The ego as pilot is taxed with a number of tasks such as meeting bodily, mental social needs as these are presented to it - it does not generate them itself but has them thrust upon it - and it does more or less well at these. Some are beyond its capacity, or they fall upon it without warning, and so it has a sense of its own strengths and capacities which it would naturally seek to augment. Such tasks are in service to goals, are instrumental, and so the corresponding abilities have nothing in them per se that could ground that fragile love of self known as egotism. This latter is an excess and its source remains a mystery - it derives from a imagined judgment in relation to which, since one cannot influence it directly, one has a magical and superstitious relation.

Why is the ego egotistic? The formal tasks of the ego, the embodied 'I', being a virtual centre for experience and the bridge between past retentions and future expectations ought to be enough for it but it seems that in addition to these and hindering them somewhat it acquires all sorts of desires and pretentions of its own, especially those of a sort of grandeur, an eminence above that of others. This involves it in elaborate and distorted interpretations needed to buttress its narratives, and further to protect its distortions etc. All of this behaviour seems so natural that we take it for granted without wondering why it should be so at all. It is as if it crystalised at some moment around a lie and has added layer after layer of defensive misdirection around it in order to build a serviceable social self. The treasure that the original lie defended has long since decayed, but the resulting habits have been cast in stone.

Most of what is significant and effective in experience, and even more what is insignificant and ineffective, all knowledge an conversation, is threaded through the axis of the historical self, or soul, the 'I' as spanned by as long a duration as can be taken in. None of this proves the reality of such a self, even tends to disprove it by way of the excess of scaffolding, its overdetermination, needed to keep it upright.

Being two opposite things at the same time, subject and object, wave and particle, ought to be impossible, but this is so only according to a certain logic, say that of the excluded middle, or were the distinct sides are given on the same plane. If these sides are no independent alternatives but facets of the one complex higher-dimensional object which can never appear in the same conceptual plane then the rules no longer apply. The difference in the mode of thought required cannot be overestimated, however. This is not analogy but direct vision.

The purpose of the world is the purpose of the one reality, out of all possible realities, and since you are a part of the world's realisation this purpose asses through you, through your very centre, without in any way being your purpose. You are an organ of the world's realisation.

The singular reality of the actual as distinct from the imaginary, from sketches, plans, schemes and variant can only be eminent if your own roots are entirely contained within it. This is not so clear; how far and fast do these roots extend? Don't they go beyond all of the marks you accept of reality, extending into a greater unknown reality with which you coincide in unknown ways? It is spanned by your reach into truth yet to be known.

One definition of being would be that which distinguishes the actual from the merely possible. This is not a modal distinction within being; in thinking of it in this way you miss the peculiar privilege incurred by admission into the irreversible order of actuality, the family of being. Thought and imagination have modes, being does not, it is gentle, almost weightless, full of pathos and yet unforgiving, eternal. Our habits of thought, our very logic, make this hard to appreciate, and yet it is openness itself.

If the universe were a simulation then it would have been brought about for a purpose, to answer a certain question, for example, but this purpose would be a purely speculative one: in order to see whether or how ... something. Whatever this purpose might be would not be readable from within the simulation, which rather would go on internally with the greatest freedom possible. In the same way if the universe exists in order to realise the moral law this too would be an essentially speculative purpose and hence would not only explain the existence of evil, but every other kind of freedom. Whether in this case the purpose would be entirely inscrutable from within the universe would remain an open question - every such claim would have to be doubted, and every kind of subjective evidence too.

The sense that your actions leave you answerable and hence are not limited to the occasion of their performance, that they carry involve burden of guilt, karma or sin or its lifting, is definitive for the existence of a self extended in time. But not every action, only those which are 'free' expressions of your nature or essence, a nature which is also forged in the same fire. And this marks or makes the distinction between imagination and reality, a distinction endlessly reflected in your dreams.

Acting beautifully is not enough to determine the ethical value of an act, aesthetics being amoral, but the aesthetic view of an action is a truer guide to the hidden maxim that generates it, and hence to its ethical meaning than any measure of conformity to an ideal scheme based on objectification of acts in general and their inferred consequences.

The actions of dogs and other higher mammals can be recognised as, on occasions, having an ethical status This has nothing to with an idea of free-will, but of a spontaneous response to the feelings of others not directed explicitly to the subject, and suggesting something like good-heartedness. This expresses a solidarity based on an abstract interdependence and shared life.

The idea of free action implies that there is a context by which to judge alternative courses and criteria for that judgment. This entails a viewing from the outside of your contemplated action and hence a judgment by others, or by your own internally modeled other, which is much the same thing. The solipsist has no freedom, but the price of freedom is inevitably being held to account, to be subject to guilt or deferred judgment. But even throwing off the burden of freedom is done against and in the face of that silent other.

There is an immediate sense for depth of being, as much your own as that of others. It lines up minds like the pole of a magnet and all your thinking far from equaling or proving being is only one of the ways you strive failingly to possess it. Intellect and even consciousness, wealth, charisma, are simulacra of it, phantoms to chase which lead nowhere. The contingency of your connection to being is all that drives experience, is all there is to talk about.

There is a seedbed of inchoate impulses, urges desires and hopes from which we instantly recognise those that are our own and those, not always the same, that ought to be our own, from which imagination draws for its fantasies, projections and deliberations and out of which again patterns for realised actions come. What is imagined in this way are always possible actions, action being the terminus of the entire process. The sense of freedom, or of free-will, comes from the experienced gap, the hiatus between merely imagined and realised acts, it is matter of feeling rather than deduction. This gap is fundamental to the kind of consciousness that you have. A kind of consciousness in which there is no such gap at all, in which all is realisation, is what must be prior to your consciousness and making it possible for you to recognise your own existence.

The totality of the world as interacting field of being and experience belongs to a single 'wave function', and each individual experiencing, each life and consciousness as we understand them being its own local 'collapse' of that ongoing wave - such a notion 'explaining' all of the material and not so material entanglements of the embodied world still leaves open the question of what it is that brings about the collapse. Here it cannot be the 'observer' or 'consciousness' as if this were somehow coming from outside, but a necessity internal to the 'wave' itself which would then be a 'panpsychist' variation on the quantum wave of the analogy. Perhaps this is the price of allowing mind into the system - even if it is taken as an emergent, it is still present in an eminent, and unrecognisable by us, form from the very start.

The world is not like an empty space furnished with objects among which your body and those of other subjects happen to be found, but a single nature naturing and natured in which everything is connected by causes and coincidences, by forces and desires, nested endlessly, in which substance answers to enquiring subjects, both emerging out of constrained freedom and free constraint.

The mind blankets you against reality by constructing a benign or perhaps not so benign micro world for your desires and expectation, a world just within range of what you can deal with. It doesn't need to know what is outside, only where to bend, where to attenuate and you are snug within it, except when it fails, which it does again and again, but not too often. It has nothing more to reveal. You can become aware of this work and silence it, somewhat. The odd thing is that the world does not disappear when you do so. It may be unrecognisable, but you still recognise it, without the mind.

Being in the world is being in the temporality of the world, of threads of history and expectation which blend the personal and the presented calendar of events. All of this is at a level where you are aware of acceding to it, of lending your imagination to the work - so you can withhold, or reimagine, can stand outside of the impulses and drives - but the aware ess itself is n act which takes place and in which you re-enter time at a deeper and more decisive level.

Pain is a reminder of how unimportant the creation and sustaining of your self is to your consciousness. It is like an entitled visitor who takes over the house.

There are two kinds of negation, one is that which goes from thesis to antithesis, negation of the object which arises by the shortfall of any positing relative to a larger totality - it begins by finding the missing, or overlooked assumption, the hidden flaw in the position and pivots by way of this to a new position. In this way it progresses through the endless possibilities of thought with the possibility of a destination always in question. The second could be called negation of the subject, it suddenly illuminates what you the one who posits or realises the situation had been doing all along without knowing it. It arises from more closely repeating the original gesture as if it concealed a kind of perfection. In this way it progresses vertically outside of all assumed contexts.

The world of objective realities, the world 'out there' could only be in relation to a world of subjective realities, a world 'in here' whose existence is easy to doubt. T e cross-over is by way of the senses, sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste and these not as random occasions of 'data' but as understood categories, or fields, 'spaces', of inner experience. This pre-understanding of possible experience has nothing to do with objective reality and yet neither could exist without the other, and the crossing point is in neither.

The structuring of possible human reality may be understandable via certain archetypes or figures, but these are not psychological. The psychological and all the general models and performances associated with it predominate only in a subclass of possible ways of being, one which is inherently limited by its proximity to operational theories of mind and brain, and thus of our particular corner or dead-end of the history of spirit.

All metaphysical positions are ultimately interchangeable and can be mapped into each other by way of a suitably deep translation. You could say that they are equally stymied by the 'why?' question, or you could point to the impossibility of thinking the outside of metaphysics from a starting point inside, even though metaphysics itself can be defined as a doctrine which models its own outside.

Idealism implicitly assigns purpose t every event in so far as it is identifiable. Thus the absurdity of the world poses its greatest challenge. Materialism has a much easier time of it incorporating into its model all the brokenness, vice and stupidity in the aggregate phenomena. That all of this might be perspective-dependent is hardly a solution, since it is the very perspectives that are in question.

An object or matter in the world can be purely given, unexpected and not prefigured in any way and no yielding up its secrets, its laws, easily or at all - that is basic to the world. The world itself, however, which does not arise in the world but in consciousness, like all content from the point of view of experiencing, is the opposite - pure givenness is impossible, the phenomenon must be constructed in order to be experienced at all, and hence must have a transparent genesis all the way back to the shared origin. That this is far from evident is because all our attention is directed outwards and our metaphysics is based on matters and things.