. Such durations come in successive blocks, woven together by another indirect form of memory. Blocks may be long or short, comparatively, depending on physical and emotional circumstances. The immediate short-term memory functions in a way that is akin to compression of movie files, that is, there is a key-frame after which the succeeding moments are taken according to their difference from this frame and each other. When the differences have accumulated beyond a certain point a new key-frame is brought forth. The subjective self belongs to a bock and is recreated entirely with each new block. Since experiencing belongs to such a self, not experiencing endures for longer than its corresponding portion of immediate memory. All the rest is interpretation and interpolation.

Under idealism of whatever kind no great significance can attach to the actuality operator which chooses one fully determined possibility out of the vast cloud of unrealised possibilities differing by one or more choice branchings somewhere upstream, or indeed from purely imaginary possibilities or alternatives. If this 'operator' is anything other than a species of ideal distinction ruled over by causality where the broader field is ruled by affinity - indeed, causality would be nothing more than a special kind of affinity. In such a view, for example, the inexistent continuation of the lives of the dead would significantly affect the lives of the living. Is that how the world is for you? Could you make any sense, find any truth in it if it were radically limited to the actual world? And does the boundary between affinity and causality itself 'exist' and change according to hidden laws?

Difference within identity, difference as a paradoxical expression of identity entirely without an other - so not even identity - would seem to be the only way to understand consciousness in it 'social' dimension. The world is then the ultimate development and full ramification of difference and every ontology, no matter how at odds it would appear to be with this view, is a stuttering expression of it. Are we at the very apex of difference, or can it go further? Is this a stable expression of difference, or not? Can any such expression be stable? Isn't difference also the ultimate of instability, that is of life, of pure dynamism, both upward and downward?

The solitary self owning, or own-ing, experience is something achieved out of a matrix of endless interactions of possible selves and their others and in which it first appears as an other, as say, identification with the figure appearing in a reflection. You cannot simply point to the who who is doing all of this, because to do so would be a 'type error', like the set of sets not containing themselves. But there could be no individual self, even as an illusion if there were not some knowing that has supplied its pattern. That knowing does not 'own' anything, has no experience. but is the experiencing prior to all reflection.

You imagine awakening to a sort of rectified paranoia in which the world is entirely suspended in meaning which branches fractally in every dimension, but in truth and beauty. However, mind and meaning, the ideal, is double-faced and carries with it its own negation, which is not-mind, and no meaning and enigmatic materiality that blocks all movement out of the silent event.

'Your face before your patents were born' - this poses objective, or historical time against subjective time, or the temporalisation intrinsic to consciousness. While your existence is a off ad on and off again sort of event in the former, in the latter, since there can be no beginning or end to inner time, it is a matter of going in and out of the conditions by which an attunement to the world event appears. When you put these two versions of time in opposition to each other one of them will subsume, or 'eat' the other. Whichever is victorious in this contest is determined entirely within consciousness, so the inertia, or sway, associated with objective time yields no advantage at all.

The appearing does not appear, there is no experience of the experiencing, no knowing the knower, and so on. Just this insight is enough to dissolve the doer or the protagonist of the whole show - which from here necessarily appears as entirely about, doers, knowers and their ways. This is the featherlight realisation of the truth as cosmic joke.

Acquiring language as a descriptive, analytic, and phenomenological utensil came comparatively late in psychological development, prior to that the language that you had was performative, injunctive, musical and poetic, and shared the stage with another and more original way of getting in and around the ontological states that were opened to you. The final form of language which enrolled you in and to the world seemed a marvellous thing, but now you strive to use it to regain some of the abilities that went with its earlier, flawed but more potent form.

The ever changing situation as which you find yourself in play, together with all its valuations, pieties and short-cuts, subversions and shadows is a trompe d'oeil. The seeing of this, the seeing in this and the seeing out of this are all the one act, which must therefore be long neither to a seer, a seen nore even a scene.

What is it that you seek to change? Perhaps no more than the kinds of distinctions you make, the field of implicit valuations which gives colour and form to your world. Is it different distinctions you wish for or a detachment in which there are none at all? Or simply the freedom to determine them at will.

Self as a modality of experience appears in daily life primarily through the will and so accompanied by a striving or incompleteness. More rarely a different kind of epiphany of the self can arise wholly through feeling as aroused by the aesthetic sense. In this case, free from all striving, it is of a different ontological nature, complete in itself and outside of time and space. This is not the ordinary kind of aesthetic pleasure, but a sese of pure affirmation which is both particular and general and not susceptible to 'deconstruction'.

Every distinct thing perceived within the field of experience is a appearance of the field of experience, sometimes called consciousness, and not of some noumenon furnishing a transcendent world. This way of seeing resembles solipsism only as far as the source of experience is regarded as itself a thing. It might be thought of as an 'open solipsism' to which the usual objections do not apply.

The source of experience is a point of being and awareness and as a result it seems to be a concentrated self-reflection, awareness of being and being of awareness. If an affective character is added, bliss, or love or compassion, the same is true with a more intricate inner dance. Self-reflection, or self-knowing is the invariant that emerges out of this, but all of this is based on taking the nature of the source of experience to consist of the same kinds of elements as those perceived in experience. When this is seen to be impossible - existence does not exist - then the whole notion of self-reflection disappears as pure illusion.

What appears as a question on the mental plane appears as ambivalence and lack of clarity on the emotional plane and hesitancy on the plane of action. All are forms of of constriction in the free circulation of being. But such constriction is the pure source of your reality.

You desire the other's desire while the other's desire is for yours. In this way your desire is a mimetic self-appropriation which in an imaginary way spans the split within your self. Or else what you are mirroring is the other's suturing of their own split, more properly the appearance of such a completed circuit. More telling still would be to mirror the failure of such a circuit which gently turns you towards the place of your own absence.