The set of the embodied world reflects back a subject as the one whose natural attitude determines it. This set changes radically in the course of a day, between waking and dream states, between morning and night, and under the influence of strong emotions, desires, intoxicants etc., and what is reflected back at a further remove is the meta-programmer who strives to maintain a level of consistency among the reflexive subjects apparently determining these different 'treatments'. This no longer corresponds to a natural attitude but to a continual struggle in which success is gained but never assured, in which the costs, the expenditure of vitality is not trivial. It is a keeping it together which cannot draw on a pregiven cogito-like certainty but which is driven by deeper urges and compulsions outside the bounds of the person. The self is a reflexive knot of energies which are not in themselves reflexive. You couldn't be yourself without first bringing about the conditions in a medium which knows nothing of any such phenomenon. It is only the unique nature of this phenomenon which produces the sense of having given birth to yourself. Your face before your parents were born is surrendering the insistence on having given birth to yourself.