Consciousness is always interpretation, a relation to its other that can always be otherwise. As much as it is driven to unfold a system behind its world, it never quite believes in it, is always aware that the terms could be reversed. In this sense its essence is freedom.

The ramification of original insight into a world, into the world in its full complexity and detail is an extreme energetic and intelligible unfolding that takes place neither inside nor outside what is subsequently taken to be the experiencing mind. You cannot believe that 'your mind' is capable of such rapid and almost seamless world-building, the energy level is well outside your ordinary self understanding except at certain moments. It appears to be something wholly outside, but you can become aware that every level of outsideness corresponds precisely to a level of 'subjective' imagination.

Consciousness surrendering so trustingly to sleep shows again that it is a development or specialisation of will. But you now must understand will as expressed more fully in dreamless sleep than in desire and other manifestations of its restless agitation.

A world continually changing under the influence of forces and intentions, actions and reactions, great and small powers at level upon level. You can sense these forces of nature and of will at play without ever being able to isolate a single pure instance of cause and effect. Are you of the same nature as these forces, caught up in the same eternal becoming, or does your very sense of them, their bracing oceanic sublimity betray something of another origin?

Initially the worlds is your other and you are anxious to achieve a unique identity in its eyes. Then there is a turn about and you are the world's other, the measure of all things that pass away. In each case there is a kind of seduction at play, a stake and a lure. The same instinct for examination persists and the terms reverse and reverse again so that every seeming ulterior dissolves into mere timeless spaceless happening of not happening.

The foreground complex of experiencing seems to be strongly invested in certain metaphysical principles, by being ready to defend them as if its own integrity depended on these as its foundational structures etc. But this level of awareness has no ability in itself to think metaphysically so it must delegate such matters to the background awareness. It relies on this senior tranche without looking too closely into it. The background assumptions can change substantially without the change registering in the foreground, and so much so that all of its vaunted metaphysical assumptions can be dissolved without any apparent change in the relationship. The very shallowness of the foreground is its greatest blessing. One fine day you wake up and notice that there's nothing there behind behind your 'I's.

The idea that this experiencing is that of a consciousness belonging to a mind belonging to a self, and a self that must be expressed in or as some sort of reality, all of this cosmology, prevents the shocking realisation that there is nothing outside of this, treating it instead as if its meaning were idealism. The feeling of sublimity that overwhelms you on gazing into the night sky in bare country far from a city properly belongs to every moment of ordinary life. You know nothing, you are no one, how does this come to be?