Juxtaposing the states of passionate arousal and calm equanimity tells us only that they are inconsistent and that they seem as if to belong to two different selves. What is more interesting would be to observe the transition between them in the same self. Something along the following lines. Desires are endlessly propagandised as expressions of the self, their connection is assumed to be unmediated. It is not enough that desires endlessly upwell and mutate slowly if at all, that they only increase in intensity after each temporary lull following gratification, but they must also be managed, or husbanded (wived?) in time and space, both personal and social. This includes the passions which here are taken to be excesses of desire and the immediate corollaries of such excesses, their excessive justifications. Desire, to be fully respected as truth-bearer, cannot be bounded and so excess of desire, desire which breaks with the energetic circuits of the self, is expected and becomes the justification for further management, as much as possible to be treated as exemplary, or heroic. All of this and its ramifications covers most of the culture, but a place remains for challenging the link between desire and the self, or indeed between desire and a self. This is where such notions as a death-drive might be invoked or more simply the alienation from desire. What is it you want? No, What is it that wants this thing in you? It is not madness at stake here but damnation. There is a crucial choice to be made, and it has long been made, but you don't yet know which way you will go. Desire is now experienced not as an aspect of freedom but of necessity, but paradoxically you find there is more freedom, of a perverse kind, in necessity than there ever was in freedom.

Strong feelings are similar to intoxication, they impose a distorting field on perception, judgment and will. Normal functioning is still available but distanced and squeezed, as if seen via a squint, and the subject of such functioning, the home self, is seen as less natural, more of a historic compromise grown into an institution but with shallow roots. How little it takes to push the mind into states of passion, envy, desire, hatred, guilt and all their concomitants. At a certain intensity their origination in childhood is clear although the precise details are cloudy; faint memories being stirred up of how it felt at one time to encounter such a storm of feelings, how shocking to first discover that some one, that you, could very well be in the place to which you had now been transported. As if in the warm and humid half-light of inseparation, of what in retrospect would seem like utter dependence and trust, a pure difference erupted, out of an elsewhere that you vaguely knew about and that others were supposed to deal with, you watched it with drowsy contemplation, a piece that didn't fit, that jarred with the whole weave of things, tangles, clashes, war, overflow, until you suddenly found it was you that was that was that. The moment of this discovery is the shadow of presencing, and so a face of presencing always turned away, and historicised by what's known as your life.

Space and time are conditions of experience and have no reality beyond that, they are internal parameters of the experiencing mechanism and do not reveal anything about the meaning or essence of that Experience. This was pretty much the Kantian position, and that of Bradleyan Idealism, and in a different form it seems to be something like the position of modern physics. We can adopt it as the first step in a critique of separation; in appearance a relation between two entities has a lesser degree of reality than the entities themselves, being added on to them, while in reality it is the other way around: what we call the relation is what is real and the reality of the supposed entities is exhausted by their role in making that relation appear. Relation is thus not relation, since there are no relata, but pure significance, outside of time. The arguments for or against such a position are of less interest than the way it helps to point out those aspects of experience which call forth the concepts of space and time, in particular the odd way in which we seem to be both inside and outside of these. If the observation that 'you cannot step into the same river twice' expresses a central realisation about time, then we must note the stepping into, the step taken from presumably dry land. All of this to now apply to experience in time as self-realisation, self-actualisation, or what has been called soul-making, which includes suffering and spiritual growth. This is what it is precisely because you cannot stand outside of it all, there is no dry land, every power you have and can call upon is fully mobilised, every residue is consumed. It is your entire understanding which moves in a dimension that you cannot grasp in any other way. And this is why the creative productions thrown off in this movement are irreducible, why they cannot be reached, or be imagined to be reached by any other path. It is the soul as living time, its significance being that it has no significance but is only significance.

You know how it is with you only by reference to how it appears to be with others. To have your standards entirely within yourself, not to depend on what you imagine of how others see you, is something you take pride in, ignoring the fact that the pride which consolidates and stabilises this stance as well as the standards of measurement on which it is based are fragile appropriations of the view from the other. That there is a way it is with you, that there is a stance you can take up, can work to retain or to discard, is to be in a kind of dynamic flow, to be in time, and in the times, in the worlding of the world. Nobody ever gets free of this, it is what must be given to be somebody (but given to whom?) in order to gain access to all the opportunities of this state, including the opportunity to strive to get free of it... or even just to grumble about it. To be a state is to have a politics, some kind of perforce democracy of subpersonalities; the machinery of state, a ministry of the interior and one of the exterior, foreign affairs which turn out to be so interwoven with internal affairs that no line can be drawn between them. All of this because there is something you want, something you can't and won't cede, and the world to you becomes the demand that you do so, the mirror image of your desire. And whether you win a round or lose one the desire only comes to seem more real, indisputably real, until the very moment that it disappears into thin air.

Accounts of life based on existential or phenomenological paradigms, and these include all accounts developed out of a study of consciousness, miss out out on all the fire and drama of it. These are genetic accounts mobilising basic terms such as desire, anxiety and identification, for which to explain is in some measure to explain away, and so they shed sparse light on the unappeasable fury of judgement, both of yourself and of others, on the craving to avenge or to submit, the thirst for justification, on the ecstasy of tyranny and tyranny of ecstasy. This is why religions with a God and an antagonist, and the secular variants of these, connect more deeply with the human condition than any philosophy. Theologies are more effective readers of philosophies than the other way around simply because they can speak of sin and evil without irony. This, at least is how it appears at times, in what is perhaps a shocked realisation of the utter impotence of understanding and of how far you have permitted a surreptitious 'mission creep' in regards to philosophy. It represents the crux of Job, the point along the path of understanding where you encounter the enduring problem dealt with in the biblical Book of Job. There is nothing more to be said, the debate is surrendered, you can only turn and allow the sublimity, the primal wildness of the whole thing to flow through you.

You depend on something from outside. The mind lacks the scope to properly frame the kind of metaphysical question it claims to want to solve. A certain co-presence of facts forms the premise to such a question, but this only comes about and cannot be willed; the mind cannot store the question's address only its own memory of having addressed it. Where it has the most to say is where it is most deficient. You cannot treat this as if it were a subject matter, something you could delineate and return to, and delineate again. Whatever is seen, once seen, melts away into the surrounding mists. Anything you can do is not worth doing, but you must not cease from doing lest the readiness be lost. There was, there is, a question, but mostly what you take to be the question is the scene of the question, or the scene of the scene of the question. Taking the mind to exist you are lost in the mind.

One resolution to the numerous paradoxes of appearance is to conclude that the universe we find ourselves in is a simulation. It is debatable whether this solves anything at all, or just pushes the problem further out of reach, but if it were the case it is not unreasonable to assume that we might have been designed to discover that fact, and to follow where this discovery might lead. Say this simulation is in a vast computer set up by a superior being in order to enjoy the spectacle of its unfolding, of the unfolding of the abstract premises applied in the building of it. In that case there must be ports of some kind through which this being can access and experience their virtual world. The obvious candidate is the subjective life of individuals. Does it make sense to ask whether a particular such port is in use at any given time, like right now? In other words, given that subjective life apparently has its own internal justification, its own internal self, the one for whom it all is all, and given that on this assumption this internal self does not, cannot, actually serve this function - being only a sort of place-holder, something like a programmed parser that ensures that memories are stored correctly in relation to the multiple lines of narrative that intersect here, that everything is always in readiness for the real subject, the creator or commissioner of the simulation - is there a difference in experience between its being 'enjoyed' by a virtual self and a real self? Is the virtual self aware in a moment to moment way of its incompleteness, aware that it needs the plenary subjectivity of that other to complete its task? This thought experiment points to a radical difference between two notions of the self, the first being as operative core of the functioning subject in its world, and the second being the final guarantor, the underwriter, of the reality of personal, or first-person, experience.