Biting the no-self bullet

On Substack Notes, Tyler Alterman writes:

I get this point of view. In the past, on this very Substack, I used words like “creepy” to discuss the way that Buddhists seem fixated on selfhood, or the lack of it. And, as a 20-year-old meditator, the aspiration to dissolve the self inspired me in a bad way—I engaged in unskilful and unhelpful self-suppression as the core of my practice.

Given that I had an unhealthy relationship with literally everything I encountered at that age, I don’t hold Buddhist philosophy responsible for my miseries. But I’m aware of how much you can be misled by crude misreadings of no-self teachings.

But also? A little over 2 years ago, I underwent a surprising transformation, which felt like a complete redo of my previous perspective on life. And if you cornered me at knifepoint and forced me to sum up what happened in five words, I’d say, “my sense of self vanished.” It is like that, and it has continued to be like that. Anything more hedged would be cowardly. I would be understating the wildness of the experience.

If I get more words, my wise friend Jake Orthwein suggested this description: “It seemed in some bizarre sense like my personality, my ambitions, my history, etc, were all affixed to a sense of tension in the middle of experience, such that the total disappearance of that tension would mean dying, and then it died, and I’m still a personality somehow.” This is a fantastically clear and careful description. But in being careful, it risks losing the sense of how dramatic it feels.

The part of consciousness that feels like “me” just went away, boom, gone, only returning in spectral fragments. In the wake of this shift, I haven’t become perfect, or perfectly happy. But I have become much more joyous, peaceful, and prosocially inclined.

This shift comes along with an almost complete loss of the subjective sense of “choice” or “will”—it seems like I am being carried along the stream of life, like everything is simply unfolding. And yet, I behave more like an “agentic” person than ever before. It’s weird.

This came after 16 on-and-off years of meditation, which had already made my mind a pretty psychedelic and beautiful place. If I’d received all of the benefits of meditation and nothing more was available, I’d still be grateful.

But that moment of self shattering was more consequential than anything that came before it. Two years later, I am consistently surprised by how my consciousness is arranged, and the change in perspective continues to echo, producing ongoing modifications to my conduct and priorities.

Everything is different, though I’m living the same life.

It’s been a little like falling in love after listening to hundreds of love songs. Now, I understand that the words of many contemplative traditions are pointing towards this experiential territory, which can’t be summed up in words. I’m one of many many thousands of completely normal people in history who have crossed this threshold in consciousness. Like many of them, I have an urge to describe it, while also knowing that this is not fully possible.

I also can’t expect anyone to believe me. Why should you? My own wife recently told me that it took her two years of living with me to fully accept what I said about my spiritual experiences, and this was before the more startling shift described here. I’m also aware that, no matter how many times I write things like, “I’m not claiming to be a perfect being, or fully enlightened, or anything like that,” boasting of this kind will be falsely imputed to me if I frankly discuss what’s happened in my mind.

I accept these obstacles. If I can persuade one person that this is available, I am happy. If you’re interested in the contemplative path, it is important to know the following. If something less than a transformation of your everyday experience has occurred, there is something more out there. Something that you don’t have to describe as “the death of the self,” but which seems an awful lot like that. If you go through it, you’ll understand why this is such a popular description. You’ll also understand why contemplative traditions are so insistent on making statements like “the self is an illusion,” even though they can be misread. (No-self is a result, not a method.)

It’s really not obvious that such profound transformations can happen to a mind, and it’s really important that this knowledge gets preserved. Additionally, making bold declarations about the extremity of contemplative experience is a decent way to keep people talking about meditation, which can be a fairly boring subject.

If someone who was new to meditation wanted to investigate the illusory nature of self, I’d say: be gentle.

Notice how much self-consciousness is a variable and transient property.

Notice how, in moments of gratitude or openheartedness, you are less fixated on history and narrative.

Notice that in moments of flow, the management of self is temporarily forgotten.

See if you can practice noticing, appreciating, and extending moments like this, via meditation and other means.

If someone who was further down the path wanted to investigate the illusory nature of self, I’d say: be curious. Examine the basic architecture of selfhood. Time, space, the feeling of lack. These are sensory phenomena that arise and dissipate. When you investigate them directly, you begin to notice that they are tensions that sometimes relax, leading to startling feelings of spaciousness, timelessness, wholeness, and so on. Keep going.

If someone who was even further down the path wanted to investigate the illusory nature of self, I’d say: be ruthless, be honest. Confront yourself. What exactly is the “awareness” in your sense of “non-dual awareness”? Are you holding onto subtle conceit about “your” spiritual accomplishments? Have you checked in on your sense of superiority/inferiority lately—that most basic see-saw foundation of the limited sense of self? What would still be scary to you about giving up control? What do you think you’re doing when you meditate? Could you stop it completely?

Good luck.

Editorial thanks to Erin Shetron, photo credit goes to Daido Moriyama.