The advocates of 'no self' protest too much, whatever it is that they disprove is not the self, but only a self would wish to so disappear. Others might try to replace the self by one of its expressions, such as desire, as if desire could exist without a head. It would be truer to say that there are only selves which give rise to every kind of expression just because they cannot be expressed, which assume every sort of relation among themselves just because there are no such relations.

Rationalists and utilitarians are typically inclined to Bayesian inferences in respect of their understanding of the world. This is more than just a convenient way of producing starting points for their deductions, it points to a common understanding of being as instance, as potentially repeatable instance. In order for a Bayesian prior to be a probability the form of belief that it embodies must be a sort of virtual frequentism, frequentist thought-experiments. (Many-worlds paradigms, and 'simulation' theories all point to this as well.) Metaphysically this makes no sense at all, since that which matter, that which speaks for the ground of being, can never be subject to these forms of speculation. This is similar to the reason why all Hegelians ultimately fail: the form of logic used gives out well short of where it purports to apply.

Sometimes the void is as simple as knowing nothing and not caring that you know nothing. Perhaps there is only this dullness, from now on there will only be this dullness, neither good nor bad, an end to all questions, the defeat of all questioners. To neither move towards nor away, the impasse, the aporia, the end of expectations, the need for something to always be happening, but also the end of futility, indifference without any momentum.

The question of free-will or determinism does not arise since that entity which would be so endowed or otherwise, the personage that represents you in your ruminations and reflections, is not a living being. It is a kind of puppet or p-zombie, or a collection of them, that is used for accounting purposes and to fill the gap where a certain abyss opens. It is as if you have this uncanny stranger rattling around inside the same space, a scarecrow, an 'npc', uncanny only because you are mostly convinced it is you. The double is already in place which is why it would be so shocking to find it also out there in world. You are haunted by your 'self'. You are fappy, however, to give it as much credence as you are able, so as not to think about how few others share such an awareness.

A complex bitter-sweet composition of emotions will thrill everyone when produced by a narrative but its equivalent in music will only affect a small minority. In the first case it is linked to the 'promise of happiness' to a forward-looking identification with time. In the second case it offers the possibility of exactly the opposite, of a detachment from all such promises through the experience of their formation and dissolution as nothing but structures in time. This is essentially Schopenhauer's esthetics; identifying with a narrative as a seduction of the will which gains power through the clarification of wishes. In the other case the will is defeated by being seen at its work in a reducing mirror.

The core axioms of all progressive beliefs are anti-essentialism and finiteness. There is a tension between the two since essences are a form of finiteness, but it is a creative tension. Spinoza produced a top down ant-essentialism, almost like a many-worlds interpretation of all limited phenomena, but Hegelian idealism, or more broadly the family of idealisms in which Hegel's philosophy belongs provides a universal solvent for all essences based on the nature of consciousness itself: the knowing of any positive content is already its negation. All of this becomes seemingly inevitable in a thinking disciplines and gives them a leftwards drift. Biologism may be empirically essentialist, but remains embedded in metaphysical anti-essentialism. It also represents the broad road. There is narrow path runs apart from this, via Kierkegaard and Heidegger, but it is hard ad uphill, rarely travelled.

Individuality as ipseity is the core f the self yet is too fragile and inexplicably ungounded taken by itself so you purposefully seek to sublate into a larger impersonal and deathless life or soul. This is an approachable gal in terms of the imaginary and the symbolic, and even more so socially and affectively. In terms of the real, however, it remains stuck at the first step. Indeed your very ipseity is already entirely a compromise, an image of itself in all those other dimensions. Only the real relation matters, everything else is an elaborate evasion.

The will to exist is the force of coherence that maintains the self through the adventures of a life. It is at the same time a primal yes and a primal no, a yes only insofar as it is also a no and a no only insofar as it is also a yes. The deeper you go into it the more this double face is revealed, each having its own all-embracing system, cultivation and ideology. Love is perhaps found at the still point where these two drives appear to be in balance, but most of the time one of them predominates.

The hunger for knowledge, is only a reduct of the hunger for truth. What has been taken out is the sacrifice of the knower, that is where it stops short, because knowledge is also about control and safety. When your insatiable knower's gaze turns back on yourself, which happens when it has nowhere else to turn, then you must give yourself up to death.

The Spinozist God as unrestricted nature, natura naturans, or the quasi Christian God of German Idealism, is consonant with the good as the vision of sovereign perfection and unity too intense for the individual mind to hold and where evil is subsumed under the cunning of the negative, all of this is not so far from a transcendental utilitarianism. Wat is omitted from this comprehending understanding is the call and the response, the non-sublatable moment that can only be encountered in a personal relation.

To perceive through being, or the pure sense of being, is to be in paradise. When desire transforms into passionate love it opens this state of awareness, but the same engine that thrust you into it propels you out again after a time. Desie and being are not orthogonal, but rather are almost parallel.

To be open to all the key perspectives on an event in which your decision and action are required would involve compassionate insight into many different parallel levels and ways of balancing and mediating between them, which is almost impossible. Anything short of this brings about some harm somewhere, not as an accident but as a direct consequence of your particular kinds of arrogance and hardness of heart, your presumption of a false disinterest, an expression and intensification of your moral burden. Obedience to the law does not absolve but provides site for further crystallisation.

The opposition of desire and being is too simple because central to desire is desire for being. In the case of mimetic desire, when you perceive what you take to be an other's satisfaction and t ink 'why not me?' you are already leaning on a sort of cogito: you come into existence through the question of a satisfaction, a fullness experienced as elsewhere, and so of your own shameful lack of being, and your need to dissimulate this, and hence your entitlement to cut across the rules to set things right. In desire you make yourself the exception, both the place of being and the place of the loss of being.

Consciousness as born of desire, not the symbolically mediated desire of embodied and acculturated life, but arising from the wish or whim of the absolute for self-manifestation, remains unconvincing, since such a desire must already have imagined what would satisfy it. Desire comes later, Aphrodite is not the first of the gods, nor ultimately the most powerful. The de-centred self is also a product of the meditation on desire. Pure being, lacks anything resembling a motivation, yet some sort of overflow of this principle is more in line with the nature of existence, for which desire serves as the forgetting.

It's not the world you find yourself thrown into but the City, a vast, endless, Piranesian city known to its inhabitants as 'the world'. A single place where infinite paths cross and each path is itself a city within the city, and where you yourself are multiple, crossing and recrossing your own trajectories in and out of dreams and portals, faces everywhere, subjected to inner and outer weathers, to strange signs and portents, distant calls, dramatic skies, lightning storms, threatening oceans, endless nights.

The motives of someone in a hypothetical Robinson Crusoe situation could scarcely be called desires since they would be entirely self-regarding. Desire proper only arises in a world of being-with, but since this is the world you always find yourself in, every motive is primarily social. The ideal of being true to your desire implicitly assumes that desire has an authentic form, free of mimesis, for example, and is thus subject to all the conundrums and epicycles of the ideal of authenticity.

The motives of someone in a hypothetical Robinson Crusoe situation could scarcely be called desires since they would be entirely self-regarding. Desire proper only arises in a world of being-with, but since this is the world you always find yourself in, every motive is primarily social. The ideal of being true to your desire implicitly assumes that desire has an authentic form, free of mimesis, for example, and is thus subject to all the conundrums and epicycles of the ideal of authenticity.

The nothing that you can imagine, wiping out everything, is only an absence against which life appears as a projection of colour and movement like a dream. This is how it would be if you were consciousness and forever sealed off from the real. The nothing that is inseparable from the real, which is always here is an unimaginable aliveness without pictures or sense or the play of opposites.

The more you become aware of your motives the more apparent it is that a broader situational awareness was not denied to you, only you were unable to reach it. Willing the good does not arise, only shunning of the bad, since you cannot undo your own trespasses. They reveal to you the orientation which you brought, bring, to life.

If a mysticism is defined as a revealing through identity, self-validating and transcending perception and cognition, of the source of being, then there is a mysticism adjacent religion, to various sciences such as physics and possibly anthropology, to philosophy, to certain physical and energetic disciplines, and even to psychology, in other words to practices which in some measure evoke the question of being. Each of these mysticisms is distinctive even as they purport to erase distinctions - there are relations between them mediated by their non-mystical dual. Art is in a different case, it either does not reach as far, or else it places itself in the space between, attempting to mediate revelation itself.

Philosophy provides an account, a journalistic one at best, of the breach, the crisis, to which your thought has kept returning from the very start, persistently but without much clarity, and only as a disconnected part of a team, similarly enlisted and quite far from the front, rife with rumours, easily misled and yet essential to the effort, since the crisis, the breach, the war or emergency, exists nowhere else but in your minds.

Love does not will the eternalisation of its objects, but its being in time, its temporality. In the eternal recurrence of the same the interval between any two successive recurrences contains the whole history of the cosmos, but affirming this belongs to its moment not to history.

Can a senior implicit understanding of reality fully sublate a junior one, that is, transcend and include it without residue? Certainly not if it wishes the junior one to acknowledge this, since there is already a place where the 'senior' view is 'superlated' by the junior, however crudely. Each knows something about the other that the other doesn't know simply by being in relation to it. And wile a certain hierarchisation, or partial order of understandings might be possible points of view are irreducible. A philosophical nostalgia can be developed into something entirely unexpected.

If you could rotate your awareness so that all was showing in its essential beauty and rightness, then you would have, as it were, swallowed up, taken deep inside, every way of seeing that was potentially distorted and wrong, perhaps just your separation from all of this, your innate propensity to stand outside of the whole. What then if you, while maintaining this gaze, were to gently turn your awareness back around onto yourself, what would you see?

The object of love is seen in its intrinsic beauty, truth and goodness. That is what love is and it so because of the object, in its reality, and not because it is seen y the seer, or because the seeing is limited and partial in some way. It is not a matter of some affirmative but limited substance given out, bestowed on the object. Rather the seer is a portal through which some measure of the limitless is able to pass.