The ontological difference, now between say reality and representation, makes no sense outside of experience, is intrinsic to the essence of experience. It is an opening of space and time from out of no space and no time. The difficulties of this are seen as from the side of what is taken by it to be representation, as logical difficulties, but doing so reintroduces the very same element over again. The natural tendency is to seek to resolve it into a projection of a single dimension, hence of mind, hence various monisms, energetic resolutions of life and death. Better to to let it emerge from the other side, the side taken to be of reality. Not to foreclose it but to allow it to fully open. 

 

The reflective difference, that between say, experiencing and (the experience of) knowing that you are experiencing could be seen as a version of the ontological difference between being and the being of beings, and altogether as one of the family of motivations for he unfolding of phenomena within metaphysics. Thus, on the one side it is a difference which holds a strong charge which as force or desire sets things into motion, including a self-referential motion tending to ramification and complexity, and on the other is founded on a certain acceptance of thing-hood, of the frame of possible realities which must remain unquestioned. At the very least notice how this distinction is dissolved somewhat in sleep and dreams and clicks into auto-focus the moment you awake. You cannot point to it, only gesture in the gentlest way towards it.

 

Unreflecting experience is direct and one-fold but on condition of being unaware of itself. Experience with reflection however i never what it purports to be, it is not unreflecting experience doubled over in reflection, since that which is reflected on is only a notion, a representation, or even just an hypothesis of experience. What is unreflected in it is the reflection which takes on a maddening quality since it has surrendered its naivety for no gain. You might think that like Faust you await the moment when it would be worth stopping time, but actually any and every moment would be worthwhile if it could be stopped, or if it could be gained through and through in reflective doubling. The problem is that it can't be done, not with this moment or with any other, none is more apt than another. The self is not some notional subject-object but simply the fulcrum with which such a complete realisation of a moment of consciousness could be effected. That's why it is sought for, and the sense of a great and indelible joy is intimated behind every failed attempt, just as the mirage of this self hovers just over the horizon of every joy. It is a sort of carrot and stick that keeps you going in circles.

 

At times the very idea of a background disappears. And if there is no background neither is there a foreground. Just neglectfulness, irritation and dazzle. You wait in vain for some clue to the strangeness, but all that is strange is the absence of any strangeness.

However it is seen to be, the certainty of judgment belongs to the cogniser and rests on self-certainty. The judgments vary greatly over times reflecting moods and other contingent factors but this cannot be seen because of the warrant of self-certainty which always claims access to the root of being. This is like an artifact of language in which the same sentence can be read in many different ways and yet be identically the same. You think you ought to know, that you must know, that the gestures are the same and call upon the same knowing when there is merely nothing that can show you otherwise. If you are not floored by doubt then you are sleepwalking and have not yet begun to question.

The naturalist version of the being of things is as determined by a net of laws which apply to kinds of things which kinds are themselves determined by these same laws. In this way particularity is ideality, only that the relevant ideas are somehow impersonal; or that the being of things is the being of the laws which is the being of mind. This end of metaphysics earnestly dissolves all particularity such as could only have been the particularity of the self. The self, properly, cannot be made up out of kinds of things, substitutable functional elements, that is just what it means to be self - an absolute particularity.  And if the self is absolutely particular then so are all things else, and laws do not apply, only seem to in a certain declension.

The distinction of mind, or consciousness in a larger but purely phenomenal sense, and self  is that which invites the discovery of illusions. It may be naive but is a strong attractor, a view that you keep returning to after circuitous journeys, perhaps a local minimum of some energy like quality. This view is also continually under attack, either with the aim of expanding the understanding of consciousness so that it absorbs 'self', or attacking self directly as the distorting element leaving consciousness to then correct itself. The methods of such an attack may be largely rational and so appeal to a more inclusive and grounded truth, but even if this is so there is no guarantee that the resulting view is itself any sort of attractor, that it can sustain itself at the high level of that energetic quality that it seems to require. The order of consciousness, and this includes what it normally called the unconscious, is that of being as presence. The self, in so far as it is being, is so in a more eminent sense that makes it unassimilable to mind. It is the opposition of these two sides that is of greater interest than any supposed unification, or perhaps it is that any such unification must be from the side of self and not of mind.