It is clear in parts, this realisation, fairly shallow but with a good intuitive reach. That it is nevertheless proceeding is of small significance in the larger context. It matters little beyond a narrow horizon whether it moves slowly or quickly towards its always potential fulfillment. What delays it, say its exemplary attachment to the particular twists and quirks of a certain kind of individual life, by no means remarkable, is probably where most of its value lies - this too, oh Lord, shall suffice. It arises already within a crowded field of monotonously problematising souls, and being near the margins saves it from some of the many self-defeating speculations that it nonetheless embodies. But if it lacks grandiosity it is hobbled by a too insistent modesty and a cracked and often-betrayed self-reliance that errs on the side of mistrust and paranoia. The psyche is deficient and thoroughly second-rate, but it is quiet and supple enough to find ways of working around this, knowing that it doesn't matter much in the end. You can get there in a rust-bucket held together with string and gaffer tape and with a torn map on your lap as well as in the latest brave hybrid equipped with GPS and state of the art robotics.

What is fundamental to a world are the varieties of estrangement with which it can confront you and the cunning ways in which these are linked together in entailments misread as causes. Whether or not these can be overcome by some effort at enlarging your scope of imagination or understanding or not, they are all estrangement effects, exhausted by what they are for consciousness. Where you find yourself is just where the limits of assimilation lie. What you can't encompass or imagine yourself encompassing does not reveal a final otherness but only the internal boundary of self-understanding. It is only when you surrender to your dialectical failure that the spectre of mindless matter arises, a compact of being. The parameters of thrownness are impersonal, no doubt, but only in relation to your immediate place in species-being. The being of beings locates you in a human history, a wonderful participation, and not in the reality which is also yours. There is a pass beyond it, made porous by the many who have already gone through. One moment it is adamantine before you and you can bang your head against it, and the next moment after nothing happens, you are through. It takes no energy, it is pure surprise.

The idea is clear enough. The self experienced as piloting its way through a world, together with that world and the vessel that makes it possible are all together the objects of a witnessing awareness that is brought to centrality by allowing the pilot and his ship and his very ocean to fall backwards into a very deep hole normally hidden somewhere behind his phenomenal eyes. From here the field of experience is flattened out and its chief folds or pivot-lines along which the material and spatio-temporal distinctions of the physical world are created and sustained are seen a phenomena on equal terms with all others. A duality reigns now, but it is a simple one of seer and seen, of spirit and matter now understood as perfectly correlative. But if the objective field has been emptied of being a sense of being remains in the subjective until it is realised that this witness cannot be distinct from what it is witnessing. So now it dissolves too into an ineffable unity prior to all experience. In each case it is a matter of achieving a certain rotation of the structure of knowing. Every level of consciousness is simply a closed group of rotations and each transition between levels is the discovery that the very same structure can rotate in the most natural way in a further unsuspected direction. You cannot suspect the address of such a rotation until you have made it.

To go back and back behind the experiencing is to approach the witnessing subject as an emptiness of deep space without any features or density, as if you were to  progressively erase the warm phantasmagoria of the only existence you have known to reveal something cool and inhospitable and other. It may seem as if a separation is involved, as if you are leaving a station behind to melt into its own dream-like past, a little life with its joys and pains, its loves and its hard ripening truths and uncertain wisdoms, but there is nowhere for all these images to dissolve into but into what you are. There is no feeling or thought, no intimacy with the other that is not experienced in full within the subject, within that vast attentive emptiness. Every colour, every sound, every touch is formed within it and belongs to it, only without boundary and unlimited. The torsion, the drawing out and the wrench of surrender of forms these are all themselves no more than forms - there is no such surrender except as required by the internal coherence of a world which can sustain neither an interior nor any such complex idea as coherence. It is wonderful to filled with fear, and yet more wonderful and more fearful that there is no ground on which to fear.

Objective reality is usually taken to mean the third-person perspective, but in fact the objectivity that is correlative to the subjective first person is what is known as the second-person perspective. As I see you, so am I seen by you, whether you are looking or can look, whether you are another self or merely an inanimate object. All of the things that populate my world are known in the second person, as direct objects. If you and I agree about the object we are seeing that does not make it any the less my object and so is still viewed in the second mode. The third is indirect, is what is not present but is inferred for the sake of coordinating and completing, of suturing, the second-person world. So what needs to be dissolved is this ghostly superstructure of the third-person world, it needs to be accorded only the inferior grade of reality that belongs to working hypotheses to thought experiments. We are trapped not in a dream but in a thought experiment that has usurped the privilege of the full reality which belongs only to direct experience, to the interplay of the first and second persons.

The temporal self's drive towards achieving being for itself is expressed through meaning, is a will to exist through meaning. Meaning is the accessibility of being. Such meaning is described as moving fluidly between four basic modes or goals: 1. the value of the self, its intrinsic goodness or worth which must be affirmed or reflected through life, 2. closure or  the resolution of unknowns, the completion of knowledge or of power, 3. participation, the being in full standing as a member of some greater entity, or finally 4. a personal immortality project, the having initiated or accomplished some kind of lasting secular monument. All of this explains a lot, especially when you add the mutual incommensurability of the different modes and the likelihood of imagining, whatever the circumstances, that others must be after the same stakes as yourself; and also the odd ways in which they each must look when viewed from the perspective of one of the others. Nevertheless the more these strategies are seen the more absurd they look, the more obvious it is that they can never achieve what they set out to do, unless it is to keep the dance going. They are perhaps the original 'memes'.

Consciousness is immediacy, but the immediate is pure positive content or qualia, and by that is the very object of consciousness and hence exactly what consciousness is not - so the content points via negation to the actuality which in turn becomes another kind of positive content which is negated again, and so on. So there is both a positive and a negative apprehension involved and they cannot be separated - at best they alternate. This doesn't mean that consciousness is inherently dialectical but that any way of trying to apprehend it must be, must go that way. It is a way of trying to point in an impossible direction. This squares with some traditions, but it is somewhat out of the line that would speak of 'altered states' and their classifications. Is it far away or is it close up? Is it inhibited by what is called ego or is it the nakedness of experience inclusive of ego? Is not knowing more or less real than knowing? Can you answer yes or no? Is there something at stake or not?