Inquiry into the self, or even meditation in the un-technical sense, is a discursive operation, which means that while it calls on analytic and synthetic thought, it is organised around inner speech. This is where themes for development in attention are introduced and mediated or dismissed by means of other themes. Here the self naturally assumes the guise of the inner speaker, and with that all of his mannerisms, say a certain incorrigible naivety and a deference to a certain culturally and linguistically defined common sense - because certainly common sense for an Australian embraces different stagings of implicit meaning from that of a Russian or a French or a Chinese. But the internal speaker, the discursive 'I' is often taken by surprise by the self who acts, and this very surprise furnishes the reflective inner voice with many of his themes, which already implies that the one who acts is more the self than the one who speaks. The self in purposive action, whether the purposes concerned are fully conscious and approved or not, is a strongly inflected self, and so an inner constancy can be assumed which may not be apparent from the superficial inconsistency of one's acts. This points towards further and deeper layers suggestive of the notion of an authentic self, and lying in the direction of desire, or purpose beyond action. A certain culture or internal politics of desire may then be seen as the house of the most authentic self of all, and the experiences this leads to in the relative autonomy which it is granted opens into a an even deeper realm of self which are validated by events we may call self-shattering. At this point we have reached a sort of sacrificial ethic of the self, the self being what you give yourself for, what you die for, in a little or maybe not so little death. All of these versions of self are actually quite diverse and probably defy any transcendental synthesis, so that if they point to a paradoxical unity it is along the lines of that lyric from a Chris Smither song which announces, "I'm not the passenger, I am the ride." 

Trying to maintain attention while sleepy and reading or listening to music it is easy nod for a moment and fall into a very brief dream. These events of other consciousness are not really dreams but fragments of dreams, or pre-dreams, as if you have plunged into the midst of a story taking place in another scene and have not had time to orient yourself. It's not even clear if you were just there in that scene, or it was only the scene, because it is almost impossible to remember anything of it when you jerk back into your drowsy mind in the present, only that it was quite vivid, seemed quite natural, and had nothing to do with anything you can think of. If emerging from it seems a jump-cut, moving into it must have been seamless, since you can never catch the moment when the other scene takes over. At best you can catch yourself just before falling into it, on which you'll give you head a little shake and feel the effort of coming awake again. It is as if the blocking in of the situation is entirely effortless, and the first thing that happens is that the situation comes into focus, a situation consisting of a setting and some other characters already engaged in various activities. Presumable it is only after a further interval, which might be permitted to develop later when you are lying in bed but not now, that what we normally call a dream can crystallise out of these preliminaries, and when this happens your role thickens and takes on the motives and purposes of a character fitted with a self into which a familiar coordination of thoughts, feelings, memory and of distinctions such as of self and other, inside and out, earlier and later, can be located, which is your self. Only in the this later phase can it become a dream. What this shows is how much more goes into having a self, it is like the meaty flavour in a soup that comes from adding a few bones, without which you would have just had a thin, evocative but unsatisfying vegetable infusion.

A dog barks at something, but a cat's miaow directs attention to its desire. Humans, even with the least intentional gesture, assert or transmit something of themselves into the space surrounding them. It could be called mana, this spontaneous distortion of the ontological field around each person, a certain unspoken demand for attention which exerts a definite force, weak or strong, positive or negative. Above a certain intensity we would likely refer to it as charisma, but why not extend this term to the entire spectrum of force of personality, from the least, or even negative, to the greatest? Although it can operate silently this force is best understood through the modality of sound, since the effect survives in sound recordings and is particularly powerful in songs or the various forms of popular music such as hip-hop, where it is mundane enough that it can be technically manipulated and re-created. All of this class of sounds are inhabited, invested expressions of self as aural energy, and are quite different from the kind of energy aroused by the beauty in random environmental sounds like the lapping of water or the wind in trees, or even cars passing on a road. It is only human voices which can evoke this incantatory magic and threaten us with its power, although an echo of it remains in the sound of musical instruments, especially those which approximate the timbre of the voice. Imagine a mature adult first hearing a church organ or a violin! It is likely that our own thoughts, in so far as they are silently heard, share in this phenomenon of surplus intensity, and in this way come to seem to be expressions of varying selves, normally bracketed together as one. On the verge of sleep one can sometimes hear one's own thoughts as if in the voice of another, and presumably in dreams this potentially plural investment is taken to its natural conclusion.

I like to think that I'm serious about these things, but it is really an elaborate piece of play-acting and play watching, an entertainment centred around the notion of insights. If I am the investigator then a moment later with precisely the same earnestness I am the pursuer of some derisory half-dream thought that has flown in from nowhere. The point is this non-distinction in the personas of earnestness, which are embodied just as readily, believe in themselves just as innocently, and fail by just the same degree to impress the veritable subject, even as one dons the guise of a German professor, and the next a blase schoolgirl, or an arrogant mastermind, or a bitter failure, or an admiring fan, or a doubt-wracked priest. As phenomena the only difference between deep realisation and ephemeral presumption is an ecological one, akin to that between a rare flower and a weed, it lies in the alliances that foster or suppress them. But in spite of this the'I'-ness is always fully invested each new thought. The thought may itself be, or enact or function as, a holding back, but there is no holding back of the investment in the thought. The self has no agenda that it needs to protect. This is a state of affairs that can't be undone by altering some belief or meta-belief. The nature of the mind is to produce thoughts as the expressions of an 'I', which is an extraordinary complication if, as many believe, no such thing exists. Thought appears as if it consists of generalised utterances, and there are plausible explanations for this, so the 'I' may be no more than an effect of the virtual social context of deliberative mind. But even here there needs to be a distinction drawn between, merely tactical 'I's and strategic ones.

Each event that arises in the field attention, whether as the outcome of a prior volitional act or unexpectedly imposing itself, is accompanied by sense of ownership by the self, which is a distinctive and sharp modality more on the side of feeling than of thinking. It is easy to overlook the oddness of something so everyday as the fact that everything that comes up, by doing so as part of my experience, thus retraces the outline of my existence. It is not that the 'I think' is or can be added on to it that makes it mine, but the other way around; because it is mine I can reflect on it as significant for me, as a significance existing entirely within my sphere of meaning. The field of attention ought to be divided into a centre and a fringe, since when something is focal everything else arranges itself in concentric rings of receding impact all around it. Some things are peripherally attended to and can immediately become focal if the need arises, others are more distant and as if merely represented by a place-holder until changes in context might need to bring them forward. All that this means is that it is easy to disavow the way that everything must pass through the needle's eye of the 'I'. The modalities by which a thing can form part of my world are rich in versions of mediation and spatialisation so that it is natural to believe that something not in the focus of attention is still there, like the tree in the forest that no-one hears fall. This is of course precisely the transcendental illusion, and the deeply held conviction that there is something not mine is itself entirely mine.

The notion that consciousness arises when a system with a vast number of possible complex states converges upon one such state, a notion that is cognate to the observation that the neo-cortex is characterised by a wildly promiscuous network of interconnections between its subsystems, unlike other more specialised parts of the brain where efficient operations are facilitated by a rigid division of labour. Normally one would expect that such a density of interconnection would create a level of chaos that would deny the stability needed for any significant operations to be accomplished in any subsystem, but then when you consider that any such operation must be ready to be instantly modified, remade or destroyed, must be both significant and momentary, convergent and frictionless, this may make more sense. The pattern of interconnections brings about a vast multiplication of states through all the possible interactions, and not limited to pairwise, of subsystems. Like all such theories the attractions of this one mask the fact that the very thing it purports to explain is not at all explained, but merely repositioned in the terms of the theory, and with all its original mystery intact. What is curious is that the pattern of this theory is strikingly similar to the mysterious collapse of the wave function notion in classical quantum theory and to the multiverse theory as a solution to the cosmic fine-tuning problem. In all cases what is at stake is the selection, or choice, of one out of a vast or even infinite space of possibilities, and always on behalf of ordinary reality, of things as they are, or simply of what is. It is reminiscent of an earlier, suggestive, but apparently quite misleading identification between the structure of the atom and that of the solar system. These vague isomorphisms are doubtless equally misleading. In the case of the multiverse as resolving the stumbling block of the so-called anthropic principle, it would seem to have the theoretical consequence that the universe we find ourselves in ought to be highly typical of any universe able to contain sentient beings capable of evolving the intelligence required to wonder at being in such a universe. But if this is so, it makes the Fermi paradox much sharper than it already is. And, following the clue of the shared pattern, we may also wonder what the equivalent of this paradox is at the level of consciousness?  

As a protagonist, the hero of your own adventure, this all seems rather disappointing. One goes into the mind and takes a look around and it looks like the same barren place as it always has, after you've removed as much of the furniture as you could and quite a bit of the rest has worn away with the effects of time and negligence and your incessant tinkering and irregular scrutiny. But is the mind like a room, is that a useful metaphor, does it take you any further? Is it a place you want to stay in, is everything you need really here, like the room in Pascal's famous saying, it being a matter of learning to stay put? Or is the process of making it habitable only an intermediate step, and now you are to see where you can go to from here, so it is more like a base of exploration? The ambiguity is in whether the mind is the inhabitant or the dwelling, or if we admit that it is both, whether it can be both at the same time? The mind seeks to resolve its multitudes, its infinite adaptability into a single momentary figure of extreme particularity, to draw pure potentiality into the definiteness of experience. The potentiality cannot be directly experienced, it seems an abstraction but if it were not present and effective in some sense then the realisation of any experience, that it is only itself when it shines forth out of a background of all the other things the moment could have been but wasn't, would be meaningless, and so the distinctive modality of experience would be lost. We can call any such definite experience (erlebnis) a dwelling for the mind, but then also it is the experience which dwells momentarily in the mind, in its theatre, its space; the mind hosts the experience, the experience hosts the mind. Perhaps it is precisely because the mind first hosts itself, that its indefiniteness closes on its indefiniteness, that all of this is possible? In that case boredom would have its concealed treasure, would be no more than the belief in a centrifugal force.