It's that absolutely particular in this, like when you wonder how you come to be the one you are and not anyone else, or what makes you not a p-zombie, how you can be so sure of that. It seems silly to ask such questions but you do so with childlike naivety, do they even make sense? And that too is another guise for it. You only touch the mystery in here lightly, by a corner, before it melts away into clouds, but it's always the same question and the asker of it has only a single identity in all of time. The questioning is not located in the heart of the heart but equally pervades all of what you think of as the field of consciousness, it is not pointed but spatial and without boundaries. And although it leans on all the good reasons why you are you and they are they it doesn't preserve you in any way. You feel you have to give up everything to come fully into it and everything looms larger and heavier until the startling realisation that you had no weight at all, that you could never be what you strive to be, but only some instructions in the glove-compartment or the nucleus, that sets the extraordinary dance going.

You have many intellectual and moral failings, among which is the lack of any desire to amend them. A deficiency of courage and of seriousness, a tendency to choose what is expedient is perhaps at the core of it. You don't inhabit a moral universe being too skeptical of agency for this notion to cohere. Is this a way of being honest or dishonest with yourself? Either alternative is possible, but the question seems irrelevant at this stage. There is only enough clarity for taking the smallest of steps and merely taking these exhausts all your doership without concern for whether they lead forwards or backwards or sideways. The kind of universe this happens to be is still an open question - indeed is it one in which anything 'happens' at all?

Reflection is a special sort of activity, and for the most part it is disengaged. To be in the experiencing of some X, doing, feeling, passing from one nexus to another, and then to be aware of doing all that. This much the system seems designed for; there is a dual consciousness that enables you to focus on X and be aware of focusing on X at the same time. Perhaps this is better described as focusing on X reflectively - the reflection is pushed up into the contextual frame within the original experiencing - it is a sort of augmentation or inflexion. The experience happens in its objects but the reflection is inside the place of the mind, or more simply in the head. It doesn't work to take it further than that - to reflect on the reflecting because you have no place to stand apart from both activities. If you had such a position then it would be easy, a position outside the mind and outside the body. Because it happens so rarely it seems as if the concept of your mind, the palpably lived concept of body-mind is fixed in stone. It needs to be both inside the inside of mind and outside the mind. Nothing about this seems impossible - the witnessing views such contortions with amused detachment.

You talk in a vague way about feelings, emotions, desires, and these are beasts that with the habituations of living you find ways to coexist with even if you can never domesticate them, but there is no vocabulary for the different constitutions of self in time and space and possibility. Very different modes of appearance succeed each other but never lead you to occupy a point outside of all of them, a point from which you could survey the metaphysical diversity of the quotidian. Or perhaps there is an intimation of such a place in those broken hiatuses between dreams when you don't know who you are and all the shattered possibilities crowd around you without any one being able to assume you. It is a palpable amnesia that sets you up as the sole subject of each passage, a peculiar power that you can't know that you possess, that shapes this shadowy and upright 'I'. 

As if the tinder is damp and you can't strike a spark but otherwise nothing would prevent it - there is clarity, absence of dominating mood, readiness to consider, and a rejection of irrelevancies, fading tendrils of desire, a kind of quiet happiness. Feeling as though you have just landed alone in this misty landscape, gathered and at peace with mediocrity, but all the weight has gone into a counterbalancing dreamlife which is rumbling in an adjacent room. Here there's just a small empty space, not quite real or unreal, a dilute solution of mind, a perpetual elsewhere. April foolishness?

Think your way to an impasse, over freedom, over consciousness, truth, purpose, life, any key term you like and you bump up against something from outside something you can't think past. It's how you proceed from that small shock that matters. You can fold thought over on itself and assume a sort of second-order attitude, you can attitudinise, plant your flag, go and search out what others have said on arriving at the same place. The frontier is lively, the possibilities are endless, a sort of festive atmosphere prevails. But all of this would be to refuse to leave the mind, to get off the train, to refuse to believe that you've arrived at the end of it. To do otherwise you'd have to let meaning fall away and take to pure experience, that is, what can only be yours, can only be here and now, that stands for nothing but itself. This is the destiny of meaning, to give itself up to non-meaning, without a fuss, taking its bearings in solitude, stepping forth, going home.

You could base your politics on the whatever stands as the minimal conditions for the fostering of what you love. But what if what you love isn't good? It isn't politics until it is about the good, love by itself is just lawlessness. However, what you love is unambiguous, or pretty well so because the reference point is within yourself. What is good is abstract and hence shrouded in contradictions. Say you believe in humanity's spiritual destiny, its unique way of bringing cosmic Being to self-awareness. This is an evolutionary ideal and hence indelibly linked to a progress in time, and this already begs the question in favour of the cognitive, the technological, of matters in which the idea of progress is intrinsically present. What if the closest approach to perfection were in respect of those parts of the spirit which don't evolve, which don't progress, for which progress is a form of betrayal? Do we put these on hold for a time when our technology will enable us to better realise them? But it is just such a bargaining that they are destroyed by. Better to stick with love and face the perils that go with it.