The ego as pure 'I' requires no defense mechanisms, these only come into play when for the assumed identities - all identities are assumed - which mask it and which are apparently needed for successful functioning in the world. However stable these might be, some uneasy memory remains of the moment they were put on, and this is a moment which they are set against revisiting. Death of identities may be the only death we can fear.

The idea, prevalent in speculative fiction, that there are grades of intellect of the same kind as our own but so vastly more powerful that we would be completely unable to comprehend their operation, that we would be to them as an insect is to us, say, is refuted by the existence of mathematics. In this case we have the possibility of unlimited depths of complexity, but however far they might go in illuminating them, it must be possible to sight the regions so illumined, to triangulate their position, so to say, from what at the limits we do understand. What can this super-intellect say about the prime numbers? For each such truth, and there may be many, it must also be possible to indicate roughly how it is arrived at, simply because it concerns prime numbers and so lives in the known universe of mathematics. If you seek complete transcendence then you need an entirely different kind of intellect, one about which all analogy fails.

Every feeling is also a belief, if only the belief in the reality of the context by which that feeling is able to persist. The feeling only points to itself, but its associated belief points beyond itself and beyond the feeling.

All experience is within the one experiential field, and even the apparent experiencer is something occurring in that same field, but is tied is a special way to the field itself. Others are as 'real' within that field as you are, since whatever you come out as being, or as showing there, is partially determined by each of them. So the field does not belong to you, but you to the field. And it is just the same way for others, and others in their relation to you, and yet the field of each are neither the same nor different from yours.

The ruling modes, archetypes or attractors of experience may be emergent in that they bear no direct relation to those of their substrate or ground and yet they seem to be aligned with the objective determinants of experience as these unfold. Not unlike the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics, there is an unreasonable effectiveness of the 'categories' of thought, feeling, and will, of values and symbols, but only when these are forced to evolve.

The relation of reality, or of experience in its most general sense, to its ground is not like that of a blank screen on which figures can be drawn from more or less random beginnings and then erased and a different set of figures allowed to evolved from different random premises. The ground is what allows the figures and can never itself be figured, but it is itself rich with primal tendencies, abstract archetypes, if you will, which again and again shape the appearing is specific ways. The relation is intimate to an inconceivable degree, so that every figure, every element of experience is at the same time the ground itself.

Qualia theory, which is essentially a broader theoretical base for utilitarianism, is a theory of suffering, a theory which reifies suffering in the most general sense. It is right to do so as against any position that treats suffering as an illusion, but in treating it as made up of a-tomic nuggets it goes too far the other way. It is an intermediate, a catalyst, real in relation to the illusory, in fact its scourge, but finally also illusory in relation to reality.

The one who suffers is as real as the suffering, but you can only untie the knot by going through the suffering and not by 'deconstructing' the sufferer. That distinguishes the real from the merely ideal.

Your personhood is not an obstacle in the way of consciousness realising itself, but the very means. And so consciousness is personal through and through. But that is not all that it is. It is what it is through you.

You are the place where experience happens, where experiences happen, as if it could be filled up if only there were enough. This is an inversion, the place comes first and you after, and since you arise, or are put together in that place, you could not be the original place. If you could reach back to the very first glimmering of experience it would already be placed, in a placeless place, that remains unchanged, whose very unchanging is your sole entitlement.

All projects, all renunciations fail in the end. No matter how far you grind down ignorance and illusion, as long as some shred of reality remains the personality is reproduced from its seeds and does its mischief over again.

Consciousness has no centre, but you appear to have one, or are one, or it's all that you do. How could that 'idea' ever have arisen? Perhaps out of space and a little mathematics, but space? What is that? To some it might look like love.

It is able to accommodate and unlimited number of variants of the same theme, without any strain at all, many of them wild and strange, perhaps nearly all in their own way. And yet at any moment it is just these, just these.

The seven deadly sins can be classified according to the degree of 'empathy' required, the degree to which they depend, implicitly, on entering into, or merely realising, the mind of an other or more generally, the minds of others, the general mind. In this sense gluttony and sloth are the most 'self-reliant', or self-contained. Greed, lust and wrath require some sense of the other against which they are posed - in the case of greed, the value ascribed of what one covets depends on others. Envy is premised upon a deep involvement with what is projected into the other, but pride, despite its appearance of self-directedness, is surely the most 'empathetic' of the sins, since it is set against the inner state or status of all others.

Sensory experience is representable, is in some ways already a representation. This is not true of desire which disappears if it is mistaken for its image. The desire that is evoked by images is desire that was already there, the images shape it and focalise it, but do not create it. A world of representations is a phantom world, will only exists when it serves desire. Desire fixes the world.

You imagine that there is a secret causal inside to things, just as in you, and it is by that that things, passive and active, do or suffer what they do. If you search for the insides, however, you never find them, it is outsides all the way down - obviously, that's all there can ever be. The inside of every outside is outside.

There s no science of illusion, just as there is no zoology of the snake that turned out to be a rope.

The 'animal faith' that forms the foundation of the natural attitude may be perfectly consistent, perfectly functional, or near enough, but carries absolutely no metaphysical weight. The gravitational force associated with some of its more dramatic emotional colourings, desire and fear, for example, or good and evil, are similarly devoid of any authority beyond their immanent function. Hence only the merest shift in perspective (by no-one) is needed to overturn it.

That there are external objects is self-evident in one frame of reference and absurdly false in another. The question of whether there are external objects is a different matter, taken not as a philosophical question but as an agnostic and genuine puzzlement leading to an anamnesis. How have you come to be a knower of an external world? Of a world beyond the absolutely immediate? How did you get the idea of 'beyond'?

One kind of time is the register of the external connection between self and other, and another kind of time registers the connection internal to self.

Time for us is a fourth physical dimension, but one that is oddly constrained since we must always slide along it in a particular sense. It may be that time actually has a second hidden dimension as well. The oblique angle towards this other dimension can be sensed in formal and final causes, why they an so easily be overlooked.

Every 'instance' of consciousness is all of consciousness, no matter how contracted it might appear. But then there are no instances of consciousness - every assertion is a limitation and so does not apply. If you could make a negation that was not also an assertion, perhaps that would apply, like Joshu's 'mu!'

In time there is change, development, causality and logical progression, maturing, and in a word transcendence or sublation; all of these form the framework for lived experience. In timelessness none of this makes any sense, instead there is a cosmic simultaneity, and as this too belongs to consciousness, or mind-at-large, there is another way of ordering, not of distinct event, since there are none, but an inner, wholly immanent order of being.

If soul distils a lifetime's experience into a few essential paradigms, what happens to all the 'dross' of daily existence that is dissolved away? Isn't that precisely where all the poetry of life dwells? All of those apparently repeated moments that don't seem to be going anywhere, the supporting cast of life, without which nothing could happen?

Consciousness is just as indifferent to your existence, your well-being, as matter, or perhaps is more so. I adds insult to injury by denying that you have any existence as such. Or say that matter is just the conservative aspect f consciousness, the part that wants to be defined and stay defined once and for all - its gravity, its futile desire for perfect repetition, its effort to escape itself.