The whiteness of the cinema screen is not the pure possibility of all possible moving images, so that it would need have that in it that which was more arousing, repellent, hypnotic or eviscerating than the most powerful images could be. Enough for it to be white when lit and black in the dark and the rest follows by imagination and contrast. In the same way the background to experience is not a concentrated essence of experience, more blissful and painful than any individual experience could ever be. If enough images were projected over each other onto the same screen it would just show white in the same way as if the lights went up in the empty theatre, everything coming down to nothing. It's contrast and context that make for the intensity of experience, not some potential hidden in its substrate.

The isolated self is not the original self or degree zero of selfhood onto which all else is layered, it is only made to seem that way. It is rather a particular and contingent extrapolation of the logic of any appearance whatsoever. You are free to move the centre in either direction from this historical point and the alternatives appear to be radically divergent and irreconcilable. In fact the space is curved and both ways lead to the same jumping off point. You can get there the hard way or the easy way, but no telling which is which.

A would-be lover who has been spurned can go away and write a poem or song about the experience, riding on the felt conflict between their native solipsism and the existential negation contained in the rejection. The opposite position, that of the one who rejects the unwanted advances is not as lyrically fertile, with some rare exceptions such as the 1967 hit 'Different Drum' or 'Criminal' of 1997. The peculiar pathos in these instances suggests that the appeal of such songs is mostly to the spurned, whose creative imagination is boundless. More generally, a God inspires the lyricism of Their worshippers in prayers and hymns of longing, but Their own lyricism is non-existent apart from a rare and more or less elegant didacticism.

Skepticism about the existence of an external world is a persistent possibility for the conscious mind and is only overcome by faith and action. The unconscious thought process does not philosophise and so does not suffer the same dilemma. Skepticism in this case is more of a compositional element or region within a far larger realm. Not a hypothesis but a kind of metaphor where everything is enacting metaphor.

The enduring thing=like self about which there is so much care, and so much fuss, is not what is asserted in shows of dominance or competence or their opposites but something indirect, a sort of weight that is taken to swing behind these various psychic acts. Its claim to reality seems rather to be in how effectively it impedes these gestures and in beliefs about such failures of intent. Take away this hidden counter-balance and you sway more perfectly, without weight the heft of these empty acts is just as it ought to be and stops short when they are complete.

Enquiring into reality is a doing and so if it were to bring you into proximity to what it seeks it would vindicate the doer's entitlement, indeed his reality. The enquiry into reality is only an adhesion to, and only to the degree of and in the terms of, the enquiry into reality as given by the unknown reality itself. What you seem to be doing is only what is done. This is both less and more as you are not free but reality is.

You are not the experiencing and this is understood in that you feel that you have all-around power over it, if not always to change it, knead it, refract it, then at least to nudge it. This feeling is however deceptive, it is a defense against the gap between you are your appearance rather than its expression. You only discover the freedoms that correspond to what you are able to do, to positive agencies rather than to possible agencies. It is the functionalist error and can persist indefinitely. The opening is there but not with but against anything you can perform or intend.