If the core of the soul is pure feeling, auto-affection, and everything else built on top of this by way of the primary distinctions it affords, then the fate of all this cognitive superstructure is to be reabsorbed, to have been nothing but a play of blind spirit. There is nothing implausible in this, and then the knowing self, the pure knowing, is only a sometimes achievement, an accidental transparency, not a goal in particular, but a possibility, rare and insignificant, a crystal grown on a happy flaw.

Accommodation to the life ways presented by your corner of civilisation, which is never fully achieved is easily confused with metaphysical accommodation to being, also never achieved. These are two separate deficiencies each of which casts a shadow onto the other. The confusion is a kind of poetry, their distinction a different kind.

From with experiencing the experiencing of experiencing. It is this co-incidence that it the source of the sese of personal identity, independently of memory. It is not a formation of time but of being outside of time.

There is something like an object which is the lure in all desire, its cause ad its point of focus, but this cannot be anything like a actual object, and adventitious other. It is recognised immediately without the need for any interpretation, it is not given, it already is. Being thus of the self t is easily confused with a kind of memory a repetition of something one known, a prior fulness, but it must be more than that, it is out of time. It is the very self, estranged, but more present than present. If it is to be thought then it deserves a transcendental deduction of its own.

If there were a single principle out of which the world would necessarily emanate with all its features, it is not self and non-self, subject and object, I and it, or a first distinction, it is rather self and other, I and alter-I. The material universe, the universe of physics and cosmology is merely a corollary, a backdrop to that most terrific, and yet also most banal of fissures.

Self, or essence, is not a natural kind, soul is the understanding of self as such a kind. There can be a class of all souls, but there is no class of selves, every self is thus the universe of all selves. Bodies and minds in their generations are permuted via the random shuffling of parental genes, this makes for a random traversal of the space of all bodies and minds, but apparently not an ergodic one. Souls which are said to evolve by way of affinities would have no chance of even that degree of diversity but would soon converge into uniformly mediocre subsets.

Disinterest, detachment are hidden factors in all the noble emotions that most realise being in the world, ambition, ethical and political passion, romantic aspiration and so on. This is seen in their near variants of irony, cynicism, perversity, addiction. All of these have something metaphysical about them; they set it to work, obviating any possibility of its 'pathological' employment, which would be precisely to do nothing.

In a 'block universe' paradigm your life history is a world-line and experiencing is a traversing of that line by a ... what? It is like a symphony played from a recording. It can be played and listened to many times in different times and places, can be played at different speeds, sampled or even played backwards. This seems absurd, so could the playing, the experiencing be itself included in the world-line? This depends on the way that time is conceived, the 'block-universe' attempts to side-step the mystery of time and its directionality, but merely displaces the question. If there is real randomness in the unfold ng of evets does time then have to be real? Is the relation of consciousness to real randomness prior to its relation to time? And does real randomness imply that there must be something outside of the system, outside of all systems. Consciousness with one foot in the world and the other in the absolute, or the divine?

Being in the world you are fully situated and yet as long as life remains everything is open for re-interpretation. The interest of consciousness, in the sense of being an interested party never ceases, never lets go of anything. Death is the point at which the horizon closes and all is simply what it was. The openness of consciousness moves on, emptied, having abandoned all that was.

Is this world the only one that is? Is it the only one that you have known? They speak as if they represent the world, but they are only guests, passing through for a time. World and body are two different sides of this experience. You put on a body to enter the world, and discards it to leave, but the body was always a property of the world, a suit that is issued to you with your entrance, and the kind and place of the body determines so much about what you will find. None of this is merely given what you have to do is to make of it what it can be, the utmost that it can be.

Everything that matters here, your very search for truth must come from and through your individual self, your particular instance of being, or ego self, and yet this self is unreal and untrue. Any attempting to make this truth worldly is, however, rightly to be seen as 'by-passing'. The only way to the transcending the self is through the self; this is one of the covering paradoxes.

Only of consciousness can there be certainty of being, and yet on the conventional ontology of 'real things' consciousness must be forever in doubt, impossible to separate out from certain intentional behaviours which, bound up in causal chains, could as well arise without this mysterious additive. In the conventional view what has being is just there whether it is observed or interacted with or not, having being is the most perfect independence of any and all consciousness. This kind of being holds itself apart from an equally uncompromised non-being, a pure nothing. Curiously, this nothing is precisely the 'address' relative to such a view of consciousness and real being.

A form of the ontological proof belongs to consciousness in that the idea of its non-existence, its final perfection, necessitates its existence, but no such proof belongs to the 'I', or particular self, pace Descartes. If there were such a thing as ego death then there ought also to be an ego resurrection, but nothing is ever heard about that. What there is instead is the realisation that the ego never existed at all, like a sudden waking from a dream. The idea of the ego's existence is a deeply buried and operative thought entirely lacking in that quality of ontological self-validation - it is not a reflexive thought object with a strange topology but something entirely flat, 'cartesian' in the most reductive sense. That is why it can continue to function after being exposed, only now with an unprecedented lightness.

There is a stark but mediated distinction between consciousness and its contents and the real, but even under any metaphysical assumption if you far enough upstream in consciousness this distinction breaks down, so that what is first 'thought' becomes what is real, becomes the law of the real. If you follow this path, however, it is the term corresponding to consciousness, the usual set of meanings no longer applicable, that becomes completely unrecognisable. Imagine, say, that it is point of view that is the crystalising content which brings about appearance, then the consciousness within such appearance has nothing in common with the consciousness prior to appearance, and yet they are identical, according to a necessity itself prior to appearance. This 'speculation' makes nonsense of all speculation

After emptying the self the self returns more virulent than ever, but as a gesturing figure in a completely different field of warring intentions, a kind of passionate zombie, so that it becomes doubtful which one stands or stood for eros and which for thanatos.

Elaborate circling paths of thought, inquiry, investigation debouching at the 'non-existence of the self' all of these are expressions of the death-drive, the desire to be present at one's own absence in the most emphatic way possible, which means that the goal must not be acknowledged but discovered, and repeatedly so. The death-drive is not final but is always in a dance with its opposite face, the erotic drive, their common root, wherein their distinction disappears is in the circling repetition, with and without variation, finite into infinite and infinite into finite.

If the self is only in the now this is because it is primarily feeling, perhaps as in that definition of consciousness as there being something it feels like to be. We are our feelings but we have little control over them; we are also the change in these feelings. So, not just qualia but changes in qualia, and changes in the changes, all of which are yet another kind of qualia. (Does the need to include 'meta-qualia' make nonsense of the whole qualia thing?) Changes in qualia are necessarily mediated by meanings or thoughts, or indeed by representations, so thought and feeling here are inextricably knotted together and this open nexus is more like the self, indeed more 'like' consciousness, than any feelings on their own.

That only the present exists and past and future are merely notional is nonsense because existence implies being in time, being f significant duration. The self, however, is only in the present, it is as if carved out of pure presentness - at any point in its history it is only in the present of the moment. The history, the 'facticity' of the self is an indelible attribute in that the self is realised as project and its range of possible actions is determined by what it has chosen in a previous present. So, although its being is presence it is not identical to it but has a relationship to it, it is a kind of operation of presence that sends reverberations into time but also back into the all-accommodating now.

The scope of other kinds of experience that are imaginable is greatly expanded by the ubiquitous cultural products that surround us, but seems stiflingly small compared to your intimation of what the core experiencing apparatus is capable of. Wat you can experience as a body, or as a mind (other bodies) or as a soul (other minds, other lives) or as a spirit (other universes, other kinds of being) or as being itself (what you are.)

Sooner or later the mind must admit defeat in its war against dullness which is also a war against itself and its need to domesticate or dominate everything, to reduce all to the condition of sleep.

Empathy is the 'near enemy' of compassion. There are occasions when what serves best is to feel what the other is feeing, but it cannot substitute for the vision which sees the event n the widest possible context, in which all pathways are open and the silent affirmation of the totality of being predominates. So it is not to ask whether reality is good or bad, or what it lacks what needs correction, but to be attuned to its music, to find it both joyous and sad, and ever more beautiful. And to find that every music is subsumed in the one symphony.

If there is reincarnation then what reincarnates are habits, tendencies, narratives, jigsaw puzzle pieces that can be indefinitely rearranged, all the not-you that you are, while the you that you stands still, never moves, never enters birth. This is all fine but can it account for overwhelming beauty? Impersonal, or even trans-personal views of ultimate reality miss this key feature which changes everything.

The idea that 'complexes' deposited or precipitated in the unconscious mind can be raised to consciousness and in that way allowed to release their energetic propensities to affect the ordinary functions of living, assumes an odd asymmetry between conscious and unconscious. If the two are seen as aspects of the same whole then you might as well bring conscious ideation into the medium of the unconscious where strange relation with the natives of that realm could unfold under a different sky. Why should either of them have priority, the reality being wholly projected in either case? What is it that sees them, enacts them, indifferently?

The search for a form of words that can elicit the self-revelation of the real is a perpetually renewed futility and yet must not be ruled out, because the real does reveal itself in its own occasions, and it does show something like structure or topology. If the essential is always withheld that is because what is sought is the seeker and this escapes all admission.

After the mind has grown tired of endless adventures that always lead bak to the same place there remains the shadows of the late afternoon moving slowly along a wall.