The modification of attention that phenomenology seeks to accomplish ought to be done without any reference to consciousness or the mind since these terms already smuggle in an 'outside' view. Better t view what is going on, the experiencing, as if it were a special kind of lucid dream. But what kind? Does it matter as long as all appearances have declare themselves free of any background at all?

In a sense awakening is consciousness and consciousness awakening, and so is open to all conscious beings as they appear in relative reality. This is the hard truth of the Bodhisattva vow, together with the fact that what remains of interest is the nature of this relative and unawakened way of being.

The wisdom of the unconscious is similar to that of Artificial Intelligence a reconfiguration of the already known according to unfathomable rules. Activated by resonances, it can play variations on any topic, including the spiritual, but falls short of the awakening of consciousness for which it would need to actually ad completely present.

Your perception of the world is filtered through many softening layers of habit and fabulation, even when reinforcing the story of being at odds with the way of things. If these layers are peeled away the result is a particularly dramatic intensification, terrifying and invigorating. However rare it might be, this naked perception belongs only to waking consciousness - it doesn't occur first in the unconscious and the get toned down. The filtering metaphor is inapt. There is an aspect of consciousness that is not passive, that can only be accessed through the waking state.

The essence or root of all phenomena is the seeing or knowing or experiencing of those phenomena, but the seeing, knowing, experiencing cannot be seen, known or experienced, hence the phenomena themselves are largely unknown, unexperienced etc., and so conceal their own mystery in their joyous blatancy. They are always pointing back towards what can never be pointed at as if this were the biggest joke possible.

The concept of consciousness, that is, as something positive, a determinable difference, of which you can say this is conscious, that is not, depends for context on a non-conscious base, an external world of mere objects, or on oneself as if seen from the outside, observably unconscious in behaviour in some way, or as vouched by someone else. This concept does not apply internally, as it were of the 'I' inquiring into its own awareness, without an imaginary doubling of the questioner. And yet this is the form in which the question most authentically arises.

Passions are fatiguing but desires, while not without a need to overcome resistances are invigorating due to their alignment with will. The sublimation of passions into the desires ('Where It was I will be') is not a matter of domesticating them so that they can be drawn under the yoke of volition, but rather a change in the understanding of volition. It is not a matter of control or of subjection to freedom, but a phenomenological component of what remains outside of control; a different way of going with things, which changes the very landscape of motives.

Desire aways contains an element of volition as if it is rooted in the ego, while passion, which is more common, more banal, easily overrides the ego, so that the ego seems rooted in passion, and hence enslaved to its momentary changes. Despite this, passion can be elicited, both by others and by one's self, through external lures ad triggers. This circular muddle makes a mockery of your intentions to disentangle from the dance.

Attention attending to attention which is the source of all of your ideas about mind and consciousness and attention itself, does not invoke a different kind of attention. Reflexive consciousness is just consciousness. There is no call to place awareness outside of awareness, as if it were an object, but rather to withdraw all such ideas, shapes, spaces, topologies from awareness.

Aware of being aware and of its momentary qualities is incidental to a certain estrangement and doubleness even when it is entirely spontaneous and ecstatic. It depends on a condition of mind that comes and goes. Sometimes there is just awareness without any echo or overflow. There is less difference between these two modes than you are tempted to think.

To acknowledge the absolute, but only in relative terms, only for the sake of the advantages you have to gain by it, to keep it always at arms length, retaining the initiative, to have this state of affairs go on endlessly. Nothing could be further from your wishes than to surrender to it, to merge with it. To be in orbit around it, to have it as art, to make an absolute out of art, as if it could be made safe in that way.

Most of your motives are negotiable, existing in a context of competing alternative motives, but there are some which are absolute, which cannot be compromised on and hence have an existential life-and-death quality, are thus primary motives and so are part o the very context of more ordinary motives. This is well understood and not just intuitively but as a theme for reflection and narrative. It may be that in earlier times all motives had that absolute quality, as appears with infants, and that the negotiable kind are an achievement of maturity and also of decadence, and so the absolute kind which are not chosen but happen to you are much romanticised. Does this point to something about consciousness, even if only on its mode of connection to mind? The consciousness-mind problem is even more salient than the mind-body problem.

Desire is historical, its origin and its adventures matter, and this is so even when the origin is falsified by the culture or be internal pressures of substitution and concealment. There is something like a primal scene of desire, usually in early childhood when the imagination is so vividly engaged that its fantasy is found to be more real than reality; and hence its direct connection to intimacy. Of course there are different desires and different, although far fewer, origins. Re-experiencing the origin of a desire weakens it, so desire itself paradoxically desires the forgetting of its source.

Consciousness is what enables experience, any experience at all, and so there is no experience of consciousness. In the same way consciousness is not, it does not possess being, it is void in relation to being. Experience which is something integrated in time, belongs to soul, for want of a better term, and the being of soul is consciousness, and so is void. It is only the belief that soul has substantial being on a par with the content of experience, that it is grounded in substance that leads it on the wayward path of metaphysics.

Simply perceiving some object, external or internal, does not coincide with 'intentionality' since this latter concept with its implication of intent, or of potential intent, adds a directionality, a vector to the perceiving, one that goes from you to the object. In this way it begs the question of the 'natural attitude' which is what is to be laid aside - intended to be laid aside. The perceiving precedes directionality, which if it is added on, can go in any direction. Allowing it to point from the object towards you, whatever you might be, the natural attitude is either gone or reappears simply as another possible object.

Consciousness, nothing in itself, enters reality through the portal of time and in the many ways in which it grasps onto time, its identification of willful rejection of such permanence as it is offered, by memory or identification, only underlines that it has no temporality of its own. To let go of the world is to let go of time, what other principle of being can it have?

The ego or system of the self organises and prioritises the diverse desires and motives that crowd in on you from multiple contexts and in this way staves off chaos, but it does this by fully engaging with desire, serving as its existential support and promoter. The only thing it has to offer, and what enables it to perform this function is its claim to the sense of being. It does not possess being but, as it were, it deputises for being, represents it via a pre-reflective cogito. By generously giving something it doesn't have it gets as close as can be to actually having it. This role play would be empty if it were not so committed to desire.

Animals have preferences, loyalty, love and even altruism, but they do not have values, or valuations as we know them, These are more than biologic, perhaps more than linguistically mediated, but are expressions of a 'simulation of God', that is, they contain, more of less latent, a pointing to a supreme value, which is an evasion of fundamental ontology which has been built to last.

The mind's function is always twofold, to solve its immediate task and to ensure its own continuance; these functions being at odds with each other it always seeks to put them in balance - ego here is the accountant. Thus, to mediate values while the value of valuation is unmediated, or to question and create interest while the interest of interest is above question.

The volatilisation of all matters as operations and contents could be named 'effective idealism' and is the most efficient tool for enforcing oblivion of being, especially where ought to be the thinnest, as in art. This starkly illustrates the impotence of dialectic.

The boundaries of the senses, of thought, of feeling and will both with respect to consciousness and each other are hidden or non-existent. Perhaps such boundaries cannot in principle be found, and this is the very same truth of appearance as that consciousness is ontological, that is is one with being itself, while at the same time is separate from sensation, thought etc. This blurring is central to the sense of bondage, to being bound.

The dream of life is that what you are you are by defiance of gravity, that all is resistance r the intermittence of resistance. This basic friction of living, its subtle grinding quality, of heaviness and the urge for oblivion, is suffering in the Buddhist sense, and the love of the drama which it engenders.

If doership is an illusion, then who is 'doing' the belief in that illusion? The same could be asked about any characteristic of the way that things seem to be. Hence no error can be involved in the distinction between illusion and reality, in fact there can be no such distinction, or better, no common plane in which both could be compared or put side by side. You can distinguish dreaming from waking, but you cannot do so from within the dream, but waking up within the dream can take place.

If you are standing on the bank of a river, the river appears to flow by, while if you are floating down the river the bank slides past, It is not like this with time since there is no place of perceiving that is not equally in time, so your impression of the flow of duration can only be imagined, from imagining and identifying with a place of permanence within time, this is not to be disputed, but only by acknowledging that the imagination itself is in time, or better, is time itself. The phenomenon is not divided into parts which 'move' at different rates.

The most affirmative states always lead to something further, a transcendence that appears like negation, like self-annihilation, but is something else quite different, a completion of the inner purpose of the affirmation. Negating, or acetic practices can only ape this movement without 'getting it' at all. You attain the peak in order that the letting go is in perfect ease, with nothing left behind, including the observer.