For idealism the body and the mind are two faces, outer and inner, of the same reality, and so as the mind strives to express its essential freedom, so does the body. This is clear in the demonstrated way that these are appreciated, but do not enter into our confused folk metaphysics for which only what appears is real.

Freedom has no objective content, it depends on the limited complexity of the interpreting system, once this limit is passed the illusion of freedom disappears. Since we interpret ourselves and with a richness no greater than our own we always see ourselves as free, while fearing that others might be able to 'read us like a book' - just as we can come to see our own past behaviour in this way. Whatever the meaning of freedom is it does not appear directly in behaviour, but only, as it were, aesthetically.

If the particularity of an individual consciousness is a choice made over a class of all possible equivalent consciousnesses, say of your stream of experience over all possible human streams, a determination of a determinable, then it embodies a certain information content. Your sense, born of your idea of freedom and open-endedness, is that your information content is infinite, in potential if not in realisation. And this again represents your ability to make choices within an unbounded class or manifold. You are willing to cede that others are merely unpredictable, and hence deserving of compassion but that your own power of distinction is entirely original.

The experiencer is not experienced, is not a thing. Reflections on and theories of experience are a part of experience. All experience passes through the experiencer and so the being of the experiencer is of a higher order than that of the experience, in other words, the experiencer is more real than the experience. Theories and reflections on experience insist on exactly the opposite, for them being is the same as being experienced. This is an illusion upon which all experience seems to depend, but which in fact serves no purpose other than to limit experience.

There is no experience of that which experiences, and yet so much of experience is precisely the search for that experiencer.

A self is the means by which consciousness produces experience. Self and other are complementary, so experience for consciousness is engagement with the other. Such engagement is always evolving, always going somewhere. There is no limit in terms of self to how far it can go.

The strange particularity of conscious is key to the development of one of the most basic indices of psychological maturity which is the sympathetic awareness of the experience of others, as it were the opposite of solipsism. It is a matter of grasping the equal particularity of others without mediation or sublation. This may be not only a cognitive and affective achievement but something touching on consciousness itself. This is readily acknowledged by ethics but is also subject to the pitfall of over-correction.

The particularity of consciousness is strange because it cannot be defined within any of the worlds that consciousness itself projects, it escapes the terms of both the objective and subjective, of the real and the ideal, it falls under no 'it gives'. If you try to think it in any of these terms you end up with the category error of solipsism, and you surrender it. To do so however is to miss the clue that it offers which must be taken up by thoughtless attention.

Consciousness prior to its restrictive centreing in the 'I' is expansive and ecstatic but is still particular in its association with a will and an imagination, as if it appears on a single screen. You do not see any other way for it to be and yet you have the sense that in its true nature it is unlimited and beyond any particularity. It must therefore be without image and without will, without any self-reflection or limits.

Feeling is not sensation but a complex thought which defines the appearance of the landscape in which you find yourself in relation to your heart's desire.

Experience through perception, sensation and imagination having an object projected into a space is known as appearance bearing no direct relation to the true nature of its object. The gap between appearance and reality is an essential part of the appearance and to the same pragmatic end. It is less obvious that all ideas and ideals, all matter purely of thought is subject to the same separation. Experience and appearance are therefore synonymous, but not everything can be appearance. Appearance arises on the original and nameless non-duality.

The mere thingness of things, indifferent, co-existent, objective and demystified is a considerable achievement of consciousness. A slight change is enough for the world to change into a seething and paranoic realm of portents and magical forces, a place of shadows in which the border between self and other, between subject and object, waking and dream is dissolved. How long did it take us to emerge from such a reality? And how we long to return and to master it and tame it, to retrieve all that was left behind.

Is consciousness then the momentary, the presencing, the immediate, the solitary? Only in that it is also a relation to the enduring, the absent, the distant, the general. It is open-ended relation to what it is not, it is positive and negative. It is truly the given in that it is a law unto itself or it is free from all law. If it arises in a way, in a mode, that it never shown before it is no less itself and requires no justification. If you think you know its boundaries then you don't know it at all.

Events happening which are not and never will be included in some way within someone's experience, from just being known about to being directly experienced, are profoundly uninteresting. On the other hand everything actually experienced seems by that mere fact to belong to us. The ontological status of experiences, even those we might never know of, experiences merely of someone, is entirely different from that of mere happenings, of mere events in putative reality. Experiences have a destiny, a destination, unknown to us, but as if being to be known by us all. The more uniquely individual, the more directed to a place within a transcendent greater individual.

Consciousness, understood in our rough but natural way as as that for which there is something it feels like to be it always has a singular subject and so does not scale. Mind scales magnificently, there are tiny minds, big minds, group minds and presumable vast minds; mind grow by accumulation like coral, and the same applies to multi-cellular lives. Consciousness differs radically from all these paradigms. You are variously a part of diverse group minds ad egregores but while these can 'possess' individual consciousnesses this is only in the sense of assimilating their associated minds - none of these 'have' consciousness. This is an important distinction, perhaps best expressed by way of the concept of soul.

A dream scenario is a wish fulfilment not because it brings a direct gratification but because the implicit conditions for that scenario itself, what would have had to have already happened in order for it to have arisen, answers to our latent wish. In this sense waking is no different to dreaming, in that the conditions that make our every action possible, the more or less direct pursuit of desire, is that of being the kind of person or agent entitled to carry out that action, and hence of being already at one with our reason for existence. We appear to seek happiness to prove that we have emerged from fundamental insecurity, from groundlessness.

A mind can never be conscious, or be a consciousness nor can consciousness be a mind and yet there cannot be a mind without consciousness, nor consciousness without mind. The difference is in this, that for mind everything is is type, a meaning a general determination of a generality, while for consciousness everything is a token, or not even that, and unique instance without a peer. The two principles are opposed, which is why you are never fully conscious and never fully a mind.

The closer to the centre you are the further from the circumference and if you aim for the circumference then you lose contact with the centre. Nevertheless t be perfectly seated in the centre you are at the same time embracing the entire circumference. While remaining somewhere between the two you are bedeviled by the paradox and can move neither one way or the other.

The mode of being of the ego is that it is for itself, that it is its own law, its own determinant, and even though everything it is as content is through imitation or imposition from others it reappropriates it all as from itself - this is its gift in every sense: its special ability. what it gives and what it takes.

Subject and object, or self and other is not a primary distinction but one already developed out of will, desire and reflection. The primary distinction on which all of this is founded is something like yin and yang, or male and female, o earth and sky where the terms are both equivalent and opposite. Subject-object or self-other is a romanticisation of the this and while immensely productive in its own way contains only a shadow of its creativity.

Social being in its many modes may be performative but if granted this is merely to recognise that any performance requires an audience and a performer and a shared context of interpretation. In the same way everything in experience requires a balance between self-determination and other-determination, a difficult balance as self-determination is by definition exceptional and hence irrational.

The core sense of 'I' which is source to itself is neither thought or will or feeling and so is a fourth 'sense' that remains latent in discursive mind which, although always seeking itself can never bridge the void between subject and object, action and passion, between the need for a ground and groundlessness.

There are concentric spheres of feeling and with some maturity you can mould those on the outermost layer to a limited degree, or by employing certain techniques or agents, but as you go deeper and pass through the regions misleadingly known as the 'unconscious' you reach core structures of feeling which are taken to be the same as your being. This notion is so generally taken up, has so many associated interests, that one begins to suspect that it imposed. The idea arises that just as a 'Copernican revolution' locates the constitution of world in the creative imagination, so all of that intimate 'beingness' and its lawgiving might also be constituted, but by a deeper and darker faculty.

You are not aware of creating your own feelings - including desire and aversion - and so you think of your feelings as authentic expressions of yourself, of 'who you are', as if in some hidden realm you preceded the feelings, as if they offered a proof of your existence. The opposite is likely the case, that you are a construct put forth in order to explain the feelings to your thinking which by itself cannot offer any proof that you exist. Your feeling world changes, often dramatically but slowly, and with certain continuities and buttresses. Even detachment from feeling is taken to be only a new kind of feeling.

You can't say how you produce your thoughts or exactly where they come from, but the process seems as if it were natural and transparent, as if you freely create thoughts while at the same time are separate from them. You emit thoughts and they drift away, but you can also follow and develop their consequences into new thoughts. Feelings are different, how they come over you is not clear and does not seem clear, and yet you are not detached from them - they belong to what you are as a self. You learn to control them by thought, but only to some degree. That feelings possess a 'valence' - negative or positive, say, expresses a core identity. All of this underlines the closeness of being and will.