self

The self never settles because the world never settles. Your body changes. Neural chemistry fluctuates. Memory edits itself. Relationships move. Context rearranges. Words drift. Culture turns. New facts arrive, old certainties decay, and the feedback never stops. So the self is not rewritten because it is faulty, but because it is embedded in conditions that do not hold still. A finished self would require a finished environment. That does not exist. What we call identity is therefore not a thing but an activity: the ongoing regulation of coherence inside irreversible change. Stability, when it appears, is local and temporary, a brief alignment of pressures rather than a resolved state. Persistence is not achieved by convergence, but by continuous adjustment within difference.

From this follows a deeper and more difficult consequence. The relation you have to the world and the relation you have to yourself are not two processes, not two domains, not two perspectives, and not two operations. They are two inseparable aspects of a single dynamical field. The same movement that organises experience into significance simultaneously organises coherence into identity. Attention does not flow outward and then inward. It folds both at once. In shaping the world into meaning, the system shapes itself into form. This is not metaphor and not projection. It is a structural constraint of any system capable of reference. For anything to appear, difference must persist. For difference to persist, coincidence must be structurally impossible. If self and world were ever to collapse into unity, contrast would vanish. Without contrast, no signal. Without signal, no perception. Without perception, no meaning. Without meaning, no self. So the system survives by sustaining a minimal internal displacement: a permanent non-coincidence by which it never fully aligns with its own description. The closed circuit is precisely this impossibility of closure.

Language intensifies this structure. Experience unfolds first, yet becomes intelligible only through meaning. Meaning arrives later, then reorganises what follows. Representation trails reality, then feeds back into it, reshaping perception from within. The distance between what is lived and what is said never collapses, and it is this distance that sustains both. The interface does not merely describe the field. Over time it becomes part of the field. Interpretation and perception spiral into one another, forming a recursive surface that cannot be flattened without erasing the very conditions of appearance. We live inside that curvature, negotiating coherence across an irreducible separation that is also a binding. This is why the self cannot become whole, and why it does not need to. Continuity is maintained not by closure, but by motion within difference, by persistence inside the (ie this) logical orbit that makes experience possible at all.