A lot of it is anticipation and retrospection and it goes by a pluralist and modal logic, but it is this way because of its relation to the limit case which is the actuality of the ever-renewed present event whose logic is two-valued and hard and inexorably consistent within its fullest extension. You know the distinguishing quality of the actual but can never describe or exhaust it. The reality always differs from expectation in unexpected but consistent ways and this is the source of objectivity. This consistency is so different from the enveloping mass of subjectivity that it needs explanation and the external mind-independent existence of the world is taken as the most economic explanation. Even if the presumption of an external reality beyond the mind is withdrawn, the consistency alone is sufficient to fulfill this role, and you can say it belongs to a larger mind, minds in general having the capacity to project a transcendent frame, but the end result is little different from simple mind-independent stuff. It is the nature, the phenomenon, of actuality that is important and not any theory of it. The only use of idealism, then, is to maintain focus on the mysterious nature of the actual by refusing metaphysics.

Rocks, trees, flowers, insects, animals, rivers, clouds, these things certainly exist, you can wipe your senses clean and see them in their glowing suchness beyond all talk of appearances and displays. You may not know what they are but you know that they are - the project for clear seeing of them is finite, it terminates on success. According to the same kind of intuition your existence is not so certain, you are something ghostly and evanescent behind your eyes and the closer you look the the more its trace retreats. But this is topsy turvy, the event of the knowing must be at least as real as that which is known, and rightly more so. Whatever it is from the midst of which your life is appearing must be more real than anything you can experience. It's not what you think you are, it's what you are. So, what is it?

Experiencing knows no distinction of foreground and background, of observer and display, that is why it is called simply experiencing.

What is experiencing if there is no experiencer in that experiencing? Or, since everything is just as it appears, say there is someone, or some thing to which it appears, then could 'you' tell if that experiencer were absent, if it was no longer looking through 'you', if it went to the bathroom and a different experiencer took over at the display? Evidently not, since all that identifies 'you' is part of the experiencing, feeling, memories, body, place, and time, thoughts etc., all on the screen, all just happenings. And if that happened moment to moment, if the seer were not itself in time so that the idea of identity simply did not apply? The phenomenal dissolves into nothing, but that nothing has always been the very nature of the phenomenal, so that in being more than ever just what it is, some huge weight of expectation that had somehow become attached to it, a promise of a reality, a cheque drawn on an imaginary bank, had been cancelled.

Whatever your current frame of understanding happens to be it always appears as a natural extension of what you are, of your being as unmodified nature. This, of course can't be true since the frame is continually changing, in particular moving up and down a vertical scale. The odd thing is that the form of insights gained at one level is retained at other levels and claimed or filled in according to their lights. This leads to all kinds of strange distortions, fabulations taking over from amnesias. This process generates errors which are often strangely productive which further confuses any attempts at mapping, or distinguishing the modes of understanding.

If a system is said to be emergent from a senior system it is only recognised to be so at its own level. It is invisible from the senior level for which things are going on as usual and it disappears at the next junior level of emergence, absorbed into whatever seems to be going on there. In a similar way the personification of a mistaken idea of the functioning of mind as an 'ego' or a private and privative personal self is only an appearance of error at its own level. Attempting to overcome it, as if it were your opponent is exactly the kind of thing it consists of. The non existence of the ego is not its death but a change of view by which it is understood to have never existed and never been a presence at all. This understanding is latent in what you take to be your personal self, and is even the source of its mysterious allure.

Distracting thoughts are like scratching an itch, they don't just happen you participate with a certain irrelevant and irrepressible satisfaction, belonging to the subject of attention. Attention can't be reformed, discipline has proven futile, but attention can never awaken the other knowing. It needs no awakening, it's always there behind all the noise of attention. No jiggle and dance of any character on the screen can ever point to the screen.