One wakes within us

I have removed the drab "superficial thoughts, etc" line from the description above, in favor of a passage from Gene Wolfe's tetralogy, The Book of the New Sun; thanks to Scraps (in a comment on this blog) and Lars (in, for example, these posts) for putting Wolfe and this series on my map. Since I will no doubt change the description again, I also reproduce the lines here:

The difficulty lies in learning that we ourselves encompass forces equally great. We say, "I will," and "I will not," and imagine ourselves (though we obey the orders of some prosaic person every day) our own masters, when the truth is that our masters are sleeping. One wakes within us and we are ridden like beasts, though the rider is but some hitherto unguessed part of ourselves.