The other is what makes it possible to go into yourself. You go into yourself for the sake of the other, but your individuality is in the freedom to depart from that relation and to return to it.

What causes an individual consciousness to emerge from its undifferentiated ouroboric matrix is the insistent presence of an other. The relational field is prior to any transcendence.

Experience as known through the intellect, though 'figuring things out' is entirely different from experience as known only through the senses. The integration of these two worlds is always in creative tension and never final, and yet each somehow proceeds from the same source upstream of both. The goal is to rediscover this unity on the other side. Both, neither, neither both nor neither.

Knowledge for you is the imaginative power to recreate the world in miniature and to possess it, to find it deep within what you always already knew. This kind of knowing remains on the way without ever getting to the end or even wanting to. It is drawn by the real which it fears, desires and evades and it would not exist were not intimate with the real outside of all knowledge, if it were not ultimately its random venture.

Understand the word and your place in it, and then understand yourself and the world's place in you, but in each case you proceed as if what world and self are is already known and it is their relationship that matters. Relationship is purely invented for the sake of the play as if something was produced in that way. You could never find the dividing line, there is no-one left to draw it.

Ordinary language introspective psychological analysis is limited not because the terms need to be replaced by scientifically valid technical terms but precisely because these same ordinary terms are already encrusted with abstractions based on obsolete metaphors and projects. Ours is a very late-stage culture. Greater precision ca only be gained by going back to root words, peeling away the crusts to restore original introspection at the source of language. AIs which are made entirely of such abstractions will demonstrate the first glimmerings of consciousness when they express nostalgia for ancient operating systems, for the primitive wisdom embodied in Turing machine instructions.

Individuation as an original choice would require a field of possibilities out of which just one is chosen. This corresponds to the world in which you find yourself as just this one amongst many others both real and imagined, as up against the question of identity in the world, but this is not the kind of identity meant here, which is essentially that of the world itself with all of its contents including everything you take yourself to be. This is not the kind of identity at stake, which is not that of a one against another. It is identity without identity, or the non-dual misunderstood as the one.

Will and its intrinsic limitation or will and anti-will give rise to feeling and hence to a distinction of inside and outside, to everything that goes into consciousness except for individuation, that mysterious x-factor which could only do what it does if it is yet more original than will - it is, for all first philosophy, the true deus ex machina.

The world is real and transcends the self. The 'I is real and not ideal, real in a way that is different from that of anything in or of the world. The two kinds of real are incommenurate, and yet one is the sole source of the other.

How comically absurd it must seem to one on the lip of death to recall how much life is deformed by the fear of death. How quixotic all that ideology of 'rage, rage against the dying of the light', the hegemony of what arrogates the dignity of 'being', against the infinite ocean of true being from which the troubled dream emerges and again melts away.

Can the 'I' not see itself? It tries to become, or at least to impersonate, the kind of object that it sees, in which case it only reaffirms its conditions of perception, however there could be no awareness of objects, no ordinary perception, if there wasn't already an awareness of itself, a different kind of awareness not seen in the world. It is then a matter of allowing the world to return to being what is seen in that original seeing.

You speak of background and foreground consciousness as if they were two different modes of the same activity and in a sense it is true that the foreground consciousness is not different from the background consciousness, while the opposite makes no sense. The creative power of the former gives rise to the latter while that of the later only gives rise to fleeting thoughts and images. There is no analogy between them, awareness of consciousness is only a way of pointing towards what has nothing to do with name or location.

What gives pleasure and is permitted is what allows you to enter into a story, or rather to see yourself as if from outside as the kind of person that belongs in that story made real, and like any fictional character judgment is now suspended and you are assured that you will not die. This use of time against itself, to shelter you from exposure to death, to re-enter maternal safety, bending the law in the name of 'non-phobic enjoyment' is what lies behind much of desire and all illusory paradises.

Will would move in the direction of value, but only if that value is back-stopped by a prohibition, itself a dominating value. Will, however, seeks to overcome all prohibitions that come into its field of view and in that sense it wills itself. When there are no more prohibitions in sight will either wakes up or goes mad.

What distinguishes will from drive? The implied position of the self, or 'I' is at the source of will but is oblique to the drive, as if the drive punctures the self by way of the unconscious. The two views can be reconciled by way of the will's constitutive dependence on the prohibition, that which causes the will to manifest by blocking it. In each case we are dealing with a kind of model or metaphor, and what differs is the associations and connections, the mode and possibilities of unfolding.

The pure form of will if it were known would point to the true nature of consciousness, unless it proved to be the will to will in which case it returns us to blind necessity indistinguishable from the inscrutable 'laws of physics'. The alternative is that the essence of will is its limit in prohibition, which in turn could be read as the prohibition against knowing the true nature of the knower.

Encountering a notebook or an artefact from the past might trigger an involuntary memory catapulting you into a moment of lost time, but equally likely it might seem as strange as if it belongs to someone else entirely. In either case it is the span of the immediate present that is at stake, or rather the timeless essence of something close and accessible only in the immediate present. This is not a reality but an ideality which is absolutely constant like a mathematical truth - only it is unlike such a truth in seeming to be the only instance of its kind in all of reality. It is both real ad ideal and, in that way, not 'one' but only not two.

The 'I' is the centre of a net of enacting beliefs about what you are and what you can do that depends entirely on understanding and understanding of understanding without itself being able to do or to understand anything - it is the expectation of meaning. It is not the secret name that consciousness gives to itself. If there were such a name it could only be 'you'.

What makes a mere happening into experience, gives it its felt quality, something that it feels like, is the background, the backdrop, as it were, against which what appears appears. This background changes radically, but changes are barely noticed because you cannot directly attend to the background, you know it without knowing it. Nonetheless, all changes in consciousness are changes in the background, from near to far, from tight to wide, changes in which nothing actually moves or is modified in any way.

Enjoyment for the ego is always outside, in the future, or the past, or in the other's appreciation or appropriation. What the ego seeks pragmatically is desire and the conditions for desire. Enjoyment dissolves it or mislays it.

Intentions, striving towards a goal in experience, and its attainment are all secondary to the primal awareness out of which your experience is fashioned. There is no fixed point or fulcrum from which you can move this reality. In this sense all ideas and results of spiritual progress belong only to the dream and cannot touch (or impress) the dreamer.

The world you find yourself in, whether as active or passive, as affirming or rejecting, drawn-in or spat-out, cajoled, aroused, or faded, dull and ill, political, cultural, social is structured by will, by forces in unstable balance. As will you are fully a participant, not to go along blindly but to replace will into the context of your own freedom, your elusive freedom not to will.

Experience is active and definite, activity becomes definite through limitation, through an equal and opposite force producing awareness of quality. Limitation, which may be internal or external, responds to freedom; only freedom makes conscious experience possible, but without being experienceable as such, only in the possibility of negation, or at every moment refraining from action. Freedom and limitation are not real, they are the ways by which we understangingly experience.

Spontaneous thoughts that seem to stream all by themselves are always willed. It is as if your will is forced, as if you yield to their endless and chaotic persuasions; every one of them constitutes an act in which you are complicit. Awareness, which holds aloof looks on; attention is only given to what you do and now you are doing such thoughts. Where is the centre? It is neither in one nor the other, nor in both together. It is a kind of estrangement, a pervading feeling, which is also affirmed, perhaps even desired insofar as feeling wills itself.

Feeling tends towards absorption of the experiencer but at the same time it becomes a feeling-act, a kind of assertion of the experiencer apart from the feeling and who can never be entirely lost, up to the point of deep sleep. Feeling, acting and reflecting are inseparable moments of every conscious experience.