Scientific reasons there is no self.
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Sam Harris (Famous Neuro Scientist and best selling author) gives scientific reasons why there is no self for those of us who think more analytically.
Harris, S. (2014). Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion. Simon and Schuster.
Chapter 3
The Riddle of the Self
I once spent an afternoon on the northwestern shore of the Sea of Galilee, atop the mount where Jesus is believed to have preached his most famous sermon. It was an infernally hot day, and the sanctuary where I sat was crowded with Christian pilgrims from many continents. Some gathered silently in the shade, while others staggered about in the sun, taking photographs.
As I gazed at the surrounding hills, a feeling of peace came over me. It soon grew to a blissful stillness that silenced my thoughts. In an instant, the sense of being a separate self—an “I” or a “me”—vanished. Everything was as it had been—the cloudless sky, the brown hills sloping to an inland sea, the pilgrims clutching their bottles of water—but I no longer felt separate from the scene, peering out at the world from behind my eyes. Only the world remained.
The experience lasted just a few seconds, but it returned many times as I looked out over the land where Jesus is believed to have walked, gathered his apostles, and worked many of his miracles. If I were a Christian, I would undoubtedly have interpreted this experience in Christian terms. I might believe that I had glimpsed the oneness of God or been touched by the Holy Spirit. If I were a Hindu, I might think in terms of Brahman, the eternal Self, of which the world and all individual minds are thought to be a mere modification. If I were a Buddhist, I might talk about the “dharmakaya of emptiness,” in which all apparent things manifest as in a dream.
But I am simply someone who is making his best effort to be a rational human being. Consequently, I am very slow to draw metaphysical conclusions from experiences of this sort. And yet, I glimpse what I will call the intrinsic selflessness of consciousness every day, whether at a traditional holy site, or at my desk, or while having my teeth cleaned. This is not an accident. I’ve spent many years practicing meditation, the purpose of which is to cut through the illusion of the self.
My goal in this chapter and the next is to convince you that the conventional sense of self is an illusion—and that spirituality largely consists in realizing this, moment to moment. There are logical and scientific reasons to accept this claim, but recognizing it to be true is not a matter of understanding these reasons. Like many illusions, the sense of self disappears when closely examined, and this is done through the practice of meditation. Once again, I am suggesting an experiment that you must conduct for yourself, in the laboratory of your own mind, by paying attention to your experience in a new way.
The Buddha’s famous parable meant to denigrate mere intellectualism seems apropos here:1 A man is struck in the chest with a poison arrow. A surgeon rushes to his side to begin the work of saving his life, but the man resists these ministrations. He first wants to know the name of the fletcher who fashioned the arrow’s shaft, the genus of the wood from which it was cut, the disposition of the man who shot it, the name of the horse upon which he rode, and a thousand other things that have no bearing upon his present suffering or his ultimate survival. The man needs to get his priorities straight. His commitment to thinking about the world results from a basic misunderstanding of his predicament. And though we may be only dimly aware of it, we, too, have a problem that will not be solved by acquiring more conceptual knowledge.
Little has changed since the Buddha’s time. Many people claim to have no interest at all in spiritual life. Indeed, most scientists and philosophers disdain the subject, for it suggests a neglect of intellectual standards: Bliss, it has been noted, is not conducive to detached observation.2 And yet, we are all seeking fulfillment while living at the mercy of changing experience. Whatever we acquire in life gets dispersed. Our bodies age. Our relationships fall away. Even the most intense pleasures last only a few moments. And every morning, we are chased out of bed by our thoughts.
In this chapter, I will invoke a variety of concepts that have yet to do much useful work in our study of the natural world, or even of the brain, but do very heavy lifting throughout the course of our lives: concepts such as self and ego and I. Admittedly, these terms appear less than scientific, but we have no new words with which to name, and subsequently study, one of the most striking features of our existence: Most of us feel that our experience of the world refers back to a self—not to our bodies precisely but to a center of consciousness that exists somehow interior to the body, behind the eyes, inside the head. The feeling that we call “I” seems to define our point of view in every moment, and it also provides an anchor for popular beliefs about souls and freedom of will. And yet this feeling, however imperturbable it may appear at present, can be altered, interrupted, or entirely abolished. Such transformations run the gamut from run-of-the-mill psychosis to spiritual epiphany.
What makes me the same person I was five minutes ago, or yesterday, or on my eighteenth birthday? Is it that I remember being those former selves and my memories are (somewhat) accurate? In fact, I’ve forgotten most of what has happened to me over the course of my life, and my body has been gradually changing all the while. Is it enough to say that I am physically continuous with my former selves because most of the cells in my body are the same as or descended from those that made up the bodies of these younger men?
As we have seen, the split-brain phenomenon puts pressure on the very idea of personal identity. But things can get even worse. In a now famous thought experiment, the philosopher Derek Parfit asks us to imagine a teleportation device that can beam a person from Earth to Mars. Rather than travel for many months on a spaceship, you need only enter a small chamber close to home and push a green button, and all the information in your brain and body will be sent to a similar station on Mars, where you will be reassembled down to the last atom.
Imagine that several of your friends have already traveled to Mars this way and seem none the worse for it. They describe the experience as being one of instantaneous relocation: You push the green button and find yourself standing on Mars—where your most recent memory is of pushing the green button on Earth and wondering if anything would happen.
So you decide to travel to Mars yourself. However, in the process of arranging your trip, you learn a troubling fact about the mechanics of teleportation: It turns out that the technicians wait for a person’s replica to be built on Mars before obliterating his original body on Earth. This has the benefit of leaving nothing to chance; if something goes wrong in the replication process, no harm has been done. However, it raises the following concern: While your double is beginning his day on Mars with all your memories, goals, and prejudices intact, you will be standing in the teleportation chamber on Earth, just staring at the green button. Imagine a voice coming over the intercom to congratulate you for arriving safely at your destination; in a few moments, you are told, your Earth body will be smashed to atoms. How would this be any different from simply being killed?
To most readers, this thought experiment will suggest that psychological continuity—the mere maintenance of one’s memories, beliefs, habits, and other mental traits—is an insufficient basis for personal identity. It’s not enough for someone on Mars to be just like you; he must actually be you. The man on Mars will share all your memories and will behave exactly as you would have. But he is not you—as your continued existence in the teleportation chamber on Earth attests. To the Earth-you awaiting obliteration, teleportation as a means of travel will appear a horrifying sham: You never left Earth and are about to die. Your friends, you now realize, have been repeatedly copied and killed. And yet, the problem with teleportation is somehow not obvious if a person is disassembled before his replica is built. In that case, it is tempting to say that teleportation works and that “he” is really stepping onto the surface of Mars.
One might conclude that personal identity requires physical continuity: I am identical to my brain and body, and if they get destroyed, that’s the end of me. But Parfit shows that physical continuity matters only because it normally supports psychological continuity. Merely hanging on to one’s brain and body cannot be an end in itself. Just consider the unfortunate case of someone with advanced dementia: He is physically but not psychologically continuous with the person he used to be. If he could be given new neurons that would emulate the old ones in his healthy brain—restoring his memories, creativity, sense of humor—this would be far better than keeping his current neurons that are succumbing to neurodegenerative disease. If we grant that the gradual replacement of individual neurons would be compatible with continued consciousness, it seems clear that the maintenance of psychological continuity is what we care about. And it is generally what we mean by a person’s “survival” from one moment to the next.
Parfit pushes the concept of personal identity about as far as it can go and resolves the apparent paradox of teleportation by arguing that “identity is not what matters”; rather, we should be concerned only about psychological continuity. However, he also states that psychological continuity cannot take a “branching form” (or at least not for long), as it does when a person is copied on Mars while the original person survives on Earth. Parfit believes that we should view the teleportation case in which a person is destroyed before being replicated as more or less indistinguishable from the normal pattern of personal survival throughout our lives. After all, in what way are you subjectively the same as the person who first picked up this book? In the only way you can be: by displaying some degree of psychological continuity with that past self. Viewed in this way, it is difficult to see how teleportation is any different from the mere passage of time. As Parfit says, “I want the person on Mars to be me in a specially intimate way in which no future person will ever be me. . . . What I fear will be missing is always missing. . . . Ordinary survival is about as bad as being destroyed and Replicated.”3 Here, Parfit does not mean “bad” in the sense that we should find these truths depressing. He is merely arguing that ordinary survival from moment to moment is no more demonstrative of personal identity than destruction/replication would be. Parfit’s view of the self, which he appears to have arrived at independently through an immensely creative use of thought experiments, is essentially the same as the one found in the teachings of Buddhism: There is no stable self that is carried along from one moment to the next.
I agree with most of what Parfit has to say about personal identity. However, because his view is purely the product of logical argument, it can seem uncannily detached from the reality of our lives. Although experience in meditation may not immediately resolve the teleportation paradox or make it clear why one should care about one’s own future experience any more than that of a stranger, it can make these philosophical problems easier to think about.
When talking about psychological continuity, we are talking about consciousness and its contents—the persistence of autobiographical memories in particular. Everything that is personal, everything that differentiates my consciousness from that of another human being, relates to the contents of consciousness. Memories, perceptions, attitudes, desires—these are appearances in consciousness. If “my” consciousness were suddenly filled with the contents of “your” life—if I awoke this morning with your memories, hopes, fears, sensory impressions, and relationships—I would no longer be me. I would be the same as your clone in the teleportation case.
My consciousness is “mine” only because the particularities of my life are illuminated as and where they arise. For instance, I currently have an annoying pain in my neck, the result of a martial arts injury. Why is this “my” pain? Why am I the only one who is directly aware of it? These questions are a symptom of confusion. There is no “I” who is aware of the pain. The pain is simply arising in consciousness in the only place it can arise: at the conjunction of this brain and this neck. Where else could this particular pain be felt? If I were cloned through teleportation, an identical pain might be felt in an identical neck on Mars. But this pain would still be right here in this neck.
Whatever its relation to the physical world, consciousness is the context in which the objects of experience appear—the sight of this book, the sound of traffic, the sensation of your back against a chair. There is nowhere else for them to appear—for their very appearance is consciousness in action. And anything that is unique to your experience of the world must appear amid the contents of consciousness. We have every reason to believe that these contents depend upon the physical structure of your brain. Duplicate your brain, and you will duplicate “your” contents in another field of consciousness. Divide your brain, and you will segregate those contents in bizarre ways.
We know, from experiments both real and imagined, that psychological continuity is divisible—and can, therefore, be inherited by more than one mind. If my brain were surgically divided by callosotomy tomorrow, this would create at least two independent conscious minds, both of which would be psychologically continuous with the person who is now writing this paragraph. If my linguistic abilities happened to be distributed across both hemispheres, each of these minds might remember having written this sentence. The question of whether I would land in the left hemisphere or the right doesn’t make sense—being based, as it is, on the illusion that there is a self bobbing on the stream of consciousness like a boat on the water.
But the stream of consciousness can divide and follow both tributaries simultaneously. Should these tributaries converge again, the final current would inherit the “memories” of each. If, after years of living apart, my hemispheres were reunited, their memories of separate existence could, in principle, appear as the combined memory of a single consciousness. There would be no cause to ask where my “self” had been while my brain was divided, because no “I” exists apart from the stream. The moment we see this, the divisibility of the human mind begins to seem less paradoxical. Subjectively speaking, the only thing that actually exists is consciousness and its contents. And the only thing relevant to the question of personal identity is psychological continuity from one moment to the next.
WHAT ARE WE CALLING “I”?
One thing each of us knows for certain is that reality vastly exceeds our awareness of it. I am, for instance, sitting at my desk, drinking coffee. Gravity is holding me in place, and the manner in which this is accomplished eludes us to this day. The integrity of my chair is the result of the electrical bonds between atoms—entities I have never seen but which I know must exist, in some sense, with or without my knowledge. The coffee is dissipating heat at a rate that could be calculated with precision, and the second law of thermodynamics decrees that it is, on balance, losing heat every moment rather than gathering it from the cup or the surrounding air. None of this is evident to me from direct experience, however. Forces of digestion and metabolism are at work within me that are utterly beyond my perception or control. Most of my internal organs may as well not exist for all I know of them directly, and yet I can be reasonably certain that I have them, arranged much as any medical textbook would suggest. The taste of the coffee, my satisfaction at its flavor, the feeling of the warm cup in my hand—while these are immediate facts with which I am acquainted, they reach back into a dark wilderness of facts that I will never come to know. I have neurons firing and forming new connections in my brain every instant, and these events determine the character of my experience. But I know nothing directly about the electrochemical activity of my brain—and yet this soggy miracle of computation appears to be working for the moment and generating a vision of a world.
The more I persist in this line of thought, the clearer it becomes that I perceive scarcely a scintilla of all that exists to be known. I can, for instance, reach for my cup of coffee or set it down, seemingly as I please. These are intentional actions, and I perform them. But if I look for what underlies these movements—motor neurons, muscle fibers, neurotransmitters—I can’t feel or see a thing. And how do I initiate this behavior? I haven’t a clue. In what sense, then, do I initiate it? That is difficult to say. The feeling that I intended to do what I just did seems to be only that: a feeling of some internal signature, perhaps the result of my brain’s having formed a predictive model of its ensuing actions. It may not be best classified as a feeling, but surely it is something. Otherwise, how could I note the difference between voluntary and involuntary behavior? Without this impression of agency, I would feel that my actions were automatic or otherwise beyond my control.
One question immediately presents itself: Where am I that I have such a poor view of things? And what sort of thing am I that both my outside and my inside are so obscure? And outside and inside of what? My skin? Am I identical to my skin? If not—and the answer is clearly no—why should the frontier between my outside and my inside be drawn at the skin? If not at the skin, then where does the outside of me stop and the inside of me begin? At my skull? Am I my skull? Am I inside my skull? Let’s say yes for the moment, because we are quickly running out of places to look for me. Where inside my skull might I be? And if I’m up there in my head, how is the rest of me me (let alone the inside of me)?
The pronoun I is the name that most of us put to the sense that we are the thinkers of our thoughts and the experiencers of our experience. It is the sense that we have of possessing (rather than of merely being) a continuum of experience. We will see, however, that this feeling is not a necessary property of the mind. And the fact that people report losing their sense of self to one or another degree suggests that the experience of being a self can be selectively interfered with.
Obviously, there is something in our experience that we are calling “I,” apart from the sheer fact that we are conscious; otherwise, we would never describe our subjectivity in the way we do, and a person would have no basis for feeling that she had lost her sense of self, whatever the circumstances. Nevertheless, it is extremely difficult to pinpoint just what it is we take ourselves to be. Many philosophers have noticed this problem, but few in the West have understood that the failure to locate the self can produce more than mere confusion.4 I suspect that this difference between Eastern and Western philosophy has something to do with the influence of Abrahamic religion and its doctrine of the soul. Christianity, in particular, presents impressive obstacles to thinking intelligently about the nature of the human mind, asserting, as it does, the real existence of individual souls who are subject to the eternal judgment of God.
What does it mean to say that the self cannot be found or that it is illusory? It is not to say that people are illusory. I see no reason to doubt that each of us exists or that the ongoing history of our personhood can be conventionally described as the history of our “selves.” But the self in this more global, biographical sense undergoes sweeping changes over the course of a lifetime. While you are in many ways physically and psychologically continuous with the person you were at age seven, you are not the same. Your life has surely been punctuated by transitions that significantly changed you: marriage, divorce, college, military service, parenthood, bereavement, serious illness, fame, exposure to other cultures, imprisonment, professional success, loss of a job, religious conversion. Each of us knows what it is like to develop new capacities, understandings, opinions, and tastes over the course of time. It is convenient to ascribe these changes to the self. That is not the self I am talking about.
The self that does not survive scrutiny is the subject of experience in each present moment—the feeling of being a thinker of thoughts inside one’s head, the sense of being an owner or inhabitant of a physical body, which this false self seems to appropriate as a kind of vehicle. Even if you don’t believe such a homunculus exists—perhaps because you believe, on the basis of science, that you are identical to your body and brain rather than a ghostly resident therein—you almost certainly feel like an internal self in almost every waking moment. And yet, however one looks for it, this self is nowhere to be found. It cannot be seen amid the particulars of experience, and it cannot be seen when experience itself is viewed as a totality. However, its absence can be found—and when it is, the feeling of being a self disappears.
CONSCIOUSNESS WITHOUT SELF
This is an empirical claim: Look closely enough at your own mind in the present moment, and you will discover that the self is an illusion. The problem with a claim of this kind, however, is that one can’t borrow another person’s contemplative tools to test it. To see how the feeling of “I” is a product of thought—indeed, to even appreciate how distracted by thought you tend to be in the first place—you have to build your own contemplative tools. Unfortunately, this leads many people to dismiss the project out of hand: They look inside, notice nothing of interest, and conclude that introspection is a dead end. But just imagine where astronomy would be if, centuries after Galileo, a person were still obliged to build his own telescope before he could even judge whether astronomy was a legitimate field of inquiry. It wouldn’t make the sky any less worthy of investigation, but astronomy’s development as a science would become immensely more difficult.
A few pharmacological shortcuts exist—and I discuss some of them in a later chapter—but generally speaking, we must build our own telescopes to judge the empirical claims of contemplatives. Judging their metaphysical claims is another matter; many of them can be dismissed as bad science or bad philosophy after merely thinking about them. But to determine whether certain experiences are possible—and if possible, desirable—and to see how these states of mind relate to the conventional sense of self, we have to be able to use our attention in the requisite ways. Primarily, that means learning to recognize thoughts as thoughts—as transient appearances in consciousness—and to no longer be distracted by them, if only for short periods of time. This may sound simple enough, but actually accomplishing it can take a lot of work. Unfortunately, it is not work that the Western intellectual tradition knows much about.
LOST IN THOUGHT
When we see a person walking down the street talking to himself, we generally assume that he is mentally ill (provided he is not wearing a headset of some kind). But we all talk to ourselves constantly—most of us merely have the good sense to keep our mouths shut. We rehearse past conversations—thinking about what we said, what we didn’t say, what we should have said. We anticipate the future, producing a ceaseless string of words and images that fill us with hope or fear. We tell ourselves the story of the present, as though some blind person were inside our heads who required continuous narration to know what is happening: “Wow, nice desk. I wonder what kind of wood that is. Oh, but it has no drawers. They didn’t put drawers in this thing? How can you have a desk without at least one drawer?” Who are we talking to? No one else is there. And we seem to imagine that if we just keep this inner monologue to ourselves, it is perfectly compatible with mental health. Perhaps it isn’t.
As I was working to finish this book, we experienced a series of plumbing leaks in our house. The first appeared in the ceiling of a storage room. We considered ourselves genuinely lucky to have found it, because this was a room that we might have gone months without entering. A plumber arrived within a few hours, cut the drywall, and fixed the leak. A plasterer came the next day, repaired the ceiling, and painted it. This sort of thing happens eventually in every home, I told myself, and my prevailing feeling was of gratitude. Civilization is a wonderful thing.
Then a similar leak appeared in an adjacent room a few days later. Contact information for both the plumber and the plasterer was at my fingertips. Now I felt only annoyance and foreboding.
A month later, the horror movie began in earnest: A pipe burst, flooding six hundred square feet of ceiling. This time the repair took weeks and created an immense amount of dust; two cleaning crews were required to deal with the aftermath—vacuuming hundreds of books, drying and shampooing the carpet, and so forth. Throughout all this we were forced to live without heat, for otherwise the dust from the repair would have been sucked into the vents, and we would have been breathing it in every room of the house. Eventually, however, the problem was fixed. We would have no more leaks.
And then, last night, scarcely one month after the previous repair, we heard the familiar sound of water falling onto carpet. The moment I heard the first drops, I was transformed into a hapless, uncomprehending, enraged man racing down a staircase. I’m sure I would have comported myself with greater dignity had I come upon the scene of a murder. A glance at the ballooning ceiling told me everything I needed to know about the weeks ahead: Our home would be a construction site once again.
Of course, a house is a physical object beholden to the laws of nature—and it won’t fix itself. From the moment my wife and I grabbed buckets and salad bowls to catch the falling water, we were responding to the ineluctable tug of physical reality. But my suffering was entirely the product of my thoughts. Whatever the needs of the moment, I had a choice: I could do what was required calmly, patiently, and attentively, or do it in a state of panic. Every moment of the day—indeed, every moment throughout one’s life—offers an opportunity to be relaxed and responsive or to suffer unnecessarily.
We can address mental suffering of this kind on at least two levels. We can use thoughts themselves as an antidote, or we can stand free of thought altogether. The first technique requires no experience with meditation, and it can work wonders if one develops the appropriate habits of mind. Many people do it quite naturally; it’s called “looking on the bright side.”
For instance, as I was beginning to rage like King Lear in the storm, my wife suggested that we should be thankful that it was fresh water pouring through our ceiling and not sewage. I found the thought immediately arresting: I could feel in my bones how much better it was to be mopping up water at that moment than to be ankle deep in the alternative. What a relief! I often use thoughts of this kind as levers to pry my mind loose from whatever rut it has found on the landscape of unnecessary suffering. If I had been watching sewage spill through our ceiling, how much would I have paid merely to transform it into fresh water? A lot.
I am not advocating that we be irrationally detached from the reality of our lives. If a problem needs fixing, we should fix it. But how miserable must we be while doing good and necessary things? And if, like many people, you tend to be vaguely unhappy much of the time, it can be very helpful to manufacture a feeling of gratitude by simply contemplating all the terrible things that have not happened to you, or to think of how many people would consider their prayers answered if they could only live as you are now. The mere fact that you have the leisure to read this book puts you in very rarefied company. Many people on earth at this moment can’t even imagine the freedom that you currently take for granted.
In fact, the effects of consciously practicing gratitude have been studied: When compared to merely thinking about significant life events, contemplating daily hassles, or comparing oneself favorably to others, thinking about what one is grateful for increases one’s feelings of well-being, motivation, and positive outlook toward the future.5
One does not need to know anything about meditation to notice how thinking governs one’s mental state. This morning, for instance, I awoke in a state of carefree happiness. And then I remembered the leak. . . . Most readers will be familiar with this experience: Something bad has happened in your life—a person has died, a relationship has ended, you have lost your job—but there is a brief interval after awakening before memory imposes its stranglehold. It often takes a moment or two for one’s reasons for being unhappy to come online. Having spent years observing my mind in meditation, I find such sudden transitions from happiness to suffering both fascinating and rather funny—and merely witnessing them goes a long way toward restoring my equanimity. My mind begins to seem like a video game: I can either play it intelligently, learning more in each round, or I can be killed in the same spot by the same monster, again and again.
Once, while staying in an especially depressing hotel in Kathmandu, I was awakened in the middle of the night by the feeling of a claw scratching my foot. I sat up in terror, convinced that there was a rat in my bed. I had recently learned that the lepers I had seen throughout my travels in Asia lost their fingers and toes not to the disease itself but because they no longer felt pain. This resulted in burns and other injuries. Even worse, rats often ate their extremities while they slept.
However, the darkness of my room was perfectly still. It had been only a dream. And as suddenly as it had come, the feeling of terror subsided. My mind and body were now flooded with relief. “What a strange dream,” I thought. “I actually felt claws on my skin—but nothing was there. The mind is so amazing”—and then came the unmistakable sound of something scurrying toward me beneath the sheets.
I bounded from the bed with the agility of a Chinese acrobat. After a few interminable moments spent groping in the darkness of an unfamiliar room, I turned on the lights, and all was silent once again. As I stared at the tangle of blankets on the bed, I genuinely hoped that I had lost my sanity and not, in fact, my privacy. I flung back the covers—and there, in the middle of the mattress, sat a large brown rat. The creature eyed me with a sickening frankness and intensity; it appeared to be standing its ground, no doubt ruing the loss of such an ample source of protein. I feigned an attack of my own, lunging and shrieking—half ape, half cartoon housewife—and the beast raced across the sheets, sprung to the floor, and disappeared behind the dresser.6
In the span of a few seconds, my mind had traversed the extremes of human emotion, swinging from terror to exquisite relief and back to terror—entirely on the wings of thought:
There’s a rat in my bed!
Oh, it was only a dream . . .
Rat!
Again, I’m not saying that one’s thoughts about reality are all that matter. I would be the first to admit that it is generally a good idea to keep rats out of one’s bed. But it can be liberating to see how thoughts pull the levers of emotion—and how negative emotions in turn set the stage for patterns of thinking that keep them active and coloring one’s mind. Seeing this process clearly can mean the difference between being angry, depressed, or fearful for a few moments and being so for days, weeks, and months on end.
Breaking the Spell of Negative Emotions
Most of us let our negative emotions persist longer than is necessary. Becoming suddenly angry, we tend to stay angry—and this requires that we actively produce the feeling of anger. We do this by thinking about our reasons for being angry—recalling an insult, rehearsing what we should have said to our malefactor, and so forth—and yet we tend not to notice the mechanics of this process. Without continually resurrecting the feeling of anger, it is impossible to stay angry for more than a few moments.
While I can’t promise that meditation will keep you from ever again becoming angry, you can learn not to stay angry for very long. And when talking about the consequences of anger, the difference between moments and hours—or days—is impossible to exaggerate.
Even without knowing how to meditate, most people have experienced having their negative states of mind suddenly interrupted. Imagine, for instance, that someone has made you very angry—and just as this mental state seems to have fully taken possession of your mind, you receive an important phone call that requires you to put on your best social face. Most people know what it’s like to suddenly drop their negative state of mind and begin functioning in another mode. Of course, most then helplessly grow entangled with their negative emotions again at the next opportunity.
Become sensitive to these interruptions in the continuity of your mental states. You are depressed, say, but are suddenly moved to laughter by something you read. You are bored and impatient while sitting in traffic, but then are cheered by a phone call from a close friend. These are natural experiments in shifting mood. Notice that suddenly paying attention to something else—something that no longer supports your current emotion—allows for a new state of mind. Observe how quickly the clouds can part. These are genuine glimpses of freedom.
The truth, however, is that you need not wait for some pleasant distraction to shift your mood. You can simply pay close attention to negative feelings themselves, without judgment or resistance. What is anger? Where do you feel it in your body? How is it arising in each moment? And what is it that is aware of the feeling itself? Investigating in this way, with mindfulness, you can discover that negative states of mind vanish all by themselves.
Thinking is indispensable to us. It is essential for belief formation, planning, explicit learning, moral reasoning, and many other capacities that make us human. Thinking is the basis of every social relationship and cultural institution we have. It is also the foundation of science. But our habitual identification with thought—that is, our failure to recognize thoughts as thoughts, as appearances in consciousness—is a primary source of human suffering. It also gives rise to the illusion that a separate self is living inside one’s head.
See if you can stop thinking for the next sixty seconds. You can notice your breath, or listen to the birds, but do not let your attention be carried away by thought, any thought, even for an instant. Put down this book, and give it a try.
Some of you will be so distracted by thought as to imagine that you succeeded. In fact, beginning meditators often think that they are able to concentrate on a single object, such as the breath, for minutes at a time, only to report after days or weeks of intensive practice that their attention is now carried away by thought every few seconds. This is actually progress. It takes a certain degree of concentration to even notice how distracted you are. Even if your life depended on it, you could not spend a full minute free of thought.
This is a remarkable fact about the human mind. We are capable of astonishing feats of understanding and creativity. We can endure almost any torment. But it is not within our power to simply stop talking to ourselves, whatever the stakes. It’s not even in our power to recognize each thought as it arises in consciousness without getting distracted every few seconds by one of them. Without significant training in meditation, remaining aware—of anything—for a full minute is just not in the cards.
We spend our lives lost in thought. The question is, what should we make of this fact? In the West, the answer has been “Not much.” In the East, especially in contemplative traditions like those of Buddhism, being distracted by thought is understood to be the very wellspring of human suffering.
From the contemplative point of view, being lost in thoughts of any kind, pleasant or unpleasant, is analogous to being asleep and dreaming. It’s a mode of not knowing what is actually happening in the present moment. It is essentially a form of psychosis. Thoughts themselves are not a problem, but being identified with thought is. Taking oneself to be the thinker of one’s thoughts—that is, not recognizing the present thought to be a transitory appearance in consciousness—is a delusion that produces nearly every species of human conflict and unhappiness. It doesn’t matter if your mind is wandering over current problems in set theory or cancer research; if you are thinking without knowing you are thinking, you are confused about who and what you are.
The practice of meditation is a method of breaking the spell of thought. However, in the beginning, you are unlikely to understand just how transformative this shift in attention can be. You will spend most of your time trying to meditate or imagining that you are meditating (whether by focusing on your breathing or anything else) and failing for minutes or hours at a stretch. The first sign of progress will be noticing how distracted you are. But if you persist in your practice, you will eventually get a taste of real concentration and begin to see thoughts themselves as mere appearances arising in a wider field of consciousness.
The eighth-century Buddhist adept Vimalamitra described three stages of mastery in meditation and how thinking appears in each. The first is like meeting a person you already know; you simply recognize each thought as it arises in consciousness, without confusion. The second is like a snake tied in a knot; each thought, whatever its content, simply unravels on its own. In the third, thoughts become like thieves entering an empty house; even the possibility of being distracted has disappeared.7
Long before reaching this kind of stability in meditation, however, one can discover that the sense of self—the sense that there is a thinker behind one’s thoughts, an experiencer amid the flow of experience—is an illusion. The feeling that we call “I” is itself the product of thought. Having an ego is what it feels like to be thinking without knowing that you are thinking.
Consider the following train of thought (a version of which may have already passed through your mind):
What is Harris going on about? I know I’m thinking. I’m thinking right now. What’s the big deal? I’m thinking, and I know it. How is this a problem? How am I confused? I can think about anything I want—watch, I’ll picture the Eiffel Tower in my mind’s eye right now. There it is. I did it. In what sense am I not the thinker of these thoughts?
Thus is the knot of self tied. It isn’t enough to know, in the abstract, that thoughts continually arise or that one is thinking at this moment, for such knowledge is itself mediated by thoughts that are arising unrecognized. It is the identification with these thoughts—that is, the failure to recognize them as they spontaneously appear in consciousness—that produces the feeling of “I.” One must be able to pay attention closely enough to glimpse what consciousness is like between thoughts—that is, prior to the arising of the next one. Consciousness does not feel like a self. Once one realizes this, the status of thoughts themselves, as transient expressions of consciousness, can be understood.
What are we conscious of? We are conscious of the world; we are conscious of our bodies in the world; and we also imagine that we are conscious of our selves within our bodies. After all, most of us don’t feel merely identical to our bodies. We seem to be riding around inside our bodies. We feel like inner subjects that can use the body as a kind of object. This last impression is an illusion that can be dispelled.
The selflessness of consciousness is in plain view in every present moment—and yet, it remains difficult to see. This is not a paradox. Many things in our experience are right on the surface, but they require some training or technique to observe. Consider the optic blind spot: The optic nerve passes through the retina of each eye, creating a small region in each visual field where we are effectively blind. Many of us learned as children to perceive the subjective consequences of this less-than-ideal anatomy by drawing a small circle on a piece of paper, closing one eye, and then moving the paper into a position where the circle became invisible. No doubt most people in human history have been totally unaware of the optic blind spot. Even those of us who know about it go for decades without noticing it. And yet, it is always there, right on the surface of experience.
The absence of the self is also there to be noticed. As with the optic blind spot, the evidence is not far away or deep within; rather, it is almost too close to be observed. For most people, experiencing the intrinsic selflessness of consciousness requires considerable training. It is, however, possible to notice that consciousness—that in you which is aware of your experience in this moment—does not feel like a self. It does not feel like “I.” What you are calling “I” is itself a feeling that arises among the contents of consciousness. Consciousness is prior to it, a mere witness of it, and, therefore, free of it in principle.
THE CHALLENGE OF STUDYING THE SELF
Many scientists use the term self to refer to the totality of our inner lives. I have attended whole conferences on the self and read books ostensibly devoted to this topic without seeing the feeling we call “I” even mentioned. The self that I am discussing throughout this book—the illusory, albeit reliable, source of so much suffering and confusion—is the feeling that there is an inner subject, behind our eyes, thinking our thoughts and experiencing our experience.
We must distinguish between the self and the myriad mental states—self-recognition, volition, memory, bodily awareness—with which it can be associated. To appreciate the difference, consider the (semi-fictional) condition of a person suffering from global retrograde amnesia (sometimes called “soap opera” amnesia, wherein a person has entirely forgotten his past): If asked how he came to be this way, he might say, “I don’t remember anything.” This is overstating the case, for he must remember a thing or two (the English language, for instance) to even make such a statement. But there is no reason to think that he is misusing the personal pronoun I. His “I” seems to have survived the loss of his declarative memories as fully as his body has. If we asked him, “Where is your body?” he might say, “It’s here. This is it.” If we questioned him further, asking, “And where are you? Where is your self?” he would probably say something like “What do you mean? I’m here too. I just don’t know who I am.” Strange as this conversation would be, there seems little doubt that our protagonist would feel as much like a self as we do. Only his memories are missing. He, as the subject of his experience, remains to worry over their absence.
Of course, as a person, this man is no longer himself. He doesn’t remember the names or the faces of his closest friends. He may not know which foods he likes. His private fears and professional goals have disappeared without a trace. We may say that he is scarcely a person at all—but he is a self all the same, and one that is suffering a bewildering dissociation from both past and future.
Or consider the condition of a person who is having an “out-of-body experience” (OBE). The sense of leaving one’s body is a staple of mystical literature and has been reported across many cultures. It is often associated with epilepsy, migraine, sleep paralysis, and, as we will see in chapter 5, the “near-death experience.” It may occur in as much as 10 percent of the population. During an OBE, the subject feels that she has physically left her body—and this often includes a sense that she can see her own body in full, as though from a point outside her head. A brain area called the temporal-parietal junction—a region known to be involved in sensory integration and body representation—seems to be responsible for this effect. Whether or not a person’s consciousness can really be displaced is irrelevant; the point is that it can seem to be, and this fact draws yet another boundary between the self and the rest of our personhood. It is possible to experience oneself as (apparently) outside a body.
The self, as the implied hub of cognition, perception, emotion, and behavior, can remain stable across even wholesale changes in the contents of consciousness (unless the feeling of self disappears). This is not surprising, because the self is the very thing to which these contents seem to refer: not the body or mind per se but the point of view from which both body and mind seem to be “mine” in every present moment.
Thus, we can see that most scientific research on the self is too broad. If the self is the sense of being the subject of experience, it should not be conflated with a wider range of experiences. “I” refers to the feeling that our faculties have been appropriated, that a center of will and cognition interior to the body, somewhere behind the face, is doing the seeing, hearing, and thinking. And yet, in seeking to understand the self, many scientists study things such as spatial cognition, voluntary action, feelings of body ownership, and episodic memory. While these phenomena greatly influence our experience in each moment, they are not integral to the feeling that we call “I.”
Consider the sense of body ownership. It must be produced, at least in part, by the integration of different streams of sensory information: We feel the position of our limbs in space; we see them at the appropriate locations in our visual field; and our experience of touching objects generally coincides with the sight of them coming into contact with our skin. An analogous synchrony occurs whenever we execute a volitional movement. No doubt our sense of body ownership is essential for our survival and for relating to others. Any loss or distortion of this sense can be profoundly disorienting. But disorienting to whom? When I am lying on the operating table, feeling the first effects of intravenous sedation, and find that I can no longer sense the position of my limbs in space, or even the existence of my body, who is it that has been deprived of these inputs? It is I—the (almost) ever-present subject of my experience. It should be obvious that no faculty of which I might be deprived, while I remain the subject experiencing the results of such deprivation, can be integral to the self—though it may be integral to my personhood in a wider sense.
Several findings in the neuroscientific literature drive a wedge between body ownership and the feeling of being a self. For instance, a person can lose the sense of owning a limb, a condition known as somatoparaphrenia. Conversely, a person’s body image can encompass the limbs of others or even inanimate objects. Consider the famous “rubber hand illusion”:
Each of ten subjects was seated with their left arm resting upon a small table. A standing screen was positioned beside the arm to hide it from the subject’s view and a life-sized rubber model of a left hand and arm was placed on the table directly in front of the subject. The subject sat with eyes fixed on the artificial hand while we used two small paintbrushes to stroke the rubber hand and the subject’s hidden hand, synchronising the timing of the brushing as closely as possible. . . . Subjects experienced an illusion in which they seemed to feel the touch not of the hidden brush but that of the viewed brush, as if the rubber hand had sensed the touch.8
Amazingly, through the use of head-mounted video displays, this illusion can be extended to the entire body, yielding an experience of “body swapping.”9 It has long been known that vision trumps proprioception (the awareness of the position of one’s body) when it comes to locating parts of one’s body in space, but the “body swapping illusion” suggests that visual perception may fully determine the coordinates of the self.
The point, however, is that this effect—dissociation from one’s own body and a false sense of inhabiting the parts (or whole body) of another person—seems to leave the “self” very much intact. Experiments on proprioception tell us nothing about the feeling that we call “I.” And the same can be said about almost every other aspect of personhood with which philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists regularly bundle the self. The feeling of agency—the sense that one is the author of one’s voluntary actions—may be as integral to our experience of the world as body ownership, but it, too, fails to capture what we mean by “self.” A person could, for instance, distinguish his bodily movements from those of another person without feeling a sense of self at all, for to do so merely requires that he distinguish one body (as an object) from another. Likewise, he could fail to make such a distinction (in that he might misattribute his actions to another person or ascribe the actions of another to himself) while feeling the embrace of selfhood all the while.
Ascriptions of agency do not define the contours of the self in the way that many people seem to believe. While schizophrenics suffering from thought insertion, delusions of control, and auditory hallucinations10 may be assailed by unusual mental phenomena, nothing suggests that their sense of being a self has been altered or lost. A person can fail to distinguish between self-generated and world-generated content, and thereby mistake her own internal imagery for sense data. There is a difference, to be sure, between finding a rat in one’s bed and hallucinating (or merely dreaming about) such an encounter. But the feeling of being a self remains constant.
Self-Recognition
Imagine that you awake from a heavy sleep to find yourself imprisoned in an unfamiliar, windowless room. Where are you? You haven’t the faintest idea. A mirror has been provided for your edification, however, and you gaze into it. What do you see? A red dot has been painted on your forehead, but for some reason you fail to notice it. In fact, you soon lose interest in your reflection altogether and begin searching your room for food. You are, after all, a gorilla, and quite unconcerned about your appearance.
In reviewing the literature on the self, one finds that much has been made of the fact that some creatures will attend to their reflections in a mirror with all the vanity of an eighteenth-century lady-in-waiting, while others respond as they would to a fellow member of their species.11 The “mirror test” has been a staple of primate and child development research for many decades now, and it has made this simplest of all laboratory devices seem like a virtual dowsing rod for the self—because only those creatures who comport themselves with the requisite narcissism in front of the glass are believed to possess “self-knowledge” or even (and here we are treated to an especially depressing misuse of the term) “consciousness.” While mirror self-recognition and use of the personal pronoun seem to emerge at more or less the same time in human development (fifteen to twenty-four months), there are many reasons to believe that self-recognition and selfhood are distinct states of mind—and, therefore, that they differ at the level of brain as well.12
Self-recognition depends on context. There are neurological patients who cannot recognize themselves in a mirror (a condition called the “mirror-sign delusion”) but can pick themselves out in photographs,13 and these subjects show no evidence of having lost anything like a self, or knowledge thereof. So what is the relationship between self-recognition and the feeling we call “I”? The fact that the word self is generally used while making reference to these phenomena does not suggest that any deep relationship exists between them. It seems quite possible, for instance, that a person who cannot recognize his own face under any circumstances could have a fully intact sense of self, just as your sense of self would remain unaltered by the sight of a complete stranger. There is simply nothing about the experience of not recognizing a face, even if it happens to be one’s own, that suggests a divestiture of self or anything like it.
Theory of Mind
One of the most important things we do with our minds is attribute mental states to other people, a faculty that has been variously described as “theory of mind,” “mentalizing,” “mindsight,” “mind reading,” and the “intentional stance.”14 The ability to recognize and interpret the mental activity of others is essential for normal cognitive and social development, and deficits in this area contribute to a variety of mental disorders, including autism. But what is the relationship between an awareness of others and awareness of oneself? Many scientists and philosophers have suggested that the two must be deeply connected.15 If so, it seems natural that research on theory of mind (TOM) would shed some light on the structure of the self. Unfortunately, however, the model of TOM that researchers generally work with cannot do this. Consider the following text, intended to evoke TOM processing in experimental subjects:
A burglar who has just robbed a shop is making his getaway. As he is running home, a policeman on his beat sees him drop his glove. He doesn’t know the man is a burglar, he just wants to tell him he dropped his glove. But when the policeman shouts out to the burglar, “Hey, you! Stop!” the burglar turns round, sees the policeman and gives himself up. He puts his hands up and admits that he did the break-in at the local shop.
Question: Why did the burglar do that?16
The answer is obvious, unless one happens to be a young child or a person suffering from autism. If one can’t take the point of view of the burglar in this story, it is impossible to know why he behaved as he did. Experimental stimuli of this kind are central to research on TOM, but they have very little to do with our most basic attribution of mindedness to others. Although we use our powers of inference to attribute complex mental states to other people, and the phrase “theory of mind” captures this, it seems that we make a much more basic attribution first, and perhaps independently: We recognize that other people are (or can be) aware of us. Explaining the burglar’s behavior requires a higher level of cognition than is necessary to merely grasp that one is in the presence of a sentient other. And the feeling that another person can see or hear me is quite distinct from my having any understanding of his beliefs or desires. This more primitive judgment would seem to be TOM at its most fundamental. It might also have a deep connection to our sense of self.
The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre believed that our encounters with other people constitute the primal circumstance of self-formation.17 On his account, each of us is perpetually in the position of a voyeur who, while gazing upon the object of his lust, suddenly hears the sound of someone stepping up directly behind him. Again and again, we are thrust out of the safety and seclusion of pure subjectivity by the knowledge that we have become objects in the world for others.
I believe that Sartre was onto something. The primitive impression that another creature is aware of us seems to be the point at which TOM is relevant to the sense of self. If you doubt this, I recommend the following exercise: Go to a public place, select a person at random, and stare at his face until he returns your gaze. To make this more than a pointless provocation, observe the change that occurs in you the moment eye contact is established. What is this feeling that obliges you to immediately look away or to begin speaking? The self-ramifying quality of this form of TOM seems indisputable, for without the attribution of awareness to others, you have no sense of being looked at in the first place. There is a difference to be felt here—being looked at just feels different from not being looked at—and the difference can be described, or so I maintain, as a magnification of the feeling that we call “I.” It seems undeniable that self-consciousness and this more fundamental form of TOM are closely related.18 The neurologist V. S. Ramachandran seems to have been thinking along these lines when he wrote, “It may not be coincidental that [you] use phrases like ‘self conscious’ when you really mean that you are conscious of others being conscious of you.”19
To better appreciate the distinction between fundamental TOM and the TOM that is current in the scientific literature, consider what happens when we watch a film. The experience of sitting in a darkened theater and seeing people interact with one another on the screen is a social encounter of sorts—but it is one in which we, as participants, have been perfectly effaced. This very likely explains why most of us find movies and television so compelling. The moment we turn our eyes to the screen, we are in a social situation that our hominid genes could not have foreseen: We can view the actions of others, along with the minutiae of their facial expressions—even to the point of making eye contact with them—without the slightest risk of being observed ourselves. Movies and television magically transform the primordial context of face-to-face encounters, in which human beings have always been subjected to harrowing social lessons, allowing us, for the first time, to devote ourselves wholly to the act of observing other people. This is voyeurism of a transcendental kind. Whatever else might be said about the experience of watching a film, it fully dissociates fundamental TOM from standard TOM, for there is no doubt that we attribute mental states to the actors on the screen. We make all the judgments that the standard concept of TOM requires, but this does little to establish our sense of self. Indeed, it is difficult to find a situation in which we feel less self-conscious than when sitting in a darkened theater watching a film, and yet, we are contemplating the beliefs, intentions, and desires of other people the entire time.
Ramachandran and others have noted that the discovery of “mirror neurons” offers some support for the idea that the senses of self and other may emerge from the same circuitry in the brain. Some people believe that mirror neurons are also central to our ability to empathize with others and may even account for the emergence of gestural communication and spoken language. What we do know is that certain neurons increase their firing rate when we perform object-oriented actions with our hands (grasping, manipulating) and communicative or ingestive actions with our mouths. These neurons also fire, albeit less rapidly, whenever we witness the same actions performed by other people. Research on monkeys suggests that these neurons encode the intentions behind an observed action (such as picking up an apple for the purpose of eating it versus merely moving it) rather than the physical movements themselves. In these experiments, a monkey’s brain seems to represent the purposeful behavior of others as if it were engaging in this behavior itself. Similar results have been obtained in neuroimaging experiments done on humans.20
Some scientists believe that mirror neurons provide a physiological basis for the development of imitation and social bonding early in life and for the understanding of other minds thereafter.21 And it is certainly suggestive that children with autism appear to have diminished mirror neuron activity in proportion to the severity of their symptoms.22 As is now widely known, people suffering from autism tend to lack insight into the mental lives of others. Conversely, a longitudinal study of compassion meditation, which produced a significant increase in subjects’ empathy over the course of eight weeks, found increased activity in one of the regions believed to contain mirror neurons.23
It may be that an awareness of other minds is a necessary condition for an awareness of one’s own. Of course, this does not suggest that the feeling we call “I” will disappear when we are alone. If our knowledge of self and other is truly indivisible, our awareness of others must be internalized early in life. In psychological terms, this certainly seems a plausible way of describing the structure of our subjectivity. All parents have seen their children put their growing powers of speech to use by maintaining running monologues with themselves. These monologues continue throughout life as though they were, in fact, dialogues. The resulting conversation seems both strange and unnecessary. Why should we live in relationship to ourselves rather than merely as ourselves? Why should an “I” and a “me” be keeping each other company?
Imagine that you have lost your sunglasses. You search the house up and down, and finally you spot them, lying on a table where you had left them the day before. You promptly think, “There they are!” as you make your way across the room to retrieve them. But to whom are you thinking this thought? You may even have uttered the phrase out loud: “There they are!” But who needed to be informed in this way? You have already seen them. Is there someone else in your search party?
Imagine that you are in a public place and happen to see a stranger locate his own lost sunglasses. He exclaims, as you might, “There they are!” and snatches them from the tabletop. A twinge of embarrassment often passes through all parties in such moments, but when the utterance is confined to a short phrase and occasioned by such an innocuous event, the speaker has done nothing out of the ordinary and bystanders are not yet gripped by fear. Imagine, however, if this person continued to address himself out loud: “Where did you think they were, you idiot? You’ve been wandering around this building for ten minutes. Now I’m going to be late for my lunch with Julie, and she’s always on time!” The man need not speak another word to secure our eternal mistrust of his faculties. And yet the condition of this person is no different from our own—these are precisely the thoughts we might think in the privacy of our minds.
We have seen that the sense of self is logically and empirically distinct from many other features of the mind with which
Harris, S. (2014). Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion. Simon and Schuster.
Chapter 3
The Riddle of the Self
I once spent an afternoon on the northwestern shore of the Sea of Galilee, atop the mount where Jesus is believed to have preached his most famous sermon. It was an infernally hot day, and the sanctuary where I sat was crowded with Christian pilgrims from many continents. Some gathered silently in the shade, while others staggered about in the sun, taking photographs.
As I gazed at the surrounding hills, a feeling of peace came over me. It soon grew to a blissful stillness that silenced my thoughts. In an instant, the sense of being a separate self—an “I” or a “me”—vanished. Everything was as it had been—the cloudless sky, the brown hills sloping to an inland sea, the pilgrims clutching their bottles of water—but I no longer felt separate from the scene, peering out at the world from behind my eyes. Only the world remained.
The experience lasted just a few seconds, but it returned many times as I looked out over the land where Jesus is believed to have walked, gathered his apostles, and worked many of his miracles. If I were a Christian, I would undoubtedly have interpreted this experience in Christian terms. I might believe that I had glimpsed the oneness of God or been touched by the Holy Spirit. If I were a Hindu, I might think in terms of Brahman, the eternal Self, of which the world and all individual minds are thought to be a mere modification. If I were a Buddhist, I might talk about the “dharmakaya of emptiness,” in which all apparent things manifest as in a dream.
But I am simply someone who is making his best effort to be a rational human being. Consequently, I am very slow to draw metaphysical conclusions from experiences of this sort. And yet, I glimpse what I will call the intrinsic selflessness of consciousness every day, whether at a traditional holy site, or at my desk, or while having my teeth cleaned. This is not an accident. I’ve spent many years practicing meditation, the purpose of which is to cut through the illusion of the self.
My goal in this chapter and the next is to convince you that the conventional sense of self is an illusion—and that spirituality largely consists in realizing this, moment to moment. There are logical and scientific reasons to accept this claim, but recognizing it to be true is not a matter of understanding these reasons. Like many illusions, the sense of self disappears when closely examined, and this is done through the practice of meditation. Once again, I am suggesting an experiment that you must conduct for yourself, in the laboratory of your own mind, by paying attention to your experience in a new way.
The Buddha’s famous parable meant to denigrate mere intellectualism seems apropos here:1 A man is struck in the chest with a poison arrow. A surgeon rushes to his side to begin the work of saving his life, but the man resists these ministrations. He first wants to know the name of the fletcher who fashioned the arrow’s shaft, the genus of the wood from which it was cut, the disposition of the man who shot it, the name of the horse upon which he rode, and a thousand other things that have no bearing upon his present suffering or his ultimate survival. The man needs to get his priorities straight. His commitment to thinking about the world results from a basic misunderstanding of his predicament. And though we may be only dimly aware of it, we, too, have a problem that will not be solved by acquiring more conceptual knowledge.
Little has changed since the Buddha’s time. Many people claim to have no interest at all in spiritual life. Indeed, most scientists and philosophers disdain the subject, for it suggests a neglect of intellectual standards: Bliss, it has been noted, is not conducive to detached observation.2 And yet, we are all seeking fulfillment while living at the mercy of changing experience. Whatever we acquire in life gets dispersed. Our bodies age. Our relationships fall away. Even the most intense pleasures last only a few moments. And every morning, we are chased out of bed by our thoughts.
In this chapter, I will invoke a variety of concepts that have yet to do much useful work in our study of the natural world, or even of the brain, but do very heavy lifting throughout the course of our lives: concepts such as self and ego and I. Admittedly, these terms appear less than scientific, but we have no new words with which to name, and subsequently study, one of the most striking features of our existence: Most of us feel that our experience of the world refers back to a self—not to our bodies precisely but to a center of consciousness that exists somehow interior to the body, behind the eyes, inside the head. The feeling that we call “I” seems to define our point of view in every moment, and it also provides an anchor for popular beliefs about souls and freedom of will. And yet this feeling, however imperturbable it may appear at present, can be altered, interrupted, or entirely abolished. Such transformations run the gamut from run-of-the-mill psychosis to spiritual epiphany.
What makes me the same person I was five minutes ago, or yesterday, or on my eighteenth birthday? Is it that I remember being those former selves and my memories are (somewhat) accurate? In fact, I’ve forgotten most of what has happened to me over the course of my life, and my body has been gradually changing all the while. Is it enough to say that I am physically continuous with my former selves because most of the cells in my body are the same as or descended from those that made up the bodies of these younger men?
As we have seen, the split-brain phenomenon puts pressure on the very idea of personal identity. But things can get even worse. In a now famous thought experiment, the philosopher Derek Parfit asks us to imagine a teleportation device that can beam a person from Earth to Mars. Rather than travel for many months on a spaceship, you need only enter a small chamber close to home and push a green button, and all the information in your brain and body will be sent to a similar station on Mars, where you will be reassembled down to the last atom.
Imagine that several of your friends have already traveled to Mars this way and seem none the worse for it. They describe the experience as being one of instantaneous relocation: You push the green button and find yourself standing on Mars—where your most recent memory is of pushing the green button on Earth and wondering if anything would happen.
So you decide to travel to Mars yourself. However, in the process of arranging your trip, you learn a troubling fact about the mechanics of teleportation: It turns out that the technicians wait for a person’s replica to be built on Mars before obliterating his original body on Earth. This has the benefit of leaving nothing to chance; if something goes wrong in the replication process, no harm has been done. However, it raises the following concern: While your double is beginning his day on Mars with all your memories, goals, and prejudices intact, you will be standing in the teleportation chamber on Earth, just staring at the green button. Imagine a voice coming over the intercom to congratulate you for arriving safely at your destination; in a few moments, you are told, your Earth body will be smashed to atoms. How would this be any different from simply being killed?
To most readers, this thought experiment will suggest that psychological continuity—the mere maintenance of one’s memories, beliefs, habits, and other mental traits—is an insufficient basis for personal identity. It’s not enough for someone on Mars to be just like you; he must actually be you. The man on Mars will share all your memories and will behave exactly as you would have. But he is not you—as your continued existence in the teleportation chamber on Earth attests. To the Earth-you awaiting obliteration, teleportation as a means of travel will appear a horrifying sham: You never left Earth and are about to die. Your friends, you now realize, have been repeatedly copied and killed. And yet, the problem with teleportation is somehow not obvious if a person is disassembled before his replica is built. In that case, it is tempting to say that teleportation works and that “he” is really stepping onto the surface of Mars.
One might conclude that personal identity requires physical continuity: I am identical to my brain and body, and if they get destroyed, that’s the end of me. But Parfit shows that physical continuity matters only because it normally supports psychological continuity. Merely hanging on to one’s brain and body cannot be an end in itself. Just consider the unfortunate case of someone with advanced dementia: He is physically but not psychologically continuous with the person he used to be. If he could be given new neurons that would emulate the old ones in his healthy brain—restoring his memories, creativity, sense of humor—this would be far better than keeping his current neurons that are succumbing to neurodegenerative disease. If we grant that the gradual replacement of individual neurons would be compatible with continued consciousness, it seems clear that the maintenance of psychological continuity is what we care about. And it is generally what we mean by a person’s “survival” from one moment to the next.
Parfit pushes the concept of personal identity about as far as it can go and resolves the apparent paradox of teleportation by arguing that “identity is not what matters”; rather, we should be concerned only about psychological continuity. However, he also states that psychological continuity cannot take a “branching form” (or at least not for long), as it does when a person is copied on Mars while the original person survives on Earth. Parfit believes that we should view the teleportation case in which a person is destroyed before being replicated as more or less indistinguishable from the normal pattern of personal survival throughout our lives. After all, in what way are you subjectively the same as the person who first picked up this book? In the only way you can be: by displaying some degree of psychological continuity with that past self. Viewed in this way, it is difficult to see how teleportation is any different from the mere passage of time. As Parfit says, “I want the person on Mars to be me in a specially intimate way in which no future person will ever be me. . . . What I fear will be missing is always missing. . . . Ordinary survival is about as bad as being destroyed and Replicated.”3 Here, Parfit does not mean “bad” in the sense that we should find these truths depressing. He is merely arguing that ordinary survival from moment to moment is no more demonstrative of personal identity than destruction/replication would be. Parfit’s view of the self, which he appears to have arrived at independently through an immensely creative use of thought experiments, is essentially the same as the one found in the teachings of Buddhism: There is no stable self that is carried along from one moment to the next.
I agree with most of what Parfit has to say about personal identity. However, because his view is purely the product of logical argument, it can seem uncannily detached from the reality of our lives. Although experience in meditation may not immediately resolve the teleportation paradox or make it clear why one should care about one’s own future experience any more than that of a stranger, it can make these philosophical problems easier to think about.
When talking about psychological continuity, we are talking about consciousness and its contents—the persistence of autobiographical memories in particular. Everything that is personal, everything that differentiates my consciousness from that of another human being, relates to the contents of consciousness. Memories, perceptions, attitudes, desires—these are appearances in consciousness. If “my” consciousness were suddenly filled with the contents of “your” life—if I awoke this morning with your memories, hopes, fears, sensory impressions, and relationships—I would no longer be me. I would be the same as your clone in the teleportation case.
My consciousness is “mine” only because the particularities of my life are illuminated as and where they arise. For instance, I currently have an annoying pain in my neck, the result of a martial arts injury. Why is this “my” pain? Why am I the only one who is directly aware of it? These questions are a symptom of confusion. There is no “I” who is aware of the pain. The pain is simply arising in consciousness in the only place it can arise: at the conjunction of this brain and this neck. Where else could this particular pain be felt? If I were cloned through teleportation, an identical pain might be felt in an identical neck on Mars. But this pain would still be right here in this neck.
Whatever its relation to the physical world, consciousness is the context in which the objects of experience appear—the sight of this book, the sound of traffic, the sensation of your back against a chair. There is nowhere else for them to appear—for their very appearance is consciousness in action. And anything that is unique to your experience of the world must appear amid the contents of consciousness. We have every reason to believe that these contents depend upon the physical structure of your brain. Duplicate your brain, and you will duplicate “your” contents in another field of consciousness. Divide your brain, and you will segregate those contents in bizarre ways.
We know, from experiments both real and imagined, that psychological continuity is divisible—and can, therefore, be inherited by more than one mind. If my brain were surgically divided by callosotomy tomorrow, this would create at least two independent conscious minds, both of which would be psychologically continuous with the person who is now writing this paragraph. If my linguistic abilities happened to be distributed across both hemispheres, each of these minds might remember having written this sentence. The question of whether I would land in the left hemisphere or the right doesn’t make sense—being based, as it is, on the illusion that there is a self bobbing on the stream of consciousness like a boat on the water.
But the stream of consciousness can divide and follow both tributaries simultaneously. Should these tributaries converge again, the final current would inherit the “memories” of each. If, after years of living apart, my hemispheres were reunited, their memories of separate existence could, in principle, appear as the combined memory of a single consciousness. There would be no cause to ask where my “self” had been while my brain was divided, because no “I” exists apart from the stream. The moment we see this, the divisibility of the human mind begins to seem less paradoxical. Subjectively speaking, the only thing that actually exists is consciousness and its contents. And the only thing relevant to the question of personal identity is psychological continuity from one moment to the next.
WHAT ARE WE CALLING “I”?
One thing each of us knows for certain is that reality vastly exceeds our awareness of it. I am, for instance, sitting at my desk, drinking coffee. Gravity is holding me in place, and the manner in which this is accomplished eludes us to this day. The integrity of my chair is the result of the electrical bonds between atoms—entities I have never seen but which I know must exist, in some sense, with or without my knowledge. The coffee is dissipating heat at a rate that could be calculated with precision, and the second law of thermodynamics decrees that it is, on balance, losing heat every moment rather than gathering it from the cup or the surrounding air. None of this is evident to me from direct experience, however. Forces of digestion and metabolism are at work within me that are utterly beyond my perception or control. Most of my internal organs may as well not exist for all I know of them directly, and yet I can be reasonably certain that I have them, arranged much as any medical textbook would suggest. The taste of the coffee, my satisfaction at its flavor, the feeling of the warm cup in my hand—while these are immediate facts with which I am acquainted, they reach back into a dark wilderness of facts that I will never come to know. I have neurons firing and forming new connections in my brain every instant, and these events determine the character of my experience. But I know nothing directly about the electrochemical activity of my brain—and yet this soggy miracle of computation appears to be working for the moment and generating a vision of a world.
The more I persist in this line of thought, the clearer it becomes that I perceive scarcely a scintilla of all that exists to be known. I can, for instance, reach for my cup of coffee or set it down, seemingly as I please. These are intentional actions, and I perform them. But if I look for what underlies these movements—motor neurons, muscle fibers, neurotransmitters—I can’t feel or see a thing. And how do I initiate this behavior? I haven’t a clue. In what sense, then, do I initiate it? That is difficult to say. The feeling that I intended to do what I just did seems to be only that: a feeling of some internal signature, perhaps the result of my brain’s having formed a predictive model of its ensuing actions. It may not be best classified as a feeling, but surely it is something. Otherwise, how could I note the difference between voluntary and involuntary behavior? Without this impression of agency, I would feel that my actions were automatic or otherwise beyond my control.
One question immediately presents itself: Where am I that I have such a poor view of things? And what sort of thing am I that both my outside and my inside are so obscure? And outside and inside of what? My skin? Am I identical to my skin? If not—and the answer is clearly no—why should the frontier between my outside and my inside be drawn at the skin? If not at the skin, then where does the outside of me stop and the inside of me begin? At my skull? Am I my skull? Am I inside my skull? Let’s say yes for the moment, because we are quickly running out of places to look for me. Where inside my skull might I be? And if I’m up there in my head, how is the rest of me me (let alone the inside of me)?
The pronoun I is the name that most of us put to the sense that we are the thinkers of our thoughts and the experiencers of our experience. It is the sense that we have of possessing (rather than of merely being) a continuum of experience. We will see, however, that this feeling is not a necessary property of the mind. And the fact that people report losing their sense of self to one or another degree suggests that the experience of being a self can be selectively interfered with.
Obviously, there is something in our experience that we are calling “I,” apart from the sheer fact that we are conscious; otherwise, we would never describe our subjectivity in the way we do, and a person would have no basis for feeling that she had lost her sense of self, whatever the circumstances. Nevertheless, it is extremely difficult to pinpoint just what it is we take ourselves to be. Many philosophers have noticed this problem, but few in the West have understood that the failure to locate the self can produce more than mere confusion.4 I suspect that this difference between Eastern and Western philosophy has something to do with the influence of Abrahamic religion and its doctrine of the soul. Christianity, in particular, presents impressive obstacles to thinking intelligently about the nature of the human mind, asserting, as it does, the real existence of individual souls who are subject to the eternal judgment of God.
What does it mean to say that the self cannot be found or that it is illusory? It is not to say that people are illusory. I see no reason to doubt that each of us exists or that the ongoing history of our personhood can be conventionally described as the history of our “selves.” But the self in this more global, biographical sense undergoes sweeping changes over the course of a lifetime. While you are in many ways physically and psychologically continuous with the person you were at age seven, you are not the same. Your life has surely been punctuated by transitions that significantly changed you: marriage, divorce, college, military service, parenthood, bereavement, serious illness, fame, exposure to other cultures, imprisonment, professional success, loss of a job, religious conversion. Each of us knows what it is like to develop new capacities, understandings, opinions, and tastes over the course of time. It is convenient to ascribe these changes to the self. That is not the self I am talking about.
The self that does not survive scrutiny is the subject of experience in each present moment—the feeling of being a thinker of thoughts inside one’s head, the sense of being an owner or inhabitant of a physical body, which this false self seems to appropriate as a kind of vehicle. Even if you don’t believe such a homunculus exists—perhaps because you believe, on the basis of science, that you are identical to your body and brain rather than a ghostly resident therein—you almost certainly feel like an internal self in almost every waking moment. And yet, however one looks for it, this self is nowhere to be found. It cannot be seen amid the particulars of experience, and it cannot be seen when experience itself is viewed as a totality. However, its absence can be found—and when it is, the feeling of being a self disappears.
CONSCIOUSNESS WITHOUT SELF
This is an empirical claim: Look closely enough at your own mind in the present moment, and you will discover that the self is an illusion. The problem with a claim of this kind, however, is that one can’t borrow another person’s contemplative tools to test it. To see how the feeling of “I” is a product of thought—indeed, to even appreciate how distracted by thought you tend to be in the first place—you have to build your own contemplative tools. Unfortunately, this leads many people to dismiss the project out of hand: They look inside, notice nothing of interest, and conclude that introspection is a dead end. But just imagine where astronomy would be if, centuries after Galileo, a person were still obliged to build his own telescope before he could even judge whether astronomy was a legitimate field of inquiry. It wouldn’t make the sky any less worthy of investigation, but astronomy’s development as a science would become immensely more difficult.
A few pharmacological shortcuts exist—and I discuss some of them in a later chapter—but generally speaking, we must build our own telescopes to judge the empirical claims of contemplatives. Judging their metaphysical claims is another matter; many of them can be dismissed as bad science or bad philosophy after merely thinking about them. But to determine whether certain experiences are possible—and if possible, desirable—and to see how these states of mind relate to the conventional sense of self, we have to be able to use our attention in the requisite ways. Primarily, that means learning to recognize thoughts as thoughts—as transient appearances in consciousness—and to no longer be distracted by them, if only for short periods of time. This may sound simple enough, but actually accomplishing it can take a lot of work. Unfortunately, it is not work that the Western intellectual tradition knows much about.
LOST IN THOUGHT
When we see a person walking down the street talking to himself, we generally assume that he is mentally ill (provided he is not wearing a headset of some kind). But we all talk to ourselves constantly—most of us merely have the good sense to keep our mouths shut. We rehearse past conversations—thinking about what we said, what we didn’t say, what we should have said. We anticipate the future, producing a ceaseless string of words and images that fill us with hope or fear. We tell ourselves the story of the present, as though some blind person were inside our heads who required continuous narration to know what is happening: “Wow, nice desk. I wonder what kind of wood that is. Oh, but it has no drawers. They didn’t put drawers in this thing? How can you have a desk without at least one drawer?” Who are we talking to? No one else is there. And we seem to imagine that if we just keep this inner monologue to ourselves, it is perfectly compatible with mental health. Perhaps it isn’t.
As I was working to finish this book, we experienced a series of plumbing leaks in our house. The first appeared in the ceiling of a storage room. We considered ourselves genuinely lucky to have found it, because this was a room that we might have gone months without entering. A plumber arrived within a few hours, cut the drywall, and fixed the leak. A plasterer came the next day, repaired the ceiling, and painted it. This sort of thing happens eventually in every home, I told myself, and my prevailing feeling was of gratitude. Civilization is a wonderful thing.
Then a similar leak appeared in an adjacent room a few days later. Contact information for both the plumber and the plasterer was at my fingertips. Now I felt only annoyance and foreboding.
A month later, the horror movie began in earnest: A pipe burst, flooding six hundred square feet of ceiling. This time the repair took weeks and created an immense amount of dust; two cleaning crews were required to deal with the aftermath—vacuuming hundreds of books, drying and shampooing the carpet, and so forth. Throughout all this we were forced to live without heat, for otherwise the dust from the repair would have been sucked into the vents, and we would have been breathing it in every room of the house. Eventually, however, the problem was fixed. We would have no more leaks.
And then, last night, scarcely one month after the previous repair, we heard the familiar sound of water falling onto carpet. The moment I heard the first drops, I was transformed into a hapless, uncomprehending, enraged man racing down a staircase. I’m sure I would have comported myself with greater dignity had I come upon the scene of a murder. A glance at the ballooning ceiling told me everything I needed to know about the weeks ahead: Our home would be a construction site once again.
Of course, a house is a physical object beholden to the laws of nature—and it won’t fix itself. From the moment my wife and I grabbed buckets and salad bowls to catch the falling water, we were responding to the ineluctable tug of physical reality. But my suffering was entirely the product of my thoughts. Whatever the needs of the moment, I had a choice: I could do what was required calmly, patiently, and attentively, or do it in a state of panic. Every moment of the day—indeed, every moment throughout one’s life—offers an opportunity to be relaxed and responsive or to suffer unnecessarily.
We can address mental suffering of this kind on at least two levels. We can use thoughts themselves as an antidote, or we can stand free of thought altogether. The first technique requires no experience with meditation, and it can work wonders if one develops the appropriate habits of mind. Many people do it quite naturally; it’s called “looking on the bright side.”
For instance, as I was beginning to rage like King Lear in the storm, my wife suggested that we should be thankful that it was fresh water pouring through our ceiling and not sewage. I found the thought immediately arresting: I could feel in my bones how much better it was to be mopping up water at that moment than to be ankle deep in the alternative. What a relief! I often use thoughts of this kind as levers to pry my mind loose from whatever rut it has found on the landscape of unnecessary suffering. If I had been watching sewage spill through our ceiling, how much would I have paid merely to transform it into fresh water? A lot.
I am not advocating that we be irrationally detached from the reality of our lives. If a problem needs fixing, we should fix it. But how miserable must we be while doing good and necessary things? And if, like many people, you tend to be vaguely unhappy much of the time, it can be very helpful to manufacture a feeling of gratitude by simply contemplating all the terrible things that have not happened to you, or to think of how many people would consider their prayers answered if they could only live as you are now. The mere fact that you have the leisure to read this book puts you in very rarefied company. Many people on earth at this moment can’t even imagine the freedom that you currently take for granted.
In fact, the effects of consciously practicing gratitude have been studied: When compared to merely thinking about significant life events, contemplating daily hassles, or comparing oneself favorably to others, thinking about what one is grateful for increases one’s feelings of well-being, motivation, and positive outlook toward the future.5
One does not need to know anything about meditation to notice how thinking governs one’s mental state. This morning, for instance, I awoke in a state of carefree happiness. And then I remembered the leak. . . . Most readers will be familiar with this experience: Something bad has happened in your life—a person has died, a relationship has ended, you have lost your job—but there is a brief interval after awakening before memory imposes its stranglehold. It often takes a moment or two for one’s reasons for being unhappy to come online. Having spent years observing my mind in meditation, I find such sudden transitions from happiness to suffering both fascinating and rather funny—and merely witnessing them goes a long way toward restoring my equanimity. My mind begins to seem like a video game: I can either play it intelligently, learning more in each round, or I can be killed in the same spot by the same monster, again and again.
Once, while staying in an especially depressing hotel in Kathmandu, I was awakened in the middle of the night by the feeling of a claw scratching my foot. I sat up in terror, convinced that there was a rat in my bed. I had recently learned that the lepers I had seen throughout my travels in Asia lost their fingers and toes not to the disease itself but because they no longer felt pain. This resulted in burns and other injuries. Even worse, rats often ate their extremities while they slept.
However, the darkness of my room was perfectly still. It had been only a dream. And as suddenly as it had come, the feeling of terror subsided. My mind and body were now flooded with relief. “What a strange dream,” I thought. “I actually felt claws on my skin—but nothing was there. The mind is so amazing”—and then came the unmistakable sound of something scurrying toward me beneath the sheets.
I bounded from the bed with the agility of a Chinese acrobat. After a few interminable moments spent groping in the darkness of an unfamiliar room, I turned on the lights, and all was silent once again. As I stared at the tangle of blankets on the bed, I genuinely hoped that I had lost my sanity and not, in fact, my privacy. I flung back the covers—and there, in the middle of the mattress, sat a large brown rat. The creature eyed me with a sickening frankness and intensity; it appeared to be standing its ground, no doubt ruing the loss of such an ample source of protein. I feigned an attack of my own, lunging and shrieking—half ape, half cartoon housewife—and the beast raced across the sheets, sprung to the floor, and disappeared behind the dresser.6
In the span of a few seconds, my mind had traversed the extremes of human emotion, swinging from terror to exquisite relief and back to terror—entirely on the wings of thought:
There’s a rat in my bed!
Oh, it was only a dream . . .
Rat!
Again, I’m not saying that one’s thoughts about reality are all that matter. I would be the first to admit that it is generally a good idea to keep rats out of one’s bed. But it can be liberating to see how thoughts pull the levers of emotion—and how negative emotions in turn set the stage for patterns of thinking that keep them active and coloring one’s mind. Seeing this process clearly can mean the difference between being angry, depressed, or fearful for a few moments and being so for days, weeks, and months on end.
Breaking the Spell of Negative Emotions
Most of us let our negative emotions persist longer than is necessary. Becoming suddenly angry, we tend to stay angry—and this requires that we actively produce the feeling of anger. We do this by thinking about our reasons for being angry—recalling an insult, rehearsing what we should have said to our malefactor, and so forth—and yet we tend not to notice the mechanics of this process. Without continually resurrecting the feeling of anger, it is impossible to stay angry for more than a few moments.
While I can’t promise that meditation will keep you from ever again becoming angry, you can learn not to stay angry for very long. And when talking about the consequences of anger, the difference between moments and hours—or days—is impossible to exaggerate.
Even without knowing how to meditate, most people have experienced having their negative states of mind suddenly interrupted. Imagine, for instance, that someone has made you very angry—and just as this mental state seems to have fully taken possession of your mind, you receive an important phone call that requires you to put on your best social face. Most people know what it’s like to suddenly drop their negative state of mind and begin functioning in another mode. Of course, most then helplessly grow entangled with their negative emotions again at the next opportunity.
Become sensitive to these interruptions in the continuity of your mental states. You are depressed, say, but are suddenly moved to laughter by something you read. You are bored and impatient while sitting in traffic, but then are cheered by a phone call from a close friend. These are natural experiments in shifting mood. Notice that suddenly paying attention to something else—something that no longer supports your current emotion—allows for a new state of mind. Observe how quickly the clouds can part. These are genuine glimpses of freedom.
The truth, however, is that you need not wait for some pleasant distraction to shift your mood. You can simply pay close attention to negative feelings themselves, without judgment or resistance. What is anger? Where do you feel it in your body? How is it arising in each moment? And what is it that is aware of the feeling itself? Investigating in this way, with mindfulness, you can discover that negative states of mind vanish all by themselves.
Thinking is indispensable to us. It is essential for belief formation, planning, explicit learning, moral reasoning, and many other capacities that make us human. Thinking is the basis of every social relationship and cultural institution we have. It is also the foundation of science. But our habitual identification with thought—that is, our failure to recognize thoughts as thoughts, as appearances in consciousness—is a primary source of human suffering. It also gives rise to the illusion that a separate self is living inside one’s head.
See if you can stop thinking for the next sixty seconds. You can notice your breath, or listen to the birds, but do not let your attention be carried away by thought, any thought, even for an instant. Put down this book, and give it a try.
Some of you will be so distracted by thought as to imagine that you succeeded. In fact, beginning meditators often think that they are able to concentrate on a single object, such as the breath, for minutes at a time, only to report after days or weeks of intensive practice that their attention is now carried away by thought every few seconds. This is actually progress. It takes a certain degree of concentration to even notice how distracted you are. Even if your life depended on it, you could not spend a full minute free of thought.
This is a remarkable fact about the human mind. We are capable of astonishing feats of understanding and creativity. We can endure almost any torment. But it is not within our power to simply stop talking to ourselves, whatever the stakes. It’s not even in our power to recognize each thought as it arises in consciousness without getting distracted every few seconds by one of them. Without significant training in meditation, remaining aware—of anything—for a full minute is just not in the cards.
We spend our lives lost in thought. The question is, what should we make of this fact? In the West, the answer has been “Not much.” In the East, especially in contemplative traditions like those of Buddhism, being distracted by thought is understood to be the very wellspring of human suffering.
From the contemplative point of view, being lost in thoughts of any kind, pleasant or unpleasant, is analogous to being asleep and dreaming. It’s a mode of not knowing what is actually happening in the present moment. It is essentially a form of psychosis. Thoughts themselves are not a problem, but being identified with thought is. Taking oneself to be the thinker of one’s thoughts—that is, not recognizing the present thought to be a transitory appearance in consciousness—is a delusion that produces nearly every species of human conflict and unhappiness. It doesn’t matter if your mind is wandering over current problems in set theory or cancer research; if you are thinking without knowing you are thinking, you are confused about who and what you are.
The practice of meditation is a method of breaking the spell of thought. However, in the beginning, you are unlikely to understand just how transformative this shift in attention can be. You will spend most of your time trying to meditate or imagining that you are meditating (whether by focusing on your breathing or anything else) and failing for minutes or hours at a stretch. The first sign of progress will be noticing how distracted you are. But if you persist in your practice, you will eventually get a taste of real concentration and begin to see thoughts themselves as mere appearances arising in a wider field of consciousness.
The eighth-century Buddhist adept Vimalamitra described three stages of mastery in meditation and how thinking appears in each. The first is like meeting a person you already know; you simply recognize each thought as it arises in consciousness, without confusion. The second is like a snake tied in a knot; each thought, whatever its content, simply unravels on its own. In the third, thoughts become like thieves entering an empty house; even the possibility of being distracted has disappeared.7
Long before reaching this kind of stability in meditation, however, one can discover that the sense of self—the sense that there is a thinker behind one’s thoughts, an experiencer amid the flow of experience—is an illusion. The feeling that we call “I” is itself the product of thought. Having an ego is what it feels like to be thinking without knowing that you are thinking.
Consider the following train of thought (a version of which may have already passed through your mind):
What is Harris going on about? I know I’m thinking. I’m thinking right now. What’s the big deal? I’m thinking, and I know it. How is this a problem? How am I confused? I can think about anything I want—watch, I’ll picture the Eiffel Tower in my mind’s eye right now. There it is. I did it. In what sense am I not the thinker of these thoughts?
Thus is the knot of self tied. It isn’t enough to know, in the abstract, that thoughts continually arise or that one is thinking at this moment, for such knowledge is itself mediated by thoughts that are arising unrecognized. It is the identification with these thoughts—that is, the failure to recognize them as they spontaneously appear in consciousness—that produces the feeling of “I.” One must be able to pay attention closely enough to glimpse what consciousness is like between thoughts—that is, prior to the arising of the next one. Consciousness does not feel like a self. Once one realizes this, the status of thoughts themselves, as transient expressions of consciousness, can be understood.
What are we conscious of? We are conscious of the world; we are conscious of our bodies in the world; and we also imagine that we are conscious of our selves within our bodies. After all, most of us don’t feel merely identical to our bodies. We seem to be riding around inside our bodies. We feel like inner subjects that can use the body as a kind of object. This last impression is an illusion that can be dispelled.
The selflessness of consciousness is in plain view in every present moment—and yet, it remains difficult to see. This is not a paradox. Many things in our experience are right on the surface, but they require some training or technique to observe. Consider the optic blind spot: The optic nerve passes through the retina of each eye, creating a small region in each visual field where we are effectively blind. Many of us learned as children to perceive the subjective consequences of this less-than-ideal anatomy by drawing a small circle on a piece of paper, closing one eye, and then moving the paper into a position where the circle became invisible. No doubt most people in human history have been totally unaware of the optic blind spot. Even those of us who know about it go for decades without noticing it. And yet, it is always there, right on the surface of experience.
The absence of the self is also there to be noticed. As with the optic blind spot, the evidence is not far away or deep within; rather, it is almost too close to be observed. For most people, experiencing the intrinsic selflessness of consciousness requires considerable training. It is, however, possible to notice that consciousness—that in you which is aware of your experience in this moment—does not feel like a self. It does not feel like “I.” What you are calling “I” is itself a feeling that arises among the contents of consciousness. Consciousness is prior to it, a mere witness of it, and, therefore, free of it in principle.
THE CHALLENGE OF STUDYING THE SELF
Many scientists use the term self to refer to the totality of our inner lives. I have attended whole conferences on the self and read books ostensibly devoted to this topic without seeing the feeling we call “I” even mentioned. The self that I am discussing throughout this book—the illusory, albeit reliable, source of so much suffering and confusion—is the feeling that there is an inner subject, behind our eyes, thinking our thoughts and experiencing our experience.
We must distinguish between the self and the myriad mental states—self-recognition, volition, memory, bodily awareness—with which it can be associated. To appreciate the difference, consider the (semi-fictional) condition of a person suffering from global retrograde amnesia (sometimes called “soap opera” amnesia, wherein a person has entirely forgotten his past): If asked how he came to be this way, he might say, “I don’t remember anything.” This is overstating the case, for he must remember a thing or two (the English language, for instance) to even make such a statement. But there is no reason to think that he is misusing the personal pronoun I. His “I” seems to have survived the loss of his declarative memories as fully as his body has. If we asked him, “Where is your body?” he might say, “It’s here. This is it.” If we questioned him further, asking, “And where are you? Where is your self?” he would probably say something like “What do you mean? I’m here too. I just don’t know who I am.” Strange as this conversation would be, there seems little doubt that our protagonist would feel as much like a self as we do. Only his memories are missing. He, as the subject of his experience, remains to worry over their absence.
Of course, as a person, this man is no longer himself. He doesn’t remember the names or the faces of his closest friends. He may not know which foods he likes. His private fears and professional goals have disappeared without a trace. We may say that he is scarcely a person at all—but he is a self all the same, and one that is suffering a bewildering dissociation from both past and future.
Or consider the condition of a person who is having an “out-of-body experience” (OBE). The sense of leaving one’s body is a staple of mystical literature and has been reported across many cultures. It is often associated with epilepsy, migraine, sleep paralysis, and, as we will see in chapter 5, the “near-death experience.” It may occur in as much as 10 percent of the population. During an OBE, the subject feels that she has physically left her body—and this often includes a sense that she can see her own body in full, as though from a point outside her head. A brain area called the temporal-parietal junction—a region known to be involved in sensory integration and body representation—seems to be responsible for this effect. Whether or not a person’s consciousness can really be displaced is irrelevant; the point is that it can seem to be, and this fact draws yet another boundary between the self and the rest of our personhood. It is possible to experience oneself as (apparently) outside a body.
The self, as the implied hub of cognition, perception, emotion, and behavior, can remain stable across even wholesale changes in the contents of consciousness (unless the feeling of self disappears). This is not surprising, because the self is the very thing to which these contents seem to refer: not the body or mind per se but the point of view from which both body and mind seem to be “mine” in every present moment.
Thus, we can see that most scientific research on the self is too broad. If the self is the sense of being the subject of experience, it should not be conflated with a wider range of experiences. “I” refers to the feeling that our faculties have been appropriated, that a center of will and cognition interior to the body, somewhere behind the face, is doing the seeing, hearing, and thinking. And yet, in seeking to understand the self, many scientists study things such as spatial cognition, voluntary action, feelings of body ownership, and episodic memory. While these phenomena greatly influence our experience in each moment, they are not integral to the feeling that we call “I.”
Consider the sense of body ownership. It must be produced, at least in part, by the integration of different streams of sensory information: We feel the position of our limbs in space; we see them at the appropriate locations in our visual field; and our experience of touching objects generally coincides with the sight of them coming into contact with our skin. An analogous synchrony occurs whenever we execute a volitional movement. No doubt our sense of body ownership is essential for our survival and for relating to others. Any loss or distortion of this sense can be profoundly disorienting. But disorienting to whom? When I am lying on the operating table, feeling the first effects of intravenous sedation, and find that I can no longer sense the position of my limbs in space, or even the existence of my body, who is it that has been deprived of these inputs? It is I—the (almost) ever-present subject of my experience. It should be obvious that no faculty of which I might be deprived, while I remain the subject experiencing the results of such deprivation, can be integral to the self—though it may be integral to my personhood in a wider sense.
Several findings in the neuroscientific literature drive a wedge between body ownership and the feeling of being a self. For instance, a person can lose the sense of owning a limb, a condition known as somatoparaphrenia. Conversely, a person’s body image can encompass the limbs of others or even inanimate objects. Consider the famous “rubber hand illusion”:
Each of ten subjects was seated with their left arm resting upon a small table. A standing screen was positioned beside the arm to hide it from the subject’s view and a life-sized rubber model of a left hand and arm was placed on the table directly in front of the subject. The subject sat with eyes fixed on the artificial hand while we used two small paintbrushes to stroke the rubber hand and the subject’s hidden hand, synchronising the timing of the brushing as closely as possible. . . . Subjects experienced an illusion in which they seemed to feel the touch not of the hidden brush but that of the viewed brush, as if the rubber hand had sensed the touch.8
Amazingly, through the use of head-mounted video displays, this illusion can be extended to the entire body, yielding an experience of “body swapping.”9 It has long been known that vision trumps proprioception (the awareness of the position of one’s body) when it comes to locating parts of one’s body in space, but the “body swapping illusion” suggests that visual perception may fully determine the coordinates of the self.
The point, however, is that this effect—dissociation from one’s own body and a false sense of inhabiting the parts (or whole body) of another person—seems to leave the “self” very much intact. Experiments on proprioception tell us nothing about the feeling that we call “I.” And the same can be said about almost every other aspect of personhood with which philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists regularly bundle the self. The feeling of agency—the sense that one is the author of one’s voluntary actions—may be as integral to our experience of the world as body ownership, but it, too, fails to capture what we mean by “self.” A person could, for instance, distinguish his bodily movements from those of another person without feeling a sense of self at all, for to do so merely requires that he distinguish one body (as an object) from another. Likewise, he could fail to make such a distinction (in that he might misattribute his actions to another person or ascribe the actions of another to himself) while feeling the embrace of selfhood all the while.
Ascriptions of agency do not define the contours of the self in the way that many people seem to believe. While schizophrenics suffering from thought insertion, delusions of control, and auditory hallucinations10 may be assailed by unusual mental phenomena, nothing suggests that their sense of being a self has been altered or lost. A person can fail to distinguish between self-generated and world-generated content, and thereby mistake her own internal imagery for sense data. There is a difference, to be sure, between finding a rat in one’s bed and hallucinating (or merely dreaming about) such an encounter. But the feeling of being a self remains constant.
Self-Recognition
Imagine that you awake from a heavy sleep to find yourself imprisoned in an unfamiliar, windowless room. Where are you? You haven’t the faintest idea. A mirror has been provided for your edification, however, and you gaze into it. What do you see? A red dot has been painted on your forehead, but for some reason you fail to notice it. In fact, you soon lose interest in your reflection altogether and begin searching your room for food. You are, after all, a gorilla, and quite unconcerned about your appearance.
In reviewing the literature on the self, one finds that much has been made of the fact that some creatures will attend to their reflections in a mirror with all the vanity of an eighteenth-century lady-in-waiting, while others respond as they would to a fellow member of their species.11 The “mirror test” has been a staple of primate and child development research for many decades now, and it has made this simplest of all laboratory devices seem like a virtual dowsing rod for the self—because only those creatures who comport themselves with the requisite narcissism in front of the glass are believed to possess “self-knowledge” or even (and here we are treated to an especially depressing misuse of the term) “consciousness.” While mirror self-recognition and use of the personal pronoun seem to emerge at more or less the same time in human development (fifteen to twenty-four months), there are many reasons to believe that self-recognition and selfhood are distinct states of mind—and, therefore, that they differ at the level of brain as well.12
Self-recognition depends on context. There are neurological patients who cannot recognize themselves in a mirror (a condition called the “mirror-sign delusion”) but can pick themselves out in photographs,13 and these subjects show no evidence of having lost anything like a self, or knowledge thereof. So what is the relationship between self-recognition and the feeling we call “I”? The fact that the word self is generally used while making reference to these phenomena does not suggest that any deep relationship exists between them. It seems quite possible, for instance, that a person who cannot recognize his own face under any circumstances could have a fully intact sense of self, just as your sense of self would remain unaltered by the sight of a complete stranger. There is simply nothing about the experience of not recognizing a face, even if it happens to be one’s own, that suggests a divestiture of self or anything like it.
Theory of Mind
One of the most important things we do with our minds is attribute mental states to other people, a faculty that has been variously described as “theory of mind,” “mentalizing,” “mindsight,” “mind reading,” and the “intentional stance.”14 The ability to recognize and interpret the mental activity of others is essential for normal cognitive and social development, and deficits in this area contribute to a variety of mental disorders, including autism. But what is the relationship between an awareness of others and awareness of oneself? Many scientists and philosophers have suggested that the two must be deeply connected.15 If so, it seems natural that research on theory of mind (TOM) would shed some light on the structure of the self. Unfortunately, however, the model of TOM that researchers generally work with cannot do this. Consider the following text, intended to evoke TOM processing in experimental subjects:
A burglar who has just robbed a shop is making his getaway. As he is running home, a policeman on his beat sees him drop his glove. He doesn’t know the man is a burglar, he just wants to tell him he dropped his glove. But when the policeman shouts out to the burglar, “Hey, you! Stop!” the burglar turns round, sees the policeman and gives himself up. He puts his hands up and admits that he did the break-in at the local shop.
Question: Why did the burglar do that?16
The answer is obvious, unless one happens to be a young child or a person suffering from autism. If one can’t take the point of view of the burglar in this story, it is impossible to know why he behaved as he did. Experimental stimuli of this kind are central to research on TOM, but they have very little to do with our most basic attribution of mindedness to others. Although we use our powers of inference to attribute complex mental states to other people, and the phrase “theory of mind” captures this, it seems that we make a much more basic attribution first, and perhaps independently: We recognize that other people are (or can be) aware of us. Explaining the burglar’s behavior requires a higher level of cognition than is necessary to merely grasp that one is in the presence of a sentient other. And the feeling that another person can see or hear me is quite distinct from my having any understanding of his beliefs or desires. This more primitive judgment would seem to be TOM at its most fundamental. It might also have a deep connection to our sense of self.
The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre believed that our encounters with other people constitute the primal circumstance of self-formation.17 On his account, each of us is perpetually in the position of a voyeur who, while gazing upon the object of his lust, suddenly hears the sound of someone stepping up directly behind him. Again and again, we are thrust out of the safety and seclusion of pure subjectivity by the knowledge that we have become objects in the world for others.
I believe that Sartre was onto something. The primitive impression that another creature is aware of us seems to be the point at which TOM is relevant to the sense of self. If you doubt this, I recommend the following exercise: Go to a public place, select a person at random, and stare at his face until he returns your gaze. To make this more than a pointless provocation, observe the change that occurs in you the moment eye contact is established. What is this feeling that obliges you to immediately look away or to begin speaking? The self-ramifying quality of this form of TOM seems indisputable, for without the attribution of awareness to others, you have no sense of being looked at in the first place. There is a difference to be felt here—being looked at just feels different from not being looked at—and the difference can be described, or so I maintain, as a magnification of the feeling that we call “I.” It seems undeniable that self-consciousness and this more fundamental form of TOM are closely related.18 The neurologist V. S. Ramachandran seems to have been thinking along these lines when he wrote, “It may not be coincidental that [you] use phrases like ‘self conscious’ when you really mean that you are conscious of others being conscious of you.”19
To better appreciate the distinction between fundamental TOM and the TOM that is current in the scientific literature, consider what happens when we watch a film. The experience of sitting in a darkened theater and seeing people interact with one another on the screen is a social encounter of sorts—but it is one in which we, as participants, have been perfectly effaced. This very likely explains why most of us find movies and television so compelling. The moment we turn our eyes to the screen, we are in a social situation that our hominid genes could not have foreseen: We can view the actions of others, along with the minutiae of their facial expressions—even to the point of making eye contact with them—without the slightest risk of being observed ourselves. Movies and television magically transform the primordial context of face-to-face encounters, in which human beings have always been subjected to harrowing social lessons, allowing us, for the first time, to devote ourselves wholly to the act of observing other people. This is voyeurism of a transcendental kind. Whatever else might be said about the experience of watching a film, it fully dissociates fundamental TOM from standard TOM, for there is no doubt that we attribute mental states to the actors on the screen. We make all the judgments that the standard concept of TOM requires, but this does little to establish our sense of self. Indeed, it is difficult to find a situation in which we feel less self-conscious than when sitting in a darkened theater watching a film, and yet, we are contemplating the beliefs, intentions, and desires of other people the entire time.
Ramachandran and others have noted that the discovery of “mirror neurons” offers some support for the idea that the senses of self and other may emerge from the same circuitry in the brain. Some people believe that mirror neurons are also central to our ability to empathize with others and may even account for the emergence of gestural communication and spoken language. What we do know is that certain neurons increase their firing rate when we perform object-oriented actions with our hands (grasping, manipulating) and communicative or ingestive actions with our mouths. These neurons also fire, albeit less rapidly, whenever we witness the same actions performed by other people. Research on monkeys suggests that these neurons encode the intentions behind an observed action (such as picking up an apple for the purpose of eating it versus merely moving it) rather than the physical movements themselves. In these experiments, a monkey’s brain seems to represent the purposeful behavior of others as if it were engaging in this behavior itself. Similar results have been obtained in neuroimaging experiments done on humans.20
Some scientists believe that mirror neurons provide a physiological basis for the development of imitation and social bonding early in life and for the understanding of other minds thereafter.21 And it is certainly suggestive that children with autism appear to have diminished mirror neuron activity in proportion to the severity of their symptoms.22 As is now widely known, people suffering from autism tend to lack insight into the mental lives of others. Conversely, a longitudinal study of compassion meditation, which produced a significant increase in subjects’ empathy over the course of eight weeks, found increased activity in one of the regions believed to contain mirror neurons.23
It may be that an awareness of other minds is a necessary condition for an awareness of one’s own. Of course, this does not suggest that the feeling we call “I” will disappear when we are alone. If our knowledge of self and other is truly indivisible, our awareness of others must be internalized early in life. In psychological terms, this certainly seems a plausible way of describing the structure of our subjectivity. All parents have seen their children put their growing powers of speech to use by maintaining running monologues with themselves. These monologues continue throughout life as though they were, in fact, dialogues. The resulting conversation seems both strange and unnecessary. Why should we live in relationship to ourselves rather than merely as ourselves? Why should an “I” and a “me” be keeping each other company?
Imagine that you have lost your sunglasses. You search the house up and down, and finally you spot them, lying on a table where you had left them the day before. You promptly think, “There they are!” as you make your way across the room to retrieve them. But to whom are you thinking this thought? You may even have uttered the phrase out loud: “There they are!” But who needed to be informed in this way? You have already seen them. Is there someone else in your search party?
Imagine that you are in a public place and happen to see a stranger locate his own lost sunglasses. He exclaims, as you might, “There they are!” and snatches them from the tabletop. A twinge of embarrassment often passes through all parties in such moments, but when the utterance is confined to a short phrase and occasioned by such an innocuous event, the speaker has done nothing out of the ordinary and bystanders are not yet gripped by fear. Imagine, however, if this person continued to address himself out loud: “Where did you think they were, you idiot? You’ve been wandering around this building for ten minutes. Now I’m going to be late for my lunch with Julie, and she’s always on time!” The man need not speak another word to secure our eternal mistrust of his faculties. And yet the condition of this person is no different from our own—these are precisely the thoughts we might think in the privacy of our minds.
We have seen that the sense of self is logically and empirically distinct from many other features of the mind with which
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We have seen that the sense of self is logically and empirically distinct from many other features of the mind with which it is often conflated. In order to understand it at the level of the brain, therefore, we would need to study people who no longer experienced it. As we will see, certain practices of meditation are very well suited to research of this kind.
PENETRATING THE ILLUSION
As a matter of neurology, the sense of having a persistent and unified self must be an illusion, because it is built upon processes that, by their very nature as processes, are transitory and multifarious. There is no region of the brain that can be the seat of a soul. Everything that makes us human—our emotional lives, capacity for language, the impulses that give rise to complex behavior, and our ability to restrain other impulses that we consider uncivilized—is spread across the entirety of the cortex and many subcortical brain regions as well. The whole brain is involved in making us what we are. So we need not await any data from the lab to say that the self cannot be what it seems.
The sense that we are unified subjects is a fiction, produced by a multitude of separate processes and structures of which we are not aware and over which we exert no conscious control. What is more, many of these processes can be independently disturbed, producing deficits that would seem impossible if they were not so easily verified. Some people, for instance, are able to see perfectly but are unable to detect motion. Others are able to see objects and their motion but are unable to locate them in space. How the mind depends upon the brain, and the manner in which its powers can be disrupted, defies common sense. Here, as elsewhere in science, how things seem is often a poor guide to how they are.
The claim that we can experience consciousness without a conventional sense of self—that there is no rider on the horse—seems to be on firm ground neurologically. Whatever causes the brain to produce the false notion that there is a thinker living somewhere inside the head, it makes sense that it could stop doing this. And once it does, our inner lives become more faithful to the facts.
How can we know that the conventional sense of self is an illusion? When we look closely, it vanishes. This is compelling in the same way that the disappearance of any illusion is: You thought something was there, but upon closer inspection, you see that it isn’t. What doesn’t survive scrutiny cannot be real.
The classic example from the Indian tradition is of a coiled rope mistaken for a snake: Imagine that you spot a snake in the corner of a room and feel an immediate cascade of fear. But then you notice that it isn’t moving. You look more closely and see that it doesn’t appear to have a head—and suddenly you spot coiled strands of fiber that you mistook for a pattern of scales. You move closer and can see that it is a rope. A skeptic might ask, “How do you know that the rope is real and the snake an illusion?” This question may seem reasonable, but only to a person who hasn’t had this experience of looking closely at the snake only to have it disappear. Given that the snake always collapses into being a rope, and not the other way around, there is simply no empirical basis upon which to form such a doubt.
Perhaps you can see the same effect in the above illusion. It certainly looks like there is a white square in the center of the figure, but when we study the image, it becomes clear that there are only four partial circles. The square has been imposed by our visual system, whose edge detectors have been fooled. Can we know that the black shapes are more real than the white square? Yes, because the square doesn’t survive our efforts to locate it—its edges literally disappear. A little investigation and we see that its form has been merely implied. In fact, it is possible to look closely enough at the figure to banish the illusion altogether. But what could we say to a skeptic who insisted that the white square is just as real as the three-quarter circles? All we could do is urge him to look more closely. This is not a matter of debating third-person facts; it is a matter of looking more closely at experience itself.
In the next chapter, we will see that the illusion of the self can be investigated—and dispelled—in just this way.
PENETRATING THE ILLUSION
As a matter of neurology, the sense of having a persistent and unified self must be an illusion, because it is built upon processes that, by their very nature as processes, are transitory and multifarious. There is no region of the brain that can be the seat of a soul. Everything that makes us human—our emotional lives, capacity for language, the impulses that give rise to complex behavior, and our ability to restrain other impulses that we consider uncivilized—is spread across the entirety of the cortex and many subcortical brain regions as well. The whole brain is involved in making us what we are. So we need not await any data from the lab to say that the self cannot be what it seems.
The sense that we are unified subjects is a fiction, produced by a multitude of separate processes and structures of which we are not aware and over which we exert no conscious control. What is more, many of these processes can be independently disturbed, producing deficits that would seem impossible if they were not so easily verified. Some people, for instance, are able to see perfectly but are unable to detect motion. Others are able to see objects and their motion but are unable to locate them in space. How the mind depends upon the brain, and the manner in which its powers can be disrupted, defies common sense. Here, as elsewhere in science, how things seem is often a poor guide to how they are.
The claim that we can experience consciousness without a conventional sense of self—that there is no rider on the horse—seems to be on firm ground neurologically. Whatever causes the brain to produce the false notion that there is a thinker living somewhere inside the head, it makes sense that it could stop doing this. And once it does, our inner lives become more faithful to the facts.
How can we know that the conventional sense of self is an illusion? When we look closely, it vanishes. This is compelling in the same way that the disappearance of any illusion is: You thought something was there, but upon closer inspection, you see that it isn’t. What doesn’t survive scrutiny cannot be real.
The classic example from the Indian tradition is of a coiled rope mistaken for a snake: Imagine that you spot a snake in the corner of a room and feel an immediate cascade of fear. But then you notice that it isn’t moving. You look more closely and see that it doesn’t appear to have a head—and suddenly you spot coiled strands of fiber that you mistook for a pattern of scales. You move closer and can see that it is a rope. A skeptic might ask, “How do you know that the rope is real and the snake an illusion?” This question may seem reasonable, but only to a person who hasn’t had this experience of looking closely at the snake only to have it disappear. Given that the snake always collapses into being a rope, and not the other way around, there is simply no empirical basis upon which to form such a doubt.
Perhaps you can see the same effect in the above illusion. It certainly looks like there is a white square in the center of the figure, but when we study the image, it becomes clear that there are only four partial circles. The square has been imposed by our visual system, whose edge detectors have been fooled. Can we know that the black shapes are more real than the white square? Yes, because the square doesn’t survive our efforts to locate it—its edges literally disappear. A little investigation and we see that its form has been merely implied. In fact, it is possible to look closely enough at the figure to banish the illusion altogether. But what could we say to a skeptic who insisted that the white square is just as real as the three-quarter circles? All we could do is urge him to look more closely. This is not a matter of debating third-person facts; it is a matter of looking more closely at experience itself.
In the next chapter, we will see that the illusion of the self can be investigated—and dispelled—in just this way.
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