Delusion of "Self"

(First Published Sunday, July 24, 2011)

Imagine for a moment that someone known to you meets with an accident, is rushed to hospital, and wakes up later with amnesia. She’s gone completely blank.

You tell her who she is, introduce her to family, to friends, show her photos but other than listen to you attentively she displays no recognition, no emotion. Her case is serious. She has difficulty in identifying and naming objects. She will try to make believe what you say.

Imagine for a moment that your friend has had a drinking binge. He passes out only to wake up later disoriented. You then think of playing a practical joke on him by and taking advantage of his memory loss. You tell him things and he believes you. It works. What a fool!

You can say anything. You say black is white, a dog is a cow, that he/she is someone else and so on. And both will listen to you and try to work from thereon to piece things together, if not for the past then for the future so they can start living their lives

She tries to remember her name but can’t. She sees faces but shows no cognizance, has trouble perceiving, takes no caution, shows no fear, bereft of emotion, feels no shame, neither in behavior nor of the unkempt, has no opinions on anything, and has neither views nor assertions. You could say she is egoless. Let’s call it the “non-self-Person”.

She then undergoes a process of learning. And as time goes by she knows her name - her new name, she acquires an identity. She sees a face has cognizance, she smiles and laughs. She can perceive what she likes from dislikes, good from bad, senses danger, is sensitive to what others think and say, particularly in how she looks, begins to have a say in things. She begins to discriminate – this is mine, that is yours - labels, colors, flavors. She now conceptualizes all things.  She has become a new person, someone just like you and I. Let’s call it the “Self-Person”.

To become her “self” she has had to anchor on to familiar forms, to sounds, to smells, to tastes, to sensations, to all things now familiar. She has had to evaluate what she senses against what she has already learnt and experienced. Without this she is nothing, a “non-self”, a non-entity. So she does not exist by herself but only with the aid of her powers of cognition, of forms, feelings, her perceptions, her experience. It would be true to say that things we become attached to define who we are. It would be equally true to say that you could take a man out of uniform to make him a mouse, some or most men I suppose.

Now just suppose someone teaches her all things differently, things that you and I are not familiar with and starts calling out at things differently to the rest of us, then we would say she is delusional.  Here I have to digress a little to say - so it would seem when a delusion is accepted by all of us that it ceases to be one. Does it really?  And what of a person, who refuses to be indoctrinated with all of the teachings, would she be nuts only to be locked away?

Then, when she begins to identify objects, only ones she can relate to she identifies them by color, sounds taste, sensation, and other characteristics like models, brands, money value and so on. These objects may or may not invoke feelings and emotions in her. Without all of these she cannot identify her object as you and I would as she will see an object for what it is, such as a box that moves on 4 round things that seem to roll on itself, which we would say is a car. So the object, that is the object she is cognizant of does not exist by it self but only in relation to and with the aid of everything else, as much as she is. So for something to exist for someone it must become cloaked in the self-nature of that person, of her view, of her assertions, which are all hers, which she takes as “mine” – views and assertions she would probably defend vigorously if challenged.

This, simply, is the concept of “non-self”, known as anatta in the Pali language and anatman in Sanskrit. That is nothing has a self-nature or has an inherent existence.  And, there are several ways this concept can be explained. I have relied on my simple presentation as most of us can find dialectics and sheer dry knowledge uninteresting, abstract and difficult to comprehend.

Now, let’s go back to the drunken friend of ours, a fool we called him, is he really. If he is a fool just because he is different to us, isn’t he just a different fool to us? Aren’t we all fools? Aren’t we all deluded? Aren’t we all so very fooled when we take everything to posses a self-nature or have an inherent existence.

If you examine closely both the “non-self-person” and “self-person” were born out of ignorance. The non-self-person was brought about by the absence of knowledge whereas the self-person developed herself in the mistaken belief that she is a self-existing independent entity existing of its own right, as free standing and inherently existing.

Having now seen both these, what of you? Can you see through the delusion we are subject to?

It would appear that if we took out the self-factor that influenced and manipulated perception, which was claimed by the self to be this or that, then, we would have direct perception. This is the same perception that she, the non-self person, saw in the object box that moved on 4 round things, which we said was a car. When we do so we do it with the full knowledge of what it is, of what is real and what is conceptual. We would do so by not conceiving of a visible thing apart from seeing or an audible thing apart from hearing or a thing to be sensed apart from sensation or a cognizable thing apart from cognition. We do not entertain any conceit of being the agent behind the act.

By now it should be quite evident to you that what is born out of this knowledge is the wisdom that there is neither a self in us nor is there a non-self.  Yes, a double negative that does not establish and stops short of a positive - the opposition of propositions – the law of subcontrariety in logic where both are not false but they could be true. It is not mental gymnastics. This is logic, medieval logic, used by the Buddha in his explanations. It is used quite often in Zen thought. 

The view or belief in the self is one extreme thought and the belief in the non-self is another, both of which existed before the time of the Buddha, usually referred to as existentialism and nihilism. Explaining it through several different ways that included dialectics the Buddha propounded the theory of the middle way, that there is neither and that both the extreme views are born out of ignorance.

Most of us will probably spend our entire lives without knowing that we are being manipulated by our own self-nature. This self is more like a being within us. It keeps us from seeing our true identity, our true “self”. Sometimes, especially at time of great personal tragedy or calamity we will be jolted back to reality to reveal this true self. It can last a few moments or a few hours before we are sucked backed into our usual self, a world suspended in animation where it is this ego self that will hear, see, smell, feel, taste and think. We will go on and on, drifting away in our dream worlds both in the day and night, in our chores, caught in the monotony. It is this self that will flee pain and pursue the pleasant in the sensual.

Let’s talk about this "I" and my world that is suspended in animation – my universe in orbit and I. It is our usual self. It is a stream or flux that is a mix of what conditions us at any given time and the subconscious life-stream or the undercurrent of life known as Bhavanga. It is a stream that propels us forward from this life to next and the one after – the life continuum. It is a stream that is completely who we are, full of thoughts, and inner voice that always talk. Now why does this happen? It happens due to delusion, from the mistaken belief that a self exists in everything.

Imagine that you have created a computer game in which there are several game objects that move on the screen at various speeds. They gain momentum when you prod them and slow down when faced with obstacles. It is the same thing that happens in our minds. 

In the vast space of our minds we create various objects that we take as having their own self-nature, both animate and inanimate. We then nourish these objects, or call it a charge much like an electric charge, with an energy that comes from our likes and dislikes, pleasure and pain, happiness, sorrow and sadness, birth of new objects, attrition and death of the existing, fear of destruction of all these creations, of things unknown of things perceived rightly and wrongly, out of speculation or out of just pure imagination. These are further charged continuously through our senses and our thoughts – of the thinking mind. We further draw on our experience, a source of seemingly never-ending supply of conceptual constructs, all of which has been stored in our stream of consciousness over several lifetimes in the “self” nature format frozen until called to play in the arena of our space of mind, when it is recharged. And then what do we get? We get a powerful vortex in which we are caught as the observer, player and active participant. 

This has happened over eons, happens now and will continue over countless lifetimes in the future. It is what gives us that buzz in our minds, that sound we hear in our ears (if you were thinking about tinnitus it is not). It keeps our minds spinning. We will continue to spin so long as we have desire, attachment and aversion.

It is quite interesting to examine this in greater detail here but, perhaps, at another time, to see how man has over time immemorial tried to control the objects of mind in vortical interplay through extraneous means – drums, beats, rhythms, sounds, melody, song, hallucinogenic substances. Doing so would, momentarily, synthesize the objects of mind to oscillate at a different speed or vibrate in unison but these can also bring about unintended consequences when they further adversely charge some other objects of mind to go off whack affecting the whole game.

It is interesting to know that LCD electronic games made its advent in 1980 when Nintendo released several games. The games were designed by Gunpei Yokoi. In 1979, Yokoi, traveling on a bullet train, saw a bored businessman playing with an LCD calculator by pressing the buttons. Yokoi then thought of an idea for a watch that doubled as a miniature game machine for killing time. It is interesting because of what it was supposed to do – kill time. Now, why would we want to kill time? Why do we pass time with pastimes? A subject that deserves discussion but on another day.

You may now ask the question why has it got to be so? Why can’t we be our true selves. It is not that we are made with this defect. It is what arises from consciousness out of ignorance. The Buddha expounded the workings of ignorance and the ego in several ways. What is considered most important among them is the explanation given as the theory of dependent co-arising in the Great Discourse of Causation or the Mahanidhana Sutta.

Interestingly enough, the concept of time arises out of the concept of self. I will show you how that happen at another “time”, one of these days.

Do think about all this when you find yourself a peaceful moment. There is much here that deserves reflection. It will help you to discover yourself and find out who you are.

Delusion (Moha) in Buddhist philosophy is one of the three categories of defilements (kilesha), the other two being greed (lobha and raga) and hatred or aversion (dosa). These are impurities that that dull, darken, dirty, agitate, stress and sadden the mind. Delusion includes everything of the confused mind and includes stupidity, fear, worry, confusion, doubt, envy, infatuation, hope and expectation. It is characterized by the mind spinning around its object - something you will encounter when meditating.

And by this I have just introduced you to wisdom meditation. If you did all this thinking and reflections with a clear mind, a mind of calm abiding then some may call it meditation – wisdom meditation.

Or just call it being philosophical. According to Aristotle, one of the greatest philosophers “every human being must philosophize because first of all philosophy is everybody’s business; every time we reason, we use philosophy".