Some part of experience has the quality of being freely determined while the rest is constrained in various degrees and some according to known laws and others by unknown laws. These are differences within experience, but the stuff out of which they are moulded is in all cases the same. To call this 'mind stuff' is going too far, mind being one of the concepts that are usefully employed to distinguish between the types. At any rate there is no need to postulate unknowns outside of all experience.

The difficulty for the idealist is getting from the infinite, the indefinite, to the finite and definite. You could deny that this ever needs to happen, or you could view it as necessitated by the result, but from the side of the infinite, of the total awareness none of these seem to carry any weight. A mirror image of this problem is that of the materialist or finitist going to the infinite. Again, you could deny it ever happens, claim it's all an illusion, but this involves you in endless epicycles. Curiously, the idealist's problem is parallel to that of the quantum theorist explaining collapse. It can be denied as ever happening, or it can be assumed because that's just what is experienced, but this ignores the question of where the 'idea' came from in the first place.

Desire passes through the unconscious, which is to say that it always contains an existential imperative. In so far as it becomes increasingly bound up with images, becomes a desire to enter into or to assume certain images it gains a currency which fragments the self. The elimination of desire is a naïve and confused goal, as is its elevation to an idol, but its curation remains a possibility.

The ontological difference, or the radical difference between fundamental awareness and ordinary awareness cannot be grasped or fixed by thought, you can only know your failure to know it. This suggests that the only course is the negative way, denying everything that it is not, but there is nothing negative about Being, or emptiness, the terms are merely place-holders for something immediate which you cannot point to, for which neither the negative nor the positive can be applied.

You can be persuaded of something by reason and argument so that an enduring change in perspective is achieved but this is far short of seeing something true as a result of a pointing (which can originate internally or externally.) The latter can only happen once and only at a fortunate moment, and yet the one who 'sees' is always awake and always free to turn towards the indicated truth. What makes the event so rare is the coincidence of ripeness and perfect disinterest, and of these it is the perfection of disinterest that is the more out of the ordinary. Reason can assist with ripeness but at the cost of introducing a motivation, of wanting something for the sake of something else or because of something else. The form of reasoning, its appearance of impartiality, which becomes an idol of the mind, obscures this.

What you experience as sense of self is a phenomenon at a certain scale in time as well as in various kinds of contextual space; it can be analysed into smaller units and also seen as emergent within larger wholes, and indeed its inter-relation with neighbouring scales forms a large part of its reflective and delibaratory activity. In this way it is embedded as an emergent within the world=phenomenon. The simple recognition of all this is a different matter and cannot belong to the same set of events. This recognition is therefore not a phenomenon, has no parts and no scale. You only know it by analogy with mind, but it is not mental, not of the mind.

Desire is subject to its intermittences and you can be left dumbfounded by the 'expense of spirit', by the use to which you have condemned so much of awareness, precluding its free self-discovery. This is to treat desire as if it were based purely on a belief, a matter of an error in perception, and to ignore its alignment with the principle of all manifestation, and at its most fiery and true, and hence with the source of all beauty, of all that is good.

Space and time are modes of the separation of things, of events or objectivities. Time is also the medium of separation for or within the subject or the soul. Space and movement through space is the medium of separation between subjects or souls. These modes are not simply side by side but are knotted together in strange ways. Which arises first, the separations or the things separated? We normally derive space and time from our experience of the ways of things and their relations, but it is equally plausible that things arise in order to stabilise original spatiality and temporality, or simply to play them creatively, like music and art.

The effective hard-problem is the derivation of matter out of consciousness, and not the other way around. You could add to that the 'uncanny effectiveness of natural sciences'. The difficulty is that while there are certain starting points ad odes of argument starting from the physical the starting point for consciousness and the modes of development of understanding are not obvious at all. The logic we possess is a logic of things, of objectivities - we can move their representatives around like chess pieces. With consciousness everything must be done on the inside, with the thing in itself, so to speak; representations and symbolisations are out of bounds.

All that you understand of mind or consciousness from out of your own experience is accompanied by a more or less subtle thought of an enduring substance that supports it. Eve if you refer to this as Being, or the thing in itself, it is projected as required to endow the experiencing as identity. This is a flaw in most acceptations of idealism. To consistently apply the latter the experiencing or consciousness or spirit would not res on anything outside of itself. Surely this is what is meant by emptiness, the final correction of the bias towards substance.

Experiments that might appear to lend weight to, or even appear decisive for, the 'mind is generated by the brain' hypothesis cannot actually be taken to address a metaphysical decision, the crux is too far upstream. That 'materialism is true' i s a certain kind of meaning or frame for interpretation and so is a certain spiritual position. Such positions are in effect on a collective level and will give rise to results according to the historical dispensation, the status of 'science', for example, that is in effect, independently of the beliefs of an individual experiencer. Nothing here is ever fully decisive, it is always probabilities, Bayesian factors, but with nothing to say about what the priors ought to be.

Theorising the origins of consciousness and of the self on a materialist or objectivist basis represents a great intellectual challenge and so confer status in a predominantly intellectualist culture. That doing so means ignoring what is both right in front of your face but also not orthogonal to the intellect only serves to raise the stakes. As intelligence and its artificial double become ever more indistinguishable what is lost falls further into oblivion. It is a perverse spiritual exercise or conjuration of the unknown, but perhaps the only one we have.

In the consciousness developmental paradigm sentience precedes the attainment of selfhood which is a special topological development, or factitious complexification of the space of awareness, caused either by language or by the needs of social modelling, depending on the kind of selfhood involved. Special efforts are required to dissolve or at least reverse the rigidification of this construction. In the soul paradigm selfhood is there from the beginning and developments is the process of learning to use the capabilities of its vehicle of expression which entails a filtering or fibration and reduction of an original unexpressive vastness. The archetype of the child exists only for the latter, the child according to the former is what it is taken to be by utilitarianism.

There is a certain subset of the emotions, quite small but fairly distinctive that are inflected as soul emotions. These are associated with Romanticism from its origins until its closure in Decadence, and have a distinctly gnostic flavour, without entailing its theology. Yearning, homesickness, the sense of exile, mysterious resonances with nature etc. Emotions, perhaps does not go far enough, there is also a set of aesthetic preferences. After the formal end of Romanticism these continue to exert their effects, but in fragmented form and intermixed with the other non-soulful emotions. Now it is the distinction between these classes that is most relevant, their different modes of attachment, and the ability to discriminate between them.

Self, the notion of self, as distinct from body and consciousness, as that for which these are active as functions, has many of the attributes of spirit or soul. It has an intrinsic dynamism, it is going somewhere, or otherwise stated it has a destiny and as such it acquires powers and abilities to serve this unknown end. It can be seen as the driver of evolution, bringing forth the senses, including thought and consciousness, out of its need. It is a matter of a change in concepts, separating spirit from consciousness, as if the two had become muddled ever since Descartes.

It requires a peculiar stretching of the term consciousness to say that that is what you are, to identify it with being. Insomnia offers a stark example in which consciousness is stuck in a state of activation while you want only to be rid of it so that you can re-submerge all experiencing into the primal blackness of being, namely dreamless sleep. Of course you could say that this is about different modalities of consciousness but this is to deprive the term 'unconsciousness' of any meaning. Consciousness is something you have, with its qualia and its 'what it feels like'-ness, and while it is a metaphysical mystery, the self, the 'i' is a different and deeper mystery, which is more than metaphysical.

Habit for all its power over or lives, is weightless, it has no inertia, no real power over time and hence over death. For all that we do to add something substantial to our being we add nothing at all, our operations work exclusively on our belief. However solipsistic you may be, you can't actually doanything with that philosophy, it provides no collateral for being. Death is certain but unprovable; it is the strangest of the transcendentals, the most intimate and the most unapproachable.

One of the things that is purely given is the landscape of priorities, or perhaps more accurately the landscape of meta-priotities behind that. Every kind of situational awareness is tacitly structured by the priorities, in the sense both of importance and of what order things should be dealt with, of its contents. The acceptance of these is automatic in order to be in the play, and even if a contrarian will wishes to reverse some of them or to reinvent them all, the prioritising principles must still be accepted. All the world-building that you do is based on these and while you are responsible for the former you are not for the latter. Because they are 'given' they can change in a beat, which is why transitions to other worlds can be so rapid and without disruption. It's not that the scene suddenly changes but that the hidden cues change and you instantly build the new scene in the blink of an eye.

The limitation of phenomenology is that while you can 'suspend the natural attitude' you cannot suspend the need to act which arises from it. How do you know when to act and what to do? Any imperative that succumbs to the suspension is probably not a real imperative - it is rather what's left over, or better, what breaks through such postures. Call it a call. How to hear the call and to know what authority resides in it is subject to a certain discipline, but whatever that is, it has little in common with phenomenology, or indeed with philosophy of any kind. The post-modern status afforded to 'the other', defined in some positive or general way, is certainly inadequate as well.

Emotions or states which seem to be entirely in the present such as lust or embarrassment may be social emotions and therefore imply the self, relative to a synchronic intersubjectivity (dogs might seem to show embarrassment when caught in something forbidden by their masters, but this is only in relation to humans), which remains a temporal structure. Joy, however, can be an asocial entirely present emotion, or might veer towards this as it intensifies into bliss. So it is natural that bliss would be a state intrinsic to consciousness; it is what persists when temporal ad social mediations are dissolved.

Emotions such as fear and anger, or aggression, are forms of care which are future-directed but they are also fundamental to life, they precede the conceptual scheme of temporality, so that you could argue that time emerges out of these rather than that they emerge out of time. To be a concept bearing consciousness and to encounter fear, and aggression is to create a temporal binding which makes the self-structure possible, or indeed inevitable. backward looking emotions like guilt, shame, regret that seem to be equally fundamental to such a consciousness are nevertheless far mor complex constructions, out of time, and having little in common with life.

Every emotion, or more accurately every mood, reveals itself as the face of a different mood. Melancholy becomes sadness becomes loneliness becomes grief, becomes depression becomes anger becomes fear becomes loss becomes horror becomes... the only termination is in absurdity. But only in following some such path do you arrive at something of the weight of it. At the outset absurdity is lighter than air, funny, almost a delight in that you feel yourself so more than its equal.

A phenomenon is emergent when its laws of development, its orders and regularities, its predictability are relative to itself, to its own co-emergent terms, and not merely to its matrix, and so the concept itself is relative to consciousness in a genialised sense. What we know as the objective is simply being for generalised consciousness, which is itself an attribute of particular consciousness. Hence consciousness cannot simply be emergent - it emerges to itself, and the 'itself' is nothing but consciousness.

Every negative emotional state, whether directed inwards or outwards, would seem to be produced out of a single pure form of self-negation, a highly charged inverse of primary narcissism, symbolically a black sun. The symmetry ends there however since the mechanisms for defending against something that repels are more varied and in a sense more creative than those that come to the assistance of something that attracts. It may also be that it is essentially invisible, like a black hole, and can only be known via its masks. Nevertheless bringing this polarity into symmetry with its opposite would seem to be a valuable exercise, not for mutual cancellation, they are too deeply rooted for that, but for the discovery of a still-point.

Escape from the self is freedom from the network of relationships that bring about and determine the self, which mediate even the purest individuality, and so, is quite impossible.