The reality of the world in which you find yourself, its contrast with and transcendence over any and all constructions of mind, its stone-kicking incorrigibility, is more than obvious, it is the original of all evidence. But isn't it just this perfection of invariable and law-giving otherness which makes it suspect? If you take idealism at all seriously it entails that you as subject-object can in no way dissolve external reality into yourself as much as the idea of doing so would persistently haunt you. If pure self-knowing subjectivity projects a duality of subject knowing object it must in the first instance be just so as to not be recuperable, to be definitively out there, to be precisely the refutation of idealism, to hold up and respond to every attempt at understanding. This seems like such a sophistry, proving the case by the very impossibility of the case, but it holds up under closer scrutiny. The deep seated intuition against idealism is the form in which the intuition of idealism must exist. And further that it be the irritant that keeps destroying any clear formulation of the distinction between say reality and mind, or nature and observer, or more crudely between physics and the 'hard' type of consciousness. And if that were the only evidence then it locates exactly where the challenge lies.

Step back, without disengaging anything and in clean ignorance. It's quite vital this thing and it splits at its core into present and past, attention and reflection, and then over and over on top of these more of the same. It splits into a sharp presence and layers of echoing dream and image and although each kind of absorption plays by different rules they are all the same type of thing, happenings of happenings, made out of the same show-stuff. Something came over you, over your original voidness and it was on, without a stop, and headlong into thrill and fascination, like a great sheath of sticky and mirrored meaning drawn-over what was before. How could it possibly have started? Now everything comes back to this strange obsessive formation called yourself, or a self, an impossibly innocent and irritating presumption that bends everything into mattering so much that it begs the question before any question is asked. The weird thing is the way it takes the place of what it happens-for as if that were even possible while it's no more than an inescapable mirage of the way of the arising which has never moved the slightest from where it seemed to start without ever having done so. Everything is perfectly equal, a constant ahhh and nothing to disengage, you might as well embrace the whole circus with all you've got. Ahhh!

The difference between attending a live music performance and hearing the same piece played in a recording has to do with the way the perceived musical unity is seated in the flow of time. The contrast between the present moment and the immediate past is much sharper in the live performance, as if the notes just played have dropped into an abyss, and the notes not yet played are utterly non-existent. In either case they have no common measure with the notes currently being played, or more accurately with the musical gesture currently in process. In a recording, even though the constitution of the gestures across time is just the same, the present moment and the past moments are all of exactly the same kind, exist on the same level. What you are hearing is all uniformly in the past even though the distinction between present and past is still active - this entire distinction being displaced behind the living present. So the recorded performance is like the recounting of an event and is never the event itself, even though in purely acoustic terms there may be little to distinguish them. When you speak of consciousness you mean the event itself in pure presence, however you never understand it in this way, but rather as the account of itself. This makes for a key difficulty in trying, not so much to understand consciousness, as to bring it to full self-transparency. The latter could only make sense in pure presence as the event itself, the absolute now. But such a now is both the only thing that exists and is completely empty, is nothing at all and thus a point of infinite anxiety, forever on the lip on the abyss.

No experiencing is more or less the totality of experiencing than any other. This is a way of saying that there is no other meaning or reference in experience but that of the absent subject, who is absent only in relation to what is unreal, to what passes away. For you it is the question of how this sense of existing could have arisen. What came before, what contains it? This can't be unknown but what you are is the idea that it is, the ideas of birth and death, of waking and sleep, of question and answer. What are ideas, who has them, who could ever have a single idea? Fullness imagining emptiness imagining fullness, what you always knew before knowing anything. The simplicity of a gesture, released to itself.

Admit that there are levels of being which imply a vertical organisation of more or less comprehensive integrations of experience - that's how it seems at any rate if you generalise from the roughly surviving remains of high culture. But then, since no level absolutely requires any another level, if the mystery of experience were to be resolved on any level it would be resolved on all possible levels in the same stroke. And so again, if it can be resolved on one level it can be resolved on any other level. This is another way of stating the odd antinomian conclusion that cultural intelligence is independent or, or 'orthogonal' to spiritual intelligence. This makes it all the more puzzling that the two goals seem inseparable when and only when viewed from a certain distance. If this is like St Paul's 'stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles' it is accidentally so, in that the same ideas naturally occur in quite diverse forms on different levels, the levels themselves being contingently related to each other when viewed along the spiritual dimension, while dialectially interlocked along the cultural.

You go round and round like a rat in a maze, terminating in the same dead ends and welcoming the same new turnings and off you go again. Well and good, but what you call the maze was already there; these same twists and turns, under other names, perhaps, but the same, were mapped and remapped long ago, by others, following the same scents, and meeting the same checks. But it is only when you are brought up short by this realisation, by the heteronomy of what you thought of as following your own path, that you get a fleeting glimpse of what that path would really be - in a sudden light which does not depend on how many strugglers it has flashed upon. It's the point outside of thought which you can only get to by exhausting yourself in the utter futility of thinking, of searching, of being the thinker or the searcher.

Being able to eminently receive what you know that you could not have created is the most commonplace of experiences, and especially perhaps in regard to art, whereas in other more discursive fields comparable results might be plausibly achieved given the right circumstances and a linear augmentation of already available talents. But then, say you are the most discerning of critics, couldn't you conceivably, given enough time, subject yourself to a systematic randomness of stimuli generated by pure combinatorics and employ your finely tuned critical sense to sift through the chaos, to follow up traces and suggestions, so as to eventually pare down the contents and reveal something truly remarkable? In other words, isn't there an imaginable algorithm that would transform being an acceptor into being a creator? Apparently this is not the case, and not just because of time constraints. The critical sense, fine as it may be, is good only for wholes and not for parts. If it set itself to following spoors it would get hopelessly lost in a tangle of competing directions. It can't compute hints. It is even likely that confronted with a series of slightly varied alternatives of something almost complete it would still have no idea which way to go. Aren't there already many examples of this, of the critic being of no use to the artist even in the finishing stages of a work. Here it is even more salient that something in genuine creativity seems to come from elsewhere, even for the artist whose magic is ascribed to diligent reworkings. And indeed it is just this magic which the acceptor applauds most loudly, it is recognised but in a passive mode. So it is not just a refinement of selection that is in play, but something else no less intrinsic to consciousness but far upstream.