I can see that I-thought is not myself

Dear Sir: I have been reading and re-reading your replies to me in the other thread along with The Ten Thousand Things. I must say I am very grateful to you for taking all the trouble to address my doubts in such detail. I had not expected this much.

I have seen that many doubts arise in my mind, and I am able to answer myself. However, there is one critical point where I am stuck, and I hope you can throw some light on it. At one place, the interaction goes like this:

Sanjay: OK. I can see that I-thought is not myself. But then why bring the word 'myself' into the picture at all? Would it not be more accurate to say that there is just a flow of thoughts, feelings, and perceptions but no 'myself'?

Circus People, 2017

Yes, Sanjay. That's the point. There has to be the concept of a fixed myself that “has” thoughts and feelings and does things because, socially, it is necessary that people be made to feel responsible for their words and other behaviors and made accountable legally for them. Morality works to keep people in line to a certain extent, particularly with those who see themselves as moral agents, but falls short of keeping the streets safe, which we humans require and are willing to police. In a few words, society depends on enforcement. So, to be sane in the world, one has to play along and pretend to be a fixed unitary "self" while seeing that myself is at least partly, if not entirely, a convention, a role, a shared tacit assumption.

The word “I” refers not to a role but to an everchanging mystery, unfolding moment-by-moment and entirely unknowable in advance, including ideas and feelings such as right and wrong, which have no objective measures.

Sanjay: From the above, it follows that “myself” is a socially necessary convention that is useful from a third-person perspective. Fine. But what about “myself” from the first-person perspective? It seems from the above that from the first-person perspective, “myself” does not exist. No self. Anatta. Yet, at other places in The Ten Thousand Things, you seem to suggest that “myself” is the totality of thoughts, feelings, and perceptions at the moment- transient but not non-existent.

When I look at my own experience, I do not feel that the totality of thoughts, feelings, and perceptions is “myself,” and I understand that I cannot force myself to feel so. I can see that there is just a flow of thoughts, feelings, and perceptions, and there is no “myself” other than a thought. But I cannot see how the totality of thoughts, feelings, and perceptions is “myself.”

Robert: Yes, Sanjay. You have your finger right on the pulse of this issue.

We all have the feeling of being, of existing. That cannot be denied. So, on that level, there is no doubt that myself exists--exists as a feeling, I mean.

Myself or I or ego is the name we use for the experience of being the apparent center of a world of perceptions, feelings, and thoughts that are different in detail, if not in their basic structure, from the perceptions, feelings, and thoughts of another human being who is not me. If I am working from a valid theory of mind, I may be able to understand others by ascribing mental states to them, but always with the awareness that their beliefs, emotions, desires, intentions, and thoughts may not be much like mine at all, so that the mental states I ascribe to them may be only projections of my mental states. I have no accurate means of assessing what is projection and what is not because I have no way of being inside the mind of another human animal. All I can know is my own mind, and only part of that.

You used the term Anatta, which you translated as “no-self,” but I think a better translation is “non-self." This may sound like a quibble over a single letter, but it isn’t. I’ll get to that. And by the way, Atta, in Pali, is often translated as “soul,” not “self,” so another possible translation of Anatta is “no-soul.” This point lies at the heart of Buddhist psychology, which is a rejection of religion (although, unfortunately, many “Buddhists” have made a religion of the Buddha’s ideas and a godlike magical being of him). To deify is to discount the humanity of the one being glorified, ruining the ability to grasp what she or he is talking about.

Hinduism and Buddhism emerged around 2500 years ago in the same region of northern India, so it's likely that the Buddha had read the Bhagavad Gita and other Hindu texts. He rejected Vedanta, left his company of ascetics, and went on alone in search of his own mind. That should be enough to silence the spirituality buffs who claim that all paths converge at the top of the mountain or that all “masters” see the same truth, but it won’t.

In Advaita Vedanta, as in Christianity and Islam, “the soul” is held to be a fact. In that tradition, moksha or liberation begins when one understands one’s “true self” as Atman, which means spirit, soul, or inner self. Perceptions, feelings, and thoughts are constantly changing, it is said, and so are not "real," but Atman is deathless, birthless, and unchanging, and so is the only reality. This is Eternalism, one of the two “extreme views” of the self that Buddha warned against. The other is Annihilationism, which posits the existence of a self that is cut off and utterly destroyed at death. According to the Buddha, these two views are extreme because they reify (“thing-ify”) the self.

So for the Advaitin, as for Christians and Moslems, perceptions, feelings, and thoughts are not myself but only part of the passing scenery in the soul’s “journey.” In this view, which is frankly and dogmatically religious, to say nothing of dualistic, perceptions, feelings, and thoughts are like a movie projected on the screen of consciousness and witnessed by Atman. They are considered no more real than a movie. In the last stage of liberation, according to this system, Atman is seen as identical to the highest metaphysical reality of the universe, Brahman, which in Western religions is called “God.”

The Buddha disagreed. When he spoke of Anatta, he did not mean that the ordinary “self” of experience was unreal or only Mithya (relatively real), which is the Vedic idea, but that the self had no fixed, permanent, freestanding existence that could either live eternally or die materially. He refused to reify the feeling of existing that we all feel. He saw the attribution of a fixed essence to objects and persons as a kind of illusion. Not an illusion à la Vedanta, in which the illusion is of a world of objects and persons, but a failure to understand the impermanence of all phenomena, including myself.

Becoming is the illusion. Nothing is becoming anything. Whatever exists is here only in this instant, and the next instant will be different, and the one after that, etcetera, with the various elements of experience flowing, mixing, and changing, producing a new “myself” in each instant—an ephemeral self, but no less real just because it does not last. Nothing else does either.

I underscore this point because I consider Advaita Vedanta to be little more than glorified Eternalism—the belief that the individual is an unchanging self—which the Buddha rejected specifically and often by name, Sassatavada. Vedanta is a faith religion through and through. If someone wants that, fine by me, cada loco a su tema, and whatever gets you through the night.

Two readers told me that I have confused popular ideas of Vedanta with its essence. One said:

“your example of Vedanta—that the goal is to manifest one's divinity and the soul's union with the divine through successive births—is a common view but doesn't capture at all the full depth of Vedanta. Advaita Vedanta teaches that Atman (the individual self) is Brahman (the universal self), transcending the usual ideas of individuality and divinity.

“Advaita Vedanta uses ideas from the Vedas as preparation for its ultimate truth . . . .”

This reader also said that:

Spirituality is not for the faint-hearted. It is a truth that is obvious but cannot be expressed in words.

I understand that words cannot express the totality of experience. I understand too that what might seem like gospel to one mind will appear as symbol and metaphor to another more subtle one. However, my critique is not so much about religious dogma and how it is interpreted but about the certainty that an ultimate truth exists—even one that defies being expressed verbally—and can be known by humans. One can believe in such a truth and even imagine knowing it, but believing doesn’t make it so.

I am not a Buddhist, but when I encountered the psychology the Buddha taught, I felt immediately that his views had importance and accuracy. The moral pronouncements, the codes of behavior, and all that never were for the likes of me. They were for the monks who, by definition, needed rules and structure. But the essence—reject all explanations and traditions and find your own mind, is what I’ve been up to, just like he was.

In direct opposition to the Vedas, the Buddha regarded the self as impermanent—a confection whose ingredients were always changing. In that view, the experience of myself is a transient, ever-changing happening produced by the coming together of the five Skandhas.

Skandha means heap or pile, so using that word denotes five separate, differing elements. These five heaps are:

material form (the body)
feelings and sensations
perceptions
mental activity (thoughts)
consciousness (that which is aware of the first four heaps.)

The impression of a permanent myself, he said, is an illusion arising from the automatic assembling of these five disparate elements into an apparently solid entity. That feeling is illusory for two reasons. First, the five heaps are not related in any predictable, unchanging way. A certain feeling might arise, such as a headache, while thoughts involve something else entirely. Meanwhile, there is awareness of both the headache and the thoughts.

But even more to the point, none of the items in the heaps has an independent existence of its own. Take the material form, the human body. A body might seem like one definite thing, one object, but it is made up of countless entities, both human matter, like brain cells or bones, and non-human matter, like the bacteria in the gut. There is no way that materials with no independent existence could be assembled to produce something that does have an independent existence.

This view is similar to the "bundle theory" of the 18th-century philosopher David Hume, who said that an object consists only of a collection (bundle) of properties, such as the redness and softness of a rose or the hardness and density of a rock. According to Hume, an object consists only of its various properties and the relations among them and nothing more. In this view, objects have no overarching essence apart from their multiple properties.

If you understand this, Sanjay, you will see that it is inaccurate to say that no self exists. There is a “self”—a bundle of all the properties of a living human primate animal. But there are many properties, and they keep intersecting, merging, and assembling in different ways, leaving this bundle, this human “myself” (body, mind, and all) inherently empty of independent existence.

This impermanence is precisely what religion tries to deny. To me, the irony is palpable: a corpse is lowered into the ground or burnt in an oven or on a pyre. At the same time, some cat in a funny costume prattles about the rewards that the previous inhabitant of the corpse is about to enjoy, just to underscore one aspect of this bizarre but ubiquitous fairytale.

As Hume had it, there is no unified self--the self is a bundle. But it makes no sense to say that being a bundle is the same as not existing at all. Hume’s view and the Buddha’s are not nihilism. Myself is not nothing--not non-existent--but not something (some “thing") either. That is what Anatta means: not something but not nothing, either.

When I say that myself is made of perceptions, feelings, and thoughts, I’m pointing out that there is no myself that is the separate perceiver of perceptions, the feeler of feelings, or the thinker of thoughts. Thought, thinking, and thinker are three
words for the same happening—three views of the same momentary event. In that view, the “I-thought” is part of myself, but only when it is present.

I usually assume that awareness is something organic that brains do, but I could be wrong about that. Any opinion at all about that could be wrong. Nonetheless, that question, which some people regard as crucial, holds little interest for me. I don't expect it to be resolved anytime soon- not by science and most definitely not by spiritual metaphysics. So, for me, the question doesn't enter into ordinary living. I see what I see, feel what I feel, and think what I think. That just arises as it does. No one seems to be making it.

The mere feeling of being myself cannot create the world of experience nor ascertain from whence it comes or how. So it falls to "Robert," who is not something but not quite nothing either, to walk on, enjoying what he can and enduring what he cannot. That is a long-winded way of saying chopping wood and carrying water.

On no evidence, Vedanta claims that there is a non-material, so-called “Absolute” and that perceptions, feelings, and thoughts are a pale reflection of that. In that conception, the “Absolute” is infinite, timeless, deathless, etc. But that is a naked claim with nothing to back it up. No human, I say, is in a position to know anything about infinity, timelessness, deathlessness, oneness, or anything of the kind. One can have ideas and beliefs about the supposed "Absolute," but ideas and beliefs are not knowledge--not by a long shot.

The so-called jnanis say that they have realized the ultimate nature of the self and have attained a timeless, deathless state. I see no evidence for that at all. Zero. Nada. Zilch. Some even claim that they never lose awareness, even in deep sleep, and the Universe would disappear if they did. In my view, that is arrant solipsism.

To me, it makes more sense to regard perceptions, feelings, and thoughts as various properties of a bundle we call a human being and the sense of self as the fortuitous blending of those properties from instant to instant, as the Buddha had it, and Hume too.

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