The metaphors we use in our self-conception seep into every aspect of our lives. We associate resistance with mass and solidity. When you stare at a project and your chest and abdomen crawl with pains, you should ask,

What is this suffering and resistant meat? There is a power inside me that resists and even hates what I (reason, or long-term good) wants to do. This power confronts me as mass, as resistance to my effort. I yearn to realize my most precious hopes, to reach my most beloved goals, but my flight forward pushes against an internal molasses!

Yes. There is mass, solidity, power, pressure, antagonism, malice, and war within me. My own desire—really, my True Desire, the desire of my best-sighted self, the self that I myself judge to be the superior one—is blocked, captured, or replaced by a power within me wants something else and with which I am happy to identify after once takes possession. The solid and electrical meat of my body is a legion of antagonistic pseudo-first persons. It is this ugly situation that is the topic of Paul’s famous lament,

Crowley called this Paul’s most insightful passage. Paul’s alter-self, which he calls the “sin that dwells within me,” is his habit-ridden or inertial self. The habit-ridden self is really a plurality of proclivities, tendencies, and habit patterns; but we refer to the collection as a unity through the power of the unity inherent to names. The nature of this unified collection can be determined by averaging over all of our actions. This inertial self is thus also a default self—i.e, one’s character.

If my weekly intake is 8 chocolate units and 2 vanilla units, I say something like,

I am mostly a chocolate person.

The set of our average doings is what we actually refer to when we think “I.” The I that we mean when we say “I” is the set of average tendencies.

Hovering above the tendency machinery is something else—a chooser. This, too, is infected by the inertia of tendency. The chooser, like the feeling- and desire-systems, does what has been ingrained—it has a tendency to choose certain behaviors.

It is a cherished principle of mine that there is no principle of psychology or mysticism that does not benefit from theorizing it inside of physicalism. And the insight here is that a tendency is not a thing. The inertia of the tendency does not emerge from the inertia of physical substance. If it did, the quality of the tendency would emulate the qualities of the substance, which is absurd. Rather, it emerges from the inertia of spatial patterns—but not really, because these are not inertial, but only reconstituted by underlying periodic movement that in turn rests on lawful chemical transformations, on periodic pattern sequencing. The inertia of the temporally self-reconstituting molecular machine is not the simple material identity of a perduring substrate, but the dynamic equilibrium of the collectively autocatalytic system.

Molecular machines reconstitute their current arrangement. This is the origin of the temporal identity of the “I.” This is a real temporal identity, although it does not refer to the identity of a stuff, which is what we prefer in our fantasies. We imagine the essence of stability to be the counterforce of mass that we grok through the kinesthetic quale—as resistance to our pushing. The felt resistance to pushing, which is both solid extension and extended solidity (noticing this fact provides a quick proof that “stuff” is a fiction), is what we want to attach to substance. That is, when we bring the temporal aspect of substance into outer-sense aspect of imagination, we enhance simple extension with the additional powers of impenetrability (solidity) and mass. Both are kinds of resistance—the first to something else appearing in the same place, the second to something else intruding into the same place (WRT our inertial frame).

The Counter-self Within is susceptible to intervention—it is constantly reconstituting and, so, is riddled with accessible temporal joints. This and this alone is the doorway to salvation.