Concern over future pain was not just seeking to spare himself from suffering but also from the bitterness of regret at at having failed to avert an avoidable suffering. This emotion would express itself in the form of anger at a past self because of its selfish preference for its own expedient profit over its responsibility to a later, a future self. From the perspective of the future self his entire existence ought to be in its service, and he could not deny this obligation since it responded to the same entitlement as he felt towards his current past. The past pleasure, or rather the otium of this present now, would have been used up by the time of the projected future and count for nothing in the face of the tortures being endured in that now. As for the case of current sufferings, these might even be thought of as clearing the way for future enjoyments, if he could imagine, and he was readily inclined to do this, the relief experienced when they were exhausted. In this way selves in time existed in a kind of sociality, or bound together in sticky bonds like a family. A current self might take credit for the achievements of a past self, without really knowing, that is, being able to fully remember, what went into them, and of course the same would apply, mutatis mutandis, to past humiliations. The internal space that separated him from himself in this way was thus akin to that which separated him from others, while at the same time being as different as intimate relationships are from other, more formal, kinds of social relations. The future selves in this structure seemed to have much more than imaginary reality. That they were inevitable gave them a flavour of necessity and hence a reality that was in some ways greater than that of the present, whose essence was contingency, and to this was added an enormous cultural momentum, the imperative to live towards the future. Similarly, he was more than the heir of his past, he was answerable for it and was therefore expected to be able to recreate it inwardly and expose its latencies if called upon. Proximal internal temporal relations were ones in which the identity between past, present and future selves was fully effective through these bonds of answerability and responsibility. There were also distal temporal relations defining an identity with a different, perhaps more literary, character.

In the confusion of reflexive terms, self, mind, I, me, consciousness, thought, subject, subjectivity, spirit, soul etc., some distinctions can be introduced based on the answers to such questions as, does it have attributes?, does it have a history?, is it extended in time or does it exist only in the now? These distinctions are purely hypothetical, or groundless in this context; they are speculative, mobilising an opposition of ideas in order to see if some small illumination results. Generally when 'I' is said or included as part of another intended meaning it points to a something with a history, something about which it makes sense to say that there is a puzzle about the persistence of personal identity. It is linked to a name, a marker for a formal identity and for a body as object in an acknowledged common world. But it is precisely this historical 'I' that seems to culminate in the present moment, in the little bubble of presence lasting a fraction of a second or a few seconds or even minutes that we call 'now', not an absolute illumination or clearing but one that dominates all past time and inherits all meanings, appropriates all mattering and is the pivot on which a vague and as yet unreal future rests. Looked at more closely this implied structure seems only a prejudice or meta-belief with obvious shortcomings. There have been an endless number of such momentary 'I's, each with the same belief in its definitive calendar moment, and there will be future ones which will erase any claim to reality of this one. As the actor and audience of experience all its reality is concentrated in one distinguished point, but reality to it must be precisely not the point but its rootedness in the all. The vivid spark of awakening to oneself in the moment must therefore be merely a reflection or declension of the necessarily unmanifest self.

There is currency in the images of those experiences which are taken to be most desirable, more than in these experiences themselves which are assigned little value if they are not presented as nameable, general and imaginable. It is not so much experiences that matter as recipes or maps of experiences built out of other such images and extended, connected, developed in various readily understood ways. In spite of this variation they are marked by a yearning for, an avidity towards, one of two ideals, an ideal of passionate participation, Dionysiac, rajasic fullness, and an ideal of detachment, subtle and cerebral, serene and vastly panoramic, Apollonian and sattvic. Within each of these directions formations appear to trump each other by being more perfect realisations of their respective ideal, pushing off from each other's shoulders; but a kind of trumping also takes place between the two directions involving first a rejection of the other, a reduction it to some pathetic caricature, an ignorant or frightened evasion of the only road to apotheosis. Both of these ideals are analogies of what is more properly seen as spiritual awakening, but they are analogies in the key of the experiencing self. They are projections into objectivity of something that is wholly subjective and therefore has no such projection by very definition. And this is precisely why they can be be endlessly detailed and elaborated, ever new, and indeed why they can seem to create the new itself, through shedding some of the dawn-like gold of their reflected light onto it.

The blackness behind his closed eyelids became like a free fall into blue-black depths, the phosphorescences that had once made a sort of three-dimensional screen in front of his face had faded with the reflexes that sustained them, of which they were the nervous traces. These had been an excitement and an anxiety, an echo of a stage-fright, an expectation of a time to gratify all wishes, and hence a validation of the one who wished, the wisher, wrapped up in himself and his space of enjoyment. For him all the lives that could still have been his, the books of experience he would pile up, so endlessly variegated and marvellous with their landscapes that he would absorb into his pulp like so many poems. But it turned out that living meant something entirely different, it was the experience of the collapse of possibility through choice. To choose was to choose recurrence, to choose that which ought to recur and then to surrender all his chaotic desire into it, to bury it. The experience of time was not the gathering of vintages but this collapse. All the phases were nothing more, be they of anticipation, initiation, consummation, withdrawal, retrospect, return, as if it were a process that recurred, that kept its anonymity and left you none the wiser. But if instead it were the coming loose of the bonds of identification, the internal cancellation of projects, of the project of projects, the opening of that deeper space, then one minute of such awareness would be worth more than ten years of mere experiences, no matter how superb they might still be.

At times a sort of sad and valedictory feeling would come over him, as if he were done with life, or were soon to be done with it. Taking a brief survey of his surroundings he would say to himself that yes, he could bear to part with this all, and he would stoically master the wave of beauty and depth that descended on his world at these words. He'd entered into life in the most ordinary, most open-eyed way, and played his various acts, burned up or at least singed all the desires that drove him into a hardened belief in it, now few seemed to remain. If the world now seemed slightly removed it was because the questions it was able to answer for him, and to raise, and to keep raising, had subsided. He had not willed this, except perhaps in his latest commitment to neutral observation, but there was a decided cooling and he felt that he'd suddenly grown old. It seemed as though there were a great many worlds in his past and that he would rarely be reborn in the same one, so many that they were mostly nameless. Had attained a degree of neutrality? How could that possibly be determined? Neutrality was only relative, but then it was impossible to know the face it was directed towards. Or perhaps it was a change in the sense of time, the image or version of himself translated into the future in a cloudy aura of possible fulfilments was not there to lend its drive to the onward flow. It had been replaced by something inward and backward-looking, scenes from childhood, lost or forgotten portions of being which when restored seem to have never been absent, to have only been unnoticed, forming part of the very flavour of the standing now.

Whatever this process is it is not inside thought, but thought and its thinker are inside of it. Thought, however, cannot keep from modelling it because thought operates via subjectivisation, turning experience into the experience of a someone, never seen but always present, in a private objective world. And that someone is no mere observer of its own identifications, it suffers and exults and suffers again as the turbulent systems of reality and hope on which it depends clash with each other as they seek to maintain their own equilibrium in responding to ever changing conditions. These systems are not itself but its identification and for aeons it knows nothing else. To fall right into it, to experience it up close and messy, its immense appetite and law-like inescapability, the bad faith of all imaginary transcendence, is to go on and on until belief starts to be exhausted.

'Eyes' forming within the flux function like a circular reflector or transformation surface so that the macrocosm outside the boundary is perfectly reflected inside it. The infinity of the outside is an ultimate horizon common to all its points of view, but on the inside its reflection is a single point, the impossible origin point at zero, a point distinguished only in its relation to the transformation which itself is not distinguished in its own space. The transformation surface in this metaphor is transformed onto itself, not in an invariant manner, but with one or two isolated fixed points relative to given direction of attention. If we can imagine such a formation in a space of events as illuminated by, or conceived in, a centreless consciousness then it invites the phenomenology of a self, of self-consciousness, without this being intrinsic to that consciousness. This is one way of trying to understand the precipitation of a self as a virtual centre or subject of experience with a peculiarly inviolable constancy. Another version might liken it to a moire pattern formed when two centreless patterned fields are superimposed. This again might be related to the tension perceived in a dissonant chord which seems to pull towards a resolution. These analogies do not present a picture of how this world might come about in a world of pure unobserved objectivity, if the latter were not a absurdity, but rather seek to jar something lose in our unreflectively assumed metaphysics.