Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live without a Self

The Indian classic Bhagavad Gītā (Song of the Lord) characterizes the relation between the self and the embodied person as akin to that between you and your wardrobe.

At the most basic level, the illusion of a self is the illusion that we stand outside of and against the world. We take ourselves pre-reflectively to be singularities: not participants in the world, but spectators of the world, and agents of actions directed on that world.

You want to be you, with their mind. And, just as in the case of the body, the very possibility of formulating this desire, or imagining this situation shows that—correctly or incorrectly—you do not consider yourself to be your mind, but rather to be something that has that mind.

a chariot can survive change in its parts, and even disassembly and reassembly. It is therefore neither identical with the collection of its parts, nor with those parts arranged in some particular way.

Just so, according to the Gītā, you, the ātman, put on a new mind and body in each life, but are never identical to any mind or body; instead, you are the bearer of that mind and body, which are just as much objects to your subjectivity as any external phenomenon.

Candrakīrti argues that we are not selves, but persons (the Sanskrit term is pudgala). And the person, he argues, is neither identical to nor different from the psychophysical processes; but unlike the self, which is supposed to be an independently existent entity, there is no reason to believe that a person needs to exist in one of these ways. It

But we cannot forget that our identity is constituted as well by the countless other dramatis personae in the play that is our lives, who together bring into existence the context in which our own roles make any sense. This fact should call upon us to rethink our supposed independence. And this can be a wonderful realization: we gain a deeper appre

Now, Nāgasena asks, consider the flame by one’s bed that was lit at dusk last night, and the flame to which one awakes this morning. Are they the same, or are they different? Should

On the one hand, the attribution of independence leads to anger when others offend or wrong us. On the other hand, the sense that we are the sole authors of our own actions leads to egoistic pride in our own accomplishments.