The frail shoulders of present consciousness are taxed with bearing the entire squabbling and dishonest edifice of the enduring self. It doesn't completely recognise its oppressor, not only because so much of the self is veiled under tangled defenses for all of its official secrets, but because the self has no face, it is mask after mask, some of them even seeming quite trustworthy, but all of them somehow bureaucratic. No wonder novels are so appealing. And the biggest of the self's secrets is simply the fact that it will die. Present consciousness and the self depend for their existence on each other, but the symmetry goes no further; all the needs and drives, all the motives and capacities for endless improvisation, for quests for love or success or singularity or enlightenment, all the plots, belong to the psyche, to the self in action. It is the multi-dimensional world, immense and endless, and yet it still takes some trickery to place at the heart of consciousness the conviction that it is nothing but the leading-edge, the ranger, the agent, wholly owned and identified with its employer, its controller.