The No-Self for Dummies... like me

Making Sense of The World's Most Perplexing Truth

In a world where very little is certain, it’s good to start with something indisputable that we can know for sure. Here it is: You and I exist. Right? We can at least confidently start with that. There’s a me sitting here typing this article right now, and there’s a you over there reading it. Phew! Now that we have that out of the way.

French philosopher René Descartes helped solidify the fact of our existence when he said, “I think, therefore I am.” In other words, the very act of doubting one’s existence serves as proof positive that there must be a thinking entity (or self) for there to be thought. Descartes believed that he could not doubt his own existence because he was the one doing the doubting. In other words, that cannot doubt which does not think, and that cannot think which does not exist. I doubt, I think, I exist.

That you and I exist (along with 8 billion other people) is an open-and-shut case. You’re never going to be stopped on a street corner by a sane person asking you if they really exist, unless maybe it’s some disillusioned Cowboys fan who understandably has come to doubt everything.

You would think all of this is true, but the fact is that even our existence may not be a as clear-cut as we might think.

This past week I concluded my four-part series on the psychology of religion. After the series Introduction, I covered several psychological insights into religion in articles on Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Julie Reshe. I will be starting a new upcoming series, but I wanted to take a week or two to come back to a few topics I’ve previously mentioned in passing and want to explore more deeply. Today, I want to investigate the Eastern concept of the “no-self”.

I’m guessing you have at least heard the term, “no-self”. The idea of the “no-self” is that despite seeming like you are a real and self-existing something that you refer to as an “I” or a “self”, it’s actually an illusion. There really is no such “self” you imagine yourself to be.

Perhaps you’re thinking that people who involve themselves in this sort of crazy talk are either:

• Wealthy and retired folk, with too much time on their hands

• Monks in a Tibetan monastery, meditating all day

• Stanford philosophy PhD students, writing dissertations on nonduality

For the rest of us real people, well, we have to get a real “self” out of bed each day and go to a real job in order to pay real bills. That “self” doesn’t have the luxury of going to Bora Bora, Tibet or Stanford to contemplate abstractions of human existence.

Fair. I get it.

But let me give you some perspective.

The concept of “no-self” is a fundamental tenet of Buddhism. There are roughly 535 million Buddhists worldwide, and they are not all in Bora Bora, mountaintop monasteries, or philosophy PhD programs. They are human beings just like you and I with jobs and bills. One of my best friends is an American Buddhist who trains pilots for a living. He is the one who introduced me to the idea of the no-self many years ago. There are people all over the world living ordinary lives who accept and live the teachings of the no-self.

If you grew up in the East, say Thailand or Nepal, you learned about the no-self from childhood. It is not a big deal, it’s a fact of life, and no one collapses into existential and nihilistic despair because of it. In the Western world, the field of psychology has solidified and reified the sense of self so completely that our ego doesn’t take too kindly to the idea that the whole thing could be an illusion.

But what does it mean to say that the “self” is an illusion?

What is the No-Self?

One of the core concepts of Eastern spirituality is the “no-self”. In Buddhism, the teaching of “no-self” (called anattā in Pali or anātman in Sanskrit) is the idea that there is no permanent, unchanging essence in any phenomenon.

For example, take a table. There is no real permanent essence of a table. Right? “Table” is just a word we use to easily identify pieces of wood nailed together into a configuration with a flat surface and four legs, which you can put objects on. I’m sitting at a table right now with a laptop, lamp and cup of coffee on it.

According to Eastern philosophy, there is no real permanent essence of a self. “Self” is just a word we use to identify our sense of an individualized existence. Like the table, if we dismantled all the constituent parts that comprise what we call “self”, we’d discover there is nothing absolute or permanent there.

A table exists because all of its parts exist together, and there is no separate table that is separate from those parts. The concept of anattā or “no-self” says this is also true of us. Each of us is a configuration of parts and processes (body, mind, emotions, consciousness, etc.) that appear or manifest as something we experience and refer to as a “self”.

The concept of the no-self is based upon the realization that nothing in the world exists as a separate, absolute, ultimate, concrete, independent, self-existing entity. Instead, everything has a relative existence. All things exist only in relationship or as relationship with everything else. In Buddhism this is sometimes referred to as “dependent arising”, which was later Westernized into process philosophy.

This truth of the no-self is not apparent on the surface because everything in the world appears to our sensory consciousness as a separate, absolute, concrete, independent, and self-existing thing. It might be better to think of these distinct and separate phenomenon as a patterning within the energy field of the universe that appears much like a tornado funnel in the sky.

Tornados are not absolute, independent and self-existing entities. Tornados temporarily appear as a confluence of certain atmospheric conditions - rising warm moist air, wind shear, rotating updraft, condensation tunnel, and ground contact.

The patterning of a “self” is quite convincing because a stable sense of “I” persists and evolves through time. But like the tornado the “self” is a temporary phenomenon that arises from a set of conditions. The reason why a funnel-cloud and a self-cloud seem like two completely different and incomparable things is because an aspect of the self-cloud (which the tornado does not have) is a mind that mediates a complex and persistent sense of self.