From intent to act and from act to result, this is the line that defines the direction self to world. There is also a current in the opposite direction, from situation to intention - except that in achieving a sense of what the situation is out there there needs to have been a considerable amount of prior traffic originating in the self. What is it that travels along these channels? Signals, representations, models, which are all elements in need of reading, or interpretation, and the framings that bring this about are themselves elements in flux within these circuits. The operations of this system are always subject to obstacles, much of one's intention is expended in remedial activity, or in fine tuning. Intention is close to being equivalent to meaning, but as we move away from pure intention the gap between meaning and what-comes-about grows. If the meaning of an act is only pieced together by us from what we can make of what others show their reactions to have been, then this is only a model or picture of meaning, understood intentionally - that is, via the intentional stance - as a kind of objectivity out there in the world, a factor or modification of the situation. We inhabit this system, and have always inhabited it, although the particularities of it have evolved with our lives, and we are aware of it as a system, as a whole. Both psychology and the novel provide means of reflection on the system in the awareness of the whole, they are sciences of the condition of being immersed in a world, or indeed in the world. They may also be critical reflections since exposing any part of the system reveals errors, short-cuts, path-dependent suboptimalities and so on. Because it is so flexible it is always a mess, and if it is not flexible so much the worse. Spiritual reflection, and the term is meant is to suggest metaphysical questions rather than religious ones, differs from these by putting the entire system in question, as if there is a subject for whom it is (at every moment) contingent. In large doses this is very tedious, but in very small and measured ones such as we find in Proust, for example, it is infinitely more powerful than the other kinds.