Say the world is a purely virtual actualisation of a formal rich structure with no intrinsic flow of time or other selector, then what we call the I in the deepest sense is the actualiser, the choice function. This version of the I has nothing, or next to nothing, to do with what we experience as the self or the soul. It is quite apart from the I that we refer to internally when we ask, 'who am I?' It doesn't proceed from a minimising or abstraction of the empirical identity which emerges in the flow of purposive action, but is closer to the notion of the I as witness. The witness, however, is tied to that which it witnesses, while the deep self, presumably, has autonomous being, is, as its essential nature, being wholly in itself. The world comes about, in a turn from this, through witnessing, and what is witnessed are general relations of relations. Anything salient is a relation of elements, but these elements on closer examination are seen to be relations as well. The error is endowing the relata with a sort of being independent of the relations in which they are actual. The witness is not outside of the field of these relations, neither is it inside it. Better to say that the field is in the witness. The field is contingency, and contingency is necessarily posterior to necessity. The witness, unknowing and unknowable, is thus free necessity.