Think of consciousness as the immediate, as that out of which, or in which, all experience if formed. Whatever you know, you know in and by consciousness - it is experience at the level of pure evidence, pure openness, hiding nothing. But what is your experience but that of a being in a world, with this-being in here and world out there; and the consciousness is what is happening in your mind which is located, or at least anchored in your body, a certain partially visible world-object. What is out there, the chair, the tree seen through the window, is not you, is not your mind. Next to the world, which is filled with physical objects, there is you, a pullulating cloud of intentional activity, and active and spontaneous upwelling of mental forms that flow out of your most mysterious and intimate centre. But of course all of this, the very shifting boundary between you and world is all in consciousness. Whatever consciousness is it is the upwelling both of the you-pole and of the world without any distinction. Consciousness paints one just as easily as the other, with the same effortlessness and with no recognition that the inside part is done any differently to the outside part. What makes the world seem separate is that it is continually surprising. Look at something that you've looked at a hundred times before and you'll always find something different, to say nothing of the bigger surprises. The world too is a spontaneous upwelling, just as free and unpredictable as the contents springing up from inside. And you have no precise intuition about what will come next in one as in the other. The distinction between the inside and outside poles amounts to ways of taking them, ways of expecting or imperfectly predicting them, and not to their common mystery - and these ways themselves are also just modes which arise of their own accord.