What Is the Self? It Depends

One way to witness that the notion of 'self' is bankrupt is to sit quietly, and gradually begin excluding all experiential input. Begin with numbing the bodily senses, then proceed to blind the mind's eye, and then stifle the voice of your thoughts. These won't actually go away, of course, but you will realize without them that your experience is nothing more than the sum of these parts. There is no 'disembodied' consciousness. You are a stream of sensations.

Things of this sort were once quite interesting. But once the 'illusoriness' of the self is understood intellectually, one comes to realize that it has essentially no implications for our lives, our relationships, our societies, or our species.

We find ourselves in this world with desires: survival, reproduction, physical pleasure, social acceptance -- whatever they may be. All of our interests stem from the need to serve these desires. Interests align and conflict with those of other human organisms. However harmonious or contentious the social context, and whatever values you seem to hold, this fact always remains at the core of our behavior.

In a sense, the Western conceptualization of the self, false though it is, is nearer to the truth: our experiences are atomic, separate, isolated -- in the most literal meaning of the word, we are alone. You may feel human warmth, compassion, and love, yet these remain individual experiences. To define oneself in relation to others is no wiser than to envision oneself as standing in relation to nothing at all.

I think this need not be a sad or a happy fact. The abstraction we call 'the self' is simply not a useful one.