The constant colourless awareness that underlies every experience could count as the origin or precondition, but it has no self and doesn't care. Regret, care and hope are the declensions of fear and pride and a kind of knowing precedes them and makes them possible, a knowing that embraces every alternative at once, and it too has no self and no preference, is unable to engage. What is the self is conjured out of these two as if it were real, or were on the way to become real, or had once been real, but only in the great imaginary.