In the unreflective living which makes up the most part of life the 'I' is not present as it is in reflection or dialogue. This is a minor distinction, the 'I' of these latter modes is a special kind of object among all the other special kinds of objects that you happen to be concerned with, it is the thing that you speak for. But that's not it at all, it is also the name for the whole thing, for that which reveals itself without being known, identically in every mode, oblique to the day's predicament. 

On one side there is the strictly metaphoric nature of witnessing. It is an essential metaphor or image of consciousness but it cannot be actual, except as a sort of ecstatic nightmare, since that would lead to an infinite regress of witnesses. Everything imaginable is experiencable, without bounds, but this is not the same as being actual. You don't know how to be in unboundedness, there is no knowing, that's what knowing is. On the other side it is personal all the way, there is no escape from the 'I' of consciousness into impersonality - into some sort of 'impersonal functioning of totality'. The self might be, or most certainly is, a provisional stability at one or more levels of experience, but it does not represent the limit of the personal. That quirky form of self-inquiry that uses 'Avoiding relationship?' targets the same opening as 'Who am I?'

It is not the witnessing so much as the being witnessed which determines not only your metaphysical and epistemological frameworks but even more severely your moral predicament. In the former cases internal imperatives point to your asymptotic identification with the witnessing, which makes these ways of thought open to the possibility of a kind of metanoia, or a good infinity, a higher freedom or liberation in very midst of ordinary experience. In the latter case the witnessing remains inescapably transcendental, but also somehow pathological. It is not just that you are seen, but that something is expected of you, but you cannot determine what that is. Reduced to its most flattened and secular form this increases the intensity of the demand to an unbearable degree. At least this seems to be what explains that oppressive perfectionism that arises, say, in utilitarianism, which otherwise might have been expected to have dissolved the force of accusation aimed at the subject by the same gesture by which it abolishes the subject. It is as if freed from God you find yourself in a Kafkaesque horror which you resolve or repress by embracing thoroughgoing consequentialism, as if you could align yourself with the witness, the Other. Can this be turned around? Can the question of who it is that is called upon, who is named, in this way be steered away from the moral and into the ontological?

Apparently some believe that a direct linking of minds, representing a vast augmentation of communicative "bandwidth" and by- or over- or under-passing language, would be both feasible and a positive advance for our increasingly 'cognitised' species. This is an extraordinary notion and whether the linkage is expected to be one-way or two- or more-way it seems to say more about the current mental models of those who entertain it than about its realisability. It seems to be understood along the lines of mental witnessing. We imagine that our inner workings are not only witnessable (formerly by God, presumably, or at least since the C16th, and now by whom? Our significant others?) but are actually being witnessed (if only imperfectly), so that the context of witnessing is actually integral to our 'inner' life. This is not to say that such witnessing actually takes place, but the idea of it, the extended metaphor is a complex idea that rarely ceases from being latently active. So, one version of directly linked minds is to imagine it taking place via the assumed witnessing function. We invite others in as audience, they are to occupy already existent but vacant seats in the theatre, if not the royal box previously reserved for God. The mind however does not make a clear distinction between content and witness; if the witness metaphor is pushed into greater clarity then it produces an infinite proliferation of mirror images, a psychedelic effect. Say that the contents of the mind are thoughts, feelings, sensations, images, and contextual atmosphere. How much of each of these can be imagined as directly shareable? In the first instance, in immediacy, these are forms of the entire subject, are complete but transient embodiments of pure and formless subjectivity. Pure subjectivity is without number (1+1=1 or 1=0), so could that be the axis of co-experience? It can't be ruled out, but the energy released by such 'fusion' would be unpredictable.

Sit for a few moments in alertness to your object of attention, whatever is before you in sensory or mental reality, and then watch the way that your state decays into dreaminess. Both object and attending subject become blurred, they peel away from the initial grasp on (relative) reality and dissolve into an underlying fluidity. The distinction between subject and object is lost and the two poles merge and drift, they melt into the imaginal. If will were not directed towards maintaining the object in place then this would be the delicious moment of yielding to sleep, to the enveloping discontinuities of dreaming mind. You would like to identify only with the clear daylight consciousness in which the object slowly yields its secrets but the failure comes precisely in that moment of identification which floods you with deeper and heavier identifications. In this case it seems that you are made up of nothing more than the series of metaphors that you use to describe what is experienced. The matter of mind is these metaphors which fit together like a puzzle, separate but inextricably tangled. And what does 'metaphor' mean here - it is itself a metaphor, they are an immediate form of imagery which are the very relations they purport to describe.

Traditional religious ways and understandings of transcendence served a number of different but interrelated functions for which there is no clear substitute in secularism. Broadly these belong to the realm of meaning in that they provide a unifying context for overlapping but divergent concerns. To list some of these, there is the linking of a system of general behavioural rules with collective survival, futurity and well-being, there is the linking of the known and the unknown in the sense of an assurance that what we have learned forms a legitimate (or lawful) portion of what we don't know and are able to wonder about, there is the unification of different modes of knowing, the idea say, that there is a larger realm in which the rational, the aesthetic, the interpersonal and the mystical are embedded, that every different kind of experience has a place in a larger whole, and finally that there is the connection between the most private and individual personal experience and objective structures valid for everyone, a connection traditionally expressed through ritual and sacrament. Perhaps this could be summed up as the embedding of the rational between the irrational and the super-rational. Secularism, by discrediting and abolishing the third of these while retaining an acute but increasingly troubled reliance on the rational seems to have made the irrational into its only other. It is possible to regain the cosmic, or synthetic function of the super-rational from out of the purely rational? Is it enough to only be able to point to the inwardness of experience without being able to account for it?

First-person, or autobiographical poetry is strangely effective despite being absurd. Present-tense declarations cast in loosely vatic diction seem to retain a trace of an imperishable discovery of self supporting whatever banal performatives are brought forth to licence the assertion of existence, as if experience conjugates being. That words merely written become a voice through the slightest inflection of form fulfills a possibility that was already inherent in perishable utterance. The stage on which they sound out is one of the earliest and most stable of acquisitions. But even without such a scene lighting and sounding the orator words fit more perfectly than what is imagined. Even if the speaker is not only absent but precisely what is in question the words are shaped to the mind more perfectly than any glove. The words are the shape and the mind is in the words, the words themselves in pure felicity mean no more than themselves and are their own commentary and unfolding. Repeat the words over and over until they decompose into sounds and then see that this takes nothing away from them except what never belonged; it is exactly what is being done.