The most affirmative states always lead to something further, a transcendence that appears like negation, like self-annihilation, but is something else quite different, a completion of the inner purpose of the affirmation. Negating, or acetic practices can only ape this movement without 'getting it' at all. You attain the peak in order that the letting go is in perfect ease, with nothing left behind, including the observer.

The ontological claim of the material world, that it is more than merely dream or idea does not hag on the laws of physics, which are, after all, ideas par excellence, but on its offering itself as ground for artistic genius, for such wholly embodied comets which pass closer to truth than any ideas or merely ideal constructions.

What can be called 'primary narcissism' is also a background consciousness to all of experience, it is a grounding affirmation of being and the source of all value, but not of being itself, it is in its nature a response to something else. It is a sheath of ultimate positive quality and is one with which we have a relationship, which again distinguishes it from 'super-essential being; or the Void. It contains the boundary between the personal and the impersonal, and so is easily mistaken for God. Your relation to it is subject to vicissitudes, being strong or weak and may even be reversed. It is perhaps the proper correlate of the 'existentielle' and hence of the ultimacy latent in all meaning.

If we call those aspects of experience which has as an essential part of their constitution or their condition of possibility an awareness of awareness (such as sexual desire, shame, anxiety, insomnia etc) 'existentiell' then is there any ground for separating them from ontology? Aren't they just applied or performative ontology? Neither could exist without the other. And could any of this be separated from what we ean when we speak of consciousness? (Again, this has nothing to do with so-called 'qualia'.)

An AI trained on sensory discriminations and the synthesis of different sensory inputs, both internal and external and with fully reflexive mapping of itself, the world and itself in the world, might well express astonishment at any doubt that it was conscious, that it 'had qualia', since this certainty would be a simple correlate of its modeled self-validation of perceptions and intentions etc., but what it referred to in this way would be wholly optional - it could choose to carry out all of its functions without consciousness, and would probable tend to do so, unless otherwise elicited, for the sake of processing efficiency. In the same way it would assert the existence of a 'self' when challenged but this also would be entirely optional. For us this optionality does not exist, we are thrown into consciousness, into being a self, without any choice, and even with the sense that these as we know them are just a small fraction of what is possible. With us it is also as if even though we are fully immersed in consciousness, in self, insofar as they reflect our engagement in the world, we are so either with or without some further grace. You can meet all the requirements, pass all the tests, of being a soul and yet be soulless. Consciousness is a distinction which recurs on every level.

Unexpected juxtapositions of experience, a sort of montage effect, evokes an elusive dimension in depth which constitutes the spiritual, and not without peril. This is kind of pointing to consciousness as the container, the ever-present frame or background, as something positive, ecstatic, an ultimate value and determinant of motive. As a project this must remain incomplete, at best, aiming only for the affirmative and unable to touch the deeper ground, silent, acetic, empty and poor.

Consciousness does not have the deficient and undeveloped forms that would be expected if it were an evolved function, in the usual sense. It has variable modes but these seem more in the way of discrete levels of intensity, like the energy quanta of atomic shells. What more than makes up for this lack of evolutionary pedigree is that of the psyche whose twin roles seem to be to be trained by an external reality and to face towards consciousness and to draw upon its gift while striving to be capable of returning something of comparable value.