The self drives thought like a team of animals, it is invigorated by how they respond and feels pride in how well it has trained them, but then the emotion changes and the thoughts no longer obey, they seem to dominate and torment the self. Surprise, "What happened to me?" This is a negative turn but there are also positive turns, equally binding but not drawing on resistance to do so. The activity of emotion runs side by side with that of the self. Are they your emotions? Pretty nearly, there may be a gap between them and you which varies in width, but it is inconvenient, and generally the source of further oblique and conflicting emotions. The self is entirely caught up in the larger emotional process, naturally enough since it is a system routed through the very nexus of the self. But still, there comes a time when you seek play that gap in a different sense: to detach the self in order to modulate the experience, to civilise it, to cut down on suffering - your motive arising entirely within the system is about making things better. But when you look into it you find something unexpected, something you did not really want to see, that the bondage is imaginary, that it is an option reliably chosen again and again in each cycle of thought. Once seen this can't be unseen, but you do your best to forget it, because if you don't there's no saying how much fun, how much delightful mischief, you'll miss out on.