The Buddhist conception of the Self
The Buddhist conception of the Self is a very misunderstood aspect of the philosophical components of the religion.
The Sanskrit term is anatta - non-self. According to Buddhism, there is no permanent, concrete "soul" or identity that persists without change.
This may strike people as initially intuitively wrong. For clearly I exist! Clearly I am experiencing things!
But Buddhism does not teach that there is nobody experiencing things - it teaches that there is no unchanging, persisting somebody who experience these things. Buddhism teaches the doctrine of dependent origination, in which everything is dependent on other things to exist - there is no independently, self-sustaining thing that we can identify as a self.
Phenomenologically, there is also a difficulty in finding the self. When I ask you who you are, you may reply that you are a student, or a cab driver, or a philosopher. But these are occupations, not the self. So I ask you again, who are you? You may reply that you are a Democrat or a Republican, you are an American, you are a human. But again this is not who you are. You attach yourself to these identities but they are not you. Perhaps you say you're happy, or sad, or getting annoyed by my questions. But this is still not you.
So the self, according to Buddhism, can be seen as a kind of "emergent" phenomenon that is kept in existence in virtue of the conditions in which it exists. Take away the conditions, and the self disappears. The self cannot be pinned down. It cannot be located in some gland in the brain. It does not persist through change. It is a series of different loci of experience, always gaining and losing components.
But this does not mean Buddhism is anti-essentialist. Instead, the process of self requires five "skandhas":
Form (body), Sensation (feeling), Perception (identification), Mental formations (habits and dispositions), and Consciousness (awareness that ties everything together). The self, then, is a by-product, an emergent phenomenon from these skandhas.
In other words, Buddhism does not deny the existence of a loci of experience, rather, it denies that there is any identity that corresponds to this loci.
An additional interesting point here is that some schools of Buddhism see compassion as an act of removing the self from the equation. Compassion is the act of realizing that there are no separate, independent entities.
The Sanskrit term is anatta - non-self. According to Buddhism, there is no permanent, concrete "soul" or identity that persists without change.
This may strike people as initially intuitively wrong. For clearly I exist! Clearly I am experiencing things!
But Buddhism does not teach that there is nobody experiencing things - it teaches that there is no unchanging, persisting somebody who experience these things. Buddhism teaches the doctrine of dependent origination, in which everything is dependent on other things to exist - there is no independently, self-sustaining thing that we can identify as a self.
Phenomenologically, there is also a difficulty in finding the self. When I ask you who you are, you may reply that you are a student, or a cab driver, or a philosopher. But these are occupations, not the self. So I ask you again, who are you? You may reply that you are a Democrat or a Republican, you are an American, you are a human. But again this is not who you are. You attach yourself to these identities but they are not you. Perhaps you say you're happy, or sad, or getting annoyed by my questions. But this is still not you.
So the self, according to Buddhism, can be seen as a kind of "emergent" phenomenon that is kept in existence in virtue of the conditions in which it exists. Take away the conditions, and the self disappears. The self cannot be pinned down. It cannot be located in some gland in the brain. It does not persist through change. It is a series of different loci of experience, always gaining and losing components.
But this does not mean Buddhism is anti-essentialist. Instead, the process of self requires five "skandhas":
Form (body), Sensation (feeling), Perception (identification), Mental formations (habits and dispositions), and Consciousness (awareness that ties everything together). The self, then, is a by-product, an emergent phenomenon from these skandhas.
In other words, Buddhism does not deny the existence of a loci of experience, rather, it denies that there is any identity that corresponds to this loci.
An additional interesting point here is that some schools of Buddhism see compassion as an act of removing the self from the equation. Compassion is the act of realizing that there are no separate, independent entities.
Comments (65)
In my view, there's a lot of misunderstanding of the meaning of non-self; it is always used as an adjective, a description - that everything is anatta. When the Buddha was asked if there is a self or not, he didn't answer (1). But that doesn't stop a lot of people saying 'Buddhism teaches there is no self'. There are endless debates about it on Buddhist forums (well, endless up until being locked, usually).
Compassion is one of the 'four immeasurables' or 'sublime abidings', the others being loving-kindness, empathetic joy and equanimity.
(Buddhists love lists.)
You have quite nicely presented a pretty standard picture of Buddhist metaphysics darthbarracuda and I am left wondering if this raises any particular questions for you ?
"This question is not proper," said the Exalted One.
I do not teach that there is one who feels.
If, however, the question is put thus:
'Conditioned through what does feeling arise?' then the answer will be 'Through sense impressions as a condition feeling [arises]; with feeling as a condition, craving [arises]."
--SN II 13
Here you have nailed it. In Western culture, you find many, many pseudo Buddhists, who follow worldly Dhammas like assiduously seeking gain, failing to realize that gain is impermanent. Fame is impermanent. Honor is impermanent. Reputation is impermanent. Loss is ineluctable, shamelessness is one of the core teachings of Cynicism (very much like Buddhism), which claims we shouldn't recognize any shame and to reject reputation. The point being you find people who think they understand change, yet participate in a culture which enshrines certain unchanging values. It would seem then, knowing culture is a source of delusion is one of the first things understand. Blind faith in the conditioned responses and stereotypes of interiorized social norms are a major impediment to the Buddhist path.
Also, meditation is vegetation. Western culture is one of myrmidons. Being able to stop and establish quietude, stillness, and silence is seen as laziness. Yet it is precisely inaction which is necessary to watch the moving parts of the self and spy the inward defilement insinuated in us by the rat race or hedonic treadmill we were raised in, and conditioned by. It isn't possible to get out of the box by novelty seeking, novelty seeking becomes a repetitive, conditioned response like any other one. Only sitting still and vegetating allows us to see what never stops moving, and lucidly untie our Gordian knots; one of the main skills meditation conveys is how to live in a state of mind similar to the onset of sleep, not unlike hypnagogia(pompia), which is a state where subconscious syndromes more readily sally up for observation... making strenuous effort to get on top - and ambitiously pursuing rewards and goals, sticks and carrots - in an economic fundamentalist system totally negates this essential quality.
Thus I've come to realize practicing Buddhism in western culture is almost too difficult. Our culture is anti Buddhist in every conceivable way. It may be possible to apply bits and pieces of it in the morning and before bed; when the willy-nilly commercialized life takes over at work and in relationship, Buddhism isn't there..the worldly dhammas take control (learned classical conditioning).
Briefly, the eight worldly conditions which repeat through socially conditioned response (which few can undo): gain and loss, honor and dishonor, happiness and misery, praise and blame. If we see that everything changes...we should also see that these conditions change as well and set them down like a red hot ball of iron.
Generally, we are taught to increase our self as much as possible everyday. The wisdom of Taoism and Buddhism teach the opposite. Everyday we should peel back and drop another layer of the onion of the delusions of our self-concept, the box we're in made up of conditioned responses. It would be interesting to compare Western psychology's idea of self-concept to anatta; then it could be lucidly understood how different are Western egocentric sickness vis a vis Buddhism's no self. And how nearly impossible it is to apply anicca, dukkha, anatta to our lives. The skhandas are not really what we have to overcome having been steeped in Western conceptions of self, it is self concept, like self-image, self-esteem, ideal- self, future selves...and other defilements that have been bred into our schemas. The skhandas, I'm afraid will remain with us till the end in shallow celebrity culture. To overcome these, you'd have to move to a monastic setting. Then we should focus on what can be overcome, or be shed, such as self-concept.
There is something that doesn't change, it's what is used in meditation. Budhho, the one who knows. If you think about it, it would be impossible to see or track the intimations of our kaleidoscopic, conditioned responses if there were nothing in us different than they are (and not another changing element). It would be a phantasmagoria impossible to exit. Luckily, meditation gets us in contact with Buddho, the one who knows everything about us and is our aid in self-examination; without it we could probably never prune away delusion, anger, greed. That one of the skhandas is consciousness itself was always a tough one for me. Buddho would seem to be pure consciousness and the tool we use to take the discontinuous, quantum leap into via negativa and unity...apparently it is a tool to be jettisoned in the end, while the organism still lives of course (since consciousness, Buddho, is a skhanda). Those who enter nirvana have been absorbed. Western culture would call them lazy or autistic..and nobody wants to be a special needs person, at the very least we have been insinuated with the idea laziness is a virulent pestilence (but what if it was that we desired very little, ascetically? apparently we are still WASPs, and fear eternal damnation without working around the clock). See the problem. We had better settle for boddhisattvahood and retain Buddho to help others get out of this violent, Western apoplexy. Then we can communicate what we know about deconditioning. Then once we are all boddhisattvas, we can wink out of existence at once together.
It's as though we come to believe something like 'knowledge is power' or 'learning is power' when learning, experience, and memory are actually a record of endless rounds of becoming, births. When it's understood any possible aspect of self-concept is made of this record of learning, experience, and memory, that the bricks of self are made of these conditioned responses, it's patent the difficulty of exiting samsara. Unlearning, unexperiencing, and forgetting are essential to deconditioning. Escaping the box can't be done by visiting another culture while bringing your own background...or even by learning another culture if you didn't have an identity... Part of us is out of existence along with the part that is in it...we aren't fully in or out of existence...we can learn to decondition by following the part that's vanishing from existence. Trusting the noetic quality in ourselves is a requisite to this, and understanding that outside of egocentrism, we still have a knowing faculty to guide us. While this sounds mystical, intelligence itself is a kind of knowing independent from what is known (knowledge and experience, etc.)...it operates far too subtly to attribute to knowledge, reason, memory or any faculty that can be collocated beside karma, or personal history.
The self is composed of memories that are always in flux: we learn, we change our beliefs, we forget. We do not call the self a specific substrate upon which memories exist: we call self the learning entity.
Yes our selves are fragmented daily by sleep, and occasionally by drugs and other intense psychological phenomena; but past the novelty of the fragmentation, we resume our cognitive train of thought unchanged.
Therefore, there is a psychological identity which is carried forward from birth to death, and we call it the self.
Consider the skandhas belonging to two people, one me(or you in your case) and one Joe Blow. This (my?) body dies and the Joe body dies. What, if anything, makes the karma or skandhas belonging to this identity of more concern to me (who?) than that of Joe? After all, there is no persisting self that spans or owns both my childhood and my adulthood any more than there is a self spanning between Joe and me, right?
When I achieve liberation from my false self concept, who or what finds freedom? The Buddha has attained enlightenment, right? But I haven't? What's going on here? Why does the bodhisattva reincarnate (indeed how?) if there are no discrete selves to liberate? If there are no selves, there is no problem. Nobody is deceived.
Maybe someone can sort all this out for me.
And how can a nonexistent self be deluded that it exists?
Perhaps the identity, the body, the karma, and all that, are like a jacket and the self is like a person wearing it. But enlightenment is like realizing that the jacket has no occupant. So who finds out they are not identical with the jacket? The jacket? Who is the bodhisattva trying to liberate? A bunch of jackets? Or a bunch of noexisting jacket-wearers who think they are jackets? It seems to me that the jackets disperse all by themselves. No need to worry. They are just objects anyway, right?
The problem of the relation between the self and the body that dies is not solved by positing a package of skandhas that reincarnates, is it? Why isn't my relation to that skandha package just like my relation to the temporary composite that is my body? Neither are me, right? Who is it that really isn't these things? Nobody? Then where is the problem?
I suspect that the skandhas represent something like a body on another level, another sheath. This idea just defers the problem. Instead of asking what happens to me when my body dies, why can't I ask what happens to me when my skandhas disperse or whatever?
How is this all not an incoherent mishmash of incompatible ideas, some of which were retained because of cultural inertia or some such?
Yes, but your interpretation of Buddhism is eminently Western . It has to be. We think from and after our own cultural history, which includes all the sedimented ideas of Western Greek-Judaeo-Christian metaphysics that form the background of our inquiries. Western Buddhism is not an ignoring or turning back from Western philosophy but a carrying forward of it. We can see examples of this in Buddhist-like thinking of the self of Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Merleau-Ponty, and in amalgams of east and west in the writings of phenomenologically trained philosophers like Evan Thompson, Carl Rogers and Francisco Varela.
But not only is Western philosophy now able to thinking in Buddhist-like ways,from its own history, it has exceeded some of those teachings. For instance, your formulation of social relations in terms of rote conditioning has already been jettisoned by some Western philosophers.
I see your point. (And a very well-written and insightful post.) As an anglo drawn to Buddhism, I too have found there are aspects of it that are, shall we say, culturally remote in many ways. But there are, as Buddhists teach, 84,000 dharma doors - a figurative expression for the ability to approach it from a variety of perspectives.
There is also the approach of 'engaged Buddhism', popularised by Thich Nhat Hanh. It builds on the mahayana philosophy of the ' non-duality of samsara and nirvana' - that samsara is itself nirvana, if understood right (and arriving at this understanding is itself the purpose and also the method). Maybe this is analogous to the Christian understanding of deity as both immanent and transcendent - in the world while also beyond it.
Quoting petrichor
Actually, Buddhists don't teach reincarnation, as such, but rebirth, which is subtly different. And there is not a great deal of detailed discussion of re-birth in the Pali Buddhist texts. (This came much later, in the scholastic tradition.) But the Buddha is simply said to be able to see 'where beings are destined' in the future life, according to their karma (traditionally, one of the 'six realms' of human, animal, hungry ghost, hell, titan, or heaven.)
I think the basic principle is, however, that if there is no continuity beyond physical death, then the principle of karma really doesn't have any foundation; at death. it makes no real difference how you lived your life. From there it's a very short step to nihilism or everyday materialism. Buddhism is a soteriological tradition - meaning, it is concerned with rising above or escaping from the endless round of birth and death.
In any case, I find the notion of previous lives intuitively appealing, as it seems to me that persons are born with attributes, talents, dispositions and characteristics which are very hard to account for in purely physicalist terms, and that in some sense they do seem to embody the memories of previous lives. The idea of an individual life being a part of a much larger sequence doesn't strike me as outlandish, although I am mindful that reincarnation is generally taboo in Western culture.
Is there really so much difference? Basically, the idea is the same. If you are good, you go better places after death. If you are bad, you go bad places.
Is this a good reason to reject the possibility that there is no continuity beyond physical death? Because it leads to the loss of other ideas we'd like to keep? What about trying to determine what is actually true rather than believing in ideas because we prefer their consequences? Perhaps the truth is palatable. Perhaps it isn't. Personally, I want to conform my view of the world as much as possible to what is actually true about it.
As a young person, I read the Bhagavad Gita as if it was scripture and saw its ideas in a certain light. Two decades later, I read it again. I saw it in a completely different light. I had no special reverence for it. This allowed me to ask certain questions.
Suppose group A has some power over group B. Group A is teaching an idea or value to group B. If we can see clearly that group A stands to gain somehow from group B believing what it is being taught by group A, does this give us reason to be suspicious of the ideas being taught?
If a slave owner teaches his slaves that maximally pleasing their owner will lead them to paradise after they die, this looks suspicious, doesn't it?
Consider the idea of Hell. Clearly, this idea was spread by religious authorities that were attached to political power. If you are a king running a country and you don't have much in the way of surveilance technologies, if you want to keep an eye on people and keep them in line, it takes a lot of police to do that. But if you can get them to believe that the laws you want them to follow are not just the arbitrary laws of the land, but rather the laws of God and that God is omniscient and watches not just their actions, but also their thoughts and will reward them greatly for doing and thinking what basically pleases the king or punish them with eternal fire for doing what causes the king problems, what costs him money, this all reduces the cost of rule greatly, no? If people really believe this, they'll self-police their very thoughts! How convenient for kings! And maybe this is good for society. But that doesn't make it true!
Consider the doctrines of karma and reincarnation in India. Notice that you have a situation where there is great disparity of wealth and power and the powerful classes are exploiting the less powerful. Suppose the exploited classes ask why they have such a shitty lot and the priestly and warrior castes have such a nice one. Maybe the lower and more populous classes express outrage at the unfairness and threaten power with rebellion. Well, the priests answer, you actually deserve your shitty lot. You did bad things in past lives. You are now working out that karma. We wealthy ones, on the other hand, earned our positions! We were virtuous! We deserve to be here. And if you do your caste duty (be a good slave) diligently throughout your life with no demand for reward, you too might find yourself on top, eating the good food, being carried on golden platforms by slaves! You might even become a god! Isn't this basically what the Bhagavad Gita teaches?
Clearly, the doctrines of reincarnation and karma served the powers that taught them. There are many other excellent reasons to reject these ideas, but their usefulness to political power is a good reason to be suspicious. It isn't so different from telling children that Santa will give them good presents if they behave and that the monster in the closet will get them if they are bad.
Many religious ideas exist primarily because they have been excellent tools of governance.
Buddhism inherited a lot of baggage from Hinduism. It is conceivable that reincarnation and karma were retained simply because of cultural inertia. Or perhaps they still served power. Maybe no-self itself is an idea that serves power or the larger community. One of the great power tensions in society after all is that between the individual and the collective. But maybe the idea of the persisting soul too is a tool of power!
Always keep in mind that those who have historically held power had an interest in what we believed to be true and what we believed people ought to do with their lives and what we valued.
Many, or all? Do you think there is any reality in religious or spiritual traditions, or they are simply power-relationships and methods of domination?
I can see how they can be turned to that end. And furthermore that there is no single thing that corresponds with 'religion' - the concept itself has many layers of meaning and connotation.
And yet, for all that, I still find something in it which cannot be described in any other terms.
I don't think religion and religious ideas are fully explained by power interest. Religion is complex. But power interest, in my view, is one of the most important things to keep in view when trying to understand why these ideas and practices exist.
There are good things in religion. I have an ambivalent relationship to it all. I even nearly became a monk as a younger man. I later grew rather disillusioned though.
But, back to the theme - the basic philosophical point about the Buddhist view is that there is nothing which doesn’t change. This applies equally to the concept of self, to atoms, and to Gods, insofar as they are posited as comprising some unchanging essence. That is why Buddhism is often compared to what is now called process philosophy. So it’s a heresy in Buddhism to say there is an unchanging core or essence which migrates from life to life. The expression that was adopted in later Buddhism was ‘citta santana’ which is generally translated as ‘mind-stream’.
Would this be true also of animals? Do you also have trouble with the use of physicalism to explain psychological phenomena like consciousness?
That is a very neat cut into what matters; thank you.
We can define as unchanging anything we want. It is just a language/imagination task. And to posit as unchanging some thing might be just what we need to advance our knowledge. So to deny that stuff can be unchanging - specially we ourselves, when we see so many people stuck in a dream or another - is to blind oneself of a very useful concept.
I know of Thich Nhat Hanh, and have listened to a few of his audio books. As an individualist, who feels only individuals, one by one, can self-regulate and handle their inward defilements, the Lesser Boat, Hinayana, has a little more appeal to me; Mahayana accommodates the social element and the place of bodhisattvas in helping, perhaps, mitigate suffering of others; withal, though, you can lead a horse to water and he may die of thirst.
There seems to be a conflict between individual virtue, Te, and group norms, however. If one places sociality at the center of being, then he also has to accept some of the obvious downward helices people around him are upholding, or even causing. TNH, as a Mahaynist is willing to endorse social norms as indomitable and to be accepted as part of the odyssey, no matter how wrongheaded they are.
The preceptor I've found most helpful is the Cambodian, Ajahn Chah, his teachings are more in line with my own fairly stubborn introversion. He will even recommend not thinking of others in order not to compare yourself to them. This chimes with one of the main issues, from my perspective, which is destroying relationships and generating noxious culture. The internet and social media, e.g., are tearing apart people's self-regulation, while extrinsic valorization and external locus of control vex to a large extent, anything remotely resembling equanimity, temperance, and quiescence necessary for a bhikku to enter the stream toward nirvana. One could ask whether it's even possible to enter the stream in modernity with driving algorithms rather stealing away self-regulation. I'd have to check where a bodhisattva falls on the spectrum of enlightenment...from stream entrant to once returner, and so on. Actually, he couldn't be a once returner, as he will have to return until everyone is wrangled into the stream. At any rate, I would think entering the stream requires internal orientation to an ever increasing extent as it parallels the delusion, anger, and greed prevalent in society.
As indicated in the post above, Christians (who have anything resembling a philosophical/theological backing...who aren't nominal, in other words, and their religion isn't only a feeling of operant obligation to them in averting hell's maw, but a primal interest) who are thinkers, can talk about cosmology, teleology, and eschatology; one of the images they share with eastern tenets, like anatta, is via negativa. Apophatic theology elucidates a lot for me, or perhaps I should say it darkens a lot for me (since neti neti =not this not that), inasmuch as darkness is a more apt image of non-existence than light (you can argue a blinding light covers all same as darkness...though it is hard to imagine such light compassing an object without some kind of limitation or source, which would give rise to opposition) . Perfect darkness is far more mysterious, the source of mystery perhaps, because it doesn't appear to have a source, it is the absence of a source, not really a contravention of anything imaginable. Darkness is a very refreshing "object" of mediation for me. Nothing can be crystallized or conditioned by it (nothing is its only condition), the way light freezes everything and subjects it to becoming (stale/old, conditioned responses).
I do see what you imply by a nonduality of samsara and nirvana, though nonduality itself is a concept and, ergo, a skhanda. Nonduality, e.g., is the antipode of duality. Immanence and transcendence, also, are in a fight with each other. Somehow, the gist of eastern though has its terminus in revealing a way out of all possible dichotomous elements at war with each other. Reconciliation of opposites. Of course, this is the Middle Way Buddha spoke of. A good metaphor from Ajahn Chah: we are floating down a river with serpents of defilement/vice on either side toward the ocean and we want to get to the ocean without ever being bit. Perhaps the banks are lighted with things we are afraid of or tempted by, appearing in the light, and as Buddhists, we try to stay in the darkness and to transcend the dichotomy of anything that has a source. Lasting peace has to find a way out of the battle.
You buddhists should make more movies!
What is the implicit argument here?
[i]P1: There is nothing which does not change
P2: The self is something which doesn't change
C: Therefore, there is no self[/i]
We could question both premises.
Let me say something before I dig into it a little. One thing that troubles me about discussions of Buddhist thought and doctrine is that there is a tendency that I've noticed elsewhere to give the Buddha some kind of unquestionable authority. Why? Because he was enlightened! And that's supposed to intimidate any would-be questioners. But that's all a matter of faith. For many, it seems not to be a question about whether what the Buddha or another enlightened being said is true, but rather whether they said it, the presumption being that whatever an enlightened one said must be true. This is a little like saying someone was a prophet who had special access to God and therefore must be believed.
I, personally, am skeptical of claims of enlightenment and prophecy. I am also very skeptical of stories and claims about the Buddha. Any kind of ascription of special authority to Buddhist doctrine is to me just as problematic as saying that the Bible says X, therefore it is true, because God gave us the Bible. How do we know? Because the Bible says so. Not that you or anyone else here would do any of this! I just want to make clear that I won't accept faith-based claims as such. The claims need to be tested on their own merits.
To return to the issue at hand, I can think of some examples of things that don't change. First of all, in the West, whatever its merits, we have Plato's philosophy, which offers a contrary set of claims. Some things don't change. The ratio of a circle's diameter to its circumference is one example. In modern physics, many quantities are invariant. There are many conservation laws. The total amount of energy in a system doesn't change. It is like having a ball of clay that changes form. While the form changes, the basic substance doesn't. There is something which passes through the changes and which is conserved. But the thing about conserved quantities and fundamental substances is that you cannot get at them directly. Suppose absolutely everything we know is a form of some basic substance. It is worse than the problem of a fish knowing water. Arguably, it would be impossible to detect the substance. All we can detect are differences. What is constant is, by virtue of its constancy, undetectable.
When it comes to a self, this problem is deepened. It could be like an unchanging substance. Perhaps it is our very consciousness. It is the ocean in which every fish that we perceive swims. Everything we experience is a modification of it or something arising within it. It itself cannot become an object of perception. It is the very condition for the possibility of perception.
I am not surprised that deep meditators come up empty-handed when they try to see the self. This is like trying to bite one's own teeth! Obviously, the only things that you can be aware of are things that change. That isn't remotely proof that there is nothing which does not change.
It might be argued that we know about some things which don't change through reason, not through perception. To sit in meditation and watch for these things to test their reality might be the wrong approach, especially if we stop thinking. Thinking might be the only way to know of them!
Kant's arguments about the transcendental unity of apperception and whatnot might be relevant here.
And what of Descartes? If there is one thing I know for sure, it is that I exist. A nonexistent entity cannot be fooled into thinking it exists. Whatever the deceptive nature of the arisings in the mind, that in which they arise cannot be doubted.
To be clear though, I don't believe in an individual self as a final substance. But I am convinced of something that might be thought of as a universal self. It is omnipresent, everywhere present to itself. But it cannot be known directly, positively. But it is that which is experiencing being everything. The personal, individual self is thus, in my view, false self. And if we examine it, it falls apart. I believe Buddhists are in fact penetrating to some depth when they see it as a fiction. But to stop there, I think, is a mistake.
As for reincarnation, in my view, the universal self is omnicarnate. It is everyone and all things at all times. But I deny that there is any discrete and separate self, soul, bundle of skandhas, or any such thing belonging to a specific person that dips in and out of the world like a sewing machine, occupying one identity after another in serial fashion. Such an idea is fraught with problems.
Eastern culture is believed to not value individualism as much as Westerners, but it’s not like that doesn’t have a downside as well. You sound guilty of the common mistake of over-romanticizing the East.
Buddhism helps separate suggestive influences and hypnotic induction from the what's really there within. In other words, it's beneficial to know my truth as it is separate from anyone else's. There's danger in representing anything or being a joiner of an organization; the danger is we start to mime what's in front of us or what we hear without fully examining the mental impression it makes in us. In this way, one may mistake the mind itself for mental impressions made in it. Being unable to make this distinction is something that should be feared.
Was it? If so, there could be many reasons for that.
I just looked up statistics for peaceful countries and Buddhism for 2018. They rank as follows:
Cambodia (97% Buddhist) is 96th most peaceful out of 163 countries.
Thailand (93%) 112th
Myanmar (88%) 122nd
The country with the most Buddhists, 244 million (including Tibetans), ranks 112th
Not impressive at all and many Western countries are more peaceful. Indeed the United States (1.2% Buddhist) ranks better than Myanmar, although just barely at 121st.
The Buddha's authority is not unquestionable. Nobody has to accept the Buddha's teaching. In the tradition, a lay person had to approach a monk three times to seek instruction before being taught. But Buddhists are not generally going to try and save you in spite of yourself, like Christians do.
There is a oft-quoted passage in a sutta called 'the address to the Kalamas' which is cited in relation to the Buddhist view of religious authority:
Clearly in Buddhism, the Buddha has authority, but the attitude is still vastly different to dogmatic religions. On the one hand, there is the explicit statement that 'the dharma that I [the Buddha] perceive is deep, difficult to fathom, beyond mere logic, perceivable only by the wise'. But on the other hand, the 'noble disciples' (aryas) and Bodhisattvas are indeed able to discover or realise these dharmas, through disciplined introspection and the other elements of the eightfold path - in other words, to become Buddhas themselves.
And finally, the Buddha compares his teaching to a raft, brought together from gathering up 'branches and twigs', which are used to transport the aspirant 'across the river' of suffering - whereupon the raft is left behind, not carried around or idolised.
In both these respects (among many others), Buddhism is quite different to dogmatic religion.
Quoting petrichor
Then why believe it? It is the epitome of unsupported speculation. At best it's a feeling. This is precisely where the Buddha diverged from Hinduism, as he showed their doctrine of 'universal self' is incoherent.
That said, there is a deep principle which you articulate well here:
Quoting petrichor
I actually do think that is true, and that it is a principle recognised by both Hindu and Buddhist philosophy (not so much Western). I think where the Buddha's approach is superior, is that he recognises that you can't 'objectify' this 'unknown knower', for the very reason that you point out: the eye can't see itself, the hand can't grasp itself. This is something the Upani?ads themselves say. But the Buddhist criticizes its proponents for trying to articulate this as a knowable. (But it's a very abstruse point and that is my interpretation, although I might add I wrote an MA thesis on it.)
Quoting petrichor
Very much agree with you. In relation to the Western tradition, I'm definitely an advocate for Platonism. I discussed this on a thread on DharmaWheel forum (where I happen to be a mod. My conclusion about the matter can be read here).
Darwinian theory is a biological theory which is first and foremost a theory of the origin of species. As an account of the origin of species, it assumes an attitude of methodological naturalism, which is fine as far as it goes. But in my view, once h. sapiens evolved to the point of language and culture, then we transcend the biological. We are able to conceive of purposes above and beyond those encompassed by biological theory.
It might be interesting to note that Alfred Russel Wallace, who is credited as the co-discoverer of the principle of natural selection, took a very similar view, and never accepted that Darwin's theories could account for every characteristic of humankind:
[quote=Alfred Russel Wallace] [Mr Darwin's] whole argument tends to the conclusion that man's entire nature and all his faculties, whether moral, intellectual, or spiritual, have been derived from their rudiments in the lower animals, in the same manner and by the action of the same general laws as his physical structure has been derived. As this conclusion appears to me not to be supported by adequate evidence, and to be directly opposed to many well-ascertained facts, I propose to devote a brief space to its discussion.[/quote]
You can find the rest of the discussion here.
The decimal representation of Pi never ends and never settles into a permanently repeating pattern.
In any case, change is itself a mental perception. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? However we might answer that question one thing is sure, if we did hear it something changed.
Looking forward to your evidence showing that "Tibet was the most peaceful culture ever," because of Buddhism.
In the meantime, what, Buddhism doesn't age well?
Iceland, in 2018 anyway. Icelandic culture must be pretty chill. :razz:
What has no exordium or eschaton is what is no self. We have at the core of our consciousness what has not existed from time immemorial and will not exist infinitely far into the future. We are dead while alive and death is the source of intelligence. To think you're fully alive is the tinge of self and imbecility. Judging a part of existence by existence is bias, judging existence by non-existence is where stupid atta can't enter. Thankfully, anatta has clearance.
I can think of a better alternative than settling for a dualism between the biological and the cognitive.
Combining neuro and cognitive science with phenomenology, enactivist, dynamical systems approaches unite the biological and the cognitive. They view intentionality as originating in the inherently anticipatory self-organizing characteristics of living systems. Cognition is not the internal representation and manipulation of external stimuli, but an active interaction between organism and world based on sensorimotor coupling.
So what? It's still thinking like an engineer.
There are some good reasons to believe it. I am not sure I have the motivation at the moment to lay it all out, as it is pretty involved. But I have long been past the point of being convinced of the matter.
Regardless, my curiosity is piqued when you say that the Buddha showed the doctrine of universal self to be incoherent. Would you care to elaborate?
Do you mean to say that there is change here? Surely, the value of Pi doesn't change.
What makes you so sure?
Well the Buddha would challenge anyone to say what ‘the higher self’ is, or where in experience such a proposed ‘changeless being’ can be found or be demonstrated to exist. This is the distinctively Buddhist conception of ‘anatta’, although it’s hard to bring to mind specific examples, because it permeates the discourses, in which all of the elements of experience (dharmas) are shown to be anatta, anicca (impermanent) and dukkha (unsatisfactory).
Furthermore, the early Vedic descriptions of the purported higher self were pretty incoherent. There were numerous ideas about the fate of the soul at death in common with many early Indo-European cultures. It wasn’t until Adi Sankara came along many centuries later that the philosophical doctrines of Advaita were made rigorous, and that mainly happened because he was disputing the Buddhists. (In fact some of his Hindu critics accused him of being a disguised Buddhist.)
This aspect of the Buddha’s teaching has lead to some depictions of him as an early naturalist or even positivist (according to one Western scholar whose name escapes me), although I think it’s a mischaracterisation. But Buddhism is in some ways very similar to Greek scepticism (in fact there are books on that.)
But your post about ‘inherent intentionality of living systems’ is still within the domain of the biological and ultimately Buddhism has aims beyond that.. But I know what the reaction is: oh, you mean supernatural. :gasp:
In a sense, yes - but Buddhism draws the map along different lines. It’s culturally remote from the Western philosophical tradition in such a way that it allows you to re-frame many knotty philosophical problems inherent in the post-Cartesian tradition. Varela and others of his ilk are really counter-cultural figures. I had EvanThomson’s father’s book, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light, decades ago. It’s what I call ‘hippie metaphysics’; it’s eclectic, draws on ideas from all over the place including science, anthropology, Eastern religion, and philosophy. It’s not overtly religious but it’s also not old-school materialist. (Read about the Lindisfarne Association.)
But in any case, and apropos of the original conversation, one traditional epithet applied to the Buddha is 'lokuttara' which means 'world-transcending'. And I think it is pretty well an exact synonym for 'super' (over or above) 'natural'. It's just that due to the cultural dynamics surrounding religion and science in the West, the supernatural has been cordoned off from rational discourse; whatever science is, it ain't that. But these new emerging models are holistic in a way that's pretty inconceivable from a traditional Western standpoint.
In comparing Heidegger with Nishitani, Thompson endorses a thinking of transcendence as historical rather than trans-historical:
"Dasein's freedom is grounded in perpetual surpassing to the world as being-in-the-world. On the "field of emptiness", Dasein is revealed as not-being-in-the-world; Dasein has attained the "other shore":
Yet this" other shore" is what Nishitani calls an "absolutely near side": Dasein's surpassing of the world
occurs simultaneously as the most thorough being-in-the-worId."
If we understand Being as being itself by always being ahead of, beyond itself in temoparlizing itself, doesn't a notion of world-transcendence become an inadequately thought-out and reifying derivative of being-in-the world?
It is a strictly defined number with a definite value. Its position on the number line does not change. It is exact. Sure, our decimal approximations of it can vary, but no decimal approximation of Pi is actually Pi.
I'm baffled that anyone would suggest that Pi changes.
What I am talking about is not what I would call a "higher self". I am not sure what that is supposed to be. And I am not sure that it would be correct to call it a "changeless being". First of all, similar to Heidegger's ontological difference, it isn't a being among beings. Second, I am not sure it would be right to call it changeless. After all, it is that which undergoes all modifications. But this is tricky.
The question you seem to have the Buddha asking reminds me of the third-person verificationist approach to consciousness, the sort of stance that leads the likes of Dennett to basically deny consciousness and qualia altogether. Consciousness cannot be demonstrated to exist, can it? Certainly not in the third-person. What about in experience? What do you experience but objects of experience? Can you find the subject in experience? Can you find experience or experiencing itself in experience? Can you find the box inside the same box? Can you bite your teeth? Can you see your own eyes without a mirror? Can space be found in space? Time in time? No? Then why believe in them?
The true self is implicit in every experience. It is what is "behind" everything. It is hard to point your mind at it because it is everywhere. Though it cannot be an object of awareness, it completely permeates it. It is awareness. When you look for it in the world or in your thoughts, you are looking in the wrong place. You can search your experiential field for it in meditation 'til the cows come home. You won't "find" it. It isn't a fish in the sea. The sea itself is in it. Space itself is in it.
Every idea you have about yourself, your identity, your biography, your perceptions of your body, and so on are all not it. What most think of when thinking of themselves is not it.
Nonetheless, it is known quite directly, in a completely unmediated fashion. It is immediately certain.
You can't exactly touch what you are. But you are that. And that is the primary experience.
We could claim that a finger cannot touch itself. But it can, you might insist! It can bend back upon itself! This can only happen because it has parts, which are actually different things. And two different things can be in relation. The tip can touch the base. But something without parts cannot touch itself in this way. It can only be itself. It is in contact with itself in a sense. It is as close to itself as something can be! But in every direction it looks, it fails to find itself. And yet, wherever it goes, there it is! It cannot escape itself! Nothing is more familiar.
What color is it? What color is color?
It is one thing to ask how you know that the Statue of Liberty exists. All the usual questions of epistemology arise. It is another to ask how you know that 2+2=4. It is another to ask how you know the stop sign is red. But what if I were to ask you how you know you are having an experience or are conscious at all? And who is it that knows?
You might be in doubt that the stop sign truly is red. You could be hallucinating. But can you doubt that you are experiencing redness? That is closer to your experiencing than the sign. Step it back toward your primary, unmediated experience even closer. Closer. All the way. There it is. Nothing is more certain than what is right there.
The content of experience can be in doubt. That I am experiencing cannot.
How might we know the self is universal or that there is only one self? That requires some reasoning beyond the scope of this thread. Maybe another time.
:down: Dennett is a materialist. Buddhism denies materialism outright. But other than that, very insightful post and much I agree with. There are some modern academic philosophers who have looked at Buddhist philosophy alongside contemporary philosophy, for example Buddhism as Philosophy : Mark Siderits and Zen and the Art of PostModern Philosophy, Carl Olsen.
Quoting petrichor
There is another well-known Eastern teacher, Ramana Maharishi, died 1960, who used to pursue that line of approach. As an Advaitin, he taught the 'Who am I' approach to demonstrate to the student that their consciousness was ultimately identical with Brahman.
Let's consider a drunkard just awakened from a blackout. People tell him of his deeds during the blackout, but he doesn't believe, because he can't remember experiencing those things. He doubts he experienced that.
Let's consider a child being told that when he grows, he will do stupid things with his life, because that is the lot of all humans; the little tyrant disbelieves his imperfection because he does not yet remembers experiencing those things. He doubts he will experience that.
Finally, consider a madman whose madness is about reality being a computer simulation, and every person being just running code. He will then doubt that his experience is real: it is just a fiction being projected, with the intention to dupe.
So we see, we can doubt that we experience; and that throughout time.
Please forgive my ignorance: is this point canonical Merleau-Ponty or you took some liberty in your exposition?
I ask because I find compelling the idea of self-reflection being a reflecting on an other, but that is because of the self being immersed in time: we propel ourselves to self-reflect, but what we find is a self to which time has passed since the propelling. So I'd agree self is both an inside and an outside, but only at different points in time.
"If my left hand is touching my right hand, and if I should suddenly wish to apprehend with my right hand the work of my left hand as it touches, this reflection of the body upon itself always miscarries
at the last moment: the moment I feel my left hand with my right hand, I correspondingly cease touching my right hand with my left hand. But this last-minute failure does not drain all truth
from that presentiment I had of being able to touch myself touching: my body does not perceive, but it is as if it were built around the perception that dawns through it; through its whole internal arrangement, its sensory-motor circuits, the return ways that control and release movements, it is, as it were, prepared for a self-perception, even though it is never itself that is perceived nor itself that perceives."(Merleau-Ponty, the Visible and the Invisible)
"Consciousness is removed from being, and from its own being, and at the same time
united with them, by the thickness of the world. The true cogito is not the intimate communing of thought with the thought of that thought: they meet only on passing through the world. The consciousness of the world is not based on self-consciousness: they are strictly contemporary.
There is a world for me because I am not unaware of myself; and I am not concealed from myself because I have a world. This pre-conscious possession of the world remains to be analysed in the pre-reflective cogito."(Phenomenology of Consciousness)
Quoting Louco What does that mean? What does it mean to say the self is an inside at a single point of time? Is there such a thing as a single point of time as an immediate 'now"? Heidegger and Husserl split up the now into a tri-partite structure retention-presencing and protention. Time is not puctual opints but stretched along as a horizon. For Heidegger thee now is a beyond itself, and thus self is already ahead of itself in a single moment of its being.
"..the identity of the thing with itself, that sort of established position of its own, of rest in itself, that plenitude and that positivity that we have recognized in it already exceed the experience, are already a second interpretation of the experience...we arrive at the thing-object, at the In Itself, at the thing identical with itself, only by imposing upon experience an abstract dilemma which experience ignores(p.162)." Merleau-Ponty
I agree. You can doubt what you experienced in the past. Epistemological problems arise there very naturally. You are not experiencing the past directly. In the present, you are experiencing memories of the past. These memories can be faulty. They can be absent. Your friends might be lying to you about what happened. You can even doubt whether the person who experienced those things was you. You can doubt that it was you who experienced the things depicted in your memories of your childhood. You can doubt that it will be you who will experience your future. But you can't, right now, doubt that you are having the experience that you are having.
Suppose you are dreaming but don't know it. The content of what you are experiencing can be in doubt. It might not correspond to any external reality. But you cannot doubt that you are experiencing, right now, in the present. Where there is no experience at all, there can be no deception that there is an experience being had. A nonexistent mind cannot be fooled into believing that it exists and is having an experience.
Let me put it another way, suppose a magician is putting on a show for an audience. They are being tricked into thinking they are seeing a woman being cut in half. They are deceived about what is happening. No problem here. Now suppose we have a magician putting on a show for a nonexistent audience. The seats are empty. He fools the nonexistent people into believing they exist and are watching the show. Quite a trick, right? Impossible, obviously!
Where there is no experience, there can be no illusion. So if you are an audience member watching a magic show right now, you can doubt that what you are seeing is what is actually happening. But you cannot doubt that you are having an experience! You can be sure that you exist!
You can doubt the content of your experience. You cannot doubt the doubter if you are the one doubting.
Quoting Louco
We can doubt the content of the experience. We can doubt that what we are experiencing is real. We might be hallucinating. We can have doubt about experiences not being had by us right now. We can doubt that we existed at other times and places. We can doubt what we experienced or will experience at other times. But we cannot doubt, right now, that we are experiencing. See the difference?
We can have all sorts of questions about what we actually are, what the experiencer really is. You might not be a human at all. You might be an alien playing a VR game right now. You might be a brain in a vat. You might be God. You might be _____. It might be impossible to really know what you really are, what the true nature of the self is. Everything you perceive and think about yourself is content, and all experiential content is subject to doubt. It may not correspond to reality. But you cannot doubt that you, whatever you might really be, exist and are experiencing something, even if that something is a deception.
All of your examples only raise questions about realities beyond immediate experience. Those externals are uncontroversially dubitable. Immediate experience is a different story.
I have to excuse myself as ignorant again, this time about the concept of time according to Heidegger and Husserl. That being said, I would say simply that in time two events can happen at different times and we order them to say one happened before the other.
When we pay attention to something, we emit the intention to focus on a sense, and this emission has the velocity of the nerves. Therefore when we receive the sensorial information, time has already passed and the self is no longer the same.
So in the instant when we focus on a sense, the self and the intention belong to the same being, the intention is inside the self. But when we get the sensory information, this information is the result of a biological process commanded by a self that already been left behind in time. So the sensory information comes from a will not inside the self.
There are a plethora of mental issues where the madman can be sure of his inexistence, or that he is a ghost, or other "degrees" of non-existence. And these people are functional language users and we share the world with them.
Personally, I prefer to acknowledge them in my beliefs, and I've brushed with the idea of non-existence myself. Yes we can doubt our existence. I guess we will have to agree to disagree on this.
Could we we instead say that the the intention IS the self? This way treats the self as a transitive process rather than a container.
When a schizophrenic has an experience of thought control or hears voices, they know that these occur inside of their head. So in this sense their body owns the experience. But they do not experience a sense of agency, the sense that their self initiated and was responsible for the foreign experience. It occurs inside them but not of them. Some schizophrenics describe themselves as a dead body whose behavior is controlled like a marionette being pulled by strings. One could say their body exists for them but not their self.
I am not a big fan of Dennett or eliminative materialism either. But Buddhism's denial of materialism is immaterial. ;)
My point was that when you say that Buddhism says that something like the self or a universal self cannot be demonstrated to exist, whatever "demonstrate" might mean there, this is a faulty objection in a way similar to some of the verificationists saying that conscious experience cannot be demonstrated to exist and therefore should not be accepted to exist. Clearly, despite the fact that it cannot be empirically verified in the third-person, consciousness nevertheless is quite real. There really are experiences. How do you know? You know immediately. You are experiencing. You know that with more certainty than you know anything about any objective, third-person realities. You know that consciousness is real with far more certainty than you know that Antarctica is real.
Quoting Wayfarer
Let's put aside the "changeless being" part for a moment. Let's just say "self". I don't know if the self is changeless or not. I don't know if it is a being or not. Let's just say that the self, for the purposes of this discussion, is not some idea we have about ourselves, such as that I am a human, that I am a brain, that I am a soul, that I am male, that was once a child, and so on. When someone says "I am a democrat", I am not talking about the democrat or the body making the statement of identity. The self isn't any content of experience or worldly identity. It isn't a description. It isn't even the 'I' thought, the self-referencing thought, not even an inward glance. That's all experiential content. That's all the doings of the mind, the arisings in the mind. I am talking about that which is having the experience, the very witness.
Let's say that someone is challenging us to demonstrate the existence of this self, this witness. What would it mean to demonstrate it? Would we have to show it in the third-person, as an object that can be probed and measured in a lab? Would it have to be shown to have mass? Would it have to be shown to have physical location?
Suppose you say that it is not being asked that it be demonstrated objectively, but rather "in experience". What would that mean? The problem is similar. Anything "in experience", arguably, is experiential content, is object of experience, not that which is experiencing the content. To try to demonstrate its existence, it seems, is to try to objectify subjectivity itself. When you look in the mirror, what you see is an object. It isn't the self. If you try to turn around to see yourself, you are still "behind" the view. Whatever is seen isn't you.
What sorts of demonstration are left? Rational arguments? There are some decent ones. But there is something more directly known about just being yourself and having an experience, the way in which you know that you are experiencing, that you exist and are conscious, that makes it obvious somehow. I simply cannot doubt my existence. I am not sure "existence" is really the right word though. What does that mean? The roots suggest "standing forth". That suggests objects. It suggests things. The subject doesn't "stand forth". It isn't a thing. It isn't a figure against a background. Rather, it is that by virtue of which there are standings forth at all! It is the condition for the possibility of experiential objects, of things, at least phenomenologically speaking.
If someone says that the great meditators have meditated long and hard and deep, deeper than anyone before them, that they have looked and looked for the self and have come up empty-handed, I am deeply unimpressed. I don't care if the person who says that no self was found is said to be a deity. I don't care if that person was prophesied to be the great world-teacher. I don't care if that person could levitate or walk on water or defeat the efforts of demons to disturb their concentration. I don't care if that person is immortal. I don't care if that person came from some Heaven to teach us. "The Buddha says..." is hardly evidence of anything.
What is it exactly that Buddhists mean by "anatta"? What is the self that they deny? Is it the identity we have, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves? Is it the 'I thought'? Or are they denying the very witness? Are they claiming that they have gone beyond the witness into non-existence and experienced themselves not existing and have returned to tell the tale? Who is it that experienced enlightenment? Nobody? Who is liberated? What deceived-nobody is now undeceived and freed from the illusion of existing? Who was there to experience whatever it was that is being reported to have been experienced? Is someone reporting a non-experience?
I have no doubt that it is possible, in meditation, to have no self-referencing content in experience, no self-idea, no 'I-thought', no auto-biographical rumination, no inner dialogue saying "I am ____". I have experienced such states of consciousness. I did that momentarily just before writing this sentence. I'm not impressed. All I did was suspend the generation of certain kinds of representational mental content. I did not therefore cease to exist or cease to experience at all. If I had ceased to experience at all, how would I know?
And supposing someone (who?) goes deep in meditation and finds themselves not existing (who finds themselves not existing?). Did they cease to exist? Did they discover that they had never existed to begin with? I am imagining some inner dialogue in the moment of realization of no-self:
Wow! Look at this! I don't even exist! I never existed at all! All my problems are solved! The knot is untied! What a fool I've been! I'm not even here right now! What a relief!!! I'm free!!! I must go and tell everyone else that they don't have to worry, that they don't exist either!!! I am going to pretend that I exist and go back into the world to teach until all the other nonexistent selves are similarly freed of the delusion that they exist!!!
These sound like the ravings of a lunatic to me.
Okay, so a madman can believe that he doesn't exist. He can experience mental content such as, "I don't even exist". Is he correct in these thoughts? Is he really not there having that experience of thinking himself not existing?
I wouldn't say that. Quite the opposite, actually: I think of the self as a metaphorical space where mental phenomena happen; so the metaphor of a container seems quite apt to me.
I can only experience the certainty or the illusion of being. I cannot get out of myself and take a peek into what is "really there" concerning myself.
Note that metaphors are 'as' structures, understanding something as something else. i think that's an apt description of the signifiying nature of the moments of meaningful awareness. Each moment of self is a self-transcending metaphorizing of the previous moment. To 'be' this moment is to have transformed oneself from what one was the precious moment. The moment of self could be thought of as spatial in the sense of a synthetic coordinating of multiple neural imputs into the unifying 'con' of consciousness. But to be consistent with recent research into consciousness, it would be useful to recognize this synthentic whole of a moment of awareness as intersubjective rather than solipsistic.
Self is space of interactive body-world transformation rather than static 'isness'.
You can experience the illusion of being? In the present? Or in other words, you can not be and yet be deceived that you are?
This has already been answered, I refuse to objectify the subject in order to arrive at your paradox. If you are unsatisfied with my answer, we will just have to agree to disagree.
Me also. Perhaps there's a problem with the way in which it's being described. But there are many texts in Buddhist and other spiritual literature about the 'death of self' which is like the portal to a higher dimension.
I don't know if you've ever encountered Krishnamurti's writings, but in some of them (particularly Krishnamurti's Notebook) there are very detailed descriptions of the sense of living without any sense of 'I and mine'. This sense, which is automatic and reflexive (which perhaps acts like a kind of 'strange attractor' in chaos theory) subtly but definitely changes the whole nature of cognition and perception. What it would be like to live without such a sense - well, we don't know.
To transpose the idea of the 'death of self' into a religious lexicon which is perhaps more intuitively familiar, consider the Biblical quote 'I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.' (Galatians 2:20). There is a contemporary Christian mystic, Bernadette Roberts - I've just learned, writing this, that she only died in 2017 - whose best-known book was called 'The path to no-self'. (People often questioned whether this had anything to do with the Buddhist 'anatta' but she remained devoutly and firmly Christian in her orientation. Her wiki entry is here. I cite this only as evidence of the cross-cultural nature of this kind of insight.)
Quoting petrichor
Buddhist philosophy on the matter was very much developed in response to dialogue with the existing mainstream Indian tradition, which is vastly different to our own secular-scientific worldview. In any case the Vedic tradition did have the idea that there was a real unchanging self that remained completely changeless while all else changed; 'set fast like a post' or 'a mountain peak' were two of the canonical descriptions. It was this sense of 'changeless self' which was challenged by the Buddha. This was challenged by appeal to the principle of dependent origination (pratityasamutpada), which describes a 12-fold causal chain that can be shown to give rise to all sensory and phenomenal experience. The Buddha would ask, where in this constant flux of experience (including very refined experiences of higher states of consciousness) is there something which is permanent, stable, and not subject to change? But to really explicate that, would be well beyond the scope of a forum thread, as this is a subject that occupies volumes of debate. (The Theravadin Tipitaka, or collection of scriptures, is about 24 times the volume of the Bible.)
Secondly, the sense in which the knowledge of one's own being is apodictic is, of course, the fundamental idea behind Descartes' famous Cogito. And although the cultural context in which Descartes articulated this idea was very different to the Indian, there's an ancient Indian school called Samkhya dualism, which is some respects is like Cartesian dualism (see here.) But again how all such ideas are developed and what they mean in practice, are very big questions. (There's a very interesting critique of Descartes' in Husserl's posthumously-published Crisis of the European Sciences, by the way.)
'
Quoting petrichor
Bh?ra Sutta
As far as the identity of the Tath?gata (which means 'thus gone' or 'well-gone', an honorific title describing the nature of the/a Buddha):
Aggi-Vachagotta Sutta
I've not yet looked deeply into Buddhist doctrine to try to understand exactly what their conception of a self is to see what it is exactly that is being denied. But I've sometimes suspected that what I have in mind when I use that word might not be what they are denying.
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't have any problem with the idea that one could live without the sense of 'I and mine'. But there still is the experiencer who simply is no longer generating self-referencing mental content. And perhaps this leads to a more peaceful state of mind, since detecting threats to self require thoughts of self and also identification with the forms threatened.
Quoting Wayfarer
I am not sure how this is supposed to be understood. Is it that I, the previous experiencer of being Petrichor, am no longer here, no longer experiencing it, and now, Christ, a different subject that is not me, is experiencing being Petrichor? I have died or gone elsewhere and someone else has taken over my body? No, I think the mystic is probably instead making a statement that describes their overcoming of their false identification with the local body-mind. They have realized that the very experiencing subject that was the one doing all the experiencing all along, in other words, their very self, the one they always were, is actually the very same as the God-self, the one self, the only self. They have experienced God-union. They realize themselves to be one with God. In other words, they realize who they really are and always were. Petrichor didn't realize himself to be God exclusively. No. Petrichor isn't God. But God, who, in Petrichor, thought he was only Petrichor, now remembers himself and now sees Petrichor as one of the many jackets that he wears. God sees through Petrichor's eyes and always did. There never was anyone else seeing through Petrichor's eyes.
Death of self, ego death, in my view, is just realizing that you are not who you thought you were. But the real you, that which is everything, is still there in this new state.
Since there is no other, and self and other are defined in relation to one another, there is also, in some sense, no "self". When there is no "there", there are also is no "here" in opposition to it. When there is no you, there is no I. But there is still that which transcends these dualities and experiences the union. There is still that which is what was the very experiencing subject that experienced everything you experienced all along. That, for me, is the true self. Is that nothing? Since it isn't related to anything, there is no form. It involves no difference. In that sense, it is nothing. It isn't even a space empty of things.
That same nothing which knows is also that which "looks out" from behind Petrichor's eyes.
All the talk that tends to emerge among mystics about love, compassion, and so on, naturally is part of realizing your true identity with everyone else and everything. To love someone is to some degree to include them in your sense of self, to walk in their shoes, to make their interests your own. If you were to take this all the way, it would mean fully and actually being them, being not distinct from them. To not literally be them is to stop short, to fail to love completely and truly. Complete universal love then is also completely being all. If God is love, as they say, and if God loves us perfectly, as they say, God then is us. The one suffering in us, our very self, is God suffering as us. Is this the "Christ in me"? I think so.
To stop thinking yourself a separate being apart from the world is also to stop not being everyone else. Your identification changes from the local to the universal. The sense of identity once encircled only a single body. Now the circle has either expanded to include everything or it has simply been erased. To the extent that this boundary is the self-idea, the ego, or whatever you want to call it, this event means the end of it. You live no longer in tunnel, but in the open air. But you haven't thereby ceased to exist. You aren't that boundary. And you aren't exclusively that which was inside the boundary. The boundary was a delusion all along. That you identified with it was ignorance.
Who am I? My jacket? No. These arms, legs, freckles, and so on? No. Step it back further. The story I tell myself about myself? No. The brain in which my body and life are represented? No. Step it back further. The atoms themselves? The fields themselves? Step it back further. Deeper. Wider. Go to the ground. The Universe itself? Getting close... What you are is underneath, behind, around, above, inside, beyond, all throughout, the very substance of, and so on, all of that, all that is. And taken as a whole, you are without form.