There is a sort of reduction of experience that you can do wherein inner and outer perception are merged. You walk along the street and allow attention to softly rest in equilibrium between awareness of the world, awareness of your own body and awareness of passing thoughts, and you find that at least for a time, all these streams can do whatever it is that they do with only a fraction of the focused awareness that they usually demand. It is a move from a serial form of attention to a parallel one, and it is a reduction in the phenomenological sense of the term because each of the streams is, as it were, declutched. To achieve this balance attention dwells on attention and allows everything to go on as usual, gently refusing the fleeting claims of representing reality as they arise. This works when the kind of experience concerned is of a fairly passive kind to start with, and the change in texture it effects is not as dramatic as it might seem. As far as thought is concerned one has renounced ownership over and interest in each passing item. There is no following of a thread and so the different notions pass rapidly through mind and fade away. Thoughts formerly given some importance, thoughts conveying a warning or a promise, are seen as no different from mental noise, like echoes, repetitions, shards of memory, bits of songs. It is easy to generalise the quality of this experiment far beyond its boundaries, to merge it with the imagined view of the world from very far away and to imagine that the whole cosmos can be subsumed under this kind of loosened, parallelised awareness. Everything then seems to be reducible to the category of what 'just happens'. But just as when this phrase is used in the ethical sphere and one is tempted to reply, 'no, things don't just happen, you do them', there is the conviction that this passivist metaphysics entirely misses the point.