no-self

No-self is one of the three characteristics that traditional Buddhism holds are present in all phenomena.

In later Buddhism, the framing is relaxed to emptiness of self, or the self is a construct. This acknowledges we don't need, or want, to obliterate the self (ego death), just to see it as a conceptual overlay on experience rather than an inherent and real thing in itself.

Traditionally one can meditate on no-self by viewing whatever is arising as "not me, not mine". Surprisingly it also works to do the opposite, and view everything in experience as "in the mind, created by mind" (the mind contains the world). Both perspectives are moving towards the same nondual insight, negating our impulse to divide experience into self and other, but the second can feel a lot gentler.

What is the 'self' and why is it an illusion? Ways to frame this:

1. We take the intentional stance towards ourselves, choosing to believe that a system made up of parts is in fact a single, coherent agent with goals and preferences.
   • But this is only a model, and all models are wrong, if sometimes useful.
2. We tend to think there's one part of our mind that can tell all the other parts what to do, and that this part controls and causes all of our thoughts, feelings, and actions. This can be seen through on a few levels:
   • Assuming we live in a materialist world, any sense of free will is necessarily an illusion. There is no part of us that is itself 'uncaused'.
   • Even basic meditation shows that we don't have nearly the level of control over thoughts and feelings that we think we do. Try to sit for five minutes without thinking. You'll notice that you can't. After a while, thoughts will start to feel more 'external'.
3. We think there is something permanent and unchanging at the core of our being, a 'me' that is always 'me' even as circumstances change.
4. We tend to think of experience as stimuli appearing on a 'screen' (the Cartesian theater) which implies a separate 'person watching the screen'. Of course this is incoherent, implying an infinite regress, but the view still persists.
5. We tend to think the seat of our consciousness is localized usually somewhere inside the head behind the eyes, that we look at the world "from" that spot. Of course, if you actually try to look at that spot, you will find nothing there, and it will seem like you're looking from somewhere else (usually elsewhere inside the head). If you try to examine what's at that new spot, there will still be nothing there, and so on --- the princess is always in another castle.
6. We tend to draw a boundary in space around the body, saying that the body is 'me' and the rest of awareness is 'the world'. But this is clearly arbitrary:
   • People who lose body parts don't generally feel any less like 'themselves'.
   • People find it natural to conceive of thought experiments in which they totally swap bodies and yet remain 'themselves' in the new body.
   • The mind quickly adapts to use tools (utensils, swords, cars, prosthetic limbs, etc) as if they are 'part of us'.
   • Many homeostatic processes that support life take place in large part outside the body. For example, breathing requires both lungs (inside the body) and plants (outside the body) to perform the requisite chemical exchange.
   • We of course never experience the external world directly; only its representation inside our nervous system (the mind contains the world). When I see a tree, I'm not seeing the 'tree itself' (which is a collection of atoms, mostly empty space, reflecting photons at various wavelengths), I see color and texture and other things that evolution has decided are useful representations. If I see a beautiful flower, that beauty is not inherent in the flower itself; it's in the way of seeing. Presumably there is an external world, independent of our representation of it, but we can never see that "other" directly; everything we see is "self" in the sense that it is a representation occurring inside the mind.

What can we not deny?

1. The existence and utility of all of these stories at a relative level. Plenty of concepts break down if you look at them too closely, but are still useful as concepts. Buddhism doesn't require ego death in a psychedelic sense --- the ego can keep going, operating just as before; we are allowed to keep taking the intentional stance towards aspects of experience. We just internalize that this is a stance and not a fundamental truth.
2. Personality. Dissolving the (illusory) sense that your actions are controlled by a little man living inside your head doesn't change the fact that you have tendencies to act in distinct and unique ways. In fact individual personality traits often becomes stronger, more liberated.
3. Distinct sensory streams. In 'my' awareness there are sights and sounds and thoughts and feelings that are different from your sights and sounds and thoughts and feelings. And there is an apparent coherence of moments of consciousness over time --- "I" keep seeing the world from a smoothly changing perspective, with a trajectory of mind-states distinct from what "you" experience. Even if all of my thoughts, experiences, and preferences change over time, there is still the continuity of trajectory.
   • Some might deny even this, saying that the apparent continuity is itself an empty representation, not something we can ever observe directly.
   • But we could also just accept a notion of "self" defined as a trajectory of mind-moments, and notice that this doesn't recover very much of the original strong meaning. The self still isn't contained in any particular mind-moment; there's still no single element of experience that could rightly be characterized as 'me' or 'mine'.
4. Localization of perception. It is probably more proper (and certainly more spacious-feeling) to identify with the entire field of awareness than to locate ourselves in a specific spot behind the eyes. But even such a decentered or nonlocalized awareness is still going to consist of perception from a certain vantage point. That vantage point may stop feeling like "you", but it will still determine what sort of content arises in awareness.
5. The ability to exert some influence over thoughts and feelings. It's just that this happens in essentially the same way that we influence other events in the external world (eg driving a car, or asking a waiter to bring us a dish), rather than through some special infallible form of direct ownership.