If you regard identification as the pivot by which a pure or natural consciousness equivalent to universal manifestation becomes for itself an embodied instance of self-reference, then alienation and irony are the central themes. These might play out in a darker or a lighter key, but they correspond to a spiritual world that is essentially comic, or that lacks seriousness. As against this you can counterpose the tragic sense of life. Here the entire force of a life is expended in following an arc that rises heroically and then comes crashing down. There is no respite and no awakening from any dream. What appears as an excess of awareness that is always held in reserve in the comic frame, a margin of unused and unusable freedom, appears here as an instance of the tragic flaw, an inevitable mistake in timing, not a potential but an error that can never be rescinded. If the purpose of your existence is so that you can bear witness to death, not death in the abstract which can never be experienced, but the unique and messy contingency of a human death, then anything that you might regard as a doorway beyond your finiteness is really just a way of bringing you back to it. The tragic sense is the true personalism and it may be that it is the only one too. it is not something that exists only in the context of the entire life and its story, but it determines the nature of every moment, as if each breath, each tiny cycle of lived time were a new edition of the hero's journey.