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I'm mind-boggled by what you write, Dominic; as so often with your poetry I love the sense of inscape of your words without fully grasping the meaning ~ this of course only says something about the limits of my mind. But what you say made me think of Jakob Boehme, one of whose desiderata was "die Entselbstung des Ichs" : I'm going to quote a brilliant collage of various statements of Boehme's from Emmanuel Nunes' great piece of music _Minnesang_, so I can't give the sources (I have some Boehme in my library, but not all); I feel it interacts with your reflections and with Philip Pullman's great novel ( I suspect him of deep reading in the Gnostics & such post-gnostic writers as Boehme ~ & Blake, of course, a Boehme fan.). (I've retranslated in order to hew more closely to the German.): > Everything is born in angst. The consciousness-feeling (Gemuet) is (bound) in a wheel of angst in the fire. The body grows in the tincture. When light was ignited, the harsh wrath turned to love and humility, and the originally wrathful source of eternal rebirth becomes Paradise, most lovesome, friendly, humble, gentle. Your soul remains eternal in the tincture. The will is reflected in the fruit in an infinite multiplicity of love (Liebeszahl, "love-count"). What is now still and without being in us has no darkness (Finsternis ~ he means shadow) in it, but is only a still, bright (hell), diaphanous (licht) rapture (Wonne) without being, and that is Eternity. Nameless. < So who needs Buddhism? In the final volume of _Hid Dark Materials_ the "shades" are released into & become one with the glorious multiplicity of nature. I would say again to Erminia: sacrifice is barbaric, unfortunately so-called Christianity has tended to graft it back on to a way that was originally its opposite. Martin