What you believe to be true about the world objectivises you as an idea and subjectivises you as a feeling. In the end the feeling comes to be the index of truth, but this feeling is not the feeling of the true but the feeling of being objectivised (subjected!) in the way that is valued as true in our particular corner of the consensus. The feeling underwrites the authority of this interpellation.

Every binary that is used to elucidate experience falls under the same dialectical inversion and repetition as subject and object in sexuality (the doer and the done to), or the lord and the bondsman more simply between persons. There is a subjectivity that belongs to the object as objectified that makes an object of the putative subject. This secondary subjectivity, sometimes slandered as ressentiment has a piquancy which that makes it more sought after, directly or indirectly, than the simple primary subjectivity. This kind of thing pervades all dealings in the world and gives rise to many strange complications.

In thought and in perception the subject and object are separated and entirely heterogenous, even though in thought the object is taken to be a direct emanation of the subject. In feeling this distinction does not arise, you cannot speak of a subject and an object, rather the experience is the experiencing. If ideal content is added to a feeling then you are identified with that content, whether directly or indirectly by way of a perspective or a parallax. Desire and motive as elements of experience can therefore only arise by way of feeling. The space of all possible feelings is larger and more unexpected, more unknown than the spaces of possible thoughts or perceptions. It seems to have infinite layers of structure as a refraction of thought and image, although in itself feeling has only the dimension of depth. You don't consider adjacency of feelings.

A system of relations, only of relations does not differ from a system of things, only of things, since in the former in the need for relations of relations the relations become things and, in the latter, nothing can follow unless the things act on each other, in which case what matters is how they do so which is just the same as their relations. The essential point is the grounding of a system, which how and why what is at stake is included, becomes at stake. The question only arises because there is always already a ground which necessarily cannot be a product of any system but its motive, and this can neither be thing nor relation. The only purpose of any system of meaning is to point outside of all meaning, and the difference is in how thoroughly and forcefully it does so.

The qualia frame is that of considering every content of consciousness as a feeling, even, or especially when that content presents itself as something distinct from feeling, such as a perception or a logical proposition. Indeed, as feeling devoid of ideal or relational aspects, pure self enclosed feeling. (The mind of a poet might justapose many heterogenous matters, but never as qualia, but always according to its naive presentification, unsevered from its context.) With respect to prehension or intentionality, qualia are the terminal objects of networks of relation. That is why there is some sense in saying that conscious content is made of qualia, ('X is conscious if there is something that is what it feels like to be X') and also why it is wrong to do so.

Expressions like intentionality or prehension which purport to point to the atom of consciousness may be flawed but at least retain the quality of implicit action, especially the latter. Qualia on the other hand is explicitly passive and so lead to an infinite regress of observers, or you could say the qualia of each quale. How do you recognise a quale? By its distinctive qualities etc. Qualia appear to be more scientific because they are theoretically, and perhaps practically measurable because they fall short of the active experiencing. Intentionality and prehension are not measurable, the mystery of consciousness is not solved but simply taken as given, or postulated. The 'I' with its dual nature is in the activity. From the qualia point of view there is no 'I' - this may suit ideas on non-self, or anatman, but foreclose experiencing.

Consciousness is recognisable as a certain activity, even what seems to be passive reception is a saccadic grasping. This belongs to a multitude of separate functions in a polyphony, each with its own history and goals, past and future not all of life, certainly, but all that is gathered in the conscious, is lit up. In terms of function each has its own subject, or actor, but wat make it conscious is the unity of the subject, the original experiencer. This is not something added on, is not a posterior construct, but is more than structural, is without thought or option, grounding.

It is evolutionarily advantageous to skew the function of truth in certain ways, including the most immediate kind of truth which notionally expresses the self-witnessing of consciousness. In spite of this, and of knowing this, truth is taken to be a criterion more rigorous and objective than relative advantage. The notion of truth is constrained to reflect on itself. This gives it a special status among ideas or ideals - a status which could not arise without pointing either forwards or backwards towards reality.

You cannot think in reverse, cannot unthink a thought even if you can forget it, and it is the same with feelings and intentions. Every thought, every movement of the mind or heart is an energetic change, it incurs a palpable cost in the day's gift, and this within a system that is far larger and includes what you take as your boundaries. Consciousness, however, does not participate in the same energetic economy and can be moved radically by the slightest touch, or by none at all. It is neither energetic nor temporal, but awareness of this is masked by identification, by fascination, with the physical and informational process of experience.

Every waking up is a waking up to yourself, but what of the first ever moment of waking in the embryo? Consciousness erupting from a possibility to an actuality - but even the possibility of consciousness is a kind of consciousness, eve the field of possible consciousness out of which this very one is chosen - but who chooses?

Scattered moments of waking pervade dreams, are felt and immediately folded back into the text of the dream, and in the same way bright specks of a higher awakening are sown all through waking life, folded back into its narratives and situations but not without lending something paradoxical to its texture, an unwonted certainty for example mistaken for intuition, and in such a way that, heterogenous as they are, waking life would lack all conviction without them.

You are separate from experience but never detached. There are many kinds of passion and addiction that are fully existentially loaded and virtually immoveable. This indicates that while the gap between the 'I' and its objectifications is known as at the core of being it is also easily overcome, experience flooding into the space of the 'I' and structuring it indelibly. In some ways this is an advance, a touching of a concrete universal, but in the living through it eventually becomes a hindrance to freedom and a work of detachment must be undertaken. Such a work is always possible, even if the will and the power of discrimination is absent. To detach from velleities counts for nothing, but from an existential identification, passion or addiction, is a real achievement.

The original source or moment of apprehension, or call it just prehension, is neither like pure perception nor pure ideation or conceptualisation, but a fusion of the two. A perception is only realised via a concept, a whatness, and a concept does not arise without an arising, a thatness. Whatness and thatness are in a sense orthogonal, they do not fuse. They are distinct 'directions', like two eigenvectors of a single transformation, or act before all action.

For the individual being is being conscious which mean being witnessed, but the witnessing function is so named only relative to the individual. In itself this function disappears. The witness dissolves into the un-nameable.

There are, we hear, over two hundred different theories of consciousness, and naturally all of them are wrong since they must take consciousness to be something that exists, or in some cases perhaps under a twisted logic an existent illusion. Consciousness, however, does not exist in a strong sense, since existence is secondary to consciousness. What's more there is nothing in general that it could be. It is never general but only this very consciousness. The drive to explain it seems to be one of the necessities of consciousness, but that is only the drive of explanation to be finished with itself.

Duality of consciousness: one side is headlong and unreflecting, unreflected and without memory, pure arising, while the other is pure witness. The witness side is confused, projected, identified, scattered in fragments which seem to originate with others, or with the singlular Other. The task is to regather and center the witness which you have always been without a break.

In all sorts of ways you travel and visit other lives that you might have lived. Merely visiting is not enough you need to have lived that other life all the way through with all its sorrows and joys, its gains and losses, perfect moments and dull half-hours - like the life you are actually living, which might as well be someone's visit to the life you call your own. They especially enjoy those moments in it when you are, in this way, aware of being bound into it. But, you say, they will go on to experience other lives while you only have this one. And they do, infinitely - look at all the different lives - and you do - provide them with these complete identifications of finiteness. This s a kind of metaphysical déjà vu.

Materialism as a metaphysical view is something of a red herring; its presumed thing in itself does not actually do anything beyond serve as a mental brace for a sense of passivity before the necessary or the impossible. In a similar way the apparent agency granted by idealism does nothing either but save the appearances in the face of that same necessity. And so in modernity materialism has assumed the mantle of agency via science and technology but it does so in service to the dream of a second coming of idealism which ultimately entails a deferred encounter with passivity in the face of necessity. It is almost as if what is at stake is a continuing dialectic of agency and passivity whose ground is the point were matter and mind originally coincide.

The psychological ego is essentially a bodily organ, like the liver or the kidneys; it serves to filter, or digest, reality to the smallest most useful and most consistent fraction. It evolves into its function, effecting various developmental trade-offs and taking on a fixed form. The key difference is that it dissolves, part way, every night in sleep and reconstitutes each morning on waking up. It enacts the role of consciousness without actually being consciousness, it is the servant who has usurped the role of its master because it better shares the nature of the circumstances of experience. It jealously hides its failings, its glaring incapacities, behind a veneer of omni-competence. Like other bodily organs it is destined to come apart, to decay away, at death.

The mind's desire to consume the self in its interests, as if that were its fuel, and leave no residue, and the self, without any desire of its own lends itself easily to being consumed, until nothing remains, least of all the nothing.

That qualia are associated with every moment of consciousness is related to the fact that for us consciousness and self-consciousness are the same. The experience is accompanied by qualia which you are fee to focus on so as to experience the experiencing - as if the qualia are shorthand notes you can reference in order to re-experience the experience. In this sense consciousness is innately self-referential, it completes its own loop, but with an unacknowledged gap, that between awareness and quale. Or you could say there is awareness of awareness, but only via the intermediary of the quale, which binds subject and object.

The dissolution of ego ought not to entail ay sort of sudden shock or trauma, these can only be signs that the dissolution is incomplete or only imagined. It is rather the realisation that the ego never existed at all, that such an existence was ever at stake, and that you have always known it. A certain frame of reference has simply come back into its true bearings and everything within it is now clear - actually it is almost impossible to understand how it was otherwise, how its time and space apparently seemed to work.

Material reality is complementary to mathematics - it is the ream of spirit to which mathematical laws apply, which amounts to being a realm where massive reduction in 'degrees of freedom' apply, where complexity can be developed out of simplicity. As you depart from the material this structure breaks down and say, synchronicities and over-determinations begin to play a key role. Will relates to will not via causal laws but according to wholistic knowings - there are no repeatable instances, what we know as meanings enter in - it is as if the very laws are alive.

Not the undifferentiated blind force of nature, of raw life, or abstract will to will, stubbornly resistant to the mind's endless reshapings, will is itself directedness and structure even showing itself as a complex rhythmic structure that turns over on itself The figures of will are like interference patterns with surprising dead spots (points of stasis) and reversal, unwilling as much as willing.

Will is what you persist in following in spite of all the things that you think you want. It is neither free nor entirely determined since it always emerges through choice; what you choose without having chose to choose, your purpose in spite of yourself. You are born out an act of will not your own and you contend with all the force at your command with other forces not your own to realise that which you express.