Some of his idea of the spiritual came from the experience of different registers of experience, as between a high and a low, an expanded or a contracted, a sinful and a redeemed. The sense of the self as moving between these gave rise to the idea of a distinctive direction, of a spiritualisation or elevation and its reverse. The basic metaphysics may be the same all along this track, there being the same entities in the same sorts of relations, and therefore the languages of the different registers would share many of the same terms, but otherwise they were utterly unlike in perspective and colouring. What interested him was the phenomenology of the changes, especially the descent. This was the sense of an expanded self with a strong sense of harmony with its environment deliberately squeezing itself into the world of a narrower self. This seemed an essential movement of compassion, but was at the same time a grotesque reversal of the natural order with a peculiarly fascinating but unpleasant aesthetic.