There are spontaneous drives towards survival and security and even metaphysical security, towards physical and moral pleasures and their refinements, and drives for dominance for victory and success, and perhaps also aesthetic drives towards beauty and harmony, but there is also a more sublime and inexplicable drive towards the frustration of all of these explicable drives, a drive towards the freedom from all drives.

Despite superficial similarities belief in God and the simulation hypothesis are diametrically opposed. The difference is between a mysterious but loving creator with who we seek union and one, ultimately without mystery, for whom we would be justified in feeling contempt. The latter is a science fiction scenario which we are willy-nilly seeking to bring about.

The friction of being, the core of unsatisfactoriness, of discontent that motivates every trespass. This is universally felt yet each instance repels each other instance, it recognises and repels itself, and delights in its own contradiction, its own frustration.

The meanings you adhere to should be no more real than you who would realise them - no more and no less.

For a philosophical idealist, realism, temperamental, psychological and pragmatic remains the only pure position. Any concession to idealism in the worldly, even if it seems to come off successfully on this or that matter, is an intellectual and moral falling away, and most of all an unforgivable error of taste.

You discover consciousness in language as an ongoing stream of thoughts and images in your head, but this is only the initial idea. Consciousness expresses as your entire undivided being, indeed simply as undivided being, that is perhaps the last idea. There is no movement from the first idea to the last. How could there be?

That you are embodied and act purposefully and intentionally, that you have certain drives associated with the body and desires formed by your own ideas of satisfaction, and that these overlap and you must choose between the, just as you can choose to follow the dictates of your drives or not, all this as immediately a component of your way of being is all the meaning that needs to be given to 'free will'. Anything that attempts to dissolve this immediacy in the name of neuro-physical causality or other metaphysical notions, such as 'simulation', can only have the significance of a conspiracy theory. If you think there is no free will then you think too much.

Concepts of experience based on metaphysical distinctions, mind versus body or self versus not-self draw a separation between experience and its reflection in intellect. The overcoming of such ideas does not do away with reflection but identifies it with immediate experience which is as fully intellective as intuitive.

Consciousness would be unbound to time if it weren't limited by conditions of embodiment to a forward facing historicity. When the past is reawakened it coincides with the present, it inhabits forbidden realms of the solitary standing now, and opening is as rare in dreams as in waking life. The dreamer wanders in parallel worlds, and all parallel worlds are dream-like from here.

Consciousness strives towards full self transparency by evolving physical laws as obstacles which it must break through in ever more creative ways. The logic which powers these laws is not predetermined to this end, if it were that would represent a 'cheat', and the first law of laws rules out such cheating otherwise why even begin? S the possibility remains that the next physical law to be creatively posited might lead to am impassable condition, at which point the universe would have to be destroyed and start all over again. In other words the God's lila is more like a two-player game in which a stalemate is always a possibility.

All the problems that are apparently dissolved by adopting the theory of a multiverse re-emerge in perhaps an even more vicious form in the determination of the fine-structure of the branching process itself. As with simulation theory allof this points to the limits of mathematicisation. These limits have no solution in any structure of structures.

Freedom of the will is an empirically incoherent concept insofar as it depends on the one who exercises that will, but freedom in the sense that say, consciousness has more degrees of freedom than its possible objects is true. That notion fails to acknowledge action however, so another version might be that human actions have irreducible moral weight, or that as a nexus of actions, suffered or performed, you continue to exist in any context in which morality remains significant.

Everything depends on the point of view, or frame of reference. This was the core realisation of the Copernican revolution. Wat seems complicated and demanding of continual intellectual effort from one point resolved into intuitive simplicity and naturalness when seen from another. However the move from one point of view to another is not itself a result of intellectual or any other kind of effort; there is no point of view on points of view, no knowing what the space of all possible frames is, no limit to the possibilities - this is something unknowable about the mind. It does not suffice to point out how much un-needed reification is involved. Otherwise, they would not be points of view.

That you are objectively a body subject to causation - but that's not all you are - is not the antithesis of your being pure subjectivity or consciousness, but simply that natural way in which the the latter appears to itself.

Consciousness is imagined as an extension of mere sentience originating in feeling, or as a development of a pre-reflexive directedness, as intentionality or prehension, but consciousness without self-consciousness, without the potential regress of consciousness of consciousness is merely mechanical, that is, no consciousness at all. It cannot be built from the bottom up, it can only be from the top down. Descartes is reviled for noticing this.

Purposive action, initiation and response is integral to experiencing and as such requires a unified agent. Merely passive experience were it to exist would be a kaleidoscope of differing momentary states. You are called forth by the need to respond, and this need already presumes your presence.

Of course consciousness does not exist, although self-consciousness apparently does. Consciousness is required only in the approach to the question of what you are, of what the true situation is.

The self which is only another kind of object of consciousness is is caught up in endless strife with the not-self and so you come to believe that consciousness is likewise in strife with its objects, but these objects can never be encountered, they arise only within consciousness. There is nothing thing-like about consciousness, it cannot be understood by any such analogy.

Recognising yourself by the feel of your mind, as if it were a kind of place, a city say, or a house, a series of places, places where... - a sense of dèja-vu with respect to your self, like dreaming of a place where you have been before, but you don't remember when, or who you were then. The quality of returning, recurrence, of excursions that always come back to the same place. A kind of loyalty, but how do you know? The one that rocognises it the one that is recognised. The entire world made out of this reflecting stuff.

You recognise yourself, even in an altered form, by your core question. But that could be anyone or everyone's question, what is your is the collection of ways you've found to deflect, distract or defer it.

Organic identity of an individual only exists in a 'Ship of Theseus' manner, and so end res only in a relative sense; in a different timescale it is subject to continual transformation. Its historicity only goes to the depth it needs to in order to ground its current state, beyond that it is 'path-independent'. There are aspects of the self which have this character as well, but even then it is only so that they can over on still deeper vistas. The self is that whose historicity necessarily leads back to the very first moment of creation.

An organism is a whole greater than the sum of its parts and which retains its form relative to a changing environment with which it continuously interacts, is self-making and able to form coalitions or communities with other organisms, or detach itself from such. An organism has a birth and a death, and a will to persist. What distinction is there between organisms which have a self or soul? Is there no difference other than a descriptive ne based on a threshold of complexity? Or is it that one has an urge towards truth, come what may?

Dilectus - the beloved, the chosen, the one picked out. Romantic attachment or yearning, whether sought or thrust upon one has the quality of finding your missing other half, of a portentous distinction of one out of an indifferent host of others, a hitherto unsuspected depth of individuation. In practice this is merely a formal distinction, and not a real one, even with the power to produce lasting consequences whether taken up or not. It is a formal attribute to appear to be the missing half of every individual in a multitude. This one way in which the dialectic of the exception plays out in the mind, but it couldn't do so without a metaphysical ground.

The personal, personal experience, desire, will, reason, feeling, judgment, the sensory panorama etc is the refraction of cosmic energies through the ego. This structure, then, which is both conscious and unconscious, in time and out of time, is therefore the most wondrous and variegated blossoming in existence. The aim is to achieve the fullest integration of the personal and the impersonal, and not to dissolve or do away with the so-called 'small I'.

The drives which define life, for survival, reproduction, dominance etc., when refracted through human experience lose all of their instinctual character and structuration and take on an egoic character, as if they originated in the free self-positing of the individual. The nature of this experiment in individuation can be inferred from the new degrees of freedom acquired by the drives.