These ideas have less interest in themselves than as soundings of what a being so constituted would think, of what these limited powers of thought can deliver at this age and location, with no assumptions other than that there is a beginning and an ending, both equally certain, both in the present and beyond it. Being embodied, being cast into time, being neither wholly body nor mind but a couplement; there are experiences which could arise in no other way, experiences of a particular flavour in which the essentials are blended inseparably, and which appear to hint of larger truths beyond your grasp, and which elicit thought on the scale of time determined by birth and death. For example to compare your childhood expectations of the story of your life with what it has actually become, now that you can pretty well see the whole shape of it. It is not illusion and truth, but the bringing together of two kinds of truth. It could only have happened in time because you are continually discovering the nature of time, not as external to the self but as an aspect of it, the bitter flavour of it within the sweetness. To know what it is to be called and not chosen, because not being chosen is also a way of being chosen, both of the same inner necessity. To be victor and vanquished, hero and fool, blindness blindly leading, surrendering of all and still stubbornly persisting.