If there were a feeling associated with the background consciousness that institutes awareness it would be a kind of boredom with the overfamiliar. You are not aware of it because it is constant, and in that it is like your most constant zero-degree of self, what you still have when you have nothing. There is nothing to see because you've seen it all before etc. So you don't notice that this boring accompanying awareness has the peculiar property of being self-grounding, a flat gray layer so that everything else can be built on top of it. It is not to be awakened or changed but appreciated for its radical strangeness.

Once you've fully made the case against the existence of the self, or its having any enduring nature etc., then certain paradoxes nevertheless remain. The arguments are fine and refined but they apply only to a phenomenal self, if such a thing were to be, one either side of any paradox. They do not apply to the noumenal self, and their failure neither proves nor disproves this one, being outside of temporality and causality. But in another sense the failure of the phenomenal self is the noumenal self, for certain values of is.

You can wonder about the nature of reality, is it 'really' real or is it a peculiarly self-consistent kind of dream? Is it enough that it is 'real for you' or does it need to be independent of you? Questions of this kind tacitly assume that the questioner is the reference point or touchstone for the reality in question, as if what they are asking is 'is my reality as real as I am?' Even if you flip this around and take the questioner as the doubtful element and ask whether the self is 'objectively' real the same game is being played. Of course the questioner is deficient in reality since it can never be fully exposed, of course objective reality is deficient because it is a product of memory. Take away the idea of reality and the idea of appearance goes too. No words remain for the event, which neither is nor isn't.

Is shame the predominant social emotion? Perhaps, if you assimilate it to rivalry. There is another route that can be followed, that of ambivalence in dependence-love. When the loved object frustrates then you destroy it in imagination. Later, when love returns, you experience shame at the overkill and seek to make reparations etc. As this cycle repeats the self is forged out of the way that time forbids a perfect undoing. The origin of self and other in an intense field of force, a sort of black-hole which creates and destroys distinctions.

The personage, the metaphysical correlate of personal names, appears in relation to the tellings and retellings of narratives and the careful nesting of frames. This is so much more stable in respect of others than in respect of yourself that in fact much of what you take to be your own 'self' is derived from that imputed to others. In other words the reverse of Husserl's idea of intersubjectivity is more true to the matter: it is because you are so impressed with the being of others, with their mysterious core and enigmatic consistency, that you take yourself as being similarly constituted. The project is never quite satisfactory, there are more threads you have to bring together in your own case and when a few of these are out of kilter then you feel lost, can no longer 'find' your self.

To know it is to be able to describe it, to put it in context, to communicate it, to produce a recipe for it etc. But that's exactly what misses it, it is invisible when looked at from that angle.

Ongoing thoughts and every kind of auto-affective making of meaning is carried out by putting a covering, a sort of costume over a native impulsion that is itself naked and formless. You can always step back from the forms in which this meaning appears, but only be grace of that formless energy and its supreme generosity.