You keep trying to describe it and never get it quite right but there is a basic set-up of the self, an almost unvarying sketch in the imagination of how you are as a being-in-the-world, a Dasein. Just as there is a body image in the mind, or more precisely two body images, the sensory figure and the motor figure, the afferent and the efferent, distinguishable but partially mapped onto each other, so there is an image of the mental self, also divided into the thinker and the observer and perhaps some other variants. What does it look like? Well, it has a front and a back at the very least, which means that it is not the sole possible observer of itself. The front may be small, bright and sharp, while the back is large, dark and cavernous. As the two sides of a single entity the front and back are coordinated in movement, when the front swings around to face where the back just was the back has also swung around to where the front just was, like a clown with a ladder. It is perhaps a clownish arrangement, there is something quite funny about how the two sides cooperate underminingly and undermine cooperatively, although there is little doubt that the front is the 'straight man' of this pair. But this is too much elaboration, the point is that this is a basic structure, or an implicit pattern out of which the structures of the knowing, living, acting being are formed. When you bring yourself to bear upon something you shape the actor-knower out of this pattern. It is the most natural thing to do since you learned to do it long before you could reflect, before there was a you, before anything like this structure itself had come about, and in most respects it works quite well. But when you begin to see that that's how it's done, that's how what you call your self, life, experience are accomplished, you are able to question the pattern itself, and for this inquiry its implicit presuppositions are fatal.