Tag Archives: Self

Buddhism Without Beliefs by Stephen Batchelor

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buddhism-beliefsI’m not really sure what Stephen Batchelor is trying to say in Buddhism Without Beliefs. I think his main idea is there in the title. Excerpts below got some highlighter… real reviews at Amazon.  This wasn’t one of my favorite books on the topic.

Awakening is no longer seen as something to attain in the distant future, for it is not a thing but a process — and this process is the path itself. […] It is an authentic way of being in the world.

The dharma is not something to believe in but something to do. [ Wikipedia: In Buddhism dharma means “cosmic law and order”, but is also applied to the teachings of the Buddha.]

An agnostic Buddhist is not a “believer” with claims to revealed information about supernatural or paranormal phenomena, and in this sense is not “religious.” […] The dharma is not a belief by which you will be miraculously saved. It is a method to be investigated and tried out. […] An agnostic Buddhist eschews atheism as much as theism, and is as reluctant to regard the universe as devoid of meaning as endowed with meaning.

Buddhism could be described as “the culture of awakening.”

Religions are united not be belief in God but by belief in life after death.

Regardless of what we believe, our actions will reverberate beyond our deaths. Irrespective of our personal survival, the legacy of our thoughts, words, and deeds will continue through the impressions we leave behind in the lives of those we have influenced or touched in any way.

Life is neither meaningful nor meaningless. Meaning and its absence are given to life by language and imagination.

Anguish emerges from craving for life to be other than it is.

Dharma practice is founded on resolve. […] An ongoing, heartfelt reflection on priorities, values and purpose. […] Dharma practice is the process of awakening itself: the thoughts, words, and deeds that weave the unfolding fabric of experience into a coherent whole.

The process of awakening is like walking on a footpath. When we find such a path after hours of struggling through undergrowth, we know at last that we are heading somewhere. Moreover, we suddenly find that we can move freely without obstruction. We settle into a rhythmic and easy pace. […] What counts is not so much the destination but the resolve to take the next step.

Focused awareness is difficult not because we are inept at some spiritual technology but because it threatens our sense of who we are.

The stiller the mind, the more palpable the dazzling torrent of life becomes.

The world is so saturated with the meanings given to it that those meanings seem to reside in the things themselves.

At every moment we are either inclining toward or engaged in an act: a physical movement, an utterance, a thought. Even when you decide not to act, you are still doing something: refraining.

As you sit in meditation, notice how what you are doing is the enactment of an earlier resolve. By attending to the details of this present moment, by choosing not to recollect the past or plan for the future, you are engaged in a process of creating yourself in a specific and deliberate way.

What are we but the story we keep repeating, editing, censoring, and embellishing in our heads? [I am] an unfolding narrative.

We cannot attain awakening for ourselves: we can only participate in the awakening of life.

When belief and opinion are suspended, the mind has nowhere to rest.

Why something instead of nothing?

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John Updike takes a stab at The Big Question:

It’s beyond our intellectual limits as a species. Put yourself into the position of a dog. A dog is responsive, shows intuition, looks at us with eyes behind which there is intelligence of a sort, and yet a dog must not understand most of the things it sees people doing. It must have no idea how they invented, say, the internal-combustion engine. So maybe what we need to do is imagine that we’re dogs and that there are realms that go beyond our understanding. I’m not sure I buy that view, but it is a way of saying that the mystery of being is a permanent mystery, at least given the present state of the human brain.

Found this (and more) in a post by Maria Popova (Brain Pickings) about a book by Jim Holt titled Why Does the World Exist? (On the way).

I think the next big evolutionary leap for humans will some form of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). When the AGI is as intelligent as we (or it) needs or wants to be, I’m going to ask it to take a good, long look at Reality and once it has a good grasp, to explain/show it to me in a way I can understand. And it will look exactly like the Reality 1.0 I’m currently running. Until, of course, we reach the point where the AGI can modify my wetware sufficiently for me to glimpse the Source Code in all its magnificence.

Consciousness and the Social Brain

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consciousnessAmazon: “What is consciousness and how can a brain, a mere collection of neurons, create it? In Consciousness and the Social Brain, Princeton neuroscientist Michael Graziano lays out an audacious new theory to account for the deepest mystery of them all. The human brain has evolved a complex circuitry that allows it to be socially intelligent. This social machinery has only just begun to be studied in detail. One function of this circuitry is to attribute awareness to others: to compute that person Y is aware of thing X. In Graziano’s theory, the machinery that attributes awareness to others also attributes it to oneself. Damage that machinery and you disrupt your own awareness. Graziano discusses the science, the evidence, the philosophy, and the surprising implications of this new theory.”

The (attention schema) theory explains why a brain attributes the property of consciousness to itself, and why we humans are so prone to attribute consciousness to the people and objects around us.

Consciousness is the window through which we understand.

Attention is a data-handling trick for deeply processing some information at the expense of most information. Awareness is the brain’s simplified, schematic model of the complicated, data-handling process of attention.

People have personal, quirky definitions of the term consciousness, whereas everyone more or less agrees on the meaning of the term awareness.

Not all information in the brain has awareness attached to it.

Consciousness refers both to the information about which I am aware and the process of being aware of it. Consciousness encompasses the whole of personal experience at any moment, whereas awareness applies only to one part, the act of experiencing.

Self-knowledge is merely another category of knowledge. How knowledge can be encoded in the brain is not fundamentally mysterious, but how we become aware of the information is. The awareness itself if the mystery.

Whatever awareness is, it musts be able to physically impact neuronal signals. Otherwise we would be unable to say that we have it.

Awareness is a description of attention. […] Attention is not data encoded in the brain; it is a data-handling method. It is an act. It is something the brain does, a procedure, an emergent process. […] In addition to doing attention, the brain also constructs a description of attention and awareness is that description. […] Awareness allows the brain to understand attention, its dynamics, and its consequences.

Awareness is the brain’s cartoon of attention.

The same machinery used to model another person’s attentional state in a social situation is also used to model one’s own attentional state. The benefit is the same: understanding and prediction one’s own behavior.

Attention is an active process, a data-handling style that boosts this or that chunk of information in the brain. In contrast, awareness is a description, a chunk of information, a reflection of the ongoing state of attention.

The unconscious machinery of the brain is so vast that it is like an elephant. Perhaps consciousness is a little boy sitting on the elephant’s head. The boy naively imagines that he is in control of the elephant, but he merely watches what the elephant chooses to do.

Your decision machinery does not have direct access to the real object, only to the information about the object that is encoded in the visual system. A perceptual representation is always inaccurate because it is a simplification.

The brain does attention but knows awareness.

(There is a ) distinction between being aware of something and knowing that you are aware of it.

Awareness is a schematized, descriptive model of attention. […] The purpose of (the) model in the brain is to be useful in interacting with the world, not to be accurate.

My awareness is located inside me. In a sense it is me. It is my mind apprehending something.

Your own private awareness and your ability to attribute awareness to someone else are products of the same machinery in your brain. That machinery computes the property of awareness and can attribute it to others.

Is it necessary to be aware of any specific information in order to be aware? Can you be aware, simply aware, without any target of the awareness? Can I be aware of being?

Consciousness (is) essentially a tale that the brain tells itself to explain what it is doing and why it is doing it. Consciousness is after-the-fact. We know about our mental states using the same tricks and inferences that we use to reconstruct the mental states of other people. We tell ourselves a story about ourselves. As a consequence, we routinely and confidently make up incorrect reasons for our own behavior.

Awareness is a model of the act of attention. […] Attention is not itself information. It is something that happens to information.

The only objective, physically measurable truth we have about consciousness is that we can, at least sometimes, report that we have it.

Consciousness is information that describes the process of attending to something.

Awareness is not knowledge about yourself as a person, or knowledge about your emotions, or knowledge about your thoughts; it is not remembering your past, or introspecting about your mood, or any other part of self-reflection. Awareness is equally present whether you are reflecting on yourself or looking out at the external world. It is present whether you are focused on your innermost feelings or on the grass and sky in the park on a nice day.

(One view of consciousness) Consciousness does not directly cause most of our actions but instead rationalizes them. In (this) view, free will plays a minor role, if any.

All consciousness is a “mere” computed model attributed to an object. One’s brain can attribute it to oneself or to something else. Consciousness is an attribution. (Consciousness) is not something a person has, floating inside. It is an attribution. […] To say that I myself am conscious is to stay, “My own brain has constructed an informational model of awareness and attributed it to my body.”

The most reasonable approach to spirituality is to accept two simultaneous truths. One, literally and objectively, there is no spirit world. Minds do not float independently of bodies and brains. Two, perceptually, there is a spirit world. We live in a perceptual world, a world simulated by the brain, in which consciousness inhabits many things around us, including sometimes empty space.

We will build computers that can construct their own awareness in the same way that the human brain does.

If I spend enough time (with him) and my friend gets to know me well, then he will construct a model in his own brain, an informational model of a mind filled with the quirks and idiosyncrasies that reflect me. His model of my mind will be the same general type of data run in the same general manner on the same general hardware architecture as my own conscious mind. It will be a copy, at low resolution, of my consciousness. In effect, I will have been copied over from one computer to another. […] Fuzzy copies of our conscious minds exist in all the people who knew us.

I consider it a technological inevitability that information will, some day, be scannable directly from the brain and transferrable directly to computers. As embarrassingly sci-fi as that sounds, no theoretical reason stands against it. If the attention schema theory is correct, then human consciousness is information processed in a specific manner. Don’t want to die? Download your consciousness onto a central server and live in a simulated world with all the other downloaded souls. When your body dies, the copy of your mind will persist. You need not know the difference. If the simulation is good, you should feel as though you are in a realistic universe. You can possess what seems to be a human body and can walk and live and eat and sleep on the familiar Earth, all simulated, all in the form of information manipulated on computer hardware. At the rate technology is advancing, give it a few centuries.

It has been said that people invented God. People will invent the afterlife too.

Across all cultures and all religions, universally, people consider God to be a conscious mind. God is aware. God consciously chooses to make things happen. […] The critical question is whether consciousness lies behind the events of the universe. If so, then God exists. If not, then God does not exist. […] The universe is conscious in the same sense that it is beautiful. It is conscious because brains attribute consciousness to it, and that is the only way that anything is ever conscious.

Meditation Now or Never

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meditationPublisher’s Weekly: Zen priest Hagen, author of Buddhism Plain and Simple and Buddhism Is Not What You Think, offers a brief and wonderfully accessible primer on meditation, which can be a surprisingly difficult practice for many beginners. He helpfully defines meditation via negativa: meditation is not a self-help program, a quick fix, a mind-training technique or a way to relax before jumping right back into the fray of our busy lives. It’s a lifelong practice that can, and should, seep into every arena of the quotidian, so that when we’re attentively folding laundry or taking out the trash, we’re doing meditation. It involves teaching the mind just to be here, says Hagen. Amazon.

A few excerpts:

We live tuned in to ourselves, but tuned out from life.

We easily lose sight of the distinction between Reality and our ideas about Reality.

Meditation is an expression of faith in direct experience itself.

Meditation is useless. (Because) meditation is, finally, just to be here. Not over there, in some other place called peace or freedom or enlightenment. Not longing for something else. Not trying to be, or to acquire, something new or different. … We can’t do meditation for any reason other than to be aware. … If you’re sitting in meditation to get something — you’re not here.

Meditation is about deeply seeing what’s going on within your own mind.

In meditation, we see that there is no cosmic mystery to break through. … Reality and Truth don’t require any “figuring out.”

You can’t become enlightened (because) you’re already here, immersed in it. It’s like trying to become human.

The practice of meditation frees us from our insane desire to control ourselves and others.

If you can get past the resistance to meditation, nothing else in life will be an obstacle.

In each new moment we can live in either awareness or ignorance.

Our meditation practice reflects the attitude we take in life.

At the heart of meditation is the intention to be awake. (To experience) Reality as it is,before goals, ideas, or desires sprout. … Meditation is never a means to an end.

Meditation is not about doing anything. It is simply paying attention. … If our will is directed toward any object or purpose — even toward meditation correctly — then we’re not in meditation.

Meditation is continually returning to life so that we don’t miss it. There’s no gap, no distinction, between you and what you’re doing.

Instead of practicing now and here, we get lost in thought about it.

Enlightenment isn’t something we need to figure out. It’s just remembering — waking up to what you knew all along but were not paying attention to. There’s nothing to figure out. It’s only a matter of seeing and not talking to yourself.

Over time you’ll discover that meditation won’t give you ideas at all.

Meditation is a matter of zero or 100 percent. Either you’re present or you’re not. There are no in-betweens.

To the extent that we’re not fully present as we live our life, a good portion of our life passes away unlived.

Meditation is awareness.

The very distinction of “out there” and “in here” is just another mental construct. It isn’t Real.

The more present we are, the bigger the picture we see. The bigger picture we see, the more things seem to slow down. And when the Whole is seen, all is utterly still.

Almost everything we do is done for a purpose a result, an outcome. In meditation, however, we let go of hopes and fears, plans and outcomes, and simply come back to here and now.

The desire of one who is awake is simply to be awake.

We can ever really explain how we feel — we can only feel how we feel.

Waking up means, more than anything else, that we learn to see ourselves.

Meditation is about your attitude toward life.

We put together a world in our mind. We carry all kinds of ideas, beliefs, notions, and prejudices — and, for most of us, that is our reality. It’s where we live. We regularly confuse what we believe with what we actually know.

Everything in culture is built around the premise of going after something else.

We find awakening so elusive because we’re looking for it. And if we’re looking for it, that means we believe it’s not here.

There is no “out there.”

We need to awaken, again and again, in each new moment. And in each moment, we have a new opportunity to wake up.

Life is all at once. It’s forever now. It’s never “then.”

Chapter 24: Weather Watch (PDF) Weather Watch (Steve Hagen)

The ego is what you think you are

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“The face in the mirror, and the haphazard story we associate with it, is the ego. (But) what we think of ourselves is constantly changing, not just day to day, but moment to moment, and mood to mood. At different times, I have thought of myself as anything from an insufferable loser, to a freaking genius, to a guy who can never quite get his shit together, to a guy who’s never had a serious problem in his life. What I think I am is so fickle and so dependent on moods and circumstances, that it can’t possibly be right — ever!”

This is what is people mean when they say the self is an illusion. It is a fictional character that is constantly changing. Therefor, not a real thing in the permanent, unchanging sense of the word real.

David Cain comes closer to explaining this than anyone I’ve read.

Immortality

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book-coverThe Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization, by Stephen Cave (Amazon)

“The Mortality Paradox – On the one hand, our powerful intellects come inexorably to the conclusion that we, like all other living things around us, must one day die. Yet on the other, the one thing that these minds cannot imagine is that very state of nonexistence; it is literally inconceivable. Death therefore presents itself as both inevitable and impossible.”

“The Terror Management Theory – We must live in the knowledge that the worst thing that can possibly happen to us one day surely will. […] We have created institutions, philosophies and religions to protect us from this terror by denying or at least distracting us from the finality of death.”

“Immortality is not for the weak and foolish.”

“”Longevity Escape velocity” – living long enough to live forever”

“”Computational Resurrection” – the rerunning of software that is your mind on a new piece of hardware so that you might live again.”

“The Soul – the most influential single idea in the history of Western civilization”

“Whether or not we literally believe we have a soul that will go to heaven, the cosmic significance we ascribe to ourselves as unique individuals reassures us that we transcend mere biology. […] We are creating a myth of immunity to extinction.”

“Buddhists do believe in some essential part of you that survives the body in order to be reincarnated in accordance with the laws of karma. This is pure consciousness, stripped of all memories and convictions and the rest of the accumulated baggage of a lifetime. The Dali Lama describes it as a “continuum of awareness.””

“In Hinduism and Buddhism there is an undercurrent of recognition that the individual mind cannot continue without the body. Beyond the theory of reincarnation, which requires a soul robust enough to be punished for its past sins, there are hints of something more radical. Nirvana, for example, literally means “extinguishing” or “blowing out.” But what is it that is being “blown out” like a candle? Some Buddhists say worldly desires. Others, however, go further and believe it is the self that is extinguished. For some in the ascetic tradition, the source of worldly suffering is not just being in the world–it is being at all. Liberation therefore means to cease to be an individual altogether, or as the Hindus put it, to become one with the all, the Brahman.”

“We have already concluded you have no soul — no unchanging essence or immutable inner core. We could go further and say that there is, in fact, nothing that is the “real you.” You are just a collection of disparate thoughts, memories, sense impressions and the like, all bundled up together in a package we conveniently label a person. What is more, all these disparate parts are continually changing,as some things are forgotten and others learned, opinions changed and new memories formed. The question is, then, if you are such an ever-changing bundle, what does it mean for “you” to survive?”

“Psychologist Roy Baumeister has estimated the length of time for which most of us can expect to be remembered as seventy years. He points out that not many people can even *name* their great-grandparents.”

“People in modern cities long ago lost the ability to survive independently—we are utterly reliant on a complex higher level system for clean water, food, clothing, shelter, medicine, security and energy. Like the specialized cells of our bodies, which have given up their independence for the greater strength and security offered by life as part of a macro-organism, we have each given up our independence to be part of strong and secure superorganisms.”

“Individual humans are merely temporary forms taken by the single, shifting web of life on earth. If humans are not really separate things, then their births and deaths are also not real, but simply one way of seeing the rhythms of life.”

“The great social-reform movements of the last centuries — emancipation of slaves, equality between sexes and races, social welfare and son on — arose only when the preoccupation with the next world began to lose its grip on Western society. […] If this life here on earth is regarded merely as a series of tests for a place in another life, then it is necessarily devalued.”

“There are as I see it two sets of problems: on the one hand, the boredom and apathy that would result from having done and seen everything there is to do— that is, from having already lived a very long time—and on the other hand, the paralysis that would result from having an infinite future in which to do any further things. Both these problems, the backward looking and the forward-looking, threaten to suck the meaning out of life and leave one wishing for a terminal deadline.”

“Death is the source of all our deadlines.”

“Life as we know it may be too short to watch daytime TV, but eternity wouldn’t be.[…] Given infinity, time would lose its worth. And once time is worthless, it becomes impossible to make rational decisions about how to spend it. […] If civilization exists to aid our preparation into the future, then if that perpetuation were guaranteed, civilization would be redundant. […] Civilization exists to give us immortality, but if it ever succeeded it would fall apart.”

“We do not “see” or experience death; death is the end of all experience. […] Neither you nor I can ever literally *be* dead. Living things cannot be dead things. To talk of someone “being dead” is just a shorthand for saying they have ceased to exist. […] We can never be aware of (life) having an end — we can never know anything but life.”

“If you are happy now, then you are happy always, as there is only now.”

The God Argument

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the-god-argumentThe God Argument (The Case Against Religion and for Humanism) by A. C. Grayling was a bit of a slow read for me, compared to a few other books I’ve read on this topic. This was, I believe, my first brush with secular humanism and it’s nice to have a basic definition of the concepts.

“Secularism is the principle of maintaining a separation between religious interests and bodies, on the one hand, and the state, on the other hand, on the premise that religion has no greater claim than any other self-interest outlook in debates about matters of government and public policy.”

“The basis of humanism is that we are to answer the most fundamental of all questions, the question of how to live, by reflection on the facts of human experience in the real world, and not on the basis of religion. […] As a broad ethical outlook, humanism involves no sectarian divisions or strife, no supernaturalism, no taboos, no food and dress codes, no restrictive sexual morality other than what is implicit in the demand to treat others with respect, consideration and kindness.”

Humanism’s two fundamental premises: 1) “there are no supernatural agencies in the universe,” 2) “our ethics must be drawn from, and responsive to, the nature and circumstances of human experience.”

“A key requirement (of humanism) is that individuals should think for themselves about what they are and how they should live. […] It imposes no obligations on people other than to think for themselves.”

Same for stoicism which, at first glances, seems to share some ideas with Buddhism.

“Stoicism’s main doctrine was that one should cultivate two capacities: ‘indifference’, and self-control. They used the term ‘indifference’ in the strict sense of this term to men neutrality, detachment, as in not taking sides on a question, or being disengaged from a quarrel.”

A few more ideas that got some highlighter »
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Ten Zen Questions by Susan Blackmore

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tenSusan Blackmore describes her fascinating book as “my own attempt to combine science and personal practice in the investigation of consciousness.”

“Learning to meditate means nothing more than learning to sit still and pay attention, staying relaxed and alert, without getting tangled up in trains of thoughts, emotions or inner conversations.”

“Now I understood the need for a calm mind. We were told that calming the mind is the starting point of all meditation, but that it can also take you all the way. We were told even scarier things; that what you are searching for is here right now, that there is really nothing to strive for and that once you arrive you will realise there was nowhere to go in the first płace; that however hard you work, and you must work hard, in the end you will know that there is nothing to be done.”

“Being in the present moment […] meant that I was not to think about the next moment, not to dwell on what I had just done, not to think about what I might have said instead, not to imagine a conversaton that I might have later, not to look forward to lunch, not to look forward to weekends, or holidays or… anything.”

“The present moment is always all right. All my troubles lay in the thoughts I was letting go of. […] The body seemed to keep on doing relevant and sensible things, apparently without all the agonising I had assumed was essential.”

“Idealism: The idea that there is no separate physical world, and everything in the universe is made up of thoughts, or ideas or consciousness.”

“Materialism: The idea that there is no separate mental world, and everything in the universe is mad of matter.”

“Actions exist, and also their consequences, but the person that acts does not. — Buddhist saying

“Am I conscious now? It troubles me that I seem so often to be unconscious. I wonder what this unconsciousness is. I cannot believe I spend most of my life in a kind of darkness. Surely that cannot be so. Yet every time I ask the question it feels as though I am waking up, or that a light is switching on.”

“How can I look into the darkness, when looking makes it light?”

“The words aren’t really necessary anymore. Rather, there just seems to be a questioning attitude, an openness of mind. Am I conscious now? Yes, I am, keep on that way, and now, and now, and gently now. […] Awareness does become more continuous with practice — it can just take a very long time.”

“I can grab a now. I can grasp out with my attention. This and this. They happened at once, didn’t they. It was a now, I am sure, even though it was gone by the time I can have that certanty. […] I cannot work out what it would mean for there to be no now. And yet there does not seem to be a now. […] When I sit quietly, doing nothing, there is no obvious choice of what is now. Stuff just happens.”

“I was looking for the me that was looking and I found only the world. I am, it seems, the world I see.”

“There is not a separate me as well as the experience. It is hard to accept that I am all those people walking down the street.”

“I see and hear and feel but name nothing. […] It is something like paying attention equally to everything.”

“How can I tell the clouds have moved? Because from one moment to the next I can remember what came before.”

“There are multiple brain processes going on, some of which take up more of the brain’s capacity than others, but there is no me who experiences them, and no time at which they become conscious.”

“The world we think we see or hear — is always a memory. and what is a memory?”

“Do past and future look different? […] They’re all just the same stuff — memory stuff; imagination stuff. Past and future can be held in mind as equivalent.”

“Mindfullness is being fully here in the present moment. But now I know that there is no such moment. So what is mindfullness?” [What I understand as ‘now’ is really just a memory of just-past moment]

“What was I conscious of a moment ago? I found whole streams of experience that seemed to have already been going on, for someone, before I noticed them.”

“There is no thinker other than the thoughts. […] I’ve always treated thoughts as a problem, or something to be dealt with. Now, instead of either fighting them or watching them, I am simply to be them.”

“The universe seems to be causlly closed. That is, everything that happens is caused by something else. Nothing happens by magical forces intervening from outside the web of causes and effects, for everything is interconnected with everything else. […] Yet I feel as though I can act freely. Indeed this magical view is probably how most people in most cultures have always thought about themselves, imagining a non-physical mental entity that has wishes and desires, can think and plan, and carry out those plans by acting on the world.”

“Decision are made because of countless interacting events, and afterwards a little voice inside says, ‘I did that’, ‘I decided to do that.’ […] I am not separate from the perceptions, thoughts and actions that make up my world. And if I am what seems to be the world, the we are in this together. Me and the world, world/me are doing all these actions that now just seem to act of their own accord.”

“The world had summed up the options, chose one, carried it out, and moved on. This action was a result of everything I had learned and done before. […] Could I just trust the world and this body to woirk all by itself without me doing anything?”

“I am not a continuous conscious being at all. What seems to be me just arises along with whatever is being experienced. […] Every time some experience comes along, the me is allowed to go, along with the ending of the experience, as though experience and experiencer arise and then snuff out together. […] There never was a continuous I. […] The ‘same me’ was never recreated. […] Will I be snuffed out like a candle? Yes, just as I have been a thousand, million times before.” #

“Consciousness is an illusion; an enticing and convincing illusion that lures us into believing that our minds are separate from our bodies.”

“(My selves) arise along with the sensations, perceptions and thoughts that they seem to be having, and die along with them. With every new ‘this’ there is a new ‘me’ who was looking into it.”

There is nothing it is like to be me.
I am not a persisting conscious entity.
I do not consciously cause sthe actions of my body.
Consciousness is not a stream of experiences.
Seeing entails no vivid mental pictures or movie in the brain.
There is no unity of consciousness either in a given moment or through time.
Brain activity is neither conscious no unconscious.
There are no contents of consciousness.
There is no now.

“At any time in a human brain there are multiple parallel processes going on, conjuring up perceptions, thoughts, opinions, sensations and volitions. None of these is either in or out of consciousness for there is no such place. Most of the time there is no observer: if consciousness is involved at all it is an attribudon made later, on the basis of remembering events and assuming that someone must have been experiencing them in the past, when in fact no one was.”

So I said to myself, “Self…”

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If someone offered you a thousand dollars to write a 500 word essay titled “Who Am I?”… you could do that. You could knock out 500 words but I suspect most people have not given five minutes thought to this timeless, existential question.

A first draft would probably be heavily biographical. Your name; what you look like; where you’ve lived; what you do for living; maybe important relationships. You’d tell your story. So, are you your story?

The more introspective might try to describe some “essential self.” That “Real Me” that no one knows. “Thine own self” to which Polonius said we should be true. This is where you start listing all of the things you believe/know/think/fear.

Now, let’s say I give you a thousand bucks to write this essay every five years, starting at, oh, let’s say, fifteen. Now you’re 65 and we have your ten essays in front of us. Which one of those “you’s” is The Real You?

“All of them,” you explain. “That’s me at 25, that’s me at 40 (and so forth).” So, the essence, the core of who you are changes from year to year? How about month-to-month? Daily? Hourly? Sounds like there are many different Real You’s.

This is an ancient question that really smart people have thought about for thousands of years. My reading has lead me to the camp that finds no evidence of an essential, unchanging, permanent self.

I need a visual metaphor to even begin to *think* about stuff like this. Let’s try one.

Shortly after you’re born, you’re issued a little backpack. This is where you keep everything. The image of the giant people who take care of you; the smell of the places around you; the feeling you get when you’re hungry or you’ve pooped yourself. Since everything’s new at this point, your little backpack fills up pretty quickly but that’s okay because you get a bigger one whenever as needed.

All your experiences get stuffed into the backpack. If you need to know if you’re good or bad; smart or dumb; afraid or fearless… the answers are in the bag. It can get confusing because nothing ever comes _out_ of the bag but if it’s in there, it’s part of who you are.

By the time you reach your early teens you’ve traded in your backpack for a duffle bag and it’s packed! Including a couple of quarts of hormones that have soaked all those memories and feelings and beliefs. It is messy.

By the time you’re an adult, you’re dragging around a steamer trunk and adding more stuff every day. If the question, “Who am I?” comes up, well, you open the trunk and the stuff on top is you.

After dragging that fucker around for 60+ years, I’m ready to leave it behind. All the memories (good and bad) and fears and ideas and concepts and beliefs. Turns out, a lot of the stuff in that trunk was put there by someone else. Family, friends, strangers, you name it. After dragging it around for ten or fifteen years, it became “mine/me.”

The reason we don’t go insane thinking about this is we have something called the ego. But that’s just a character, like Willy Loman. A little different every time he walks onstage. Not real. For most of my life, I didn’t know it was a play. I thought I was Willy Loman. Now I’m sort of watching from the wings. I can see the make-up is a little different each performance, lines are delivered with slightly different inflection. I’m becoming aware it is a performance and that the lines aren’t mine.

“The self is impermanent. […] It is constantly changing, decaying, and being reconstructed again, always slightly differently, depending on the circumstances of the moment. […] It never repeats itself. Whenever you look, it is slightly different.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go There You Are

Why deconstruct the concept of the self (ego)? Apparently, that is the source of all suffering.

[This is where I ran out of gas on this post. Fortunately, I came across this post by Brian Hines who takes this idea on down the road.]

Wherever You Go There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn

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Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life by Jon Kabat-Zinn (Amazon)

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What happens now, in this moment, influences what happens next.

We tend to be particularly unaware that we are thinking virtually all the time. […] Meditation means learning how to get out of this current.

Meditation is the only intentional, systematic human activity which at the bottom is about not trying to improve yourself or get anywhere else, but simply to realize where you already are.

Let go of wanting something else to happen in this moment.

Is it possible for you to contemplate that this may actually be the best season, the best moment of your life?

Look at other people and ask yourself if you are really seeing them or just your thoughts about them. Sometimes our thoughts act like “dream glasses.”

If you do decide to start meditation, there’s no need to tell other people about it, or talk about why you are doing it or what it’s doing for you. […] Just look at (this) as more thinking.

Meditation is neither shutting things out nor off. It is seeing things clear4ly, and deliberately positioning yourself differently in relationship to them.

Meditation is not about feeling a certain way. It’s about feeling the way you feel. It’s not about making the mind empty or still. […] Meditation is about letting the mind be as it is.

Even our leisure tends to be busy and mindless. The joy of non-doing is that nothing else needs to happen for this moment to be complete.

“To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.” — Thoreau

(We meditate to realize) “…that things are already perfect.”

We tend to see things through tinted glasses: through the lens of whether something is good for me or bad for me, or whether or not it conforms to my beliefs or philosophy.

At the deepest level, there is no giver, no gift, and no recipient… only the universe rearranging itself.

Voluntary Simplicity: “…intentionally doing only one thing at a time and making sure I am here for it.

If mindfulness is deeply important to you, then every moment is an opporunity to practice.

Meditation is more rightly thought of as “Way” than as a technique.

Awareness is not the same as thought. It lies beyond thinking. […] Awareness is more like a vessel which can hold and contain our thinking.

Meditation involves watching thought itself.

The posture itself is the meditation. The posture speaks of not looking for anything more, but simply digesting what is.

Mindfullness: Allowing one moment to unfold intot he next without analyzing, discoursing, judging, condemning, or doubting; simply observing, embracing, opening, letting be, accepting. Right now. Only this step. Only this moment.

We often see our thoughts, or someone else’s, instead of seeing what is right in front of us or inside of us.

When we perceive our intrinsic wholeness, there is truly no place to go and nothing to do.

What we call “the self” is really a construct of our own mind.

Stop trying so hard to be “somebody” and instead just experience being. […] You are only you in relationship to all other forces and events in the world.

You are who you already are. But who you are is not your name, your age, your childhood, your beliefes, your fears. They are part of it, but not the whole.

The self is impermanent. […] It is constantly changing, decaying, and being reconstructed again, always slightly differently, depending on the circumstances of the moment. […] It never repeats itself. Whenever you look, it is slightly different.