Language of analogies is not trying to set up a correspondence out there, made up out of second and third thoughts but to reflect back a kind of knowing more early than that which is the current working version of presence, in the same way that a mosaic of broken mirror fragments can give a roughly true reflection even if each individual portion is out of true. If the mind puts together a self in a place, then what comes first the totality or the self? Say it has to be the former, then certain things follow. The prior is not vague or indefinite but only might seem that way when tried to be grasped by later thought, since it is not thinkable. There is a prior to thought as well. Sometimes art is able to evoke the peculiar adamantine energy and perfection of the prior moment. The priority here is not in ordinary time but in another sort of time curled up within the time we know. This other time does not have duration but is the possibility, what gives the possibility, of complex, definite, and probably non-linear articulations. What the mind does is to resolve the given field into experience, and in doing this it gives sense and direction to the elements so that they can emerge and be the experience of a knower, an empirical self in a world of others. In this way the mind can only be said to be the transcendental self's organ of experience. The empirical self is a fleeting thing, but with a kind of metastability, like an eigenvector. State of mind is thus like the distribution of eigenvalues. The mind in an instant runs down the spectrum of awareness and stops at the highest level it can sustain since the corresponding knower has the greatest sense of freedom and joy.