Experience as you know it is both perspectival and human. It is always as from a distinguished point of view, which is not the same as being entirely isolated, only, as it happens, relatively isolated. And it is endowed with, or embedded in, a complex of attributes and abilities and relations characteristically living, bodied, and human, as thought, feeling, will, perception, historicity, finitude, and so on, none of which are entirely fixed but subject to open reflexive variation and resistance, so that no matter how much you feel at home you cannot escape a fringe of strangeness, a puzzling estrangement. Not that you want to escape it at all but rather to get hold of it once and for all and dive into it. The sense of self is incidental to this condition and carries no metaphysical weight, it is the functionality of the functional. Self is a speculative veil behind which is the realisation that nothing that passes for ontology in the world as understood could ever point to the origin of all this. Any imagination of the birth of consciousness or of time in whatever form, is only of a modification in something prior, the unestranged behind all possible estrangement, which being out of time is here and now, saecula saeculorum, serenely unchanging.