#22: Is the Self an Illusion?

The answer to whether or not the self is an illusion is tricky—it really depends on what you mean by both self and illusion.

In this episode, we challenge the sense of self that we all feel from the first-person subjective experience. We all feel like we are riding around inside of our heads looking out at the world. We don't feel like we are identical to our bodies, but instead that we have bodies—we look down at them from up here inside of our heads.

Nondualism:

Most people would say that they are behind their eyes in the center of consciousness. But neuroscientifically there is no place in the brain for such a self to exist. And we know from optical illusions that the brain can be easily fooled.

It is in this sense that the self can be shown to be an illusion because like all illusions, it disappears when you examine it more closely. This experience is known as nondualism or non-dual awareness, and it is when the sense of subject and object—of you in your head and the world out there—merge into one unified experience.

But this is not to say that you aren't real or even that the self isn't real. Illusions can be like any emergent phenomena—on one level of analysis they don't exist but on another level, it makes perfect sense to talk about them.

Temperature, for example, is an emergent phenomenon. Temperature is the average kinetic energy of the particles in a system. So it does not make sense to talk about the temperature of one atom, but that does not mean that it never makes sense to talk about temperature. I think of the self—the concept of being an "I" or a subject—in the same emergent way.

There are times when you can look closely and realize that you are not a separate subject. This experience of nondualism is beautiful and worth exploring. Sometimes it happens on accident—you've probably even had such a self-transcending moment without realizing it—and sometimes you can induce it through the practice of specific techniques (linked below).

But the fact that the self is an illusion doesn't mean that you have to experience the non-dual emptiness of consciousness all of the time. And it doesn't mean that you have to completely dispense with the concept of self. Most of the time it is perfectly valid to be a separate subject who has a name and an identity.

What's the point?

For me, the point of nondualism and of practicing non-dual awareness is just to be able to see this deeper reality whenever I want. Because it is the sense of being a separate self that creates most of our suffering in life, and it can be an immense relief to let go of it—to realize that there is nobody inside of your head to experience the suffering. Suffering doesn't go away, but the sufferer can.

So with a meditation practice to give you some concentration, you can get underneath the many layers of the mind to realize that there is nobody inside of your head—there's no experiencer having the experience.

There's just consciousness and its contents.

Timestamps (clickable on website):

• [03:50] What is consciousness?
• [07:03] The mind-body problem
• [17:10] The problem of personal identity
• [25:35] The illusion of the self and why there isn’t a center to consciousness.
• [33:36] What is the point of discovering the illusion of the self?
• [46:06] Why having a self makes us suffer more
• [52:05] Kalu Rinpoche and Jack Kornfield on the fear of being nothing.

Links:

• Taming the Mind: A conversation with Dan Harris