The energetic vortex is a field both of expression and of self-preservation, of preservation through expression and expression through preservation. As a form or clothing of the self it is constituted through appropriation and identification, but only in the ensemble. If an individual component or voice can be distinguished, it is known as divergent, as an objectivity in process, an image forming and deforming. One narrative of the dual thrust of the self as energy is that of an isolated entity set loose in a dangerous world. Such a self is in need of protection and love, where receiving love is an assurance of protection and giving love is a transcendence and affirming of protection. Knowledge of the causal roots and consequences of its isolation is a value that serves to expand the system of the self. Degree of expansion matters in this, and it is a dramatic gain if the subject is ready to stake itself on pure risk. This is a playing the game of life, played relative to that self-gathering energy, cancelling and reaffirming itself, aligning its essence with recurrence, with the glorious again. If expression is optional then self-preservation ought to be too. The reality of the world only appears to the outermost sheath of protection, protection from protection from protection, and so on. To collapse the sheaths is to be exposed to the open, to cease utterly from imagining death.