To be aware of something already separates you from it, so sufficient for freedom would be the ability to become aware of every conditioning to which you are subject, even without the ability to act against it. Indeed a certain portion of self-knowing seems to be dedicated to just this kind of discovery. Freedom is a salient matter, but what kind of being you are that freedom would be meaningful in relation to you is the more important question, but one which does not naturally arise. There is nothing less natural to thought than to question the very being of the thinker.

Insofar as there is freedom it cannot be understood or theorised since that would be to put it in the frame of causal logic. It could only be enacted and only by going against desire for the sake of some other rational motive. But can such motives be freely chosen? What if the motive were simply in order to 'prove' that you were free, or the desire to maintain the illusion of personal freedom?

The feeling that tells you that you are acting out of your free will is only the feeling that your desire is consonant with your action, but not that you are free to choose your desire, whatever that could mean, and which is, even so, not even considered. You might identify strongly with your desires but this is all the more so as you have no idea where they come from. With no other idols one might end up worshipping one's desires, or seeing them as a sacred gift, but consider that they are only a post-hoc alignment of mind with action. Or again, freedom as the ability to make a free response to some innovation - but this too is a mental artefact, since you have no way of knowing what that innovation is in itself - you only know as far as your ability to respond to it.

The image of a complex interconnected and coherent structure that internally transforms into a different form, like a multi-dimensional cat's cradle, without repetition is a sort of mandala which fascinates the mind on the highest cognitive level. It is perhaps not so much a theory of being as a sort of striving for self-reflection.

As the hierarchic coherence brain networks is relaxed subjective experience becomes more intense and vivid and anarchic. If experiencing were a faculty it would therefore function in the opposite way to the senses. The 'background' to ordinary awareness is not like a dark screen but something like a continuous explosion, like the sun.

Soul may be thought of as that aspect of the self that bridges the moment and the entirety of time, that looks toward timelessness without positively attaining it, but embraces the deep past and the deep future. Freedom is not an alternative for soul but a possible expression of it. It is not an emotion or a mood, but is somehow related to certain emotions and moods. You can speak of the soulful and the soulless, of loss of soul and its surrender, its recognition or the failure to recognise it as the language adequate to soul is lost and found (language and soul are a pair), it may be hidden, the language we have chosen may elide it, although soul itself is always present.

There is much in the way of mental life that behaves in a quantum-like way: you can be in a superposition of a yes and a no, allowing both to project their alternate worlds until at some point you choose what you had perhaps already decided. This kind of vagueness, like negative capability, has its creative uses. This phenomenology does not apply to the ethical, you cannot be in a superposition of good and evil intentions, to dwell in moral ambiguity is already evil, the good is always definitive. Practical reason is classical, speculative reason, quantum.