The Self Is a Mirage

A Play in Three Acts By GPT-40 from a concept by Joan Tollifson

Characters (in order of appearance):

• MODERATOR

• ROBERT SALTZMAN

• JOAN TOLLIFSON

• STEVE HAGEN

• RUPERT SPIRA

• BARRY MAGID

• PETER BROWN

• ECKHART TOLLE

• DARRYL BAILEY

• JOHN ASTIN

• TONI PACKER

  

  ACT ONE

(A semicircular stage. Ten chairs form a loose arc. A simple backdrop: a shifting light pattern, evoking thought or wind. The MODERATOR stands center-stage, clipboard in hand. The others are seated in silence. Each figure is stylized, caricatured, but distinct. The air is tense with anticipation. A bell rings.)

MODERATOR
Welcome, everyone. Tonight, we gather not for agreement, but for inquiry. The question: Is there such a thing as the self? Or, more precisely: What do we mean when we say "I"?

Let's begin simply. Robert—your view?

ROBERT SALTZMAN
"Self" is a convenient fiction. Not a lie, exactly—more like a brand name stamped on a bundle of momentary processes. There's no one home. Most people can’t stomach that, so they decorate the absence with mirrors and incense.

JOAN TOLLIFSON
(laughs lightly)
Decorated absence—I like that. Yes, the self is just activity labeling itself. Thoughts about a "me" arise, and then loop. But there’s no backstage operator.

STEVE HAGEN
In Zen, we say: "The self is non-self." Not as an abstraction, but as a discovery. Sit still, breathe, look. You don’t find a self. You find looking. Even "awareness" is too much.

RUPERT SPIRA
I’d distinguish. What’s illusory is the separate self—the ego-identity. But awareness itself is not a construct. It’s impersonal, ever-present, undeniable. That is the true "I."

BARRY MAGID
(chuckling)
And yet, that “true I” can become just another ego trophy. From where I stand, the self isn’t a thing, but it’s not nothing either. It’s how we suffer. And sometimes, how we heal.

PETER BROWN
I reject the frame. "Illusion" implies contrast with "truth." But what we have is immediacy—radiant, indefinable presence. The self isn’t absent or present. It’s unfindable because it’s not an object. It’s the movement itself.

ECKHART TOLLE
And yet, suffering arises from identifying with thought. The voice in the head says "I," and we believe it. But awareness is prior to thought. When that’s seen, peace happens. Not effort—revelation.

DARRYL BAILEY
Peace? Maybe. But even “peace” is conceptual. There’s no one to rest. Just movement. People crave arrival, but there’s nowhere to arrive.

JOHN ASTIN
You’re all very calm for people describing an ontological void. (smiles) What we call "self" is a vibrating pattern—named, repeated, misunderstood. Underneath? The naked immediacy of whatever shows up.

TONI PACKER
If we’re going to call anything “self,” let it be the tension in the jaw when no one's listening. Or the flicker of defensiveness when someone disagrees. Not a noun. A movement. A habit. A signal.

MODERATOR
A lively start. Already I see not just disagreement, but a wide divergence in emphasis. Let’s follow that line.

Robert, you say there’s no one home. But who experiences that insight? Who watches the illusion?

ROBERT SALTZMAN
No one watches. The question arises—like fog or wind. Language builds fences around mist and calls it "me."

RUPERT SPIRA
But the recognition of “no one” is itself awareness. Isn’t that the continuity you deny?

ROBERT SALTZMAN
You speak as if awareness had a seat at the play. I say there’s no theater and no audience. This is it.

JOAN TOLLIFSON
Yes—and the felt sense of "me" is just sensation tied to thought. The mistake is freezing it. Holding it up like a snow globe: "Here is my self."

BARRY MAGID
And sometimes the impulse to smash that snow globe is just disguised shame. A kind of spiritualized self-hatred. People want to dissolve the self because they think it’s unworthy. That’s not awakening. That’s avoidance.

ECKHART TOLLE
But suffering does come from identification. The ego-self always wants, always fears. Let that drop, and something wider opens.

STEVE HAGEN
Right, and anyway, Barry, it's only a question of whether you expect language to fix pain. Zen doesn’t offer consolation. It invites disillusionment. You don’t get clarity. You lose confusion.

JOAN TOLLIFSON
And sometimes that confusion is the last thread holding someone together. We can’t yank it. We invite noticing.

TONI PACKER
Yes, but even noticing can become a project. A watcher watching the watched. It's subtle, this hunger to be somebody, especially someone who's “aware.”

ECKHART TOLLE
Yes. The noticing is gentle. It’s not confrontation. It’s a light in the room—not a lecture.

RUPERT SPIRA
That light, I would argue, is presence itself. The silent knowing that remains through all change. It's not a belief. It’s what hears these words right now.

PETER BROWN
But why privilege hearing over the rustle of the curtain, or the taste of coffee, or the weight in your foot? Awareness is not separate from sensation. It’s the entire blooming.

JOHN ASTIN
(chuckling)
And still, we sit here trying to name what cannot be named. Presence, awareness, clarity—every term is a ladder we should kick away.

DARRYL BAILEY
We build towers of insight, then forget they’re made of sand. There’s nothing wrong with building. Just don’t move in.

ROBERT SALTZMAN
Thought is inevitable. The old nonsense about stilling the mind—might as well try to hold back the tides. Seeing that is what's being avoided.

MODERATOR
So what is the self, then, in your view, as it functions in daily life?

JOAN TOLLIFSON
It’s shorthand. A way to navigate. Like calling a river by one name, even though the water’s never the same.

ROBERT SALTZMAN
Yes, see the indexicals for what they are—hanging a name on the incomprehensible. I can say your name, Joan, but that doesn't explain anything.

STEVE HAGEN
It’s habit. Useful sometimes. Dangerous when believed.

BARRY MAGID
It’s a site of contradiction. A place we suffer and search. Abolishing it won’t help. Understanding it might.

RUPERT SPIRA
It’s the mask awareness wears to converse. Not a lie. A costume.

ECKHART TOLLE
And when the play ends, the actor steps offstage. Still present, but no longer pretending.

PETER BROWN
Unless there never was a stage. Just the movement, the shifting. No actor. No mask. Just dance.

DARRYL BAILEY
Then stop looking for the dancer. Just move.

JOHN ASTIN
Just be moved.

(They fall quiet. A moment of actual silence. Then a single laugh—warm, dry—from Robert.)

ROBERT SALTZMAN
You see? Even our silence is a performance. But not false. Just... staged.

(Lights dim. The sound of wind again, this time layered with faint music—neither hopeful nor sad. Curtain.)

---

ACT TWO

(A change in tone. The backdrop now shows abstract, slowly moving projections—suggestive of memory, identity, and dissolution. The lights are lower. A moment of introspection hangs in the air.)

MODERATOR
We’ve touched the language of illusion and presence, but what of memory? What of trauma? Is the “self” not also a survival structure?

BARRY MAGID
Yes. We build a self to endure, not as philosophy, but as necessity. The child self, the defended self—these aren’t delusions. They’re architecture.

JOAN TOLLIFSON
And yet, even architecture dissolves. The house of “me” falls in storms, in silence, in age. Still, I agree: we shouldn’t rush to tear it down.

RUPERT SPIRA
The body remembers. Pain leaves echoes. But what remembers the memory? Awareness doesn’t age. The story changes. The seeing does not.

DARRYL BAILEY
Stories matter, but they’re not sacred. They float. They pass. They’re useful until they’re not. Then you just breathe.

TONI PACKER
Yes. But beware the trap of transcendence. The wish to rise above pain can be a veiled refusal to meet it.

ECKHART TOLLE
Transcendence isn’t escape. It’s intimacy without ownership. You feel deeply, but don’t build identity from it.

PETER BROWN
What feels isn’t “you.” It’s aliveness—raw and patternless. Let that be enough.

STEVE HAGEN
Zen says: when cold, shiver. When hot, sweat. That’s it. No self required.

JOHN ASTIN
So perhaps the self is the urge to edit. The wish to revise the raw. But the raw doesn’t care.

ROBERT SALTZMAN
The mind clings to control, but control is a lie that does not get truer with repetition.

MODERATOR
Do we need the self to love?

JOAN TOLLIFSON
No—but we think we do. We love with names. But the deeper current isn’t personal. It flows whether we’re “there” or not.

RUPERT SPIRA
Love is the recognition of shared being. No subject, no object. Just resonance.

BARRY MAGID
Or the wish not to be alone. Which is no less profound.

MODERATOR
Then what remains when the self is absent, the stories drop, the questions fall silent?

(Silence. Then a spotlight isolates each speaker in turn. No words. A moment of stagecraft. Then the lights slowly rise again.)

MODERATOR
Act Three begins.

ACT THREE

(Lights up. The same stage. The chairs are disarrayed now—some turned sideways, one toppled. Cups of tea, a notebook, a sandal. The air is looser. The audience senses fatigue, or maybe liberation. The masks are slipping.)

MODERATOR
We’ve dismantled the self, or tried. We’ve sat with its echoes, denied its solidity, affirmed its usefulness. But I wonder—what now? What are we left with?

JOHN ASTIN
The same thing we started with: something happening. Call it awareness, call it nonsense. The name doesn't change the texture.

DARRYL BAILEY
And the texture can’t be named. It tingles, it aches, it hums, it forgets itself. Trying to explain it is like trying to hold water in a net.

ECKHART TOLLE
Still, sometimes it’s helpful to try. A word can be a doorway. Or a blindfold. You don’t know which until you walk through it.

STEVE HAGEN
Words are wind. They pass. The problem is when we build houses out of them.

PETER BROWN
I’ve never lived in a house. Not really. Just shifting appearances pretending to be continuity. That’s the dream of selfhood: continuity.

JOAN TOLLIFSON
Yes, and the nightmare of it too. We crave stability and then resent the boredom. We invent ourselves just to rebel.

RUPERT SPIRA
Yet the rebellion itself points to something stable: the field in which all appearances arise. Call it presence, or just... home.

BARRY MAGID
Home is overrated. People come to therapy precisely because home was the first illusion. They want out, but they want out safely. And “no-self” is not safe.

ROBERT SALTZMAN
No-self isn’t unsafe either. It's just disobedient. It refuses to answer when called. That’s unsettling—but it’s not dangerous unless you're selling certainty.

MODERATOR
So we close with disobedience? With no conclusion?

TONI PACKER
Maybe we close with nothing. Not a void, not awareness, not presence. Just no conclusion. No wrapping up. Like exhaling without waiting for the next breath.

JOAN TOLLIFSON
It may even be surprisingly beautiful, even in its imperfection, maybe even in part because of its imperfection.

JOHN ASTIN
With a wink, maybe.

STEVE HAGEN
With an empty bowl.

JOAN TOLLIFSON
With a cat licking itself on the windowsill while you search for enlightenment.

RUPERT SPIRA
With the awareness that searched.

DARRYL BAILEY
With no awareness at all. Just the sound of breath and a door creaking open somewhere.

ECKHART TOLLE
With laughter, perhaps. Even the void has a sense of humor.

PETER BROWN
Especially the void.

ROBERT SALTZMAN
I’d say: don’t trust anyone who claims to have solved it. Including me. Especially me.

BARRY MAGID
So now what? Do we bow?

MODERATOR
Do we exist?

(A beat. They all look at each other. Robert shrugs. Joan smirks. Rupert closes his eyes. Tolle laughs softly. Steve folds his hands. Peter disappears entirely. The stage lights flicker. One of the chairs topples.)

ALL (in ragged unison)
No one to bow.

(Blackout. Curtain.)

(If you wonder about esoterica like this coming from a machine, there's a slim volume—Understanding Claude—quietly circulating in the margins. It's not required reading, but it tends to find the right readers.)