“Deep phenomenology allows us to identify the conditioned aspects of memory, thought, and mind, and enables us to dis-identify from all the symbolic representations of reality stored in our heads. This process of clearing out the structural artifacts of the conditioned mind reveals the active imagination at the heart of all experience. We discover that the activity of the imagination is what binds the myriad phenomena by ‘minding’ them into a centered whole, in the same manner that the dream self is imagined into existence while we sleep. We realize the self as the terminal bud unfolding at the end of the waveform of moment-to-moment experience. First feeling, then perceiving. In the end a self is image-mind(ed) into existence. Then, right at the moment when the wave of experience crests and the moment dissolves into the traces of its past, the self, a reflection through the looking glass of imagination, turns around to catch a glimpse… but the moment has passed and the phenomena have disappeared. The self is left only with its apparition… and it too is not there.“
From Kosmos, “The Phenomenology of the Self” Bonnitta Roy