It seemed to him that no matter how caught up in his experience he was, a silent witnessing always remained. He came to this notion through the persistence in experience of an interval in which reflection was possible. Just as being aware of the gaze of another can make us self-conscious, so it seemed that what he called selfness was induced by that witnessing, and it came as an often passionate reaction to something that in its essence was utterly without judgement or feeling. In this way he equated the two disparate meanings of the term self-conscious, so that while the social version of the term illustrated the principle on which the metaphysical version functioned, it was the latter that supplied the motor on which the former was able to run. We may be deeply skeptical about the evidence for the existence of other minds, and yet be sure to blush when we notice we are being looked at. Self-consciousness as another name for consciousness, for the bare being as an individual self, is before all else a state of being looked at. We know this objectively through the above-mentioned interval or gap, which points to the unknowable subject with which we are at one. Meanwhile the self in manifestation can't still, it has to keep in motion to maintain attention on itself, to maintain its looked-at-ness. An exhausting business, at its most turbulent it becomes downright personal.