If there is one who has questions, who pushes the inquiry, that one is only an element of the scene, a catcher of stray disjunctions. The whole thing is a mystery to him, a hidden mystery which he's rather proud to have unearthed, at least some of the way. The actual mystery is not hidden at all, maybe isn't even a mystery, but just simple being.

Stationary awareness is essentially the same as transcendental consciousness (Kant or Hoffman) and as the understanding that the waking world is like a dream. It is not dream-like in the idealist sense of arising in the imagination of a world-spirit, or as a sort of consensual illusion, but in the very simple sense of being made out of the same stuff. What you see, hear, touch, smell etc. is a reconstruction by the mind, a projection, in just same way as a dream is. Its source may be completely different, it is as veiled in the one case as in the other, but its material is the same. When you see a red flower, the red comes from the same bottle as the red in a dream, and the space and geometry of the object are built out of the same elements.

Experiencing naturally devolves a division between the experience and the experiencer, so that there is always a something to whom seemingly the experience is 'happening', but there is no experiencer that can be fixed as an object. There are in fact multiple experiencers which sit inside each other like Russian dolls. The deepest of these, or perhaps it is better to say the largest, has no relation to any narrativity in experience, it exerts no demand that experience be ordered, or have a development. It lies at the same remove from the experiencing at every stage of life, but this sunshine like quality may be reflected in the experiences more or less clearly at different times and stages of life.

Shame or humiliation is not primarily a moral emotion but an existential one. It is the feeling of being a poor naked thing in the face of the elements, the emotion proper to one freed from social bonds and alone in the face of conditions, the emotion of a Job or a Lear. There is nothing moral in this. The system of good and evil is parasitic on that of shame and pride and is a falling away, a fatal deviation from it. Social animals perhaps feel shame in some basic way, an ant is a shameful creature, but a spider is not. Among humans there are perhaps some true solitaries, but they are rare.

The word consciousness, from scio, = I know, or its German cognate Bewusstsein, from wissen = to know is heavily freighted with analogies to a knowing, or knowingness. But the roots of consciousness are deep in feeling and emotion while these, lacking any detachment from their objects, and inner distance, are an embarrassment to the theoretic or speculative self understanding of consciousness. Feeling and emotion however are not the end of the story, they are not self-contained, auto-affective, but arise and exist within vast currents that we can point to only with mythological terms - the most powerful of which are eros and its natural opponent. And as these forces come into sharper conflict the times themselves grow mythic.

The seeing is stationary. You run around playing role after role, but nothing moves but a puppet in a picture. The seeing moves neither in space or in time and that is how movement can appear. This is the thing that is too simple to believe - it seems crazy, it's not backed-up... but who or what would be qualified to validate it, other that you, the subject to whom it all appears and who truly has nowhere else to go.

There are events in early life that crystalise desire, if not its specific forms then the general framework in which it will arise. One of these might be the first encounters with books. For some the book, perhaps a encyclopedia, or a bible, might suggest a condensation and concentration of the whole world into a an object that can be held in your hands, and the power of knowledge that it connotes. For others it might instead be the fantasy of entering into a picture or into a story, wanting to be like a character in a book. The naïve desire might be soon abandoned, but as a structuring of desire it might present a perfectly indelible and unattainable ideal. This is a phenomenon of a certain kind of cultural development, it arises at a certain point and ends too, at a different point.