The temporal self's drive towards achieving being for itself is expressed through meaning, is a will to exist through meaning. Meaning is the accessibility of being. Such meaning is described as moving fluidly between four basic modes or goals: 1. the value of the self, its intrinsic goodness or worth which must be affirmed or reflected through life, 2. closure or  the resolution of unknowns, the completion of knowledge or of power, 3. participation, the being in full standing as a member of some greater entity, or finally 4. a personal immortality project, the having initiated or accomplished some kind of lasting secular monument. All of this explains a lot, especially when you add the mutual incommensurability of the different modes and the likelihood of imagining, whatever the circumstances, that others must be after the same stakes as yourself; and also the odd ways in which they each must look when viewed from the perspective of one of the others. Nevertheless the more these strategies are seen the more absurd they look, the more obvious it is that they can never achieve what they set out to do, unless it is to keep the dance going. They are perhaps the original 'memes'.

Consciousness is immediacy, but the immediate is pure positive content or qualia, and by that is the very object of consciousness and hence exactly what consciousness is not - so the content points via negation to the actuality which in turn becomes another kind of positive content which is negated again, and so on. So there is both a positive and a negative apprehension involved and they cannot be separated - at best they alternate. This doesn't mean that consciousness is inherently dialectical but that any way of trying to apprehend it must be, must go that way. It is a way of trying to point in an impossible direction. This squares with some traditions, but it is somewhat out of the line that would speak of 'altered states' and their classifications. Is it far away or is it close up? Is it inhibited by what is called ego or is it the nakedness of experience inclusive of ego? Is not knowing more or less real than knowing? Can you answer yes or no? Is there something at stake or not?

A level of experience is a connected realm of thoughts, feelings and mediated reflections in which some particular value is at stake and for which there is no resolution at that level. The most common example is that of what is called egoic or personal psychology in which the stake is the value of the self. The corresponding level is therefore that in which this value is taken to be real, to be in a sense its simulation of God. Once a term is given this master reality then everything which can affect it, directly or indirectly, also becomes real, and since these causes are endless and infinitely knotted together every move that favours one disfavours another. There is no final strategy to 'solve' the problem posed by this level. It is only by finding yourself on a higher level in which that stake no longer plays its key role but is simply an object among others of a different game that you can be free of it. If there is a path to such transcendence, a path that can't be entered but only approached blindly, then the only thing you can do is to try to arrange things so that the intensity of the forces mobilised on the original level weakens as you approach it rather than strengthens. Such a weakening can only be an adumbration of the higher level, a sort of faith in its existence while it is still largely unseen. So it is not a matter of cultivating virtues but of strengthening the intuition of the illusory nature of the stake around which everything dances. 

One version of idealism is the inverse of panpsychism. Instead of the material ultimates having an inside, a primitive prehension which locally unifies into the various centres of consciousness we say that the primitive phenomena borne like ripples by absolute consciousness have an outside, which is how they appear to the dissociated centres of consciousness which form in the phenomenal field. This is a neat trick because it evades the problem of integration which dogs panpsychism. In the objective field which embraces the outsides of the primitive phenomena there is no problem of integration; these outsides which we know as material reality only interact as only far as the needs of whatever our current field theory requires. It is a dual aspect theory, and hence a kind of dualism, which actually fits together like a neat puzzle. The other version of Idealism is the non-dual or rhizomatic one where all phenomena are the projections of the 'one' subject and the plurality of centres of consciousness is implicit in the branching projection. In this case there seems to be a recurrence of an integration problem since there is no a priori reason why the worlds of projected for each centre should 'experience' integration with each other, their synchrony is, as it were, scripted from outside them. Is this really the difficulty it appears to be, or does it depend on an error of concretising a metaphor? Or again, might it not be truer to seek a sort of dialectical resolution of these alternatives?

The perhaps excessive emphasis on consciousness leads to the idea that all our rich and novelistic human complexities are just artifacts of the evolutionary history of an organism capable of bearing an autonomous self-reflective consciousness. Don't we already perceive signs of the exhaustion of this experience of the human, its romantic failure? As if we are a kind of organism bred so that we can yield a vital element in a potentially self-purifying way though further inevitable and cruel evolutionary cullings? That the messy and limited vagaries of human biography are the bitter and disposable husk of a fruit which is the sole purpose of our erstwhile species-being but whose destiny lies elsewhere? Isn't some such bloodless notion at the heart of all idealism and in a lesser key even of all utopianism? There is something that cries out against it, but the sense of this pull is present in all forms of transcendence. At some level, for all our nostalgias, all our love for the foul rag and bone shop of the heart, wasn't this inhuman will to transcend the human integral to the human from the very start? Isn't it what is symbolised in the crucifixion? The cracking of an egg, the first glimmerings of a different light.

The strangest thing about experience is that you don't know who is actually experiencing all of this - it could be anyone, or it could be everyone, it might even be no-one, but it is not nothing. This is so hard an idea to unpack, partly because of its simplicity, almost banality. When you look at all of the ways you have of performatively understanding who you are you find that they are all made out of cross-referring thoughts, they are a sort of trick whereby the objective field seems to contain the subject while consisting entirely in what the subject isn't. If the 'thoughts' invoked in this description were like the things you produce when engaged in the activity you call thinking then it might be easy enough to demystify the picture, but the thoughts involved are more than that, they include all that is experienced as the interconnected functioning of body and mind, and in that a tremendous and groundless reflex of unification of experience as belonging to some 'I'. You are held within a certain field, anchored to an emotional process of doubt, which is intense and urgent the more it is exposed. Every intention has a motive and every motive has a value and every value an opposite value. And again every act is an expression in which the congruity of the inside and the outside is at stake. How is it, and again how is it really? The perspective reflects back and forth between different mirrorings which are themselves only forms of thought. It works just because while you are in it you are also what it is that is aware of it and is thus out of it. There would be no perspective is there wasn't a point of view outside, but no perspective is ever able to reach it or express it or even come close.

All experience is particular and even if it makes sense to speak of a concrete universal this only means that experience is not bound by the particular that it is. To be particular is to have a body and a world, and for that body in turn to have a place, a mode of participation in its world. The distinction between a body and its world is an ongoing tension which finally is inherent or inherited from the world in which it finds itself. Every world may itself be a body for experience within a larger world. And every way within a world is a crooked way; that is its particularity, its possibility of experience, as what is crooked is always in tension as if it seeks to become straight or perfectly conformed to what gives it being. There is no limit to bodies either above or below. So there is nothing special about self-consciousness or the soul but only a way that consciousness sees its resolution within an expression of particularity.

Why is there no boundary to consciousness, no surface at the edge of mental space through which new ideas come, even though new ideas do come into mental space all the time? Sometimes you say, 'this idea just popped into my head' - how did that happen, what was it like? You suddenly found yourself thinking it as if you were already doing so a moment before you noticed that you were. And what you recognised was its incongruity with what you had been thinking before. You started with an implicit sense of the range of ideas that were available, or that you were capable of producing, you knew that pretty well. And then suddenly a new thought arose, something quite fresh, perhaps the solution to a problem. It is mysterious the way that it got there, but it was you that produced it, it came up from right inside your mind but at the same time with a quality of otherness or impersonality. If there was something you knew it was how to seize it in the bud. You might say it was a little bubble of intelligence that you gathered up in a quick gesture. You were already thinking it before knowing that you were doing so. So if there is a boundary it is between what you know and what you know you know; as if these are two different orders of mind; and also between what happens fast and what happens slow. The fringe of mind is this in pre-reflective consciousness - impossible to say how far, how deep it goes, but it is always happening.

It's one thing to realise the inherent beauty of everything in the perceptual field, all it requires perhaps is just a small sideways shift in attention, why then should it seem to be so much more complex a task to reposition everything within the field of thought and self-reflection, or all the embedded reflexes of purpose? The world is shared and beauty, even unexpressed falls under love, as a sort of gift or potential gift. But you do not love yourself, is that it? Or is that inner love is conceived at cross-purposes, misdirected both in intensity and aim? But why not even that as no more than pure phenomenon, you alone with your maker. Can't you just share a quiet joke at the expense of every cherished image and its reverse?

Actions, even the simplest of them, turning a handle to open a door, say, are intentions, not so much meanings as purposes, they are what you are as ongoing doing, these plural overlapping intentions that are both expressed and withheld in the flow of actions in waking or in dreamed reality. In relation to these thoughts are a kind of disengaged act that is the image of intentions. For much of the time such thoughts form a continuous branching web, every thought being prompted by another thought and in turn prompting others, reaching backwards and forwards and sideways at once, a 'though' capped with a 't'. Thoughts know the matrix of latent intentions out of which they arise, but not in an explicit way, they arise in consonance, more or less, with a background of self-reference that is strictly limited, bounded by whatever is taken to be the ordinary. If you interrupt the flow of such ruminations you can bend it back towards the implicit subject, towards the 'I', and this immediately translates by the identical web of references into a certain set of inner body sensations, objects of attention experienced in a self-reflexive doubling: the feeling of you-ness. It is no more than a dream of self-reference but so habitual that you take it at face value. There is supposed to be a fulfillment, a moment of perfect satisfaction in it but which is missed in favour of this objective and almost thinkable proxy. This is the normal way in which you allow yourself to slip through your grasp, and you fail to catch what might be the authentic and world shattering doubt that is concealed in it like a light behind a translucent screen.

Your being conscious relies on the body which accompanies it and defines its contents and limitations, its participation and scope, and the body is a thing in the world, albeit a special kind of thing, an object in addition to being a subject, subjecting and subjected, and so you think of the consciousness which is the constant event, the pure act of the appearing of everything as somehow an analogue of the body, a particular centre and a subject within that you call for brevity a person, a mask and pretext for the experiencing I. This is a too hasty assumption since as the appearing of location consciousness can have no location, as what makes particularity possible can have no particularity. And so you conceal its dirty little secret, that it doesn't exist and isn't anywhere, that it has no character, no centre, and knows no limitation and is a quite other order of reality than anything conceivably real. Put simply, what is looking can never be found and not because it is missing, but just the opposite.

This may not be the only world you inhabit. What is it to be in control, if not that you can be released from the interlocking panels of one world into another and find your way back? Or that you belong in none of these but only to yourself at the source of them all? This sweet world is only the sweeter in its particulars when opened out to all the possibilities of mind and all its otherings. You take baby steps, fall and get up again, and fall again into your own bewilderment without safety or escape. Remembering that there is no safety or escape that you've not invented.

You can never prepare for it, it's much too quick, and all of your whistling in the dark is worth no more than so much rippled wind. But if you can't turn the self's big slow unblinking eye towards it you also can't turn it away, and besides it's hard to tell the difference between those two well-intentioned pilotings. It's not as if there are things you can actually do, but there is the idea of action, of cause, effect and agency, of great tidal waves of time full of salt and fish and weeds, and as they now tell, of plastics, to deal with and it won't go away, keeps beating like London's mighty heart.

A problem of idealism is the way that the cleavage lines of the mass of phenomena, lines that admittedly keep changing but only within strict limits, express a nature that seems foreign to anything mental, to anything resembling meaning. But of course this observation is always made at the first point in time at which it appears to be true. That is to say that it was always yesterday that the understanding of the world was distorted by imagination, enchantment and projection, and only now that we step out for the first time, bareheaded, beneath the naked sky of an other planet. Why shouldn't this progressive disenchantment, which goes just as deeply as it needs to, not be another self-inflicted trial of the spirit? Fine, but more difficult to reconcile is the sheer mass of humankind and its misfortunes and misapprehensions. What possible motive could a world spirit have for interesting itself in such a proliferation of shabby stuff, in endlessly repeating so many banal and incomplete realisations? But that is just how it looks from here, only one more instance of the same fatuity except for the startling fact of its irreducible presence. What is inexhaustible in the meaning is never the content, it is that very particular irreducibility. 

Idealism is the taking the step of letting go of the mystery ballast that is deemed to be outside of mind in the large sense. It seems like a step that you take but it is no such thing since you are already floating freely in mind whether you know it or not, and are no more than the element in which you find yourself as the element is no more or less than you. Perhaps then it is just the realisation that mind, again in the larger sense, is dense enough, necessarily dense enough, to maintain buoyancy whatever happens, not having an outside. The so-called ballast then was just an assumption needed to make the old dualistic scheme seem plausible, in other words a certain exercise in meaning and no more. There could never be evidence for such dark matter, as evidence (there to convince who?) it would have already contradicted itself, being only a prejudice in favour of an arbitrary limitation of mind's scope, of meaning's scope, nothing outside of what it means in each and every relation and nothing inside as well.

The protagonist of the unfolding life is contained in the unfolding life and is distinct from the experiencer. The experiencer cannot appear within the experience but so much of the intensity of the experiencing arises from the will to anchor the experiencer in the experienced phenomena. This ought to be simple, when clearly see it should be the simplest of distinctions, but everything works to obfuscate this understanding. You want to see it but at the same time you don't want to see it. You dream that you want to wake up and so you dream harder, but you still want to wake up. 

Desire and purposive action and their variants, such as longing and reaction, are intrinsically temporal formations in that to be able to be what they are they require the the unfolding of time from future to past, or from past to future, in all its mysterious inherence solely in presence. They do this in different ways, in that while action consumes time, rendering it ultimately void, desire solidifies time as irreducible duration. Be that as it may, together with this relation to temporality and perhaps just because of it, these experiential formations seem to be such as to reveal consciousness, containing within themselves both an essential pole of self and an essential pole of other such as not to be clearly distinguishable from each other. Consciousness is something you know is there but you cannot describe it, cannot objectify it or know it, so your understanding of it relies on clues such as those offered by temporality. Time is the more concrete experiential trace by which you seem to be able to touch the skirts of consciousness. However if experience is flat then temporalisation is an illusion and so can offer no insight at all into the nature of the consciousness subject to that illusion. Consciousness is precisely not temporalisation, and temporalisation is only one of the ways in which consciousness constructively misrecognises itself.

It is just because experience is flat that it unfolds in endless depth. If it were not, if depth was 'real' then there would be an exhaustion of the degrees of freedom, you'd come up against a failure of resolution, a mismatch between the the thing as it is and the mental mechanism that seeks to model it. Such points of irreducible density and brute otherness are the stuff of fantasy, but as such they always reveal an unsuspected opening. It just keeps going on. Like a fractal in some way, but since the seen is only the seer just beyond itself, it is never caught out repeating itself exactly, although at some point it is pervaded by a strange déjà vu.

It's very funny really. You are a process full of interesting turnings and entirely devoid of the depth suggested by the idea of self-reflection. It is a weird kind of illusion, a refraction really that installs a virtual centre to the presentification, and the thoughts revolve on themselves and in them the idea reigns that it turns on this intended and intending centre, and so the meanings taken up with rays that seem to splay out, fantastically interdependent webs of meaning and intention, but really all quite flat. And when it turns it takes the whole weird structure with it. That's the only way it could get to be so rich it seems, if it were really how it thinks it is it would deflate in a matter of minutes.

Thinking, feeling and willing, or logos, pathos and mythos, dimensions of experience but offering no help in describing something like this incompleteness, this pure mood which is yet not a mood but a sort of empty willing, a wanting without an object, a sort of unachievable intimacy, a reaching towards hidden eyes. A pure mute animal feeling, a dog's nameless sadness, dark and inward, the opening of curtain after curtain behind the screen or stage of images in a night world, a path that circles beneath velvet black trees. It is a familiarity, a returning, without external reference point, not happening to you, but you sinking into yourself, into the brimming phosphorescent heart contained in a  blue dusk no bigger than a room or a bed and a sea breeze, drawing at the warmth of skin and solitude. How often, what they call longing, without an answer, you know that doesn't change, is never assuaged, the being here one of the pillars of sense, even after it vanishes under some tangle of intents or is put sleep and fed like ghost meat desireless to hungry dreams.

Nothing is like anything else, nothing refers to anything else - so the connectivities through which experience seems to be intelligible never reach beyond the thoughts in which they are contained, and all intelligibility is illusory. What proof does it have, could it ever have, but more of the same? It is good enough at this game to keep you fooled, and why shouldn't it be, since that is what it is for, its delight. And through it you imagine that there is such a thing as experience, and you having it. The thing in itself is not an inaccessible beyond, as implied by thought's belief in itself, but is right up here, closer than the nose on your face, absolutely blatant, a This louder than a thunderclap that scatters the murmurations of thought with its time and space, so many ghostly chattering birds dissolving into the empty sky out of which they are born, mere ripples in the void, unlike anything else.

Experience being always individual experience has its own internal lines of force, its native situation or predicament, its tendency towards what would complete it. That expresses the work that is there for it to do and exhausts it as a volition and a reception and a self-understanding - its outward, inward and reflexive vectors. None of these can change or needs to change, it is there so it can perfectly be what it is. The only direction of increased consciousness, if it can be put that way, is that it know itself in place. You do not need to alter or transform your content in any way, to think in a better way about anything, but only to expand the context so that your place as it is in the immediate, should be more fully revealed. This is a way of saying be more aware without any desire to change anything. In so far as desire is there, and it must be there, it belongs inside the experience, is a part of its very perfection. So, it is not at all a matter of eliminating desire, but of realising a neutral desire outside of desire, that everything be just as it is, unmodified.

The story of a soul, the successive stages of understanding and communion that you pass through is made up of contingencies; the various accidents which lead to this or that sense of the whole, to this or that ethic or revelation, are not the contents of a book either already written or being written, they fall into no necessary pattern and have no connection to a substrate that would be your own. What you advance on entering into each formation is not yourself or your destiny but the fulfillment of that very formation whatever it happens to be. If you discover that your ethic is one of compassion, say, rather than justice, this is to the purpose of compassion as a universal attribute of spirit, and your role is merely to help it along by making the irreducible contribution of one more thread of individual consciousness, a small and necessarily incomplete addition, depending on the precise mode in which you embody it. You might as well be perfectly detached and indifferent, aware of only playing a part, except that whether you are so or not is integral to the particular mode in which you enter on it. And what follows after could be anything at all. You are building the completed edifice of spirit but it is not your spirit, and not you as spirit. What you are is outside even this. You receive nothing but only give, and what you give is nothing of yours, only essence, only the essential, only what completes contingency in necessity, a difference without a difference.

Whatever object your attention falls upon is by that happening known not to be you, you, the one who is aware. Anything in the world that you can encounter directly falls under this immediate negation. But it is also true that whatever you do you are aware of doing it. This reflection, or ability to be reflected, of all events that take their origin from you is native to consciousness, is an immediate concomitant of any purposive action, no matter how subtle or almost involuntary. Just as with attention it falls under the same internal pattern as the distinction of the seer from the seen, now say, the doer and the doing. But what is this intrinsic reflection, this unity which can be expressed as if it amounts to being always able to say 'I do' (and not merely 'I think') without modifying the associated content? It is known or recognised almost in the very instant, but as if from just before. It reaches back before anything like an idea or image, it is a doubling of self-presence, and is the reason why being is sometimes referred to as 'pure act' - pure because precedes any specification of an action. A stationary movement within itself, but when you graze it ever so lightly it emits a bell-clear resonance.

The reality of the world in which you find yourself, its contrast with and transcendence over any and all constructions of mind, its stone-kicking incorrigibility, is more than obvious, it is the original of all evidence. But isn't it just this perfection of invariable and law-giving otherness which makes it suspect? If you take idealism at all seriously it entails that you as subject-object can in no way dissolve external reality into yourself as much as the idea of doing so would persistently haunt you. If pure self-knowing subjectivity projects a duality of subject knowing object it must in the first instance be just so as to not be recuperable, to be definitively out there, to be precisely the refutation of idealism, to hold up and respond to every attempt at understanding. This seems like such a sophistry, proving the case by the very impossibility of the case, but it holds up under closer scrutiny. The deep seated intuition against idealism is the form in which the intuition of idealism must exist. And further that it be the irritant that keeps destroying any clear formulation of the distinction between say reality and mind, or nature and observer, or more crudely between physics and the 'hard' type of consciousness. And if that were the only evidence then it locates exactly where the challenge lies.