SAINT AUGUSTINE wondered:
What is time? Who can explain simply and briefly?
As long as no one asks me I know, but if someone asks me and I try to explain, I do not know.
Augustine is here concerned with time, but the same kind of inquiry can be applied to the self, for that matter, to any phenomenon.
In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus reflects on the nature of the self:
For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers.
I can sketch one by one all the aspects it is able to assume, all those likewise that have been attributed to it, this upbringing, this origin, this order or these silences, this nobility or this vileness. But aspects cannot be added up.
This very heart which is mine will remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap will never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself.
In Buddhism, the self is not the only object under investigation. In fact, all phenomena are radically questioned. The notion of self receives much attention because it is at the root of much suffering. To claim that the self does not exist, while other phenomena really do, would be inconsistent.
However, for some Buddhist traditions, as for the master Mahasi Sayadaw, a few phenomena really exist. They are: space, nirvana, consciousness, mental factors, and the four elements (fire, earth, water, and air). Whereas for some thinkers of late Buddhism (Madhyamaka), when phenomena are questioned they cannot be said to exist or to not exist; they are just empty appearances.
There is a radical difference between the visions of the world before and after questioning.
At the superficial level of the everyday life before investigation, all phenomena are what they are. If I am not asked, I know.
But if I am asked . . .
There are two ways of questioning phenomena.
The first is a logical investigation. It is at at the level of knowledge, an objective inquiry even when it concerns the self. It seeks to know what is the reality of the phenomenon under investigation. It helps to loosen the certainty in the reality of the everyday world, but it is still bound by concept. Some traditions seem not to go beyond this kind of investigation.
The second way approaches the problem nonconceptually, either through a clear seeing of the chain of conditioning or from the side of awareness. The latter does not consider a particular phenomenon, but the role that intentionality plays in the presence of the objective and subjective worlds. It is not an investigation per se, but a withholding of intentionality through a rigorous meditation. Without intentionality there is no more language, thus it is no longer possible to deny or affirm anything. The mind, free of duality, does not pertain to knowing but to awareness. This is where we leave the world of logic and philosophy. We leave knowledge for wisdom.
What is behind the expressions “I” or “me”? Who is speaking when someone says “I”?
While Buddhism holds this question at its core, it is not unknown to other spiritual and philosophical traditions. However, the importance this question has in the Buddhist tradition differentiates it markedly from the others.
When other religions question the reality of the self they do not stop at the elusive nature of this perplexing entity — they quickly move on to something else.
In its quest for the the true self, Vedanta finds a consciousness, pure and eternal, and refers to it as Atman, or what the Anglo-Indian thinkers call “the Self” with a capital letter, so as to differentiate it from the limited self, which they also deem unreal.
Christian mystics and theologians have a particular way of seeing the “I.”
What I find deep inside myself is not me as “ego,” but the Divine light.
— Saint Augustine
The word I does not belong to anyone other than to God — alone in his unity.
— Meister Eckhart
Buddhism does not seek to replace the unreality of the self by something else, rather, it appreciates the space of freedom it offers.
When some wandering ascetics asked one of the master’s main disciples, Anuradha, to know if the Buddha will exist after his death, he replied: “We cannot say that.” So they asked him the opposite: Would he not exist after his death? He answered: “We cannot say that.” The ascetics became upset. They insulted Anuradha and left. Perplexed, Anuradha went to seek counsel with the Buddha. Could it be that he had given them a wrong answer?
Before knowing whether someone will exist after his death, we should determine whether he exists now.
As they faced each other, the Buddha challenged Anuradha to find something that corresponds to the Buddha. Here, he used the term “Tathagatha” to speak of himself. He asked the monk whether the Tathagatha is one of his constituting aggregates, whether it is the body, the feeling tones, perception, volition, or consciousness. Is he the sum of the aggregates? Is he anything other than the aggregates? Anuradha could not put his finger on anything that is truly the Buddha. The Master concluded by affirming that it is useless to ask whether he will exist after his death if we cannot find what he is while alive.
This analysis will be repeatedly taken up by the majority of Buddhist traditions.
Why wouldn’t a person be a collection of aggregates that constitute him or her? What would it mean to be constituted of various elements?
In an ancient text, this question is addressed by using the example of a wooden chariot obviously composed of various parts.
The story tells of a meeting in Punjab between a monk named Nagasena and a king of Greek origin named Milinda. The two men debate numerous questions, including the notion of the self.
The King approaches Nagasena and salutes him politely. The monk returns his greetings.
The King asks him his name.
“I go by the name of Nagasena: this is how my brothers call me. But, O King, while parents assign names to their children such as Surasena, Virasena, or Sihasena, it only an appellation, a simple name. It has no power over the individual.”
Milinda then addresses the assembly: “Here is Nagasena, who claims that there is no individual under his name.” Could we admit that?
Then, Nagasana explains: “O King, delicate as a prince. Does it happen that you walk barefoot in the mid-day sun on the hot ground, in the burning sand, treading the contours of gravel, shards and sand, your feet in suffering, your body weary, your soul exhausted? Have you come on foot or by means of a vehicle?”
King: I do not go on foot, O Venerable one, I came in a chariot.
Nagasana: Since you came in a chariot, Maharaja, tell me what is a chariot? Is it the tiller?
K: No, Venerable.
N: Is it the axle?
K: No, Venerable.
N: Is it the wheels, the cart, the yoke, the reigns, the spur?
K: No, Venerable.
N: Is it the sum of all those parts?
K: No, Venerable.
N: Is it a thing completely distinct from all this?
K: No, Venerable.
N: My interrogation is useless, I see no chariot. Maharaja, your word is false and misleading — there is no chariot.
The king tries to justify himself: “I am not lying, Venerable. It is from the tiller and the different parts that the common expression chariot is formed.”
Then Nagasana explains to the king that it is on the basis of the different aggregates of the body and the consciousness that the appellation Nagasena is formed.
The Greeks used the story of the Ship of Theseus to illustrate how difficult it is to grasp the existence of a phenomenon constituted from a number of parts.
The ship on which Theseus embarked was a galley of thirty oars that the Athenians preserved for a very long time. When the time came, they replaced the worn-out and broken pieces of the ship by firmly attaching new ones to the remaining old. Philosophers cite this ship as an example illustrating doubt. Some believe that it is the same ship, while others argue that it is a different one.
Yet does the real Ship of Theseus not depend on conventions rather than in ways the old or the new pieces are assembled?
A monk asks the Buddha: “How is it that there is no “I” when each sutra begins with: “Thus have I heard?” The Buddha replies that the notion of “I” has three distinct sources: confusion, pride, and convention.
The first two should be given up and the third should be respected.
Not all thinkers have such measured opinions.
Pascal used to say that a respectable human being should not use the terms I and me.
Another type of meditation shows that the human being is moved not by an independent entity — I — but by a chain of impersonal conditions.
This chain is defined in the Suttas in the following way:
When this exists, that comes to be.
With the arising of this, that arises.
When this does not exist, that does not come to be.
With the cessation of this, that ceases.
This is not an affirmation of causality, but an observation of a succession of events. This chain does not describe the general aspects of things, but things at one particular moment. For example, the “body-mind” comes to signify the body and the mind at one particular moment, a moment that is a part of this chain. This sequence must be understood in the context of impermanence, where all phenomena change from one instant to another. Conditioned by ignorance, holding to the existence of a real and independent self, mental formations emerge. These mental formations are psychological conditionings such as arrogance, pride, and anxiety. They all lead to certain types of behavior at particular moments. Conditioned by these mental formations, consciousness appears; a particular type of consciousness at each moment, such as for example, a worried consciousness. Conditioned by the consciousness, the body-mind arises; conditioned by the body-mind, the sense organs; conditioned by the sense organs, contact. Contact that means a felt experience, is that moment of consciousness when an object, a sense organ, and attention meet. Conditioned by felt experience, feeling arises; from feeling, desire (or another type of emotion); from desire, clinging; from clinging, becoming; from becoming, birth; from birth, old age, sickness, and death.
The confusion arises from the identification with any of these elements. When ignorance attached to the reality of the self ceases, the chain of conditioning does so as well.
Nietzsche noted:
One thinks; but that this “one” is precisely the famous old “ego,” is, to put it mildly, only a supposition, an assertion, and assuredly not an “immediate certainty.”
Ignorance is not a simple lack of knowledge, but imagination. It projects the concept “I” onto the various links of the chain. Meditative presence frees from this confusion, leaving thought and desire to themselves. When the I is no more, the chain stops.
The self, for Buddhism, is only a conventional designation, a representation. Confusion mistakes I for a real, autonomous, and independent entity. However, and thanks to contemporary psychology, we must admit that this representation plays an important role in the development and the functioning of human beings.
Eirich Neuman, Jung’s disciple, describes the emergence of (self-)consciousness:
The history of human consciousness was the gradual extraction of a small but a growing and increasingly clear and self-determined focus on inner human experience from a dream-like state of virtual identity with body and environment.
Elsewhere he writes:
Just as the infantile ego, living this phase over again, feebly developed, easily tired, emerges like an island out of the ocean of the unconscious for occasional moment only, and sinks back again, so early man experiences the world.
It is precisely the notion of “I/me” that allows this island of consciousness to emerge, to extract itself from the oceanic depths.
Let us imagine how the sense of “I” develops from early childhood.
This sense is not innate, but is transmitted from the mother to the newborn child. For psychoanalysts, an infant at the early stages of life does not distinguish itself from its mother or its environment. It is not conscious of itself, but is merged with the world that surrounds it. We could imagine the state of wholeness preceding the separation of the subject from the object, a state of confusion without a clear self-consciousness.
As Winnicott points out, at the beginning the infant is the surrounding and the surrounding is the infant.
The mother’s projective identification* is certainly essential in the infant’s construction of the sense of self. But, the mother transmits not only this sense of self, but also a boundless love toward this self. Such love is certainly necessary to gather the energy needed for the considerable task that an infant undertakes.
Self-consciousness, more subtle than consciousness of objects, is a sign of a greater maturity. At first, access to self-consciousness necessitates a release from the initial sate of fusion and the capacity to distinguish oneself from others. As described before, consciousness can function as a subjective center only by creating a representation of itself, a representation that seems to exist at the level of objects. “I” is something other than self-consciousness. However, the tendency to confuse I and consciousness is persistent.
The third Karmapa’s “Aspirational Prayer for Mahamudra” says,
Under the power of ignorance, we mistake self-consciousness for an I.
And Freud, in his correspondence with Romain Rolland, said, with a certain reserve, that he could not conceive of the mystical experience except as a regression to the oceanic state of infancy. But Freud would lend his ear to neurotics only, not to mystics.
There is a deep confusion here, a confusion that Ken Wilbert calls “the pre/trans fallacy.”
It is important to differentiate between the two stages of human development in which consciousness is not enclosed by the notion of I. One of these two states of nondual (non-differentiated) consciousness precedes the development of the I; the other follows and transcends it. Without this important distinction, the inner experiences of the greatest philosophers and mystics can only be understood in terms of regression.
From the few remarks made earlier about consciousness, the pre-egoïc stage can be defined as a fusion between consciousness and objects: consciousness takes itself to be what it perceives, what it feels. At the trans-egoïc stage, consciousness is, above all, conscious of itself through each experience. It is pure presence. The first stage is a state of extreme confusion, inhibiting all human behavior, making it difficult to relate to the everyday world. At the second stage, consciousness is capable of dealing with the world in a more lucid and efficient way than at the egoïc-stage.
Another very frequent mistake is to take pathological states for mystical experiences. These few lines below, taken from Nijinsky’s diary, illustrate the use of mystical language by a disturbed person.
I can do everything. I am a servant. I am a factory worker. I am a gentleman. I am an aristocrat. I am a Tzar. I am an emperor. I am God. I am God. I am God. I am everything. I am life. I am eternity. I will be always and everywhere. People will kill me but I will live because I am everything.
These two nondual states have in common the fact that they are not enclosed within the limits of I. Other than that, they have nothing in common.
Nonetheless, the I is a notion that is essential for the development of self-consciousness and its maturation. Any disturbance in this development can lead to serious difficulties.
Ronald Laing cites a case of a patient who lacks a stable notion of his reality:
I forgot myself at the Ice Carnival the other night. I was so absorbed in looking at it that I forgot what time it was and who and where I was. When I suddenly realized I hadn’t been thinking about myself I was frightened to death. The unreality feeling came. I must never forget myself for a single minute.
The questioning of the sense of self does not precipitate mentally balanced individuals into confusion regarding their own reality. On the contrary, the state of pure presence that can develop in meditation is experienced with a total sense of evidence, but as we will see, meditation does not stop here.
The sense of existing cannot be reduced to the sense of self. Personalization of presence gives it an appearance of consistency, but of confinement as well.
The self manifests in two contradictory aspects. On the one hand, it is stable and seems to endure. On the other hand, it constantly manifests under different aspects.
I am certain of being the same person throughout my life, whether it is at the age of five, or twenty, or fifty, yet I have changed physically, emotionally, intellectually, and socially. What is common in these different instances of me? There must be something similar in these instances to have this impression of consistency. The similarity cannot be found in the shape of the body, or social status, or in psychological maturity. The only element that remains constant throughout a lifetime is self-awareness in each experience, as described above. The unity of consciousness does not depend on a self, but on this self-awareness.
Knowledge grasps this phenomenon, emerging at every moment like itself, by the concept I and generates a feeling of permanence. I is mainly a representation of self-awareness, its personification. It is akin to a thing, not to a consciousness.
I is not an abstract word like, for example, contrarily. It has a way of appearing that commonly relies on the speaker’s body image. When the appearance of our body is damaged by old age, for example, we suffer. But it would be wrong to say that the I has deteriorated. Suffering, in this case, results essentially from pride affected by the deterioration of the body’s image.
There is also another, more general way for the self to appear — a way that includes body-mind as a whole.
To illustrate this, a Tibetan master gives the following example: Imagine that someone pricks you with a needle. You jump. What is affected here is not only the body, but an I that combines body and mind. If someone accuses you of a wrongdoing that you haven’t committed, this offended self cannot be reduced either to the body or to the mind, but it encompasses both.
Consciousness has no objective characteristics through which it can be apprehended. Its representative — I — uses aspects of the present experience to take on an appearance that is either physical, “I am tall,” “I am stooped,” and so forth, or spiritual, “I am intelligent,”“I am sad,” and so on, or both, “I am home.”
It is because the “I” does not possess its own characteristics, as with the words “here” and “there,” that it can take on so many different aspects.
This limited aspect of the “I” makes it vulnerable and incomplete, and thus is endlessly under the sway of worry and desire, but those emotions do not affect self-consciousness, which is necessarily impersonal.
Because self-consciousness is free from limitations, from duality, it is a totality and thus cannot be prey to attachment or to desire. Who would desire, and what would be its object?
At the level of consciousness, death carries no meaning. It cannot imagine its own passing away, as it would need to be present to experience it.
Death has a meaning only for the self.
Freud calls nirvana a drive that seeks to attain a state of no-tension. For him it is a death-drive. However, he can only conceive of this tensionlessness as a return to an archaic state. He does not move beyond the point of view of the I.
Suffering and the end of suffering are the main subjects of the Buddha’s teachings. He teaches the ending of birth, old age, sickness, and death, here and now. But the master might seem to have given a bad example by attaining the advanced age of 80, getting seriously ill, and dying.
It is obvious that Buddhism does not aspire to immortality.
Through identification and, therefore, thingification, consciousness takes up a fate similar to that of things and to that of the body in particular. By taking itself for a corporeal “I,” consciousness grows old, withers, crumbles, and prepares to die. But this is only the body’s destiny. To say that the self is not the body does not mean that it is outside of it. This would entail a rather unwise disassociation. The “I” cannot be grasped in such and such way because it is only a conventional designation, a grammatical particle, as Nietzsche states.
If we consider someone to be nice, where is this “niceness” located? It would be useless to look for it in the person — it is not there. Moreover, it is probable that this point of view is not unanimous. It is not because we all use the terms I or you almost unanimously, that they can be located. They cannot be pinpointed any more than the concept “nice” or words like “here” and “there.”
An attentive presence, bereft of intention, as it is cultivated in meditation, unveils a consciousness devoid of self, of the duality of subject and object, and finally is free of grasping.
The Bahiya Sutta makes the point clearly:
Bahiya, who had doubts about his practice, pressured the Buddha to give him concise instructions for the practice of meditation. The Buddha advised him to meditate in such a way that while seeing there would be only seeing, while hearing there would be only hearing, while tasting there would be only tasting, while smelling there would be only smelling, while feeling a physical sensation there would be only sensing, and while thinking there would be only thinking. The Buddha concluded: “Then you will be neither here nor there (neither in the object nor the subject), nor in-between — this is the end of suffering, this is nirvana.”
This same principle applies to all emotions.
It is really a question of being the experience; of being intimate with hearing, with sadness or joy for example, so as to realize their fundamentally impersonal nature. In such closeness, such intimacy, there is no place for “I.” There is only a sad, happy, or bored consciousness. It is not so much a question of recognizing and naming the emotion, but of living it. Joy is present to itself; it does need “I” to experience it.
It is not a matter of being conscious only of the physical symptoms of emotions, like heaviness on the chest, but of accurately perceiving the quality of consciousness that is sadness, for example. It is only then that it can be experienced in an impersonal and serene way.
According to some masters, we should be careful not to create an abstract voidness.
When we decompose a compound, it is clear that the compound no longer exists.
When we are left with parts lying on the ground after having pulled apart a chariot, then to realize that there is no chariot anymore is not a realization of its emptiness.
It would be quite strange that, to investigate the real nature of something, we must get rid of that thing altogether. That would imply a negation of the world.
The emptiness of a phenomenon is not realized by getting rid of its presence, but by seeing it with a nondual mind, a nongrasping mind, which realizes the inseparability of appearance and emptiness.
To deconstruct a person into its various constituents and to discover that there is no longer a human being is not a realization of the person’s emptiness. It is simply an abstract game: a game that can be instructive at times, but does not lead us to see reality.
“I” and “you,” just like “here” and “there,” are expressions devoid of essence, but not of meaning. This realization does not prevent dialogue: on the contrary, it brings lightness to it.
At the closing of these meditations, “I” has not been destroyed because it never really existed. Only the illusion of its reality has been dispelled.
* Projective identification is the projection of parts of the self into an object (a person). The object is perceived as having acquired the characteristics of the projected part of the self, but in the self may also become identified with the object of its projection.