There are different mental formations which successively take up the foreground of attention and in which we variously project an image of truth based on their own peculiar enframing. In a context where a term like the promesse de bonheur is understood it appears to offer a clue to expose and undo the deceptive operations of desire from the perspective of the one who passively suffers them. It is a small clue but since it is phenomenological in nature it implicitly points outside its frame, which is enough to arouse the appetite for a mastering truth. In this way it is typical of a whole range of mental attachments whose study is rich in insights, but which still seem wedded to a base level of circularity. They buy into the charmingly twisted logic of self-consciousness. Other formations differ fundamentally from these in being either more active or more passive, or assigning the balance of this polarity differently, to the extent that they even seem to belong to different regions of the brain. How many brains do we have? There is talk of reptilian, limbic and cortical, and also of buddhi, manas and ahamkara. These two triune divisions are not equivalent, if we try to combine them we might get anywhere from four to nine as a starting point before further subdivisions become necessary. Whatever the answer to the question, and however their plurality can be understood, a persistent illusion has us insisting that there is just one. The truth correlative to this illusion is indifferent to every formation.