The No-Self is an illusion

abstract: buddhist/hinduist terminology is misleading enlightenment fits much better into western psychology than into eastern religions.

No-Self: It is not possible to have no self. It is possible to have no Ego (or in german "I"). The self is that part of the psyche which is healthy and undamaged and selfdeveloping when you are born.

The Ego is the part which is reactive to the world and creates 1."patterns of muscletension" and 2. "directing the mind" to avoid unpleasant sensations (this is btw pure freud). it splits unpleasant parts of its experience off and creates a border, one side is called outside or not me (the unpleasant part of the experience) and one side is called inside or me (the pleasant part). Therefore the baby can dwell in its own wellbeing, while the "outside" may be unpleasant. in aduts this is called "projection" meaning to see your bad parts in the other. this allows the baby to keep the paradise, with the concession of a smaller world.

the trick comes with a cost: the loss of feeling unity and the tension to keep the new developed Ego (the split) upright. in case of subtle tension: directing the mind (away from the unpleasant experience) or in case of gross tension: somatisation, muscletension to reduce the ability of the body to feel (useful when you have pain).

Therefore enlightenment is not the experience of no-self, it is the experience of pure self. It is not the experience of pure consciousness, it is the experience of pure body, in a sense like a baby did. there is no other unity than the unity of the biological body with its biological environment.

I read that in zen they don't have the no-self concept they have the true-self concept and this seems to fit better and is not that provoking (like I like to be )

Who says so?

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Who says so?



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I don't know! )

My experience is that no-self is a truth. But it wasn't always the case that this is known. My path is pretty much similar to my teacher Thusness: awakeningtoreality.blogspot.com/2007/03/...s-of-experience.html

Also in Zen, they do teach no-self. Check out Genjokoan by Zen Master Dogen, among others - awakeningtoreality.blogspot.com/2011/08/...ssence-and-form.html

By the way, I do not see Anatta as merely a freeing from personality/ego sort of experience; I see it as that a self/agent, a doer, a thinker, a watcher, etc, cannot be found apart from the moment to moment flow of manifestation or as its commonly expressed as '˜the observer is the observed'; there is no self apart from arising and passing. A very important point here is that Anatta/No-Self is a Dharma Seal, it is the nature of Reality all the time -- and not merely as a state free from personality, ego or the '˜small self' or a stage to attain. This means that it does not depend on the level of achievement of a practitioner to experience anatta but Reality has always been Anatta and what is important here is the intuitive insight into it as the nature, characteristic, of phenomenon (dharma seal).

To put further emphasis on the importance of this point, I would like to borrow from the Bahiya Sutta ( www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/ud/ud.1.10.irel.html ) that '˜in the seeing, there is just the seen, no seer', '˜in the hearing, there is just the heard, no hearer' as an illustration. When a person says that I have gone beyond the experiences from '˜I hear sound' to a stage of '˜becoming sound', he is mistaken. When it is taken to be a stage, it is illusory. For in actual case, there is and always is only sound when hearing; never was there a hearer to begin with. Nothing attained for it is always so. This is the seal of no-self. Therefore to a non dualist, the practice is in understanding the illusionary views of the sense of self and the split.

Many people speak of Anatta/no-self as an experience, but failed to realize that it is a dharma seal. Without this realization there can hardly be effortless experience of no-self.

Norman Fischer talks about it for example at the end of the video at 18:36:

"The Ego [...] splits unpleasant parts of its experience off and creates a border, one side is called outside or not me (the unpleasant part of the experience) and one side is called inside or me (the pleasant part). "

Can I ask a thing? KF says that no mental phenomenon whatsoever is you, because you can look at it, including the pleasant sensations. Is this reality the same of the one you presented, just told in different words?

Yes, I guess. As far as I understood also Ramana Maharshi used the word self in a western sense as a kind of "true you".
If you had no self you wouldn't even be able to distinguish background from foreground, a door from a wall etc. so there is always a basic conceptualisation going on. I mean there are illnesses in which somebody loses the self, but this is for sure not enlightenment...

My impression is that the buddhist folks beeing more related to harvard seem to dislike the no-self and void-concept:

www.shrinkrapradio.com/2010/11/25/252-%E...ith-mark-epstein-md/

might be a question of terminology and the translation of shunyata but i don't think so

"Yes, I guess. As far as I understood also Ramana Maharshi used the word self in a western sense as a kind of "true you".
If you had no self you wouldn't even be able to distinguish background from foreground, a door from a wall etc. so there is always a basic conceptualisation going on. I mean there are illnesses in which somebody loses the self, but this is for sure not enlightenment..."

Maharshi wasn't talking about no-self. He was talking about the experience of the Self. It's completely different. No-self is the flow of phenomena, the senses, thoughts, the myriad things all dancing selflessly. Self is, well, just read the Upanisads. It's the transcendent source or cosmic subject, which is seen to be illusory once you get no-self.

BTW enlightenment is way more than just having a healthy ego. Western psychology doesn't come close to the wisdom of the East (and this is coming from someone who is working on a PhD in psychology). The Freudian ego has nothing to do with muscle tension, nor duality, nor is it developed at birth. The ego develops in later adolescence to keep the id in check (which is only interested in pleasure). Freud knew nothing about nonduality; his idea of health was to have a healthy ego which mediated the pleasure seeking id. He never spoke about unity or anything of the like. He was a materialist and saw the self as an independent self-contained thing hell-bent on surviving and getting laid.

"My impression is that the buddhist folks beeing more related to harvard seem to dislike the no-self and void-concept:

www.shrinkrapradio.com/2010/11/25/252-%E...ith-mark-epstein-md/

might be a question of terminology and the translation of shunyata but i don't think so
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No-self doesn't mean void. It means that "self" is just a label for an active process.

I haven't listened to that audio yet, but Mark Epstein is a psychiatrist. I don't think he claims to be enlightened or even an expert on Buddhism. Not sure why you're propping him up as some authority.

"Maharshi wasn't talking about no-self" yes, thats what I am saying.

"The Freudian ego has nothing to do with muscle tension, nor duality, nor is it developed at birth" I would recommend to read Freud first especially "civilization and its discontents" and his letters to the nobelprizewinner romain rolland (who was btw a close friend of vivekananda) where he describes exactly how the self splits off the sense of I in the first pages of his work

"I haven't listened to that audio yet, but Mark Epstein is a psychiatrist. I don't think he claims to be enlightened or even an expert on Buddhism. Not sure why you're propping him up as some authority. "

Probably because he studied in Harvard is professor at NYU for psychology, wrote several bestselling books about the topic and cofinduced the mindfulness-turn in psychology together with kabat-zinn.

You mean the "oceanic feeling" ? He said that's an aspect of infantile undeveloped consciousness, not an actual reality or how things truly are, which he called "infantile narcissim" He still saw humans as independent physical things like any good materialist would.

But even if you take that literally, like Rolland did, seeing the world as one grand Self is exactly what the Buddha came along and refuted with his teachings of no-self and emptiness.


Studying in Harvard, writing books on mindfulness, being a professor at The Best University doesn't make one an expert in Buddhism or enlightened in any way. Are you seriously suggesting that? I'm very surprised...

I think it's wise to distinguish between MBSR, which is what a lot of psychologists are into these days, and the kind of awakening practices we do here. There is some overlap but after that the two practices aim at different targets. Very different targets. So when MBSR types teach they teach practices aimed at relaxation and "mindfulness" is the goal. Being present. For us, mindfulness is a goal and also a means to an end, that end being real awakening. Awakening is much, much more than mindfulness.

@mzaur: "You mean the "oceanic feeling" ?"
- No, if you continue reading, you 'll see that he writes about "directing the mind" and "muscletension" and how they create a sense of seperateness, that you mentioned have nothing to do with Freud in post 9.

"The ego develops in later adolescence to keep the id in check"
-You are confusing the terms Ego and Self. They are different things in psychology. That's the topic of the this thread.

"Freud knew nothing about nonduality; his idea of health was to have a healthy ego which mediated the pleasure seeking id. He never spoke about unity or anything of the like."
-See oceanic feeling

"Studying in Harvard, writing books on mindfulness, being a professor at The Best University doesn't make one an expert in Buddhism or enlightened in any way. Are you seriously suggesting that? I'm very surprised..."

-- Not to do all those things, doesn't make one an expert either. It seems you are pretty quick in judging people who spent their lives working in a field, in which you are still in education (Epstein, Freud). To think that somebody changed the western culture and gets nominated for the nobelprize 12 times for finding out that we are "hell-bent on surviving and getting laid" is not meant very seriously I guess.

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I think it's wise to distinguish between MBSR, which is what a lot of psychologists are into these days, and the kind of awakening practices we do here. There is some overlap but after that the two practices aim at different targets. Very different targets. So when MBSR types teach they teach practices aimed at relaxation and "mindfulness" is the goal. Being present. For us, mindfulness is a goal and also a means to an end, that end being real awakening. Awakening is much, much more that mindfulness.

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Yes, and the question is: What is it?

Is it the end of the Self, which is something that is proven to be there in the toddler (see Daniel Stern and his wellknown research on toddlers but also Hartmann and Winnicott)?

Or is it the end of a part of the Ego that developes around the second year and brings a sense of Authorship of action, Identity, Control, seperateness and personal power into the game. The time when the child says suddenly "I want" instead of "Peter wants".
If it would have influence, be the real director of its actions, it can therefore be guilty, responsible, shameful, do things bad etc.
All that would disappears when it would loose the sense of beeing an identity which is in charge for it's actions later. But then it is not loosing the self, it is just loosing the small part of the Ego, that creates a feeling of Authorship of its actions. Like here:

I'm going to attempt to further explain my thoughts on this notion that awakening is more than the realization of not self. It's multi-faceted, or should be (because it manifests differently for each of us), but non-dual awareness plays a role, as does the ability to observe one's own bullcrap and not act it out. And yes, there is a decreasing sense of agency, an increasing sense of not being able to control events, a knowing of just how late to our moment to moment attention and awareness game the purely narrative, thinking-centric mind comes, and how even space and time are aspects of a relative version of the universe that co-exists with the absolute.

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I'm going to attempt to further explain my thoughts on this notion that awakening is more than the realization of not self. It's multi-faceted, or should be (because it manifests differently for each of us), but non-dual awareness plays a role, as does the ability to observe one's own bullcrap and not act it out. And yes, there is a decreasing sense of agency, an increasing sense of not being able to control events, a knowing of just how late to our moment to moment attention and awareness game the purely narrative, thinking-centric mind comes, and how even space and time are aspects of a relative version of the universe that co-exists with the absolute.

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Does bodyperception increase or decrease in your experience of enlightenment? Are you more or less in the body?

I'll say this in reply -- there far less confusion that there is any kind of duality regarding the mind-body dichotomy. It's really all one human being.

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I'll say this in reply -- there far less confusion that there is any kind of duality regarding the mind-body dichotomy. It's really all one human being.

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'Cause this became kind of a key-question in the whole thing for me.
In my experience there is just a body left and no mind at all. it is a pure body experience, just senses and nothing else, no spirit, no superconsciousness, no void.
Therefore I tend to a materialistic interpretation and see no need for any esoteric interpretation of the experience at all.

Pure perception of the environment through the body is therefore pure self and the only thing thats lost is a additional sense of the ego which was perceiving its own virtual reality before, instead of the real world. It doesn't enable me to say more about the universe, time or space. It only allows me to say more about how my brain works.

I'm sort of confused by of some of your terms, like "pure self" and "just a body left" and such.

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I'm sort of confused by of some of your terms, like "pure self" and "just a body left" and such.



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thats whats happening between meditators and psychologists too, both are using the same word for different things and different words for the same thing.

Maybe that helps: "Donald Winnicott (1961) considered this subjective perspective obvious. He attributed to the self the feeling of the reality, continuity, and rhythm of mental life, at the same time emphasizing that it is rooted in bodily sensations.

In the end they are often pretty close to each other without knowing it.

But I was more interested in your conclusion that you are just a body, and what you mean by "pure self."

Loco, how can your experience of the Now reify with a materialistic interpretation?

I can only experience past, future, causality, etc. as conceptualizations so how can they be taken to be Reality?

If you acknowledge that this materialistic perspective is just a conceptualization, then the argument boils down to:

Pragmatically speaking, what is the most useful model to conceptualize the Path to realize a Goal?