What is distinctive about the subject of experience is not self-reflection, or personal identity mediated through memory or some core feeling of self-ness, or an emergence out of intelligence, but the sense of freedom. This may be denied intellectually, or experienced mostly in a negation, but however tiny the flame it is what the living now consists of, and what makes any sort of meaning possible. Identity which grows more and more constricting with the years is only a negative imprint of this freedom which is the essence of the 'now'.