Words in the form of descriptions or confessions or investigations can fascinate but don't change anything of themselves, the thinking through them is the weaving of a virtual subject far removed from the reality that they serve. Seeds sprout, fevers rise and die away again, what urgency is there in stones and flowers, doors and windows, water and sky? Experiences and relations are more plausible, fall closer to the grain, but prove no match for the simple persistences of time forming and dissolving ways of being, faces no longer recognised, tendernesses relinquishing. Afternoons grow pale and your hands release their grip. If only this blue light would remain, would prevent you rising up again to follow old dreams to old conclusions. Neither this one or another, here nor there, unquestioning the silence. 

If every brain cell has an atom of consciousness how does it understand its restless activity? It would feel like being in a vast economy, perhaps. It carries out its tasks and it gets the nourishment it needs, a tremendous hormone-soaked duty of responsiveness and exchange subject to unpredictably rhythms. Its life is giving and taking. Does it have the faintest suspicion of the mind to which it is contributing? How could it? And now all the brains are wired together in vast non-linear relational networks of flows, and soaked in passions - perhaps they too are giving rise to an unsleeping mind incomprehensible to us? Computational theories of mind would seem to require this. How is it that we know it is nonsense, that it doesn't figure among all the things we know we don't know, and also those we don't know that we don't know? 

Waking consciousness is positional through and through. Every intention refers back to an interlocking network of references in physical and psychic space which align to bring about the effect of a real subject in a real world. All of this exhausts the mind so that periodically it needs to surrender it all in order to renew itself, in dream sleep and in dreamless sleep. The body is temporarily paralysed when physical references are dissolved and in the same way the psychological self is loosened and anesthetised when its referential structures are reabsorbed into consciousness - they are made of nothing but consciousness and have no intrinsic being. It would be frightening to discover that consciousness could retain its vividness in their absence, but until this is realised the waking world, the sense of being a life, remains haunted by a subtle sense of inauthenticity, of being an imposture that veils a truth you feel unprepared to handle, but which always looms over you.

You would seem to hold lightly to identity, with a relaxed grip as if ready to relinquish it at a word. To insist on it would be an error of taste and of logic, a sort of inversion of cause and effect, a presumption. There is nothing unique about you, you are just a kind of person, a coming together of certain experiences with certain mental and moral quirks, an ordinary venture of presencing. And yet being here is so inexhaustibly cozy, needing no grander epithet. The moments belong to their own occasion and soon evaporate, and yet each is perfectly filled, is a perfect instance for empty witnessing and quiet delight. 

The idea that our reality is a simulation is a debased form of theism. In either case there is an ultimate motive for reality which lies in another consciousness, or an Other consciousness. For the believer in the simulation this other consciousness while vaster than what we know is of essentially the same kind, its foundation being outside of itself - and hence its need to experiment - whereas for the theist the creator can be both in-itself and for-itself and the creatures still ends in themselves. Either way the notion gives imperfect form to a metaphysical question which can't be formulated but needs to be formulated. If you strip away the metaphysical machinery, however framed, you are left with the inner mystery of consciousness being the same as but also prior to the mystery of existence, its alien kinship. Your life is not the solution to this mystery but its husk which with all the forces of its nature resists being cracked open.

Why is experiencing anything other than a description of the mind at work - not in the sense of an organ that excretes experiences (although such a notion, playing of reification, certainly plays a large role in contemporary culture), but that experience is just what such a level of information processing feels like, the feeling being internal to the self-organised processing? This is also a form of physicalist soft eliminationism that one comes across. This makes it difficult to define the boundary of consciousness in relation to the  aggregate of all other brain functions. There is an odd way in which despite its rather powerless and captive status in relation to such physical functioning, mental functioning seems to be structured entirely on behalf of consciousness. Consciousness may be a captive, but it is a captive prince, its servants admittedly do everything for it, but without it they would lose their raison d'être. It very worklessness underlines the way that consciousness is not there to serve the mind, but rather the other way around. It is with difficulty that we can imagine consciousness as a concomitant of mind, but the intuition that mind, and the entire objective field in which it is embedded is a degradation of consciousness, is startlingly clear. Everything fits inside of consciousness but consciousness is only illusorily inside anything else.

What an extraordinary Swiss-army knife of a operation the mind is?! It can have perceptions, conceptions, imaginations, memories - all of which are entirely distinct modalities, but which affect each other - it can communicate with other minds, solve problems, theorise, introspect and extrospect, have aesthetic 'experiences' and make fine judgments on them, it can be infused with desire, or a vast spectrum of emotions, it can dream, manufacture and inhabit its own worlds, it can deceive itself mightily, and it can also sift through the relations among experiences and come up with a grain of truth. It can have ideals and ultimates and relate itself to them in various ways. Its capacities seem to be limitless, and even when they are not it can sense its limitations and search out ways to go beyond them. No wonder that times you seem to be entirely lost within it. And yet in all of this, and even in the naming of its endowments, there seems to be a distinction between you and your mind. Is that one more of the mind's tricks? Is the experiencing, the pure presencing something else the mind does or produces as a matter of course? If so, then what is it for, what is the motive for all of this play? And if not, then what are you and why are you hiding there?