"Cette sphère transcendentale est une sphère d’existence absolue, c’est-à-dire de spontanéités pures, qui ne sont jamais objets et qui se déterminent elles-mêmes à exister. Le Moi étant objet, il est évident que je ne pourrai jamais dire: ma conscience, c’est-à-dire la conscience de mon Moi (sauf dans un sens purement désignatif comme on dit par example: le jour de mon baptême). L’Ego n’est pas propriétaire de la conscience, il en est l’objet."
— J-P. Sartre, La transcendance de l'ego.

‘But it’s not a question of sight, it’s a question of touch.’
And he remembered—sentiments-centimètres—that French pun about love, so appallingly cynical, so humiliatingly true. ‘But only humiliating,’ he assured himself, ‘because we choose to think it so, arbitrarily, only cynical because Beatrice in suso e io in lei guardava; only appalling because we’re creatures who sometimes vomit bile and because, even without vomiting, we sometimes feel ourselves naturally Christians.’ But in any case, nove Muse mi dimostran l’Orse. Meanwhile, however . . . He tilted another gill of water down his throat. And when he was well enough to work, wouldn’t he also be well enough to thirst again for that other god-like kingdom, with its different ecstasies, its other peace beyond all understanding? But tant mieux, tant mieux, so long as the Bears remained unmoved and the Muses went on pointing.
— Aldous Huxley, After the Fireworks

"Hidden away under the symbol of their corporeality, both in him and in her, doubtless lurked something which was themselves. But that self was hard to get at; obscured by the too familiar trappings of voice, name, appearance, occupation, circumstance, even the fleeting perception of self became blunted or confused. And there were many selves. She could never be the same self with him as when she was alone; and even that solitary self which she pursued, shifted, changed, melted away as she approached it, she could never drive it into a dark corner, and there, like a robber in the night, hold it by the throat against the wall, the hard core of self chased into a blind alley of refuge. The very words which clothed her thoughts were but another falsification; no word could stand alone, like a column of stone or the trunk of a tree, but must riot instantly into a tropical tangle of associations; the fact, it seemed, was as elusive and as luxuriant as the self. Only in a wordless trance did any true apprehension become possible, a wordless trance of sheer feeling, an extra-physical state, in which nothing but the tingling of the finger-tips recalled the existence of the body, and a series of images floated across the mind, un-named, unrelated to language. That state, she supposed, was the state in which she approached most closely to the self concealed within her,...."
 — Vita Sackville-West, All Passion Spent.

She reaches up to a cupboard for the tin of ground coffee and the filter papers, runs the cold-water tap, fills a jug, fetches a spoon. Most of the cups are clean. She sets out two. There’s pathos in this familiar routine, in the sounds of homely objects touching surfaces. And in the little sigh she makes when she turns or slightly bends our unwieldy form. It’s already clear to me how much of life is forgotten even as it happens. Most of it. The unregarded present spooling away from us, the soft tumble of unremarkable thoughts, the long-neglected miracle of existence. When she’s no longer twenty-eight and pregnant and beautiful, or even free, she won’t remember the way she set down the spoon and the sound it made on slate, the frock she wore today, the touch of her sandal’s thong between her toes, the summer’s warmth, the white noise of the city beyond the house walls, a short burst of birdsong by a closed window. All gone, already.
— Ian McEwan, Nutshell.

The dogs still bark,
and something is not clear.
From ignorance dogs barked always.

How to enlighten them?
There are no dogs now -
They do but bark.

What it not clear is what is clear.
Dogs have the scent,
Yet nothing runs like prey.

Shall we seem to disappear
Until the dogs stop barking?
There is no other way to explain.

— Laura Riding, "Cure of Ignorance".

From a phenomenologist’s perspective, then, pre-reflective self-consciousness is not a static self-identity but a dynamic process – a process sometimes described as a ‘self-differentiation’, a pre-reflective ‘mineness’ or even pre-reflective ‘self-affection’. The inner dynamics of protention and retention, which are unnoticeable as such, form what might be called a ‘phenomenal background’. Husserl himself refers to this structuring also as ‘(primal) association’, as an interlacing of subject and object preceding their separation and opposition. And it is worthwhile to emphasize once more that this associative fusion in retention and protention is not identical to the experience of the world as expressed in objective judgments but that it is related to a lived, naive, and speechless experience of the world.
- Norman Sieroka, Leibniz, Husserl and the Brain.

À minuit, je sucre des fraises
J'ai la feuille de vigne embrasée
Je me lève, je pèse mon pèze
Rue Saint Denis, y a bon baiser

Pas besoin d'être une sorcière
Pour avoir un manche à balai
J'en ai un qui me dit : " Poussière !
Tu iras où je veux aller "

Il me nargue, il me tarabuste,
M'enfournant dans ses réacteurs
Ce relatif petit arbuste
S'enracine au fond de mon cœur

Que désigne-t-il cet index
Pointé toujours vers l'azimut
Comme si le ciel avait un sexe
Comme si Dieu même était en rut ?

Alors à minuit, moi je mange
De la femme avec mon bec tendu
Oui, j'en mange comme on se venge
D'être un ange trop mal foutu

D'avoir là, sous cette ceinture,
Ah non ! ça n'est pas élégant !
D'avoir là, qui dure, qui dure,
Ce doigt borgne obsédé de gant

...

- Claude Nougaro - "Rue St Denis"

“But dear friend, understanding helps nothing. Understanding is a sport like any other. A very noble sport, and a very expensive one. One can squander his whole soul on it and be left a beggar. But understanding has nothing in the slightest to do with our feelings—almost as little as with our actions. It won’t save us from sadness, from disgust, or from annihilation. It leads to nothing. It’s a blind alley, so to speak. Understanding only means an end.”
- Arthur Schnitzler, The Road Into The Open, tr. R. Byers.

... À côté de ces circonstances mentales existe un autre facteur, beaucoup moins visible ; je n'ai pris conscience que tardivement de son rôle et ne le crois pas moins essentiel : un certain état de la vision du monde extérieur.

QUESTION : Pouvez-vous préciser ?

RÉPONSE : C'est difficile. Si j'essaye de préciser la nature de cette vision, ce que je puis dire est que j'étais dans un monde essentiellement dynamique. Un monde arc-bouté, tendu, jaillissant, surabondant, faisant craquer tous ses corsages, un monde en marche aussi, lancé sur la pente d'un présent intense. Ce qui l'avait fait apparaître, c'était la lecture des poèmes de Rimbaud. L'uni-vers avait commencé à « travailler » une ou deux années auparavant ; la plante était déjà née, Rimbaud a brusquement amené un printemps, tout en conférant à la plante un visage bien défini.

— Stephen Jourdain, La vie à l'endroit.

Then came the new Mercury Anomaly. The path of a planet in space-time, we found to our dismay, could be an appendage of a creature whose body extended across galaxies, with holes many parsecs in diameter and gaps millennia in duration. The transcategoricals, as is now common knowledge, could combine a phrase of music, a particular human jawbone, a black hole, all the entities of a certain mass or shape in the universe, and so on, in a single intelligent being, with whom communication began to be possible.
....
Tenacity rolled onto his side. “Tell these lubbers all about it, ‘Scope. We got nothing to do till the transcat’s gone.”
“I was gonna. They made me early on, but that’s not how come I’m old. I was born old. They had to do me that way. It was just after the Mercury Anomaly, the second one, the big one, when the transcategoricals shimmered in, and Descartes and Newton and Einstein and Hume and everybody in the whole history of Western Civilization who ever mentioned a point or a line or a frame of reference or a sequence of one thing after another—they were all quite suddenly vestigial… I bet you wish you knew half of what I do.”
‘Scope covered his “mouth” as if he had hiccoughed, and then went on. “Everybody Earthside had always thought the world was built up out of particles of one kind or another—sensations or quarks or souls. Well, now they saw that that idea was upside-down: the world is built down from one big, undifferentiated whole, down into particles. And the particles are provisional. The borders between things are unreal, like pocks on a putty ball: squoosh! and they’re all rearranged. Nobody had ever thought that big since the Upanishads or the Mahayana Sutras. That’s where Buddhism started to come into favor.
“But who were these transcats? You know what I mean? That’s what people were saying. How can we get rid of them? That’s what everybody wanted, right off, as if that was ever an option. It would be like trying to gnaw off your brains and heart. We’re laced through with transcats like brine with salt. I was supposed to be a kind of search-and-destroy machine, but all I want to do is dress up Betsy McCall.”
“It’s gone now, isn’t it?” No Mind said.
“No.” Old ‘Scope pursed his wrinkles to wet them. “Sit tight—that’s the best thing. This one’s just passing through. It won’t be long.
“It’s ironic when you think about it. The tech they used to make me, the skinbags got it all from transcats—from watching them, and from being watched by them, the funny way that works. As if water could taste you because you swallow it. They had to rewrite all the science books and stop thinking of skins as skins. Mind you, they’d always known they were permeable to air and moisture and thoughts and feelings, but people wanted to hold onto the idea that everybody was something apart. The transcats made that hard.
“The Planners made me to scan the universe for transcats, to log every border between one thing and another, every way you could define it, cross-referencing each phenomenon for fifteen-billion light years in every direction. I was supposed to be a sieve. They were going to use me to pan the universe for transcats. They figured that then they could get rid of them somehow, or at least get out of their way… It’s leaving now… but, you know, you can’t.
“The Planners focused down their big n-dimensional hypostat guns on fragments of twenty or thirty cosmology mavens and astrographers, along with a tightrope walker I believe, for his particular concentration. They also hypostatted a number of ephemerides, yes, a bunch of technical beeohtees, and a part of Tycho Brahe, which they picked up in the dyne pool where the transcats like to feed.
“But they didn’t have their tech down, did they, all that non-dual transcat-think being so new to them? Any hypostat beam cuts back and forth through time and zigzags through space like a spastic’s backstitch. Some little girl in what’s left of Kenya, a seven year old snoozing, spooned against her mama’s belly in their cool thatch hut, was smack in the path of the hypostatic ray. And pow zingo! When you hear that nya-nya-nya nya-nya in my voice, why, it’s her.”
— Eliot Fintushel, Zen City.

Since, by his own active generating, the Ego constitutes himself as identical substrate of Ego-properties, he constitutes himself also as a "fixed and abiding" personal Ego — in a maximally broad sense, which permits us to speak of sub-human "persons". Though convictions are, in general, only relatively abiding and have their modes of alteration (through modalization of the active positings — for example, "cancellation" or negation, undoing of their acceptance), the Ego shows, in such alterations, an abiding style with a unity of identity throughout all off them: a "personal character".
— Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, tr. D. Cairns.

Gauges in the head, Szpindel had called them. But there were other things in there, too. There was a model of the world, and we didn’t look outward at all; our conscious selves saw only the simulation in our heads, an interpretation of reality, endlessly refreshed by input from the senses. What happens when those senses go dark, but the model—thrown off-kilter by some trauma or tumor—-fails to refresh? How long do we stare in at that obsolete rendering, recycling and massaging the same old data in a desperate, subconscious act of utterly honest denial? How long before it dawns on us that the world we see no longer reflects the world we inhabit, that we are blind?
Months sometimes, according to the case files. For one poor woman, a year and more.
Appeals to logic fail utterly. How could you see the bird when there is no window? How do you decide where your seen half-world ends if you can’t see the other half to weigh it against? If you are dead, how can you smell your own corruption? If you do not exist, Amanda, what is talking to us now?
Useless. When you’re in the grip of Cotard’s syndrome or hemineglect you cannot be swayed by argument. When you’re in thrall to some alien artifact you know that the self is gone, that reality ends at the midline. You know it with the same unshakeable certainty of any man regarding the location of his own limbs, with that hardwired awareness that needs no other confirmation. Against that conviction, what is reason? What is logic?
— Peter Watts, Blindsight.

"You don't understand what is happening, you have never experienced anything like this, yet you know exactly that this is what they call the sweat of death. An ice-cold surface covers your inner heat. You see that nothing has changed around you and so you can still comprehend that the difference between your own perception and that of others is greater than you would normally expect. A sensational experience that concerns me and no one else.
"I was already at a great distance from them in the morning, and apparently I am at an even greater distance now. They are not burning with an inner heat covered by an ice shield.
"I really didn't imagine that I would be so close to absolute strangers, but now with eyes wide open in my death panic, I realized that, mutually adjusting to one other, we constantly measure our position against that of the others and check the position of others against our own."
— Peter Nadas, Own Death

"What he lived in was not any compact, continuous sense of personal identity, but rather a series of disembodied sensations, some physical, some mental, in which his identity was absolutely merged and lost. He was vividly aware of these momentary sensations in relation to other feelings of the same kind, some long past and some anticipated in his imagination; but he was accustomed to regard all these not from out of the skin, so to speak, of a living organism, but from a detachment so remote and far away as to seem almost outside both the flowing of time and the compactness of personality."
— John Cowper Powys, Wolf Solent.

Whether or not a basic correction of communism will take place via esoteric elements, supposedly represented even in the Komintern according to reliable sources, will appear, if at all, only indirectly. (Zen and Hesychasm seem to be the leading contenders in this reform.) In any event, the high degree of discipline required for those making up the highest cadre of the Komintern (such as the conscious renunciation of the ego for the sake of an idea) is not to be underestimated with respect to its effects; it is on the same plane in a secularized form as the religious orders and their demand for absolute obedience and self-denial. It is a hypertrophied form of discipline to which we in the West have nothing equivalent to oppose, particularly as military obedience, partly degenerated to the form of "corpse loyalty," is of itself no real comparison to the true-to-line attitude of the communist (with respect to the cadre, not to the despots)." - Jean Gebser (1953)

There was a silence. Eleanor's being was flooded with the strangest, most ecstatic sense of deliverance. She had been her own executioner; and this was not death—but life!
....
Again that extraordinary sense of happiness and lightness! She shrank from it in a kind of terror.
- Mrs Humphry Ward, Eleanor.

"L’information est ce par quoi l’incompatibilité du système non résolu devient dimension organisatrice dans la résolution..." 
- Gilbert Simondon

Der Leidensfreie Geist befasst
Sich mit dem Stoffe nicht, ist aber auch
Sich keines Dings und seiner nicht bewusst,
Für ihn ist keine Welt, denn ausser ihm
Ist nichts.
-  Hölderlin, Hyperion.

Par l'imagination, découpez au laser un petit rond au centre de votre esprit. Faites sauter la pastille du moi coutumier. Puis, pensez à l'infini. L'infini. L'infini.
Pas facile. À un moment, un choc diaphane, une fugitive dilatation de l'âme vous avertira que votre intelligence a été émue, qu'elle a vu. Avant qu'elle ne se fane, insérez la vision dans le vide central.
Vous voilà serti d'un infini.
Aucune incompatibilité de principe avec la vie de tous les jours. Simplement une situation humaine inédite assez hallucinante. 
- Stephen Jourdain, L'illumination Comanche.

"Emily pressed her breast, ‘Oh, what a pang! I suppose you really could die laughing, Suzanne? It’s an awful rolling spasm, you’re out of control, but madly happy, inhumanly happy, you feel as if you’ll go over the edge of the precipice in another minute, and at the same time, delicious, strange, only you. You feel as if now you’ve escaped, it’s you and you’re dying because it’s you. I suppose you could go into convulsions? Oh, I think it was because I was just talking about my physical sufferings as a fat girl and I was given over entirely to remembering my sufferings physical, so very physical. And the body gets up like an immense giant and grabs me and balances me over the cliff, threatening to toss me over. Oh, heigh-ho, nothing in my life compares with my physical feelings. How often are we physical in life, Suzanne? A hot bath? Pouah! A childbirth, well, yes, it is. Sex? I mean compared with what I felt just then? I wanted to love, Suzanne, I madly wanted to love but I wanted it to be like that. But it can’t be. And that’s an intellectual for you. I guess I know how coal-heavers feel on Saturday night.’"
- Christina Stead,  I'm Dying Laughing.