The distinction between whatness and thatness continues to latently structure your sense of reality. It has a certain taken for granted quality in modern thought, even when it rules over cruxes that only the select few, which means almost everybody, 'gets' - that too being a part of its taken for granted quality. In fact the distinction breaks down pretty readily. Whatness, which is something like likeness, runs in a spectrum from the everyday second or third hand perception of the familiar and of the increasingly foggy difference between the actual and the simulated to the 'seeing as if for the first time' - the cleansed doors of perception - at which point it transforms into pure thatness; while at the same time, thatness having become the high stakes in the play of experiencing is transformed into a special kind of whatness relative to an even more transcendent, because never manifest, thatness.