The question of free-will is moot but ultimately irrelevant to the experience of the enactment of a self, or purposive action, the sense of there being ongoing deliberate intervention in ongoing states of affairs including the intervention itself, conscious action in short, including thwarted action and reaction, that has a coherent point of origin, that includes an account of itself, an account that belongs to it, even if wildly misleading in terms of making sense of the consequences of that action. If you try to refrain from grasping onto the hypostases of folk psychology you find yourself floundering with some sort of picture of an incomprehensible flow and various attractors, metastable forms on which the pattern of the flow appears to depend, and held together by other overlapping patterns in other more slowly moving flows, a sort of shifting moiré which has hypnotised you since an immemorial past, which might as well be just now. All of this to reveal ever so slightly the sense of ego or ahankara as seeming both autonomous and entirely dependent on a balance of tensions, inward and outward pointing, desires, dependencies, defenses, that puts you here and now cradled in these intents and countercurrents and leaning towards these imagined levers, going forward, bringing yourself forward into the next moment. All of this both solid and imaginary, because at times whole sections of it can be erased - can fade like a dream into the never was - without the slightest effort, and suddenly the whole system tips over and you wonder how you can ever be the same.