Beautifully said. You see clarity. Right now the word that comes to mind as seen is coordination. Thanks, Robert. And that picture is somehow perfectly right.
My goodness, this was so clear and useful. And as an added comment, as a photographer who spends a lot of time working in graveyards I can attest that even plastic flowers DO wither and fade. 😊
You nailed it again and gave me an excellent template for a reply when I am asked by friends, family, what this ‘non-dualism’ means as sometimes happens (I never volunteer anything).
Not wanting to intrude with unnecessary talk, but still wishing to participate, i would like to point out a few sentences that are light and lively as well as encouraging. The idea and the experience of emptiness is leavening; it lifts the spirit and advocates play.
"This sense of centrality is real. What is questionable is the further assumption that it refers to a fixed, independent subject underlying experience.”
“What exists is a process, a configuration of experience with continuity but no identity. Experience does not belong to a self; the sense of self arises as part of experience.”
“This does not mean that the self is unreal. The experience of being a self is real. The illusion is the notion that this experience refers to a fixed thing.”
“There is no hidden witness standing apart from this process, no final metaphysical ground waiting to be discovered. There is only what is happening, as it happens.”
Thank you. Not an intrusion in the least. Those passages do point to something important, and I’m glad you singled them out.
What those passages are doing is limiting the question of selfhood to what can actually be described without consolation or metaphysical surplus. The sense of centrality is part of experience, not something to be argued away. What’s under examination is the further move that treats that experience as evidence of a fixed subject standing behind it.
If this is experienced as light, playful, or even ironic, it’s not because anything has been added, but because the demand for a fixed referent has dropped away. Caring doesn’t disappear, but it no longer needs to be anchored in an identity. What remains can feel improvisational, not because it is unconstrained, but because it is no longer defending a center.
Nothing is added. Nothing is preserved. When the demand for a center drops away, experience continues without explanation, without appeal, without residue. It moves because it moves.
I remember struggling with anatta in the early years of my acquaintance with zen - seeing it as a belief to be adopted rather than an explanation of how things are to be arrived at through observation and contemplation.
As you've said before - you get what you get when you get it...and if one "gets" this, it unavoidably has a significant effect on one's perspective on everything - in the moments when this clear seeing arises, at least😀🈚️🫶
Beautifully explained! Since you bring up "The Buddhist concept of anatta", do you think the process that I mistakenly pretend is a real self will continue after death? Is reincarnation possible in your thinking, or it that an unjustified metaphysical add-on that some Buddhists have mistakenly adopted?
Short answer: nothing continues, because nothing ever existed as a thing in the first place.
If what we’re calling a “self” is a process, a functional stabilization arising from biology, memory, language, and social pressure, then it ends the same way any process ends when its conditions end. Death is not a transition point for an entity; it is the dissolution of the conditions that made the process possible.
Reincarnation only becomes a live question if the self is first mistaken for a thing rather than a process. Once that reification occurs, a new problem appears: what happens to the thing when the body dies? Reincarnation is then introduced to solve that invented problem by positing some carrier, stream, or essence that can survive bodily breakdown.
From here, that move is precisely the metaphysical add-on. It does not explain experience; it patches a hole created by turning a process into an entity and then asking how the entity travels.
Some Buddhist traditions retain reincarnation language for cultural, ethical, and pedagogical reasons, and more fundamentally as a response to the biologically conditioned fear of complete cessation.
What continues is not you, but continuity itself: other lives, other processes, other stabilizations, none of which inherit anything personal from this one.
Thanks. I tried to be careful and not imply that a self would continue by saying "the process that I mistakenly pretend is a real self", but might something like karma link the process that I now mistakenly pretend is a self to another process in a later time that flows in an around another body? For example, maybe karma is like a bundle of memories or a record of some of the memories that my process is now gathering (presumably in my brain somehow, but maybe also in some other structure that we know nothing about now but that is connected with the functioning of the universe), and some of those memories stored in the universe structure somehow become available to another process later. Of course all of that is rank speculation with probably a lot of metaphysics mixed in. And also, I am not really that keen on actually experiencing reincarnation, though conceptually I find it fun to think about.
You’re right that what you’re describing is speculative, but the more important point is where the speculation comes from. The idea that karma might function as a transferable record, memory bundle, or cosmic archive is not an inference from experience. It’s a received religious solution to a familiar pressure: the fear of complete cessation.
Once the self is correctly seen as a process rather than an entity, there is no remaining mechanism by which one process could be linked to another across death in any personal sense. Introducing hidden structures, unknown substrates, or universe-level memory stores doesn’t clarify that. It simply rebuilds, with far-fetched metaphors, the very continuity one was trying not to smuggle back in.
That doesn’t make the idea immoral or shameful. It does make it conceptually indulgent, a kind of metaphysical Rube Goldberg machine constructed to keep nothing from turning into nothing.
If you find thinking about it conceptually entertaining, OK by me. But from here, it’s not an open explanatory possibility. It’s a culturally sophisticated way of resisting the unglamorous fact that processes end when their conditions end.
Wonderful article Robert - thank you! All quite clear. As often happens, a perturbation occurs. I find it too final. Because one cannot experience outside of one’s bubble should not determine there is nothing outside, or other than, the bubble…feels like there is no value to wonder. This is an unsatisfactory reply, but words - subject/object - are too limiting.
Thank you. I’m not saying there is nothing outside the bubble. I’m saying that the idea of an outside is largely inherited, and I don’t see anything in actual experience that requires it. That doesn’t eliminate wonder. It just keeps wonder from turning into a conclusion
Beautifully said. You see clarity. Right now the word that comes to mind as seen is coordination. Thanks, Robert. And that picture is somehow perfectly right.
Yes on the photo, Kate. I agree. Somehow germane.
My goodness, this was so clear and useful. And as an added comment, as a photographer who spends a lot of time working in graveyards I can attest that even plastic flowers DO wither and fade. 😊
You nailed it again and gave me an excellent template for a reply when I am asked by friends, family, what this ‘non-dualism’ means as sometimes happens (I never volunteer anything).
very fine distinction you made in this piece ...thanks Robert!
Great article and wonderful photo!
Thank you, Joan
Not wanting to intrude with unnecessary talk, but still wishing to participate, i would like to point out a few sentences that are light and lively as well as encouraging. The idea and the experience of emptiness is leavening; it lifts the spirit and advocates play.
"This sense of centrality is real. What is questionable is the further assumption that it refers to a fixed, independent subject underlying experience.”
“What exists is a process, a configuration of experience with continuity but no identity. Experience does not belong to a self; the sense of self arises as part of experience.”
“This does not mean that the self is unreal. The experience of being a self is real. The illusion is the notion that this experience refers to a fixed thing.”
“There is no hidden witness standing apart from this process, no final metaphysical ground waiting to be discovered. There is only what is happening, as it happens.”
Rupert—
Thank you. Not an intrusion in the least. Those passages do point to something important, and I’m glad you singled them out.
What those passages are doing is limiting the question of selfhood to what can actually be described without consolation or metaphysical surplus. The sense of centrality is part of experience, not something to be argued away. What’s under examination is the further move that treats that experience as evidence of a fixed subject standing behind it.
If this is experienced as light, playful, or even ironic, it’s not because anything has been added, but because the demand for a fixed referent has dropped away. Caring doesn’t disappear, but it no longer needs to be anchored in an identity. What remains can feel improvisational, not because it is unconstrained, but because it is no longer defending a center.
Nothing is added. Nothing is preserved. When the demand for a center drops away, experience continues without explanation, without appeal, without residue. It moves because it moves.
I love that photograph!
My first thought!
Indeed...clearly expressed.
I remember struggling with anatta in the early years of my acquaintance with zen - seeing it as a belief to be adopted rather than an explanation of how things are to be arrived at through observation and contemplation.
As you've said before - you get what you get when you get it...and if one "gets" this, it unavoidably has a significant effect on one's perspective on everything - in the moments when this clear seeing arises, at least😀🈚️🫶
Beautifully explained! Since you bring up "The Buddhist concept of anatta", do you think the process that I mistakenly pretend is a real self will continue after death? Is reincarnation possible in your thinking, or it that an unjustified metaphysical add-on that some Buddhists have mistakenly adopted?
Tim—
Short answer: nothing continues, because nothing ever existed as a thing in the first place.
If what we’re calling a “self” is a process, a functional stabilization arising from biology, memory, language, and social pressure, then it ends the same way any process ends when its conditions end. Death is not a transition point for an entity; it is the dissolution of the conditions that made the process possible.
Reincarnation only becomes a live question if the self is first mistaken for a thing rather than a process. Once that reification occurs, a new problem appears: what happens to the thing when the body dies? Reincarnation is then introduced to solve that invented problem by positing some carrier, stream, or essence that can survive bodily breakdown.
From here, that move is precisely the metaphysical add-on. It does not explain experience; it patches a hole created by turning a process into an entity and then asking how the entity travels.
Some Buddhist traditions retain reincarnation language for cultural, ethical, and pedagogical reasons, and more fundamentally as a response to the biologically conditioned fear of complete cessation.
What continues is not you, but continuity itself: other lives, other processes, other stabilizations, none of which inherit anything personal from this one.
Thanks. I tried to be careful and not imply that a self would continue by saying "the process that I mistakenly pretend is a real self", but might something like karma link the process that I now mistakenly pretend is a self to another process in a later time that flows in an around another body? For example, maybe karma is like a bundle of memories or a record of some of the memories that my process is now gathering (presumably in my brain somehow, but maybe also in some other structure that we know nothing about now but that is connected with the functioning of the universe), and some of those memories stored in the universe structure somehow become available to another process later. Of course all of that is rank speculation with probably a lot of metaphysics mixed in. And also, I am not really that keen on actually experiencing reincarnation, though conceptually I find it fun to think about.
Tim—
You’re right that what you’re describing is speculative, but the more important point is where the speculation comes from. The idea that karma might function as a transferable record, memory bundle, or cosmic archive is not an inference from experience. It’s a received religious solution to a familiar pressure: the fear of complete cessation.
Once the self is correctly seen as a process rather than an entity, there is no remaining mechanism by which one process could be linked to another across death in any personal sense. Introducing hidden structures, unknown substrates, or universe-level memory stores doesn’t clarify that. It simply rebuilds, with far-fetched metaphors, the very continuity one was trying not to smuggle back in.
That doesn’t make the idea immoral or shameful. It does make it conceptually indulgent, a kind of metaphysical Rube Goldberg machine constructed to keep nothing from turning into nothing.
If you find thinking about it conceptually entertaining, OK by me. But from here, it’s not an open explanatory possibility. It’s a culturally sophisticated way of resisting the unglamorous fact that processes end when their conditions end.
Wonderful article Robert - thank you! All quite clear. As often happens, a perturbation occurs. I find it too final. Because one cannot experience outside of one’s bubble should not determine there is nothing outside, or other than, the bubble…feels like there is no value to wonder. This is an unsatisfactory reply, but words - subject/object - are too limiting.
Thank you. I’m not saying there is nothing outside the bubble. I’m saying that the idea of an outside is largely inherited, and I don’t see anything in actual experience that requires it. That doesn’t eliminate wonder. It just keeps wonder from turning into a conclusion
Done.
Thank you Robert!!!!!!
Well said, well said O son of noble family :)
Excellent