- Two key intuitions: cogito ergo sum and esse est percipi. See them first as embodying pure intuitions and not as mere historical assertions or hypotheses. And then see them as exactly the same intuition, now seen from cognition and now from perception. See how perfectly they correspond, or put them together in endless mutual reference. The thought you are thinking for the former is the latter, which exposes the being which it indicates, and so on. The statement and its quotation are in the same field, are that field. The 'I' and the it are identical, tat tvam asi.

As the event opens the subject object duality is transformed and finally dissolved. On the way to this the object becomes other subject. So now it is clear that just as subject does not dissolve into object, object does not dissolve into subject. If you want to talk of the ultimate self, then this is just as much ultimate other; this is not a simple alternative but an essential structure of the opened event. Alterity is never melted into sameness, rather sameness is a special pathology of what is both and neither.

Mind is the condition of experience and hence nothing in experience can be beyond mind. Mind in itself is in part absolute and in part extremely fluid and evanescent, in particular the content of experience as experience falls into the latter category. The self-standing world is known through this fleeting medium, so that if it is claimed that all that is is mind there must be another side to mind which ensures the extraordinary self-consistency of the world known through experience. For an idealist there is the unreasonable consistency of physical reality. This can only be due to what must be inferred as a cosmic mind, a demiurge, ishvara or world-soul. This might equally be called god or nature. In this sense materialism and idealism, duality and non-duality are identical.

Materialism is also a monism and differs from idealism only in denying to consciousness a direct intuition of all of its irreducible determinants. It is as if to say that side by side with the cogito there is another dark cogito, equally essential as a basis for experience but which affords no possible insight. (Or you might say that ide by side with the transcendental unity of apperception there is also a transcendental divergence of apperception, a dark matter of the mind.) But all of this only concerns what is defined as consciousness, and since any such definition is contingent on a view of experience there is nothing to stop you from redefining it, and redefining whatever is understood by intuition, logic, etc. to include this outside. You are never late enough to declare the terms fixed.

It's not always obvious, but every experiential moment, thought or perception or act of understanding, requires a basis, is what it is only in relation to a prior certainty. For all of our ordinary experience this basis is self-certainty, that is the inner intuitive certainty of self-existence, or the cogito in its most general sense, having nothing to do with thinking as such. This self-certainty is so common as to be almost entirely overlooked, and is prior to all the terms that arise in phenomenology, noesis, noema, horizon, Dasein etc. This basis is assumed equally in materialism as idealism, and in particular materialism in any form, even the strictest only makes sense in relation to this inner certainty, as if it is precisely this that it is displayed to. The thing is that if you look more closely it is clear that this inner certainty is no such thing and actually requires an appeal to an even deeper basis. This is not an infinite regress, it only goes one step beyond your individual self-certainty, but it is a leap.

The peculiarly melancholic beauty of duality for which a very specific kind of happiness exists but only in the negative, as what is lost or withheld or forfeited, because as you are imagined it is with a perfect balance of the inside and outside, the present and the absent, neither existing without the other. The same certainty of fulfillment can be grasped from either side, but only from absence does it also produce this yearning kind of beauty of a winter evening.

The eye cannot see itself, but in some sense this is a deficiency of the eye whose function it is to see objects and being itself an object. Another eye can see this eye and subject it to the closest observation etc., and while it remains true that by no possible augmentation could the eye see itself in the very act of seeing it might be brought indefinitely close to doing so. This is not the same as awareness being unable to objectify itself, which is in no sense a deficiency, since awareness does not objectify, rather it gives rise to point consciousness whose essence is to do so. Objectification represents a special case you might say, and in no way expresses the essence of awareness which itself knows no deficiency or limit. A corollary of this is that no possible refinement of objective awareness, say pure witnessing, touches the essence of awareness. The necessary deficiency of objective consciousness points to awareness, but not in the way you think.

There is something that it feels like to just reduce attention to what is yourself and it is the same as what you do each night when you lie in bed and gently petition sleep to come, a settling and cozying of the body, a detachment from purposes and an enjoyment of a sort of homecoming, of the companionship of your unchanged self, and the sense of proximity of the interior paramour, only you do this too without the intention to sleep but maintaining a steady vigilance. That is what being you feels like and yet it is not at all a reflection of what you are, since it is the project of a point consciousness whereas the truth must be a global consciousness, whether you think of this as what is happening in your brain, the myriad complex networked processes or as the mind that is projecting the entire scene, the total context that makes the point consciousness possible. The point consciousness knows itself to be incomplete, that is why it always has something further to do in order to coincide with itself, and it is that incompleteness, reimagined surprisingly, that is the doorway to the global consciousness without any possible boundary.

It's not knowing, knot knowing, and bewilderment, perfectly rendered even to the point of an experiencer inside and outside and forgetfulness, and it is the dreamer, the pilot of it, hiding in the heart and indifferent to his creation only its perfection and long foreshortening of time.

All that distinguishes this moment from a myriad of other similar moments when just the same thoughts and questionings have been current is that this is now, has the brief privilege of courting the only now and failing to ensnare it. It is all for the sake of the now since there is no other occasion for your being, you are all compressed into it without showing, without touching its edge. And all your thoughts and questionings are ineffectual remedies you've taken up from the times with no other purpose than to abandon you, absurd and gesturing towards the fading fulness.

Not a state of absence but the absence of any state, and that no more than an absence of a description of a state, and that only a refusal of a description, and so a condition of the will. This only exists from the inside, and disappears from the outside, so it is the will's insistence on the inside expressed by the impossible demand for the description of a state. The nature of will is to be a knot.

Ordinary mind is the misalignment of the centres of several parallel but very heterogenous modes of being: consciousness, desire and will (whose default is a constant frustration), feeling (somatic not moral), and thought. This misalignment is a felt lack and so where you are to be found in all of this is with desire and will. Worst is to be decentred from consciousness, a paradoxical parallax. This is what you try to correct by slowing down, by witnessing, but with little success.

Mind and consciousness as two different things. There can be mind without consciousness, certainly, but consciousness without mind is perhaps that hypothetical (?) consciousness without an object, that is consciousness without positive appearance, or background consciousness. Mind is not separate from its environment, it is a matter of circuits of reference but gives no distinguishing point in the loops, it can be reconfigured from any perspective - in other words it does not individuate. But consciousness also does not individuate, there is no conclude that there is more than one consciousness, since without mind it is completely weightless. It is only in the bringing together of these two different kinds of universality that individuation arises, like a sort of moiré pattern. Or is it the other way around, primary individuation giving rise to both consciousness and mind to express its paradoxical nature. Something like the trinity?

The embodied self, which not a distinct thing but a highly coherent set of overlapping matters, is a factor that the mind must include in all its calculations, it is a player, an important stake-holder, among the most important ones, you might say. Consciousness, on the other hand, is nothing of the kind. For a start it tend to foster the illusion that it is the mind, or rather the mind is no more than it - this is patently false, but the mind doesn't seem to care enough to disabuse it. Perhaps only in dreams does the mind demonstrate some unease about its belated parasite. This is far from the whole story. The consciousness present in others matters very much, and your own consciousness too, in so far as it is the concern of others, which turns out to be quite a bit. For all the tremulous privacy of consciousness you might venture the idea that it only 'exists' due to your uncertainty about others and how they, as minds, interpret you.

As an embodied mind you must model yourself in your world according to nested structures that go back to some of the most basic predator and prey routines. As the cognitive level goes up a self emerges from the mists; it is objective but virtual, a general translation point that maintains functioning. So the mind relative to the world is free-standing, an animated sculpture, the-dimensional. Consciousness, which is some sort of further refinement of this, whose medium or world is the mind, does not have the same kind of relation to it. It is not three-dimensional, you can't walk around it, it has no objective constancy, it is like a flat fish darting through the minds circular canals, and never is where it is.

As if all the energy has gone to the dark twin of consciousness leaving only a twilight at the surface while below dim and heavy forms move slowly in a sort of sultry heat that is known only in dreams. The centre sunk far below the horizon and working in secret.

Brief periods of focused attention punctuated by long ones of reverie, this seems to be how dogs and cats spend their time, like you only with no lingering guilt about so indulging the 'default mode' - novel reading is a way to day dream while pretending to be purposeful. If dogs could read novels, they would. Birds on the other hand show little of this, when awake they are always alert, which makes them irascible, and from time to time ecstatic. A dog may be full of good humour, has social emotions, is perhaps only (nearly) ecstatic in an olfactory way, through disinterested inquiry. Cats can be supremely contented but never outright happy, they are perhaps more enslaved by sex, but don't show it, and don't appear to dream of it either. The nose covers all bases, put it before the mind.

Too much importance is given to consciousness, as if the 'hard problem' were the key to the ages, as if mapping its protean forms were the way to metaphysical truth. The latest toy. Instead regard it as an instrument, a sheath, a kind of body, a condition of appearances, but not its own ground, not sui-generis, not the source. This is the condition of the times, the obsession with the instrumental in itself and not as a medium, the avoidance at all costs of That for which it is an instrument.

A dog or a cat or any other hunting animal, and perhaps even a spider, makes updating predictive maps of the world which incorporate themselves, their own position, movements, salience, revealed intentions etc., and so all the elements that go into self-awareness. Of course we credit at least the vertebrates with consciousness, interpret their behaviour intentionally etc., but not always with self-awareness. What is the difference? Less freely hypothetical perhaps, or not as creative with errors, fantasy, the intentionally irrelevant. But you also see dogs and cats as peaking into self-awareness at certain moments, but not sustaining it. and so it is with you too, peaking briefly into self-remembering and then falling back into complacent animal faith - 'scepticism' and animal faith - suspended between the two.

A relation to reality that is outside of thought and so inaccessible to thought, thought here meaning to cover all forms of representation. But you have to ask yourself if such a relation is possible and by doing so you would reduce it to something thinkable, to some relation that you can model or represent to yourself. If there was never any need to go beyond thought, or for the beyond of thought, closer in, that is than any thought, then this would be an idle speculation, but it is just the way that thought stammeringly admits its dependence, it lack of anywhere to stand.

Acting not from will or desire (desire is will with a subject, will is desire without a subject or with only an immanent one) but purely hypothetically, out of the consideration that you might be a subject, to see what follows from being as if a subject.

Only to be in simplicity so often comes as an image, part thought, part picture, part gesture and is assumed. You can't get behind that because it only yields more of the same, but wonder instead at the first or final container or receiver of that image, and so in walking and doing the many trite repetitions of a day, the subject changes but the subject of the subject remains, not behind but beneath.

This isn't it, this is what's blocking the way to it. The idea that this isn't it is just what this is; this is the idea that this isn't it Therefore this is it! - The only way to break the loop is to not break the loop.

If idealism is parsimony it is also intuitionistic or constructivist: whatever is serves coherence, or rather its individual being is its part in coherence. But nobody with any real intuition is an intuitionist, they are a more or less covert Platonist. Idealism is fine when it is punching downwards, against matter or the indiscernible object, but against Platonism it would have to punch up, where it turns out to have almost no force. More simply what is beyond mind, beyond the conspiracy of consciousness is in the subject not the object. This is where you have to let go of metaphysics. Idealism is the most pristine emanation of the metaphysical urge, and so in its way is Platonism. To make terms with super-essential Being or the great void you need a whole other language.

Idealism can be argued as following directly from the principle of parsimony - what is being the minimal ground for the experiencing and in a similar way the principle of parsimony can be seen to follow directly from idealism, in its grander cosmogonic sense. Thus the two are equivalent. There may also be an independent argument for parsimony: If positive being is not parsimonious then it consists of a parsimonious kernel, P plus some extra stuff, E, but P + E can be seen as parsimonious from a further perspective, that is from a deeper level of self: P + E = P', and so on. (E could be a 'forcing extension' of P containing uncountably many indiscernibles, but these are in fact discernible from a further position upstream of where P was taken to emanate from.) The point, however, is something else: that the existence of others, or alter-egos, is not adventitious but a direct consequence of there being anything at all. Perhaps even the apparently time-dependent number of such alters is a physical constant.