Most of the time there is no thought of the self, but everything takes place under its vigilant protection, within its forum. At the slightest challenge it is ready to come out fighting. All of this is a construct, the most banal of constructs, and this can be seen with a seeing that cannot belong to the self. Where is that forum, that city of mind? Inside itself? Why must there be one at all? There is no trickery involved in this parallax, the self is not a magician that conjures the self. It is only a matter of looking aside.

The Hegelian dialectic is simply a reflection of German sentence structure. A collection of diverse and antithetical thoughts are thrown together and compressed until a point of maximum tension is reached at which point the verb appears, as if out of nowhere, and in an instant retroactively synthesises the meaning. The mind is always at work, depositing meaning jointly from intuition (Anschauung) and its own activity (Verstand). In contrast, a language like French, with its Cartesian obsession with clarity, in which the order of the words is taken to reproduce exactly the order of the ideas, are perfectly suited to literary description and over subtle phenomenology. In English, word order is subject to tacit rules of decorum, as in 'The King's English', and so to the ever-present Other.

The trick of turning attention back from the mind's activity and towards the consciousness in which and by which it is taking place at all, is one that benefits from naivety. As soon as it is thought about you realise that the movement of attention is simply another activity of the mind and so the trick itself is only an illusion, a transcendental illusion what's more, about which there seems to be much that can be discussed - in place of merely carrying it out. The opportunity once offered is immediately lost. History now becomes the various attempts to justify the journey of returning to the starting point.

But you and everyone else seem to be taxed with the task of acquiring and then shepherding your own ego through... through what? Through time, through circumstances, through life ant is thrown at you? Or through 'samsara' whatever that means? It is a kind of place, or a (theatre) stage, a locale, a proving ground, some even call it a movie - something real but not quite real, half-imagine, a haunt of mysterious forces, gods and demons, of laws and coincidences. If only there were a name for it.

Over time many words that remain current in a language acquire several diverse meanings which have nothing to do with each other. Those who are fluent in the language and use these words in conversation or in reading and writing texts effortlessly, selection of the intended meaning is cued by the context and no awareness is retained of the semantic fields belonging to the un-selected meanings. This is the most ordinary thing and yet the complete absence of any tendency towards a semantic synthesis refutes a key pillar of Hegelianism. This, of course is seized on by deconstructionists with their incessant punning, even though the latter tendency is more accurately described as a debased Hegelianism. If the tendency of these diverse meanings is rather to draw apart that to come nearer, isn't this still an indication of an irreducible togetherness of sign an meaning.

One step at a time without searching too far ahead. You accept each unfolding circumstance with equanimity, even when what it is is your loss of equanimity, or especially when it is so. New matters call for a positive response to different degrees, something that must come from within, this is were you will not to will and entrust yourself to what comes up even when it means making a commitment more demanding than you might have hoped. It's the reactions that reveal and which bring what needs to be seen to attention.

In the end the stakes for all inquiry into the nature of consciousness is not the kind of being that it possesses but its relationship with Truth. All that we discover factically about it seems to undercut the possibility of such a relation, except that it remains the sole horizon of all such ventures, of every position taken, of every hypothesis and every denial, even as it resists all attempts at systemisation.