Affect may be predominantly ego generated and centred or somatic in origin and unfolding. As far as the ego is concerned, although negative affect may be unboundedly intense, positive affect, although very much socially promoted is bounded and relatively weak. Its limits are the limits of the ego's reversion into itself and these are surprisingly narrow, much more so than how they present themselves - but isn't that the very nature of the ego. Somatic negative affect can be extremely intense but is bounded in that beyond a certain point one loses consciousness. Somatic positive affect is however unbounded, but rarely encountered in its extreme forms - and these tend to be feared more than desired, with a fear that can be easily overcome.

To a the mind that has been absorbed in solving geometric problems all causal and logical relations take on a geometric character so that all of experience seems to be geometric in origin. The same might be said of music or even of programming but these are superficial effects compared to that of geometry which seems to go infinitely deep into phenomena.

Experience is momentary, like the frames of a film, while desire aims at the future and initiates temporalisation and memory. Desire is to complex a structure to begin out of nothing, to create itself. To say that it is brought forth by lack is just to say that what comes first is pain, uncalibrated pain which might be infinite, or reversed, but whose inevitability we still feel behind everything.

Desire encodes memory and so is a clue to the deepest layers of the self. But desire is also mechanical, always assimilated from elsewhere, is at once what is most authentic and most inauthentic, belonging to a deathless psychomachia in to which we are thrown. Which is more futile, desire or the absence of desire?

Desire seems to be co-extensive with subjective consciousness. Even an ant when placed in a situation where it behaves in a way that expresses desire is i mediately seen as though it were aware of its situation and itself in that situation. And you, when desire is almost entirely absent, don't you barely seem to exist? This equivalence is present in the terms in which the atoms of consciousness are attempted to be expressed, intentionality, or prehension, or in the primacy of will in late-metaphysics. Qualia is a suspect term precisely because it strives to neutralise desire. Desire comes and goes as mysteriously as thought, but perhaps more in a more salient fashion. Furthermore, it is loops on itself as desire to desire etc., as easily as awareness, but has the advantage of possessing both a positive and a negative valency.

Multiple meanings of consciousness all point towards that which is ever-present and underlies or enframes what appears, and which possesses a nature which all that appears is unknowingly striving to express, to bring to self-transparency. You might see the same movement in the striving of painting to cause the act of seeing to emerge from out of the seen, or the move that goes from a consideration of acts and characters to psychology or spirit. Isn't this just the defining gesture of metaphysics and isn't it then subject to the same move being repeated at one further remove?

Experience or mind as the expression of consciousness is driven by the problem that consciousness sets itself to solve, which in terms of experience is that of the non-self and more particularly of the other. In terms of experience this unfolds not as the problem of the isolated thinking subject, or even the psychological and spiritual subject, addressing, personal liberation, redemption or salvation, or enlightenment, but at the problem of peoples, of species, races, of large group interactions, of what might even be called global consciousness. At the very least that abstraction, the individual, is a point of self-knowledge only as embedded with one or more collectivity struggling for clarity and justice.

At the core of being a conscious self is the quality of disclosure, of the immediate relation to the truth of whatever attention is directed upon, even if that truth is misinterpreted or misunderstood in the moment that follows after. The phenomenological frame, interpretation immanent to consciousness, can be taken as more immediate and so closer to truth that the transcendent interpretation, according to the 'natural attitude', or perhaps it ought to be the other way around, but the question is at least worthy of, and potentially able to be resolved by investigation. These framings are modes of belief, or of meta-belief, and as such are vulnerable to an infernal re-interpretation in which everything is a deception, or a simulation etc. The knowledge that is sought is, however, of a kind which rules out such re-interpretation, and hence must have no dependence on belief at all.

Consciousness is profligate of minds which rise and aspire like ocean spray before breaking against the rock of necessity. They never take the same form twice nor do they evolve. If consciousness is likened to the ocean it is also just as much the the wind, the rock and al the restless forces which keep it in eternally aimless and perfect expression.

Chopin is the sexiest composer because the promesse de bonheur in his most romantic passages is entirely without irony or even nostalgia. In their momentary sweetness even the prospect of suffering that is not voluptuous is forgotten. It's not so much that they are lying about desire as doing away with truth willfully and altogether.

Mind creates a world from thought because it can direct itself towards absent things. In this sense the power of mind is the opposite of that of consciousness which can only be aware of itself. The inwardness of consciousness extends beyond the self-identity of the 'I', but is of a different kind from the wide-rangingness and unassuageable curiosity of the mind. The two express the fundamental polarity of being, Shiva and Shakti.

Did consciousness create, or evolve mind in its own image? How are pleasure and pain possible, these opposites that seem to colour by turns its whole being? Does mind desire to create other minds so that it may be known or know itself? Are the pathologies of mind, addiction, narcissism, dependencies, distorted selves, are these reflections of more subtle conditions of consciousness? Or is it that ais possible and experience the result of a random walk, a crystallisation in a space of unlimited possibility, a pure void in everything is cancelled by its opposite?

From one parent a measure of faith in the mystery, a hidden poetry of feeling, nostalgia, well-wishing, a desire to love the world, a will to believe, and from the other a joy in puncturing those same beliefs, a hard edge, mistrust of everyone and everything, and an ability to be pleasantly surprised, but not often.

Can there be consciousness without mind? Or mind without consciousness? Isn't there bare consciousness without a mind, just raw instantaneous feeling-will, prehension, and aren't there minds, processors of symbolic content without accompanying awareness, without a 'what it's like to be that', isn't that obvious? Our notions of mind and consciousness presume such elemental forms, but that may be the very heart of our misunderstanding. We build our models of reality going in the opposite direction from reality itself.

Experience is of someone experiencing and who or what that someone is is what fills that experience. The someone, nominally you, is not behind the experience but in front of it, spread out in endless branches of desire and relationship in that experienced world and merely identified with the experiencing of which it knows nothing.

To awaken inside the dream, or to be restored to original mind, lucid waking.

Every technical development that externalises memory changes the nature of time, emptying it out, pushing it toward instantaneity, making it less of a medium for will and emotion, and the subject more of a Buddhist. But at the same time the significance of estrangement from time becomes shallower and more commonplace.

Depth of consciousness is the depth of meaning that can be given to the word 'being'. This is not fixed, since a meaning is an act, and an act is what can be negated in relation to the awareness of the act. Being and awareness of being are but one.

If the parameters of consciousness were slightly different then some final metaphysical truths would be discoverable. Isn't there, in other words, a sort of analogy of the so-called anthropic principle that applies to consciousness, a sort of ontological principle? If the purpose of consciousness is for being to awaken to itself wouldn't it be fine-tuned in such a way as allow this possibility in terms of the possibility of unlimited clarity and penetration and the impossibility of stopping short, of ever coming to the final end and truth of anything finite?

Existing timelessly in the now is synonymous with consciousness and is not a fact about its metaphysical being. In so far as the world is in strict correspondence with e knowing of the world the same is true of it, but again this just means that all temporal and physical relations exists timelessly in the now. It is not a truth at every level but only as seen from the seeing.

You cannot witness the persistence of the 'I'-self in time since it is only located in the 'now' and there cannot be two different 'now's at once. You can witness all kinds of feelings and thoughts, but only in the 'now' - everything else is a thought. That you persisting in time, that the same self recurs and in that recursion makes meaning is a large part of thought. It's not really essential to anything but that is where it starts and ends - it acts like a filter that smooths the course of experience by blurring it, more or less.

You have a consistent self for others and for yourself via others, but purely for yourself there is only a succession of unpredictable momentary states, each one complete in itself but with no relations between them. You can create an autobiography only by getting outside yourself, consulting memory as if it were a book, but it can be wiped away in the next moment. Fully entering into time would leave no trace behind.

A good part of the culture is about finding your authentic self, discovering and being true to your authentic desires etc. Authentic being a catchall term for a certain kind of focus and release of energy. It doesn't end there. Another, smaller part of the culture is realising that the authentic self is no self at all, that every desire is founded on the fundamental misrecognition that you are the one that has it, that it expresses, that it is real.

Consciousness as it is to you, the sensory, individuated self-reflexive, knowing inside of life can only be as the restriction or limitation of a universal potentiality, the inside of everything and the outside of everything, and so the being everything all at once.

Do you have life or does life have you? Life's way of having you is for you to have life. Only you could call it life. This why the troubling question is never answered, always escapes, you could never contain what contains but rages endlessly, unnamed and new, without purpose or repetition.