There are the questions, or the one question that you think of as at the core of your being, and whatever it is it is bigger and more enduring than you are. It is a question many have asked at every time and place and some have held it central and gone further than you, and other have done other things with it. So, in a sense it is not your question, rather that you belong to the question, you are a moment in its history. As such you are not central to it, you will not 'solve' it, but you serve to keep it in play, and not without distorting it as well, turning it off centre. And in as much as you are in this way an enemy of the question your work is balanced by some other enemy whose thrust is the opposite of yours. But at the same time as you are a false friend to this question you are the true embodiment of another question, one that is hidden, and more 'gnarly', as they say. This just as you can be a supporting character in one story and at the same time the hero of a different story. These stories are woven together in yet another story. And so on.

A represents B, if this substitution were the template for representation then representation could not 'work'. To clear this dead end it must be at least ternary - and at most - A represents B for C. This is already a story. Note that by varying A, B or C the story is transformed in various ways, and further transformations arise from permuting the terms. Essentially, however, the story paradigm is a way to understand an idealist or mind-only theory, since consciousness is what makes a random collection of three units into a story, and a story is the only indicator of consciousness to itself. Essential to this as well is that stories always have an inside and an outside. Consciousness need not be limited to stories in the atomic form suggested, but that is another story.

Like all good dualist theories, samkhaya or 'the philosophy of clothes', or computational mind, the idea of a total web of narrative elements is a way to push out of every possible content of experience, out of the impossibility of pushing as yet one more content. You only have to notice that it is there, that it constricts you as much as supports you and expect nothing to follow.

It's all made out of stories, like a vast mosaic where each tile is a fragment of a story, the patterns being so complex that it can be followed in many different ways. These fragments or tiles can also be thought of as figures in time, glyphs or ideograms, a kind of writing then. The passions don't have to be brought in from outside but arise in the relations between these elements which are also 'read' inside the elements. You cannot ask why you are experiencing this or that story since the experiencing of it is the story. This is another way of dissolving the isolation of the self, one which offers no outside. You move along narrative lines, which are also lines of tension, in the sea of narratives.

Structure of the ego: it isn't an internalised pecking order, sense of superiority or inferiority, is not built out of qualities, it is identification with a character who has those various attributes. This character exists within a story and only in this way does it 'tell you who you are'. The story is not a random invention, it is an episode belonging to a comprehensive unfolding tale, a unique story whose roots are ultimately mythological. This is the source of the power of narratives. If you encounter a narrative in which the role you identified with is better filled by someone else, and this happens all the time, then your role is immediately transformed into that of a different character, the pretender to that role, etc. This is the ever present threat posed by the other. The deeper you go down the more archetypal and strange, and simpler, the overarching story becomes.

The soul is the only organ of awareness that you know. As you go deeper into awareness things get more peaceful, but as you go deeper into the soul they become much more turbulent and intense, more war-like, the soul is born out of an explosion and retains its violent characteristics. And somehow these are the same movement, at least that is what the soul tells us.

Attention to experiencing includes an implicit idea of a stream of experiences as if these were a kind of contents in a flow of time, like music or a film or a stream of point realisations or qualia or what is known in jargon as a 'feed' - your experiencing as a feed. The complex of references to past and future and to other levels of context is simply folded in. Even the soul is operationalised in this paradigm. This is one of the ideas that holds us captive and is impossible to think your way out of, although there is a cottage industry in presenting structures of thought that purport to do so. The soul is homeless, what is it for?

This has largely been an exercise in monitored decline. A negative outcome is still an experimental success. That it has coincided with a period of increasing turbulence in the spirit of the times is probably more than a coincidence. The problem now is how to change the tone in order to better reflect these chaotic conditions. It would be an aesthetic or poetic problem if that were a possibility for this instance, to make it darker still.

Turning from what is being experienced to the experiencing and then to what makes the experiencing possible, to see the light by which what appears appears - this is the same as the move from form to emptiness. As long as these are opposed to each other the turning cannot occur. Instead it is that the seeing and what is seen are not two; what is seen is the seeing and the seeing is what it seen because there is nothing else that either can be.

In memories there is a sense of something you ought to have noticed but missed every time. When all that remains is the content of the event you see how that was never what mattered, the element that might as well have been a dream. Something else mattered, a realness that you were always turned away from. Why couldn't you see it at the time, why can't you see it now?

Another duality: in or before the scene and behind the scene. The peculiar exhilaration of being behind the scenes, present when the decisions are made that gather the materials and construct the illusion. Now put these two together, or simply erase the barrier that separates them, the scene is also behind the scene, behind the scene is the scene, in endless reflections. This is the peculiar condition of the contemporary world.

Idealism is nominalist since for it appearance is all the reality there is and objective truth is formed from local regimes of coherent beliefs. Appearances are not determined by something fixed which underlies them and so there can be and are in fact incompatible objective truths which maintain their conflictual coexistence expanding in mutual interpretation of each other without any horizon of ultimate resolution in favour of one or another. That we observe such conflicting regimes in many matters on a day to day basis thus constitutes evidence for idealism-nominalism. However, the opposition of realism and nominalism is one of the original instances of such a multiplicity (or duality) of truths and hence is itself irresolvable under either assumption.

You are trying to peck your way out of an egg. How can you point your beak in the right direction? If you knew what the right direction was you'd already be out of the shell. Next best is to realize that there actually is some kind of shell around you, it's far from obvious at first. It's the kind of shell that recedes as you approach it, according to some strange geometry. Doesn't matter, keep going, keep trying to get a clear sense of the shell without thinking of anything beyond it. From where you are beyond can only be an illusion.

You want to know what consciousness is, but the terms in which the query is framed and the desire to know that moves the inquiry are all produced within consciousness, within its diegetic reality, so are mere representations in relation to the real which they would reveal, puppets wanting to see their own strings. As this becomes more and more apparent the force is drained out of the desire. At the point at which the predicament was fully revealed there would be nothing left of the desire to overcome it. Nothing? Well, let's say instead that the desire is attenuated by a certain factor. If the initial desire was much stronger there would enough would remain to punch through the thin membrane at the limit, the representation-reality barrier.

The two levels of idealism, critical and absolute. In critical idealism you are the transparent eye - but every eye has a blindspot. Consciousness abhors a blindspot and reverses it and so to the absolute... But critical idealism is zen-like; it is when you finally renounce absolute idealism, absolutely. It is the metaphor of transparency that misleads. Whoever said that consciousness, that this experiencing here and now, has anything to do with transparency, or with reference or with representation?

Idealism ought to be able to be decomposed into independent factors. First the dissolution of the distinction between the objective and subjective qualities in experiencing. This is what the dream analogy points to in which the apparently independent substance of everything you are experiencing is made out of exactly the same stuff that you are. You might talk of this as being the mind, the same mind constituting the dreamer as the dreamed world; if again it is like being in a theatre and absorbed in a movie, it is both the fact that the theatre, the audience, the screen, the watching and all that makes it up, responses etc., are all just the same mind in its various capacities, and that it is possible to immediately realise that fact without any doubt or speculative shadow - these being two different things, the philosophy one, and the meditative direct experience of its conclusion another. This might be one level of idealism, the ground floor, but there is also the content of the unfolding experience, the source of the movie you are watching, whoever wrote, produced and directed it, or the world-mind as distinct from your mind. The idealism which includes this level as well is a further step, and the direct realisation of it would be yet a further step requiring a different kind of validation.

In experiencing there is a division into the act, the object and the frame, which in phenomenological language might be called noesis, noema and horizon. The act is in immediate running time, the object is stationary only with respect to the act but otherwise also belongs to continuous or flowing time. The horizon, however, has a different temporality, it is out of the flow of time since the flow itself is relative to it. The horizon is a different, or alien act of knowing, it it is the view of the other, in which subject and object can, but need not, be distinguished as opposing nodes. Self-deception, or error arises from misidentification of the other's view. Put simply, you are a performance for an other, in effect a superego, but you distort or invent who or what that other is. This is always a mistake, a secretly cherished mistake etc.

Is there anything that crosses the representation-reality barrier? If there is, then there isn't, because anything known to do so, by virtue of that very knowing, would belong entirely to representation. The distinction itself is no more than a representation. But if there isn't, if representation knows itself to be forever enclosed in its own hall of mirrors, then there is, since grasping representation as a whole would puncture it. This is not quite the same as the procedure of the Cogito, since the opening only exists at the point at which there is no longer any doubt about what it was that was originally doubted. A point of tension which remains at its maximum intensity only for an instant.

What you ordinarily experience as experiencing takes place entirely in that region of being called soul, where there are only meanings and flows of intensity and where there is no fixed self but a succession of situational subjects loosely overlapping by way of memories and attachments (in the neutral sense of that word). So you could say that your world is made of thought, but then what is thought? There is language which consists of objective events through which you enact thoughts, but the thoughts themselves are much the same sort of thing as language, subjective events of a vague kind through which you enact meanings. You experience something directly, say drinking a glass of water, and then you can think about this by reference to its afterimage in memory, the reference and the meaning are the same here. Direct experience in this sense is far from direct, it is already structured by prior meaning, prior representations. Perhaps all of this hangs on certain truly original experiences that occurred in early childhood. The closer you get to original experience in this sense, the higher the associated energy of imagination, so that in the limit the maximum of otherness coincides with the maximum of imagination.

The indelible reality at the level of soul is other minds, or rather other souls. The question here is not that of overcoming solipsism from the base of Cartesian self-certainty, but of gaining some kind of self-existence in a flux determined by forces and flows which originally collect around diverse centres not yet identified as alterity. This translated what is called psychological reality, and indeed it describes the world in which most of your time is spent, the habitation of forces and deliria of every kind. Self and other is not the primary opposition here, but is derived at one or two removes, while in experience selves and other selves are never separate but continually bleed into each other. That its metaphysics is the reverse of what is suggested by the physical world is one more of its veils and obfuscations. The doctrine of anatma or no-self is not about the abolition of the self-centre in this realm but the seeing through its mystifications in their entirety.

To say that consciousness is all there is is to say that only the experiencing is. This means that the objective is pre phenomenon and does not exist i any separate way in its own right. The point is to not put belief on to another kind of reality that lies on the other side of the experiencing, even if that other kind of reality is theorised as 'frozen' consciousness, or dissociated consciousness experienced 'from the outside'. This kind of belief is the idealist version of physicalism. 'Consciousness only' is a far more radical belief. What the two have in common, however is that they each force a revision of what consciousness is understood to be, but the correct revision removes all putative objectivity or objecthood from consciousness and from its apparent objects.

Soul, or mental body, which has, by analogy, its own anatomy and physiology. The metaphysical conditions in which it exists are very different from those we have developed to understand and operate within the world of waking, physical reality. In the latter instances of the same archetype are functionally distinct, but this is not so in the former. Whereas the metric in physical reality is based on time and space, in subtle reality it also includes the formative idea, which is not itself quantitative, but affects the quantitative values of the other parameters. This is just a way of trying to get at the phenomenology of this realm, its peculiar multi-dimensionality, and the relations between what is conscious and unconscious. Also the interrelation of quantitative and qualitative differences.

Memory is a function of soul, not the other wat around. Around every feeling that was felt there is a constellation of unfelt feelings. Art and music evoke past feelings but also past unfelt feelings, that is how you know they are unfelt Dreams do this too. By putting together elements that were originally experienced a different times and in different contexts, these feelings are developed. Because of this these feelings or complexes of feelings are outside of time, outside of the linear time or their component parts. In linear time with its ever changing contexts the self seems to be split into fragmented and unrelated parts. In the work of the soul the underlying unity is revealed, as if the pieces are rearranged to form meaningful patterns in a timeless dimension. This could be called mandala consciousness.

The idea of the soul is like that of the body. An enduring structure that both digests and is constituted out of the stream of experience. It is an organic unity of differences formed according to archetypical patterns which are uniquely expressed in each instance. That which nourishes, or that which poisons, is extracted from the stream and broken apart, each component going to its corresponding organ. Time, which governs the order of the stream, is forgotten and only the relation of the different organs counts. The soul is more or less complete depending on how fully its pattern has been expressed, all that matters is the inner logic of the pattern or form.