The idea that this is the life of some kind of inner self or soul, something located inside the body, here in the head perhaps, or here in the chest, and who has desires and reasons and goals, a certain outlook, a series of usefully nested identities and an ever growing store of memories, and even a distinct and abstract character beyond a random set of traits, a character which your friends recognise more easily than you do and which it is generally pleasing the receive in reflection, a self then, for whom it is of moment to determine whether it survives death or has free will and so on and so on. All of it a wonderfully interlocking set of metaphors and ongoing adventure and history, the only weak spot of which is that you have no idea what you are, what the ultimate source of all this engrossing narrative might be, because when you turn around to look you find only the trace of a ghost no longer on the scene, an empty knowing of emptiness. And you are troubled by the knowledge that if one part of all this proves to be nothing but a flimsy and merely opportune fiction then the same must be true of all the rest it. And it isn't really troubling at all, in fact quite the opposite. The more the structure dissolves the happier you seem to become and the more solid and incorrigible the sense of being on which it was once (never) apparently inscribed.