Tag: buddhism

Self and No Self

Posted on by Herbert Harris

by Herbert Harris

No Selfie

Many years ago, I began a meditation practice, sparked by curiosity and vague, middle-aged worries about stress and blood pressure. To my surprise, it quickly became a regular part of my life. I restlessly explored many forms of meditation and meditation groups, eventually coming to the San Francisco Zen Center. Before long, I found myself seated on a black cushion in the meditation hall each morning at 5:30. Twenty years later, and 2,500 miles away, I have a much more relaxed schedule, but I am still at it.

What is it like to meditate? This is a question I am constantly asked. Would a philosopher or scientist say there’s a distinct state of consciousness with its own special qualia? I don’t know. Maybe I’ve been doing it wrong, but meditation has never given me an experience that I would call altered consciousness. I’ve come to think the more interesting question is not what meditation feels like moment to moment, but what it is like to be a meditator, to live a life punctuated by these quiet, unremarkable moments of sitting still.

There are many ways our minds can store the details of our experience. We put facts and figures in one place, sensory experiences in another, and skills and procedures in yet another. There is a special kind of memory, called episodic memory, that holds not just the information about an event, but also a sense of our being there. Recalling episodic memories gives us a faint sense of time travel. These are the memories we can reinhabit. We remember a beach vacation as if we can feel the warm sand between our toes, hear the gulls above, and sense the light breeze on our skin. They have a lived-through quality, a presence that feels like “me.”

I have a torrent of episodic memories from my time in San Francisco, where I had just started a new job. I felt like a tourist; every street, every café, every meeting at the new company introduced a parade of unfamiliar faces. My memory was overloaded with experiences and sensations. It felt like my life had entered a new incarnation, complete with a new cast of characters I had to learn. As I stepped into a new role, I became, to some extent, a different person as I adapted to meet new duties and responsibilities. I was surrounded by people who each had hopes and expectations that I would be a good employee, a respectable colleague, and a friend. These hopes and expectations exerted palpable influences on my sense of self.

In the meditation hall, expectations were few. Read more »

Wednesday, September 10, 2025

Not Selves, but Not Nothing

Posted on by Marie Snyder

by Marie Snyder

We’re living at a time when the glorification of independence and individualism is harming the world and others in it, as well as leading to an epidemic of loneliness. According to Jay Garfield, the root of suffering is in our self-alienation, and one symptom of our alienation is clinging to the notion that we are selves. “We are wired to misunderstand our own mode of existence,” he writes in his brief yet substantial 2022 book, Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live Without a Self.  

Garfield traces arguments against the existence of a self primarily through 7th century Indian Buddhist scholar Candrakīrti and 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume, and explores where many other philosophers hit or miss the mark along the way. The book is a surprisingly accessible read about a complex topic with perhaps the exception of a couple more in-depth chapters that develop  arguments to further his conclusion: you don’t have a self, and that’s a good thing. 

Garfield starts with the idea of self from ancient India: the ātman is at the core of being. A distinct self feels necessary to understand our continuity of consciousness over time (diachronic identity) and our sense of identity at a single time (synchronic identity). A self gives us a way to explain our memory and allows for a sense of just retribution when we’re wronged. We feel a unity of self to the extent that it’s hard to imagine it’s not so. 

However, Garfield argues that feeling of having some manner of core self is an illusory cognitive construction. Hume claimed the idea isn’t merely false but gibberish, and Garfield calls it a “pernicious and incoherent delusion.” We cannot infer from a sense of self that there is a reality of self. Garfield asserts that, “We are nothing more than bundles of psychophysical processes–changing from moment to moment–who imagine ourselves to be more than that.” We are similar to the person we were yesterday and a decade ago because we’re causally related yet distinct. We share enough properties and social roles with ourselves to feel as if we’re the same over the years. That causal connectedness enables the memory of the past and anticipation of the future.  Read more »

Friday, August 15, 2025

Blending Psychotherapy and Spirituality

Posted on by Marie Snyder

by Marie Snyder

In my last post of meditation, I suggested that there’s not a lot of harm that comes from meditation and mindfulness training, so maybe it doesn’t need the kind of scientific scrutiny that we might expect from a clinical drug trial. However, in Toward a Psychology of Awakening (2000), Buddhist psychotherapist John Welwood documents three traps: spiritual bypass, narcissism, and desensitising, that arise in part because we’ve leant too far to either psychology or spirituality instead of using both. He also discusses them in brief in a paper, “Principles of inner work: Psychological and spiritual” (1984). 

Both psychotherapy and spirituality are about “developing a new kind of loving relationship with one’s experience,” and both help us break free from our conditioned reactions. But spirituality doesn’t address our early mishaps that affect our perceptions, and psychotherapy doesn’t address the need to transcend our personal feelings. 

When he first trained as a therapist, Welwood was concerned that psychotherapy has a narrow view of human nature, but then realized how much it can help once we no longer demand answers from it. It can help free people from negative childhood conditioning, particularly from dismissive or engulfing parenting, by working with our needs, scripts (now narratives), fears, self-respect, etc. A lot of us don’t learn how to exist in the world well. Welwood claims that part of the problem is the “breakdown of extended families and tight-knit communities” so that children just get influenced by parents or just one parent instead of many people providing a variety of ideas that can help a child figure out where they fit in the group. As far as I understand this point, with only one or two major influences, children might accept lessons without question, then have to “spend a good part of their lives freeing themselves” from this singular impact in order to find their own sense of self. It’s somewhat unintuitive, but a larger group influence helps a child find their individual self by differentiating from others more clearly at a younger age. But whether we find it at 5 or 50, it’s necessary to have this “stable self-structure” before trying to go further.  Read more »

Thursday, November 14, 2024

The Feeling of Authenticity…is not a feeling

Posted on by Gary Borjesson

by Gary Borjesson

Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows. —Henry David Thoreau

What does being true to ourselves feel like? The question goes to the heart of authenticity. Rousseau viewed our innermost feelings—the feeling of our existence (“le sentiment de l’existence”)—as a guide to authenticity and contentment. Nowadays we’re familiar with the notion that to find our way in love and work, we need to get in touch with our true feelings. Authenticity has even been equated with feelings, as if our felt sense were the only trustworthy guide to our lives.

In fact, authenticity is not a feeling, but an active way of being defined by conscious attention to the fit between who we are and the situation(s) in which we find ourselves. (See my previous essays in 3QD, here and here, for more on the meaning and practice of authenticity as an ethical ideal.) That said, our feelings do crucially guide our (ongoing) discovery of what it means to be true to ourselves.

But in order to be good guides, we need to know a few things about them. Here’s a big one: feelings are not as much “our own” as we might think. Our brain and the rest of our body evolved for engaging with our surroundings, meaning that our feelings are shaped and prompted partly by external factors. We’ll see that we cannot even know where our feelings are coming from unless we examine them.

To do that, and to start exploring how feelings inform authenticity, let me ask you to notice what you’re feeling right now. What word or words best describe this feeling? I’ll come back to why I ask. Read more »

Friday, October 18, 2024

Becoming What We Are: Authenticity as a Practice

Posted on by Gary Borjesson

by Gary Borjesson

Become what you are, having learned what that is. —Pindar

[To protect their privacy, I have changed identifying details of those mentioned here.]

Aristotle

What do we want for our lives? It’s a peculiarly human question; other animals don’t appear to be worrying about it. I’ve asked myself this question, sometimes with curiosity, sometimes more desperately, for as long as I can remember. I’m always moved when patients raise it in their therapy. A man who retired from a successful career said that when he looks into the future without the mantle of his professional title and status, he feels empty and lost, ashamed that at 70 he doesn’t know what he wants.

Sometimes we raise the question ourselves; sometimes the world raises it for us. Another patient, whose boyfriend just “dumped” her, is wrestling with her alcohol use. The men she wants in her life don’t want an alcoholic in theirs. She’s angry at the thought of sobering up for someone else, “Wouldn’t that be inauthentic?” At the same time, she (authentically) wants a partner in her life.

She knows what most of us know, that we want to be authentic. By “authenticity” I mean living in a way that is true to oneself and to one’s situation in the world. (For the bigger philosophic picture, see my previous column, Reclaiming Authenticity as an Ethical Ideal.) Authenticity resonates because it is that rare thing, an ideal that most of us embrace—despite our divergent religious, ethnic, social, and political values. After all, each of us faces (or not) the question of how to become our best selves.

Although we must ask and answer that question for ourselves, I will suggest a few core principles that can guide our way. I’ll start with Aristotle’s view, that the one thing we all want from life is to flourish, which means living in such a way as to be fulfilling our nature. This might sound about as helpful as telling someone who is struggling, “Just be true to yourself!” How do we even know what our true self is? If we’re a lonely alcoholic, is our true self more of the same, or is it sober and in a relationship?

We can find some guidance by unpacking two principles of flourishing that extend to living authentically. Read more »

Monday, July 3, 2023

Why I Am Not NOT a Buddhist

Posted on by Deanna Kreisel

by Deanna K. Kreisel (Doctor Waffle)

I have a confession to make: I ❤️ Seymour Glass. If you don’t know who that is, count yourself lucky and walk away now—come back in a few weeks when I’ll be discussing humiliating experiences at middle-school dances or whatever. (Obviously I am joking—as always, I desperately want you to finish reading this essay.)

For the uninitiated, Seymour was the scion of the Glass family, a half-Jewish-half-Irish troupe of tragic prodigies populating nine stories by J. D. Salinger, of Catcher in the Rye fame, set in the years 1924 to 1959. If you’re familiar with the oeuvre of Wes Anderson, you probably know that the Royal Tenenbaums are generally considered an homage to the Glasses. Both families are casually and eccentrically well-to-do, aswim in a world of brownstones, 5 p.m. martinis, private education, summers in the Hamptons, family branches in Connecticut, fur coats, and tennis lessons. And they’re all brilliant. On this point Salinger was most adamant—every child of the Glass family, all seven of them, appeared on the fictional radio program “It’s A Wise Child,” a purportedly wholesome entertainment wherein smarty-pants kids are prompted to say unintentionally hilarious smarty-pants things, but (IMO) is clearly just a wisecrack sweatshop where children are ruthlessly exploited for their youthful naïveté and left dessicated husks sucked dry of all joy.[1]

But Seymour alone is a true savant. Precocious even by Glass family standards, he is a brilliant poet who becomes a professor of English at Columbia by the age of 20. He is also the most tragic member of the gang, a real Romantic-hero type. Too smart and sensitive for the world around him, even his gifted family members,[2] he eventually blows his brains out in a Florida hotel room in front of his sleeping wife. This all happens in the very first story in which he appears, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” so from the moment of his introduction we already know he is doomed. Read more »

Monday, January 2, 2023

A Buddhist Perspective on Addiction: Nothing is Vital

Posted on by Marie Snyder

by Marie Snyder

Now that the hangover from New Year’s Eve is abating for many, and we might be freshly open to some self-improvement, consider a Buddhist view of using meditation to tackle addictions. I don’t just mean for substance abuse, but also for that incessant drive to check social media just once more before starting our day or before we finally lull ourselves to sleep by the light of our devices, or the drive to buy the store out of chocolates at boxing day sales. Not that there’s anything wrong with that on its own– it’s a sale after all–but when actions are compulsive instead of intentional, then this can be a different way of approaching the problem from the typical route. I’m not a mental health professional, but this is something I’ve finally tried with earnest and found helpful, but it took a very different understanding of it all to get just this far (which is still pretty far from where I’d like to be).

Meditation is not about escaping the world but sharpening our awareness of it. Addiction comes from the Latin dicere, related to the root of the word dictator. It’s like having an internal dictator usurping our agency. And Buddhist mindfulness meditation can help to notice that voice and then turn the volume down on it so we can get our lives back.

In many ways the Buddhist perception is closer to Stoicism than to Freudian tactics, but don’t toss the baby out with the bathwater. Many people benefit from the psychoanalytical method of finding themselves before they can work on losing themselves. This is particularly true with traumatic experiences that might need to be worked through enough before allowing the mind to wander into dark recesses unrestrained. Read more »

Monday, October 19, 2020

Erring on the Slippery Earth: Conceptions of Moral Identity

Posted on by Jochen Szangolies

by Jochen Szangolies

Who Are You?

Figure 1: Who are you? Here’s one answer, from the ‘Get a Mac’-advertising campaign.

I want you to take a moment to reflect on the answer that first came to mind upon reading this question. Was it something related to your job? Are you a baker, a writer, a physicist, a construction worker? Or did you start thinking about your passions—the things you love, the things that drive and inspire you? Perhaps you define yourself by your values: you are who you are, because of what you hold right and good.

Identity has become a central, and somewhat fraught, topic in contemporary discourse. I believe that, in itself, is a sign of progress: in earlier times, identity was not something that was up for discussion; by and large, what made you you was decided by circumstances of your birth. You were born either noble, or a commoner; male or female; free or in bondage—and whichever of those buckets happenstance chose to place you in, would be the central driving force of your fortune. That today, we can worry about, struggle with, and redefine our identities is a sign of increasing self-determination—who we are is no longer just who we were born to be, but a matter of discovery and deliberation. Read more »

Monday, June 26, 2017

On Awareness, pt. 1

Posted on by Evan Edwards

by Evan Edwards

Nan-in

There’s a zen koan about master Nan-in and a younger monk, Tenno, who had been studying with his teacher for ten years. Tradition went that a student had to study this long before they were qualified to begin teaching, and Nan-in had invited Tenno over for tea to celebrate his pupilship coming to an end. Since it was raining that day, Tenno wore clogs and brought an umbrella, and left them by the door when he entered Nan-in’s home. After his guest had sat down, Nan-in asked Tenno, “I assume that since it is raining, you brought an umbrella. Correct? And did you put it on the left or the right of your clogs?” When he didn’t have an immediate answer, Tenno stood up and returned to the monastery in order to continue as a student for six more years.

The story is usually interpreted as an illustration of the value of attention and, more importantly, what we might call ‘awareness.’ Because Tenno was unable to recall the position of his umbrella, or perhaps better, because he was unaware of how he had arranged his things in the other room, he was not practicing “every-minute zen.” In other koans, the theme of the significance of attention and awareness return again and again. A student asked Master Ichu to write him something of great wisdom. Ichu took up his pen and wrote “attention.” The student asked Ichu what “attention” meant, and he responded that “attention means attention.” This theme seems to be so recurrent because, as individuals in the Vipassana school argue, nirvana, as a kind of “Budda-consciousness,” has to do with a particular state of vijnana, or “consciousness.” This kind of consciousness is a state of perfect awareness.

Certain strains of ecology and western environmental philosophy, also, stress the importance of awareness. In the work of Henry David Thoreau, we see an intense attention to nature that has been described by several commentators as an attempt to integrate himself more fully, and therefore live more authentically, within the web of life. Read more »

Monday, August 24, 2015

TIIME and SPACE. Richard Long. Arnolfini, Bristol until 15th November 2015

Posted on by Sue Hubbard

by Sue Hubbard

It is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth.

— Nietzsche

Arnolfini_Long_003Since early Christianity pilgrimages have been made to the Holy Land, to Rome, to Lourdes and Canterbury, by walking on foot. Buddhists, understanding that a journey of a thousand miles starts with one step, walk in mindfulness. The writer, Bruce Chatwin, wrote in his celebrated book, The Songlines, that “… a Bushman child will be carried a distance of 4,900 miles before he begins to walk on his own. Since, during this rhythmic phase, he will be forever naming the contents of his territory, it is impossible he will not become a poet”. According to Aboriginal legend, the totemic ancestors – among them the great kangaroo and dream-snake – were first sung into existence, as was every feature of the natural world, as ancient Bushmen walked across the Australian continent.

The British artist Richard Long also walks. Other artists paint, sculpt or make installations but Long walks and as he does so he notices and records the minutiae of the landscape. Sometimes he stops to create interventions using the raw materials – stones and driftwood – found along the way as a means of articulating ideas about time and space. Through the act of walking connections are made to rivers and mountains, deserts and clouds, sky and ground. He touches the earth lightly, rarely re-tracing his steps. His interventions are tactful: a realignment of stones, a path trodden across scree, a track left in grass or water poured slowly onto rock. He has been walking for more than 40 years. His process is simple. He takes time, pays attention and records what he notices and hears, sometimes as text, sometimes in photographs so we, too, can share something of the experience. And although we might all engage with the natural world this way, the point is, we don't. He makes looking and seeing into art.

Read more »

Monday, December 23, 2013

The Northern Moment

Posted on by Gautam Pemmaraju

by Gautam Pemmaraju

Because I could not stop for Death
He kindly stopped for me
The Carriage held but just Ourselves
And Immortality.

– Emily Dickenson

FadingAway

The wise emperor of Marguerite Yourcenar’s masterful Memoirs Of Hadrian, says to his successor Marcus Aurelius that his frail, diseased body is fast approaching its demise. It is the evening of his life. Despite the “vague formulas of reassurance” that his loyal physician Hermogenes offers him in an attempt to mask the imminent end, the sage old man knows that he is sure to die of a dropsical heart. The time and place is uncertain, and he “no longer runs the risk of falling on the frontiers, struck down by a Caledonian axe or pierced by an arrow of the Parths…” but he does know that his days are numbered. His body, a faithful companion all these years, may well turn out to be “a sly beast who will end by devouring his master”. But what of the moment itself, Hadrian contemplates:

I shall die at Tibur or in Rome, or in Naples at the farthest, and a moment’s suffocation will settle the matter. Shall I be carried off by the tenth of these crises, or the hundredth? That is the only question. Like a traveler sailing the Archipelago who sees the luminous mists lift towards evening, and little by little makes out the shore, I begin to discern the profile of my death.

Often enough in literary descriptions we find familiar tropes: the inner light dims, an ethereal illumination brings in the uttara kshanam, a phrase used in literary Telugu to describe the dying moment. A most intriguing phrase if ever, it can be translated in numerous ways but the most literal one appears to me the most elegant. The moment exists ‘up there’, in some mystical northward quadrant, and as we approach it, it reveals itself. As we apprehend it, it embraces us. The Northern Moment is then the final one. It is the peak of earthly life. There is a wide fascination for the dying moment – how will it come to pass, in what circumstances, will it be filled with pain and suffering or under the comforting shroud of sleep, will it be in the presence of loved ones, or alone, on some forsaken highway? Will it be a ‘good death’ or a ‘bad death’? How indeed do we imagine our final moments?

Read more »

Monday, May 31, 2010

Cerebral Imperialism

Posted on by Richard Eskow

Neurons The present is where the future comes to die, or more accurately, where an infinite array of possible futures all collapse into one. We live in a present where artificial intelligence hasn't been invented, despite a quarter century of optimistic predictions. John Horgan in Scientific American suggests we're a long way from developing it, despite all the optimistic predictions (although when it does come it may well be as a sudden leap into existence, a sudden achievement of critical mass). However and whenever (or if ever) it arrives, it's an idea worth discussing today. But, a question: Does this line of research suffer from “cerebral imperialism”?

___________________________________

The idea of “cerebral imperialism” came up in an interview I did for the current issue of Tricycle, a Buddhist magazine, with transhumanist professor and writer James “J” Hughes. One exchange went like this:

Eskow: There seems to be a kind of cognitive imperialism among some Transhumanists that says the intellect alone is “self.” Doesn’t saying “mind” is who we are exclude elements like body, emotion, culture, and our environment? Buddhism and neuroscience both suggest that identity is a process in which many elements co-arise to create the individual experience on a moment-by-moment basis. The Transhumanists seem to say, “I am separate, like a data capsule that can be uploaded or moved here and there.”

You’re right. A lot of our Transhumanist subculture comes out of computer science— male computer science—so a lot of them have that traditional “intelligence is everything” view. s soon as you start thinking about the ability to embed a couple of million trillion nanobots in your brain and back up your personality and memory onto a chip, or about advanced artificial intelligence deeply wedded with your own mind, or sharing your thoughts and dreams and feelings with other people, you begin to see the breakdown of the notion of discrete and continuous self.

An intriguing answer – one of many Hughes offers in the interview – but I was going somewhere else: toward the idea that cognition itself, that thing which we consider “mind,” is over-emphasized in our definition of self and therefore is projected onto our efforts to create something we call “artificial intelligence.”

Is the “society of mind” trying to colonize the societies of body and emotion?

Read more »