• The mind is a system that registers, records and retrieves differences, but in doing so creates those differences.
• One is relieved of agonising over the status of the mind-independent object if one accepts the coincidence of the mind and world. The mind does not reflect differences in the world, the mind is the differences in the world.
• Mind moves through distinction and association (how?). Understanding a sentence requires that we hold both the distinct concepts associated with each word and the combined meaning they produce together: “The big red hat’. In this we understand scale, object-hood, colour — each distinct yet all combined.
• The fact that a visual scene (like the one above) contains both discrete objects and a unified field is seemingly so obvious that we skim over it. But considered in its fullest implications this contradiction is excessively difficult to hold in our mind, which is perhaps why we skim over it.
• A collection: Something that is simultaneously a singularity and a multiplicity.
• It is important to discover how the brain sustains differences, i.e. how difference is encoded in the organic structure.
• There is a valid sense in which prior to human consciousness there were no stars, planets, trees, rocks, etc. (one of the objections often raised to point out the absurdity of idealism). Such objects only come into being at the point they are understood as objects by minds. Likewise, in the case of the tree falling in the uninhabited forest, there is not really a tree or a forest, nor any sound, since these attributes require a mind to exist.
• The error is to think existence precedes or transcends mind. Only if you hold on to this do you wonder how things can continue to exist when no-one is perceiving them.
• The mind is like a torch shining into the dark. Whatever falls into the path of the beam comes into existence. What we take to be the external object, however, is actually the reflected light originating in the mind. In a sense we only perceive the activity of our own mind (standard idealism). We have to abandon the idea that there is something ‘out there’ separate from the light reflected back to us (things in themselves). The light reflected is the object, it creates the object's existence — its 'thingness' — which is another way of saying the mind is the world.
