And if the band you’re in starts playing different tunes…
So there You sit.
Thirty-five trillion cells.
And one hundred trillion foreign cells comprised of about ten-thousand various and sundry species.
And each cell made up of about one hundred trillion atoms, give or take.
And each atom about 99.9999999999999% empty space.
And believing You are One.
This is a quotidian miracle – the apparent unity of You built on a foundation of constantly shifting and ephemeral multiplicity, but it serves. At these scales the notion of “I” is such an abstraction as to be meaningless. The numbers are too big, the entities too tiny. So we don’t bother with this except as an intellectual exercise. It has no real lasting resonance. While it provides some thrilling existential shivers, it doesn’t invite fundamental change.
In philosophical circles, there’s a well-known anecdote regarding an incident involving the Irish bishop George Berkeley, the English writer Samuel Johnson, and the Scottish lawyer James Boswell. According to the story, as the trio were walking out of church together Berkeley was trying to convince the others that matter does not exist and physical reality is only apparent. Boswell, though not accepting Berkeley’s philosophy, conceded that he could not repudiate his argument. Johnson, however, was not so easily defeated. Kicking a large stone violently he remarked, “I refute it thus.”
What’s the connection? If the Bellman, or anyone, told you that You don’t exist you could think of any number of ways to counter his claim. You would kick the stone. And you would be correct. And you would be wrong. How? Here’s how: this either/or thinking is engendered by a conceptual and linguistic trap that emerges from our dual natures.
An ignorance of our clashing dual natures is the crux of the problem.
Writ large, both in numbers and in time, these individual subconscious conflicts act as viruses: self-reinforcing and creating the conditions for an invisible, alienating, and septic culture.
The Black Antelope 
This is covered in many zen parables, from basic meditation on the body and its make up of 10,000 pores and excrement to the story of the young monk and the boulder. The illusion of “I” is one of the biggest obstacles to living in the moment and experiencing enlightenment beyond momentary satori .
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Bryan,
Thanks for your comment. Buddhist psychology, including the doctrine of anatta (“not-self”), is very deep and, it seems to me, universally relevant. There’s also a rich Western tradition of Self-examination including Locke, Hume, James, Freud, and Jung, as well as the motley crew of linguistic analysts. (Hume’s view, I think, aligns fairly closely with the Buddhist perspective.) In 2009, the German philosopher of mind Thomas Metzinger published The Ego Tunnel, a book that claims, from a neuroscientific perspective, that the Self does not exist. Sometimes I wonder if the view of the self isn’t part of the Perennial Philosophy. I’m still torn on this one. Beneath the later dogmatic and ritually reflexive practices of even the Abrahamic faiths, does the mystic experience the non-existence of Self during divine union?
A great number of people, as a purely intellectual exercise, probably would have no problem accepting the idea that the Self doesn’t exist. However, merely cognitive understandings do very little to change practice. There are no doubt, some walking the Earth as we speak, who have truly annihilated the sense of “I, Me, Mine” and many more who are assiduously working toward that goal. The dominant culture, though, is lumbering massively toward the opposite polarity: Ego – and all that attends it – is easing more comfortably into its throne.
I would like to examine an alternate route. What happens when, rather than intellectually accepting the truth of not-self, someone viscerally accepts the truth of a bifurcated self?
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Can we first define self. What is the self? Is ego just a biological drive to survive manifesting in a highly neurologically evolved creature? Or is it something more? We seem seem to develope this concept of self, but out side of clinical circles and certain arm chair philosophers the definition of self always devolves into ” well, … you know,…. me.”. It becomes a circular argument . Je pense, donc je suis is only corollary and not causation.
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Bryan,
I suspect there’s an analytical sphinx in many of us, especially those who are interested (obsessed) with traditional academic disciplines and their mode of discourse. She lays linguistic traps demanding that travelers’ ideas be fixed with denotation before proceeding. Of course, the nature of language ensures that nothing of consequence ever gets satisfactorily defined and, so, we get devoured by the sphinx before even beginning our journey down The Path. The twin blades required to slay her are Metaphor and Acceptance.
I’m in love with words. I’ve always been in love with words and therein lies my sphinx. I confused the finger with the Moon.
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