I like to think that I'm serious about these things, but it is really an elaborate piece of play-acting and play watching, an entertainment centred around the notion of insights. If I am the investigator then a moment later with precisely the same earnestness I am the pursuer of some derisory half-dream thought that has flown in from nowhere. The point is this non-distinction in the personas of earnestness, which are embodied just as readily, believe in themselves just as innocently, and fail by just the same degree to impress the veritable subject, even as one dons the guise of a German professor, and the next a blase schoolgirl, or an arrogant mastermind, or a bitter failure, or an admiring fan, or a doubt-wracked priest. As phenomena the only difference between deep realisation and ephemeral presumption is an ecological one, akin to that between a rare flower and a weed, it lies in the alliances that foster or suppress them. But in spite of this the'I'-ness is always fully invested each new thought. The thought may itself be, or enact or function as, a holding back, but there is no holding back of the investment in the thought. The self has no agenda that it needs to protect. This is a state of affairs that can't be undone by altering some belief or meta-belief. The nature of the mind is to produce thoughts as the expressions of an 'I', which is an extraordinary complication if, as many believe, no such thing exists. Thought appears as if it consists of generalised utterances, and there are plausible explanations for this, so the 'I' may be no more than an effect of the virtual social context of deliberative mind. But even here there needs to be a distinction drawn between, merely tactical 'I's and strategic ones.