Inquiry into the self, or even meditation in the un-technical sense, is a discursive operation, which means that while it calls on analytic and synthetic thought, it is organised around inner speech. This is where themes for development in attention are introduced and mediated or dismissed by means of other themes. Here the self naturally assumes the guise of the inner speaker, and with that all of his mannerisms, say a certain incorrigible naivety and a deference to a certain culturally and linguistically defined common sense - because certainly common sense for an Australian embraces different stagings of implicit meaning from that of a Russian or a French or a Chinese. But the internal speaker, the discursive 'I' is often taken by surprise by the self who acts, and this very surprise furnishes the reflective inner voice with many of his themes, which already implies that the one who acts is more the self than the one who speaks. The self in purposive action, whether the purposes concerned are fully conscious and approved or not, is a strongly inflected self, and so an inner constancy can be assumed which may not be apparent from the superficial inconsistency of one's acts. This points towards further and deeper layers suggestive of the notion of an authentic self, and lying in the direction of desire, or purpose beyond action. A certain culture or internal politics of desire may then be seen as the house of the most authentic self of all, and the experiences this leads to in the relative autonomy which it is granted opens into a an even deeper realm of self which are validated by events we may call self-shattering. At this point we have reached a sort of sacrificial ethic of the self, the self being what you give yourself for, what you die for, in a little or maybe not so little death. All of these versions of self are actually quite diverse and probably defy any transcendental synthesis, so that if they point to a paradoxical unity it is along the lines of that lyric from a Chris Smither song which announces, "I'm not the passenger, I am the ride."