To be in the stream of life is to be identified, or to coincide with purposeful action, and since such action, including thinking, valuing, desiring and movements of attention require enabling contexts these too are part of the stream, the continuous unfolding of discontinuity. The contexts are what is revealed in ordinary reflection and in them it appears as though personal and cultural understandings overlap, although in reality this distinction is itself purely contextual. The way we understand ourselves which is expressed in the discourses with which we assert ourselves in our world is an integral part of ourselves, and only appears, like a mirage, to float some way above the unthinking absorption in purposes. Recurrent themes in such understanding are thus anything but innocent products of self-scrutiny. Such, for example, is the notion that all significant distinctions can be reduced to pleasure and pain and that this polarity is itself a misrecognition of purely objective, say electro-chemical events. This idea, trading on an analogy with reduction in the physical sciences, attempts to express a satiety with and discrediting of more complex value systems. If not this then other more nuanced reframings of lived experience in the objectivist language of pseudo-science are the forms of contemporary nihilism. The destruction of residual belief in values may be a preparation for spiritual inquiry, but such is the appetite for disillusionment that it generally also destroys the possibility of it as well.