This doesn't name or describe itself in any way but hosts enactments of identity which are tactical or topical and operate with very forgiving and loose requirements for consistency over time and context. The notion of self is of a higher order of identity which begins to precipitate out of the jumble of virtualities and appearances which are in large part a product of the outside, mirrored back to you from others, from events and histories, narratives and roles. There is an almost overwhelming flood of these almost undirected summonings that washes over you from birth. That they are effective, that they can even seem to summon a one is because an empty category of self is already in place. As if you know what you are looking for and that it must exists even though you have never quite found it, or at least you know the kind of thing it ought to be, and so you have gathered together a mosaic of failed solutions. What then is this category of the self? It is your originary being, you as you originate in yourself, it is the coincidence of a phenomenon with the arising of that phenomenon, or it is the inaccessible substance behind the arising, for which the arising is the appearance. That you exist means that you have an origin, one that is ever active since you exist afresh in each moment; and this origin cannot be external, cannot be of a nature heterogeneous to your subjectivity, to the thisness of your inwardness. There is nothing in mind which answers to such a definition or demand. You are most involved with, most taken up with the manas, the inner discursive voice. This never even pretends to be the self but only to speak for it; it draws its script out of an inner abyss and presumes to express the self. It plays the imaginary role of the self until it is gently pushed aside, it is the understudy always prepared to leave the stage but never actually doing so.