Insightful discussions about the nature of mind and subjective reality are a perennial feature of the culture demonstrating a high level of fascination with this topic. It is not merely one interesting subject amongst others, but one with the promise of providing a solution to all the rest, or at least to all the vast family of problems that ranges from epistemology to spirituality, the alpha and omega of questions if not those in between. Various paradigms are frequently put forward to explain consciousness, the phenomenon of phenomena, but few of these make a clear distinction between high levels of functional integration, complex but computable attributes of mind, and irreducibly subjective experience, sometimes called 'the feeling of what happens'. None of the functional explanations make sense without a notion that serves in the place of who-it-is-for, and we can observe the position of this term moving about like a piece on a chess-board as different configurations of ideas are ventured. What is more curious is the range of different structured activities that can serve as the basis for an allegory not so much of consciousness itself, of the one who, as of the inquiry into the meaning and significance of this one. Any pursuit that can be interpreted as a form of self-transcendence, art, of course, but sport, travel, food, the whole gamut of leisure affords occasions for these indirect invocations of the source of all value. This leads to a profoundly pagan this-worldliness, a horizontal transcendence, or excedence which purports to redeem any activity deprecated under the vertical kind, and which is perhaps no more than its inevitable, or satanic, counter-current.