The Self

Don Brautigam, 2 February 2011

Although Buddhist meditation has been part of the western world‟s counter culture for several decades, it is
now making inroads into mainstream culture, and in particular, scientific investigation. One of the most
perplexing teachings of Buddhism is that of selflessness, that of no-self. Although the disciplined practice of
meditation enables us to open more deeply to the direct experience of selflessness, there is also a natural drive
towards conceptual understanding. Of course concepts are articulated through a language grounded within a
cultural and experiential context, and it is of interest to explore the concept of self from the perspective of both
neuropsychology and Buddhism.

The well-known western Buddhist meditation teacher Jack Kornfield1 explains that

All phenomena are empty of self. There is no entity separate from the flow of experience, no “self” to whom it is
happening. … Our primary delusion, one whose influence pervades all aspects of our lives, is the belief that there is
an “I,” a self, an ego, that is solid and separate from everything else. But actually this sense of “I” is made up only
of the process of identifying: “This is me. This is what I do …,” and so on. It is created entirely by thought and has
no substance. [Goldstein & Kornfield, 1987]

The phrase used by Kornfield, “all phenomena are empty of self,” relates to the interdependence of all things.
The Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh uses the term interbeing to emphasize the dynamic nature of this
interdependent relation. No “thing” exists separate, in and of itself; its existence is dependent upon, and
defined by, the relationship between other things. It is our tendency to abstract from the whole of being a
dynamic pattern of percepts to which we attribute a self-existent identity separate from the whole from which
it arose. The Ground of Being is a term often used to refer to the unconditioned nature of the universe from
which all conditioned things arise. If we contemplate the natural environment as a metaphor for the “Ground
of Being,” then what we call a “tree” is simply a special configuration of that Ground of Being – a
convergence of a unique set of elements in space and time. The photons from the sun, the CO2 from the
atmosphere, the rain falling from the clouds, minerals from the earth – all coming together to perform a special
choreography called “tree.” In a conventional sense, it may sometimes be useful to ascribe to the “tree” its
own identity separate from the environment. However, it can become problematic if we forget that the concept
of “tree” is just a convenient label we create through language to describe a relatively stable pattern of activity
arising from the environment that we find particularly useful to relate to. In a deeper sense, the identity of the
“tree” is the Ground of Being.

The human organism arises from the Ground of Being as all other phenomena do. However, because of its
relative complexity, there are a number of sensory and mental factors that co-arise within a field of awareness
– creating an elaborate choreography of experience. Buddhist teachings purport that it is the grasping nature of
mind that creates a certain quality of possessiveness to this experience and in so doing creates the sense that
there is a substantive “I” to whom this experience belongs. It is the unconscious reification of this “I” that
leads to self-limiting behavior and is the root of much suffering. The human mind-body naturally gives rise to
various mental images - bodily sensations, thoughts, emotions, and feelings. However, there is a tendency to
become fully identified with these mental images that arise and to attribute to them a more substantive and
independent reality then they deserve. There is the sense that there exists some fixed rigid identity behind
these fleeting images, a separate independent owner as it were.

Kornfield goes on to explain that if we can change our relation to our senses, thoughts, and emotions, and not
get so wrapped up in them by recognizing their fleeting and impermanent nature, then we begin to see “I”
more clearly for what is – simply a transient construction of the mind - one that is sometimes useful and
sometimes not so useful.

1
Joseph Goldstein & Jack Kornfield, Seeking the Heart of Wisdom: The Path of Insight Meditation, 1987
 If we are not caught up in all our thoughts about our experience, there is simply experience in each moment: just
seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching. It is all emptiness, all without self. Of course, it is not that we have
to get rid of thoughts to experience emptiness, because thoughts are empty in themselves, thoughts are merely a
process, words and pictures, conditioned by certain causes and composed of constituent elements. We don‟t have to
make things empty of self; emptiness is their true nature. We have only to experience each moment directly; each
moment is a manifestation of the empty, unpossessable nature of reality. [Goldstein & Kornfield, 1987]

The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio2 has spent a great deal of time investigating the biological processes in
the brain involved in the construction and maintenance of the self. He theorizes that the sense of self is
intimately tied to not only how the current state of the body is mapped to specific structures of the brain but
also in the particulars of how the brain‟s map of the body changes in relation to the various objects that the
organism encounters and responds to (whether externalized objects such as another person or internalized
objects such as recalled memories or bodily sensations).
When we discover what we are made of and how we are put together, we discover a ceaseless process of building
up and tearing down, and we realize that life is at the mercy of that never-ending process. … Just as death and life
cycles reconstruct the organism and its parts according to a plan, the brain reconstructs the sense of self moment by
moment. … Our sense of self is a state of the organism, the result of certain components operating in a certain
manner and interacting in a certain way, within certain parameters. It is another construction, a vulnerable pattern of
integrated operations whose consequence is to generate the mental representation of a living individual being.
[Damasio, 1999]

Damasio envisions this construction of self as unfolding through a hierarchy of graded awareness. The process
is grounded in continuously changing activities of the body/brain that are unconscious (proto-self) but from
which arises a primal mind-body awareness (core self) created moment-to-moment that ultimately leads, when
integrated over time through the complex mechanisms of memory, to a fully conscious autobiographical self.
In contrast to the core self whose very nature resides in the perpetually changing moment, the
autobiographical self provides a more stable sense of continuity. Within the context of the Buddhist meditative
tradition, it may be suggested that suffering arises when the dynamic relation between the core and
autobiographical self becomes severely out of balance. We humans have the tendency to lose touch with what
is happening in the mind-body in the moment, and instead, get tangled up in elaborate dramas largely rooted in
fantasy generated from autobiographical biases.

There is some intriguing research3 investigating the two forms of self-reference alluded to above, each with its
own unique focus: Experiential Focus (EF) is characterized by an awareness that is simply monitoring
physical sensations moment-to-moment (i.e, core self); and Narrative Focus (NF) by an awareness that
extends through time during which self-narratives and enduring self traits are developed and elaborated upon
(i.e, autobiographical self). Neurological evidence indicates that distinct regions of the brain separately
support each of the two modes of focus, yet are typically coupled together by default. The study has found that
those who have practiced a form of meditation referred to as mindfulness training (MT) are better able to
consciously decouple and differentiate the two modes of awareness. The study concludes that the capacity to
better balance these modes can lead to greater mental and physical health.

This dual mode of self-reference is better revealed following mindfulness training (MT), where these modes
become uncoupled through attentional training. This hypothesized cortical reorganization following MT is
consistent with the notion that MT allows for a distinct experiential mode in which thoughts, feelings, and bodily
sensations are viewed less as being good or bad or integral to the „self‟ and treated more as transient mental events
that can be simply observed. As such, the capacity to disengage temporally extended narrative and engage more
momentary neural modes of self-focus has important implications for mood and anxiety disorders, with the
narrative focus having been shown to increase illness vulnerability. Conversely, a growing body of evidence
suggests approaching self-experience through a more basic present-centered focus may represent a critical aspect of
human well-being. [Farb, et al., 2007]

2
Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, 1999
3
Norman Farb, et al., Attending to the present: mindfulness meditation reveals distinct neural modes of self-reference, SCAN (2007)
2, p313-322