'Intentionality' in vernacular usage means having a will or an intention (to effect something), it is active and energised even if it is 'hanging fire', but its technical meaning refers to the essential property of consciousness of always being about something, or simply 'aboutness'. Like the case of 'disinterest' the concept is hard for secular understanding to hold on to because the latter is closer to the domain where every act of attention carries potential aggression. A contemplation that harbours no wish to affect or consume its object is alien to the living matrix out of which consciousness arises.

Inside every experience there is a grain of affirmation, of accession of will. These are so in the flow of evets that seem prompted from outside that they are mostly overlooked. These 'grains' are fibres of the one timeless will and so are more apparent when you look back on past events whose occasions are forgotten and whose details are muddled, but they are the reason you can respond in feeing to those memories. This is one of the meanings of free-will and its shadow in guilt, shame and judgment, and for ultimate instance of truth. As if time is the medium for this timeless precipitate.

Life turns neutral space into place, dividing it into an inside and an outside, a here and a there, a territory. Consciousness reverses this, first by the inherent duality of seeing and being seen, then by the deliberate modification of territory, by home and domain, and by working towards its abolition in abstract presence, in coincidence and juxtaposition, in claiming and editing world. It would treat time in the same way if only it were able.

Consciousness bears a special relationship to life out of which it in fact emerges. This is not an 'emergence' because there is a special commonality or overlap of essence, from its inherent striving towards light and freedom to its self-focus and self-creation, to its problematic relation to death, sometimes opposed, sometimes allied, to its affinity with beauty and excess, its boundlessness and ubiquity, its weird wisdom and crystalline archetypes. So much so that it is a question which comes first, or whether there is no difference at all.

Consciousness is display, is showing, that the thing appears, is known or revealed. Before consciousness there is life, which 'knows' only in responding in acting, in purpose that arcs between self and the thing, not yet other. Consciousness is a will to close on itself, to be the totality, but it depends on life which is always open on what is other, what is unknown, on the unbridgeable gap. And so consciousness inhabits this founding contradiction, this negative.

The dreamer is uneasy, refuses to wake up, but senses that something is amiss, can 't help it, his dream within a dream within a dream goes on, but something is amiss in every dream, reality stirring.

As we experience consciousness it has the necessary attribute that it can be cognisant but not directly aware of itself; that which sees cannot be seen, that which hears cannot be heard, that which feels cannot be felt. This is a primal split and it is is not a feature of the supposed underlying global consciousness then one is left to wonder how such an idea or operation could have arisen, if not by encounter with an otherness which would already represent a break in its perfect self-enclosure. Further, the impossibility of direct awareness of the source of awareness is not a static given, but an enigma and an invitation to its transgression.

Without any clear idea of what experience actually is there is a folk ontology of inner life which while being based in body and energy awareness attempts to make sense of one thing turning into another thing, or of one thing standing in for or representing another thing. And in a quite different way there is a (more complex, but somewhat better delineated) folk ontology of outer, 'objective' experience based on causal instances and linguistic and aesthetic effects. And just as inner and outer are not clearly separated, the very terms of the delineation being ultimately contingent, the two ontologies mutually contaminate each other with various fallacies. ()The 'pathetic fallacy and its inverse, ie psychology.)

All experience is finite, personal, historical as path-dependent, embedded in personal life, there is no experience of impersonal truth as such, nothing that approaches the purity of a single concept, and yet our minds are enslaved by ideas and imaginary conversations, without which there is only animal faith.

Time with its before and after is the paradigmatic asymmetric relation that makes experience possible, both feeling and intentionality follow on from this break. It is impossible to conceive of experience outside of time and yet the somehow the temporal distinction is understood, not by thought and not by experience but through that which gives rise to them.

Consciousness is intentionality, or else it is that there is a feeling of being (what it is). These are two polar views, from knowing say, and from feeing. Both are sensory, empirical, and depend on prior belief in certain fundamental distinction between a reality and its representative. None of this can apply to the grounding consciousness which creates and holds the distinction. Some kind of distinction is at play in the latter consciousness, but where in the one case the distinction is radically asymmetric in the other it is perfectly symmetric and so is not recognised as being of consciousness.

If the ego would only stay in its box there would be o need for it to get mixed up with mind at all, its relation to the whole could be limited to piety, rebellion, to the positive and negative ecstasies of its adventures. Something gets in the way of this, a certain presumption or gadfly of truth which it cannot shake off, and so it is driven against all instinct to self-destruction.

Mind is necessarily seamless and undivided, while the experiencing ego or life is what it is through a network of boundaries and un-crossable or one-way barriers. These cannot be 'natural' barriers, say between operational levels of complexity, necessary reductions, since all such are themselves within mind - or if you will, they can only do what they are required to do from inside mind. Therefore the divisions that generate experience are within mind; they are not ideas but a kind of spacing for which we have no analogy or model.

The change is only apparent in respect of metaphysical questions, where the intuitive predominates over the conceptual and the inherited. As far as the texture of everyday life things are unaltered, and the aporias of the various egos, even as they fade in importance, are essentially as they were.

All progress is in the a priori. Positions on certain metaphysical conundrums are not points to be argued but filters, or, having passed them, milestones. Such are scepticism, solipsism, idealism naturalism etc., and also their more recent cousins, simulation theory, panpsychism, psychoanalysis etc. These are all topoi that you pass through, once and for all, or not.

You are the reflection of the formless in the mirror of form. Just as there is no subject without an object, nor object without a subject, so there is no self without an other (self) and no other without you. One is singular, the other is plural, but the roles easily switch. Which is it now?

It's not what you experience but that you experience. The mind that moves expresses both sides, subject and object, that is its undivided thought, and your subjectivity, your unanswered question, merely a development of its mood, a sort of side-effect within. There is no outside to this and it includes your desire, your poetry, your need to understand, as its internal echoing. Your model of mind always takes it as responding to an outside. What you cannot fathom, except perhaps in reflections on dreaming, is a mind, an experiencing, wholly encompassed within itself.

Experience positions the self as that wherein and for which it is there. It can do so either as master, as preceding and gaining the experience, and perhaps enlarged or contracted by it, or else as questioned by it, or negated by it, and hence challenged forth to answer it.

Philosophy is not a matter of logical argument but the provision of a series of intuitions that lead to its complete embodiment. It is distinct from a method which is an optional series of positions or experiments, linked by argument, and meant to attain a certain result. The latter is more scientific which is why there is no philosophy of science, only at best a science of philosophy.

The boundary between duality and non-duality is fractal, there is no direction within this from which only one order prevails. All of the interesting phenomena arise in this interspace of strange dimensionality.

In our narratives and folk psychology there is a metaphysical difference between the usual moments of life in which our choices are predictable or made for us in the sense of a refusal of freedom and those determinative ones in which a decision is made that 'goes off-script', that affects the entire future course of life, that intervenes in whatever meanings we can make of existence. This difference, which cannot by definition, belong to a scientific psychology - which can only deprecate the very idea of it - can be taken as evidence for transcendental idealism - not necessarily, buy only by way of a leap of faith.

If transcendental freedom is the distinguishing marker of human reality when it is exercised? Freedom being understood as charaterising certain actions, and not merely potential actions. There can only be certain moments in a life when such freedom is more than merely potential, rare moments, and in certain lives perhaps never realised. One an action is performed it can no longer be distinguished in this way, it becomes 'data', or are there certain concrete universals of freedom. Is this why actions are always embedded in stories and why stories are so important. And what if we are entering a time where stories are emptied of this capacity?

The material, historical and social worlds are forms of necessity opposed to but also defining the core freedom of the self whose nature and structure is inseparable from them. Their significance is thus not ontological or epistemological - they are not there for science - but moral, ethical, spiritual.

'All is consciousness' and 'all is emptiness' are equally inaccurate ways of saying the same thing. Consciousness is as a something of the general kind called a 'field', like electro-magnetic or quantum only somehow more subtle, but this at best refers to a kind of sheath, a most refined prakriti, missing the point that there is, as it were nothing behind it, non-conscious ground. While 'emptiness' is too easily confused with the void of annihilation, or else yet another rarefied ether. Better, perhaps, if you must think, to think of pure act.

What is distinctive about the subject of experience is not self-reflection, or personal identity mediated through memory or some core feeling of self-ness, or an emergence out of intelligence, but the sense of freedom. This may be denied intellectually, or experienced mostly in a negation, but however tiny the flame it is what the living now consists of, and what makes any sort of meaning possible. Identity which grows more and more constricting with the years is only a negative imprint of this freedom which is the essence of the 'now'.