Experience can be seen as a succession of moments each with its predominating quality, drawn out of detached contemplation (sattva), active reactivity (raja), and dull submersion in pure feeling (tamas). The succession of qualities, their intertwining, never ceasing, a triple streaming, now fast, now slow, now smooth, now eddying, and always unpredictable. Where he appeared in this flow, as the apparent subject, was something else again. In some respects he seemed to lag the flow, to be always one step behind, as though it took time to consolidate an identification with a certain subjective character, and by the time it was achieved the conditions had moved on. In other respects he could only knowingly identify with the contemplative and sometimes the active moments and so was entirely at sea when the predominating quality was dullness or a purely negative reactivity. Yet another understanding of this process was that his identification was always out of phase with the changing qualities, a phase difference that also differed with the respective quality, and that these differences contributed to the dynamism of the process according to some ghastly differential equation. Since the subject is phenomenally absent and the qualities constitute phenomenality itself, there can never be a simple identification of one with the other. The subject quality is always the one that's just been, or about to be, and the little gap that never closes it so puzzling to the mind that it produces the idea of thrownness.