Desire is often accompanied by prohibitions, by a shadow-work of taboos. What is enviable is not the other's enjoyment in their possession of X, but that they have given themselves permission to possess X, to enjoy it: that they are so constituted that such permission is only one of the things they can afford themselves.

Subjectivity the soul look inward, consciousness looks outward. The inward then, is only a special case of the outward, or a reversed image of it.

All of this interest, desire, stories heaped on stories, genealogies, rabbit-holes, all of it a smokescreen around the private self compacted of pure feeling, fear, guilt, memories of hidden joys, and all of that a smokescreen too shielding the unborn, the inactive, the unchanging.

It's not all the colourful objects with which you build the house of memory that constitute an image of the soul but the secret correspondences and echoes that connect them, often just simple relations that do not require masses of detail, or great wealth of spirit. Soul is unnervingly abstract, or seems so, because what it yearns for is of greater unity.

Soul is not at home here, was never at home here. It finds space and especially time endlessly strange and fascinating. However could time have appeared?

All your metaphysics depends on the effects of a handful of molecules, and most of your art too. These are almost entirely absent on Sundays.

Art can open a door to a hitherto inaccessible or forgotten region of experience, but only as if by chance. It cannot say why you should go through it (even if it orders you to do so) and if your own restlessness drives you to do so, it deserts you once past the threshold. In this it is akin to nature.

The rational ego, the purposive transactional hegemony of the light extends its reign even to your dreams, it has enlisted art to its side, abolishing shadows and all deliria. A great psychomachia is needed to free the soul.

Soul is the longing-body, that is why al myths speak to it. It tirelessly longs for the lost paradise of itself. It awakens with consciousness, like its shadow in light.

The will to power in its many forms, an ideal that applies to every kind of desire, contains its own ground and so does not require consciousness. What you do under its influence - it does not need to be your will to power - is done unconsciously, but whatever is done unconsciously by a conscious being is done in regard to consciousness, in defiance of it, and consciousness is embroiled in it willy-nilly.

Is self-reflexive purposeful action only a stage in the realisation of intelligence of does it necessitate the presence of awareness, of consciousness? The distinction between mind and consciousness sees to be justified by the fact that we can imagine forms of mind, say purposive response to environment, entirely without consciousness. Does it work the other way around? Can we imagine forms of consciousness free of involvement with mind? Panpsychism seems to suggest that this is so. Or we can imagine consciousness associated with different kinds of mind and bringing forth very different kinds of ... something analogous to what 'subjective experience' is for us. That in our experience for which consciousness is indispensable may have nothing to do with problem-solving, or with making accumulations of knowledge coherent, but purely with moral and/or aesthetic experience.

What exhausts the mind is not coming to terms with the world as it is, but conceiving all of the ways in which it might be.

Your cognition has few degrees of freedom, although this is only in the judgment of a reasonably mature meta-cognition. Relative to this meta-cognition has infinitely many degrees of freedom since it can can gain a compensatory awareness of every limitation of cognition, but these remain latent for the most part, and whether the whole pattern repeats one level up (the meta-ego would be the 'overself' and not the super-ego) is unknown.

Your knowing extends further than you know, it is not fully spanned by what meta-cognition you possess. The two are yoked together by way of the ego-self and so what you may know is limited by what you can acknowledge. Much knowing is free from concepts and language, and the goal is not to bring this into the purview of meta-cognition such as it is, but to extend the latter far into the non-conceptual, non-verbal.

False beliefs can arise from sensory illusions, but these illusions can be seen through, or disbelief can be suspended, a playful quality reigns. False beliefs can also result from having your judgment overborne by others, by a collective or a powerful or deceptive individual. In this case exposure has a traumatic quality, and you do not easily forgive and forget, most of all your own gullibility, and out of this the self-contradictory belief that truth is only an effect of power arises and veils the world.

The conclusion of Descartes's cogito is an ontological certainty, 'I may be deceived about everything else but not my own existence'. There is also an epistemological version of this: I might have no autonomy, and be only a simulation of agency, but the fact that this simulation requires my belief in my freedom-to-discover-the-truth-of-my-situation means that this belief is an essential component of the simulation. What constitutes this belief is that it is about my true situation, so even if it is incorrect it is in an irreducible relation to my true situation nevertheless and retains the possibility of being correct. This argument is analogous to asking of someone who asserts that consciousness is an illusion, 'whose illusion?'

The soul can sicken and imagine itself to be no more than a self among other selves in search of themselves, or an identity amongst other identities fighting over recognition; it can project itself into these ways for a time, and not without some bitter reflux, and not without retaining in some hidden corner its soulfulness. That a self or an identity could pull off playing at being a soul is absurd, and somewhat obscene, and yet we see the attempt made all around and every day.

Even if you can identify with a remembered past self you ca always still give reasons for your purposive actions or inactions. The habitus is immediately recognisable, but none of this is unambiguous.

Pressed to come up with reasons for your actions and beliefs you would be unable to attain consistency. Instead there would be inconsistent islands of consistency with ever-shifting boundaries. Your philosophy would lie in the felt but unstated rules for determining these boundaries.

What world you are in is determined by what philosophical questions are possible regardless of whether they are asked or of the answers that might be offered to them.

Experience always presupposes acceptance of the kind o being for which that experience can be, it is framed by an ideal experiencer. When you inquire who you are you answer with some general ideas. Consciousness is not general but infinitely particular, the very basis of all particularity, so a thin veil separates it from all experience: the form of experience, not as an idea but an act, an acceptance.

Self, as soul, bears the same relation to each moment of a lifetime. Memory is your only imperfect organ, working with and against time for perceiving this.

Waking at 4 a.m. you feel a little crazy, but in fact you are both more intelligent and more emotionally intelligent than in waking life. What is the difference? The world is far more porous, there are holes, gaps everywhere you look and you must consciously question what might be behind them. Knowing this you still cannot will this perception in day light, it is a gift of the night, the dissolution of the stuff of self that smooths out every perspective.

It's not the set of possibilities at each moment that marks consciousness but the measure imposed on this set, that is a structure imposed on the set of subsets o possibilities, a structure which arises in relations of correspondence to other structures etc. There is something both suggestive and futile about attempting to find the origin of consciousness in mathematics. In mapping metamathematics inside mathematics or in playing on the duality of measure and degree of belief all you are doing is finding more and more subtle ways of begging the question.

At every moment an undetermined choice is made. Consciousness is not the act of choosing but the awareness of the range of possibilities out of which that choice is made, an awareness always already perspectival.