Experience has the sense - both as meaning and as direction - of falling short of adequation, as if it is in search of something which it never finds, the self being nothing but the search for self. Ordinary experience, or better, the way of the world, is a pretended acceptance of this condition and a redirection of the quest towards a series of temporary pseudo-fulfillments, known as happiness or pleasure or even ecstasy, but which never for long shake-off the sense that the point has been missed, that the true life is elsewhere - the true life being a complete and all-embracing self-possession, what some call absolute consciousness, or just being God. Despite the faith we moderns place in Cartesianism of various forms, it is impossible to picture this self-adequation as the necessarily prior state, but it is possible to conceive of it in this way. Broadly, the condition aimed at can be taken as prior to experience, in the sense that positive experience is brought about by some sort of clinamen or symmetry-breaking which spins out of control, unable to recover itself; or else it can be taken as a future state, as what everything is tending towards, so that our temporary deifications are like puzzle-pieces to be finally assembled into a permanent and seamless epiphany, or eclosion; or else again, in a third possibility, we can posit that perfect self-adequation is ever-present but unrecognised, the failure to recognise it being a sort of parallax effect, an illusion without substance like the Vedantic snake which proves to be a rope. These understandings, individually or together in a suspension or superposition, underly the experience of experience, and deserve to be critically scrutinised if only a point outside them all could be located.