The incessant activity of perception and thinking that absorbs consciousness could not be what it is if it did not lean upon the the fundamental knowingness that is consciousness directed to any object, but this knowingness is rented out, leased and sub-leased, divided into thousands of tiny strands so that it becomes denatured in self-recognition in favour of its equally trivial and granular objects. This is why the practice of concentration is not something added on to consciousness but a recalling and regathering of it so that it can begin to express its own nature. Only then can it be turned towards the only impossible and therefore only proper object which is its own source. The scandal of misrecognition is only so for the consciousness that had regained its undivided essence, which is to say that the question can only emerge when questioning in thought is no longer possible, and a turn, almost like prayer can be allowed to supervene.

Peculiar feeling that goes with a big clearing out of old books, papers, recordings, clothing, objects, bottles of wine never to be drunk. These remained as parts of your intimate environment embodying abandoned but never quite relinquished desires, or the possibilities of reviving some past historical locations in a mood of wry nostalgia, of autumnal fullness. You are merciless with them, out they go, leaving large holes as if you are erasing parts of the backdrop and losing tethers and orientations. It is a kind of death, a wrench at first and then strangely liberating, seeing how personhood is put together, layer by layer, in its undoing. All that ballast overboard, but not to float higher, rather to settle more lightly on the ground.

Human reality with all its vicissitudes is carved in delight which is the knot, as it were, that attaches consciousness to it. You are conceived in enjoyment, in fusion, and this is the willing descent into being, so steep that you cannot go back the way you came. How else could consciousness be persuaded to break open its divine circuit? It is in seeing that beauty infinitely pervades this broken reality that you discover how serenely detached consciousness remains, how there was no fall, no attachment, no connection, and nothing to connect, and that the joy resolves into silence.

You can write about presencing and if you had more talent you could expressively evoke indications of it in a poetic fashion, but you cannot mean it, even as presencing seems to be the at the very heart of all meaning. Once the words are written they escape completely, you could die, that is cease presencing, in the next moment and it would make no difference at all. And the words themselves are snatched out of thin air by the writing process, out of some sort of intimate otherness which is never here. Presencing remains serenely elusive, it doesn't care, is incapable of caring, just as it doesn't matter at all, has no objective value. To think that it does, that somehow your wish is to impress it onto the world, onto the real, in such a way that it would be inescapably witnessed is a mistake, since this could only be done for some peripheral concomitant of it which was already a sort of object. It is not beautiful, not fragile and ephemeral, but so much the opposite of these as to beggar all imagination. You cannot care about it, but what you care about is precisely the way that it is indispensable to experience - no, more than that, that is the only thing that makes experience matter at all - without in any way being (an) experience. This is so strange that that it continually elicits your curiosity without in any way corresponding to any possible object of curiosity, or having any connection to anything you think of as yourself.

Human reality is coextensive with the world, it is multifarious like a troubled sea teeming with strange life, but all of it, down to the most contemptible filigree is only this human reality, everywhere and in each and every instance, is this arising of consciousness, absolute particularity, banging its fist on the table. The current is too strong, too wild for the vehicle, consciousness overloads us, frays the circuits. Human reality is the striving to take on the shape of consciousness, which is as much as to say that it is contraction, its blinding its suppression, and the failing to achieve anything. Human reality is the ranting child, being schooled, unable to learn the first thing. You know it here as the ineluctable modality of presence and you strain to raise your mind to its wavelength, but in just the same way it is the continuous breath of desire, of wishing, that pushes and pulls at your tired body, the very mind and heart of desire.

What you've always known is consciousness in situations, as being inseparable from situations, so that it can seem as if what goes by consciousness is only a particular reflection of the ongoing situations which, integral to the world, follow streamingly. But the situations by themselves seem incapable of coming to life, they are like an immersive cinema in which you are fully absorbed but which is only for you and not you yourself. Although this is a strange way to think of it because the personhood belongs to the situation every time and might express nothing about the consciousness. No, the strange thing is that even though the scenes shift quite rapidly, go pell-mell onward, the 'camera' never shakes, is never in the slightest degree pulled off-centre. Which is not to say that what is identified as consciousness, as the light of experience, doesn't change in its glow and warmth and penetration, but all of those transformations correspond to different kinds of situations as they come about. The core of it is wonderfully fixed and it's that unshakable constancy, which can only mean self-adequacy, that is the clue that keeps the ever-arising personalities intrigued and searching and wondering who or what to thank.

The senses, sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch are pointed forwards in time; when you give full attention to one of them you perceive what is breaking in on you. Sensory memory may be an essential component of perception but this so as all the better to delineate what is coming to be encountered through sensory experience in the present. To be present for the senses is to be directed towards the future, or perhaps it could be said that futurity is first of all defined by the orientation of the senses. Thought, on the other hand, is always backwards directed; even new thoughts are built up out of the known. In thinking we proceed backwards and perhaps this is the only way in which we can be surprised by thoughts; we suddenly find ourselves in the midst of something new, realising this a moment after we have arrived. In this way you can tell that the 'sense of self' is really just a form of thought, because it is experienced backwards in this way. The question remains as to whether there is another hidden dimension of self that is experienced forwards, or in a different and exclusive direction entirely?