Say that experience consists of states of consciousness in something like the way that qualia theorists would have it. Then, it seems, you could have two states that were almost indistinguishable but that unfolded in quite different ways through their relations with successive events. For example two versions of an identical happiness one of which was solidly rooted and resistant to being overturned by challenging events and the other of which was shallow and easily overturned by much the same sort of events. What is referred to as the depth of their rootedness is not a part of the conscious realisation of these states, but yet distinguishes them sharply from each other. This is why qualia are never enough to characterise lived experience and yet one could still make the case that the original experiences were the same. The distinction here is sometimes made in terms of states and stages. The stage being, as it were, the biographical context of the experiences that arise. Is this another way of saying that experiences are constrained while consciousness is free, is and must be, unconstrained? The two are melded together, at least conceptually, but are not the same. It would also follow that although there are experiences of freedom, experiences whose positive character is a realisation of freedom, there is no such experience of the freedom of consciousness. And again, consciousness is not constrained in the experience of constraint, so that if there were a realisation of the freedom of consciousness, whatever form that realisation might take, this could equally, or especially, arise in the midst of the experience of constraint, of the everyday awareness of heteronomy.