Not-Self

On the Buddhist idea of anatta.

The idea that there is no self gets thrown around a lot in Buddhism and meditation talk. I've been reading and hearing about it for a while. It's something I can wrap my mind around well enough, but only to a point. Still, my understanding of the idea as one plausible reality is helpful. If nothing else, it allows me to hit the reset button when I am besieged by all the strange firings of all the strange things that comprise the seemingly one strange thing I often think of as me. But it's only recently that I've had a few surprise glimpses of not being this thing, of not being the boss or even the sum of my parts, of not being me.

The first glimpse happened when I was still deep in what I've started to call morning mind. (There's apparently a book called The Morning Mind. I've not read it, though. So I'll just explain what I mean by the term here.)

Morning mind to me is the state of mind only barely removed from the one we inhabit in sleep. Think of that moment just as you start to wake up or fall asleep, when you're awake, but not quite.

When we're jolted awake after starting to fall asleep, there's a sense of having just been pulled into something or someplace else. There's a moment where we effectively scan ourselves for the story of who we are. It might last for only a second, but it happens. It does for me, anyway.

It's a similar experience, and I would say a heightened one, when we wake up in the morning. We have this moment where we establish who we are, where we are, where we've been, where we're going—if not by quickly assembling the summary of our lives, then by thinking about what day it is, and what we're inclined or obligated to do with the time that gives it shape. This story, too, tells us who we are. And once we re-enter it, our mental habits—good, bad, and in between—get to work, and we again start to become the characters in our stories. But they are tired, too. And this, in my experience, makes for a wobbly and more imaginative sense of reality and self, one not entirely dissimilar to a dream. This is what I mean by morning mind.

If you wake up before the sun, morning mind lingers a while. It wraps you in it. And if you start doing caffeine while still inside of it, it adds a sense of focus and propulsion and liftoff to the mix. But the daylight burns that stuff off fast, and then you're just you again, fully awake, back on the spinning wheel, doing all the things you must to keep the little embers of your mind and spirit glowing.

Okay. Back to those times when I was not exactly me.

You should first know that my kitchen is in a structure separate from the rest of my house. Think: a small shed behind a house, but with a kitchen inside instead of a lawnmower and hose and whatnot. Every morning after I wake up, I exit my house through the back door, walk down a few stairs, put on my knockoff Crocs (don't waste your time judging me), walk a few more steps, take off my not-Crocs, and enter the kitchen to make coffee. It's usually still dark when I do this.

As I was doing it one day a few weeks ago, my mind went to the gazillion ants marching in straight lines like little robotic soldiers all around me in the dark. I started imagining what it might be like to be one of them: what thinking might be like, what lifting something might feel like. And I must have done a pretty good job. Because when my thoughts turned back around, I found myself imagining what it might be like to be a human in comparison to an ant. And what it felt like was giant and intricate and big-brained and strong and immensely strange. But "it" wasn't me. It was something I seemed to be observing from elsewhere, some vague surrounding space, the same space from which I'd observed the ants as things not me. It only lasted for a second or two. And as soon as I became aware of it, I felt a slight shift in my equilibrium, and then I was back to being me again, making coffee and stretching my aging parts out in a dimly lit room in the dark.

To be clear, I don't think I actually got up close to the Buddhist notion of not-self. What I experienced doesn't even align very well with my understanding of not-self. What I do think is this: a door opened, I was there to see it open, and now I get to walk through it and see where it leads. And in our hidden-doored kingdom, that is not nothing.

Also not nothing: Earlier this week, I came to another door. I was working in my home office and listening to music, though I think I may have been mostly just listening to music. I was listening to an album that was released when I was 10 years old and people still bought music. I'm not knocking people for not buying music now. I'm just saying it was different then, in 1990, to be exact. No Internet. No MP3s. Just the stuff you heard on the radio or read about in magazines or saw on MTV and wanted badly enough to leave your house and give someone else with no Internet money for. The same stuff you maybe sat alone with and studied for days and weeks and often months or years, even when it wasn't that good. If you still do that now, hats off.

Anyway, I was listening to this album and anticipating hearing my favorite track on it: a two-and-a-half-minute gem that's been with me for 31 years. Never mind which song it is. Just insert whichever childhood obscurity you've grown older with and still love. Okay. It's that song now, for the remainder of this story.

I left the room for a minute but didn't pause the album. As I was coming back, I could hear the song playing on the other side of the closed door. I don't know why, but I didn't go back in. Instead, I put my forehead against the door and closed my eyes. Suddenly, I was an observer again, a witness to something that I know will sound absurd but that felt in the moment profound. I saw my 10-year-old self in the room. I watched him move around, unsure and awkward and innocent. I watched him follow the melody of the song to someplace purer and more layered and mysterious and magical than the one he had access to then. And I was him but I wasn't. And he was me but he wasn't. And we weren't separate or the same because we weren't really anything. We were just the connective cord running between us, a phantom channel that life moves through, but not any single thing that exists inside of it.

And it struck me: if I'm not literally the boy in that room, then how could I literally be the man standing here? And anyway I cried. On the door. And then I went back into my office and wrote a note to myself to tell you about the times that I wasn't quite my self.

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Notes:

• If you want to further explore the Buddhist notion of not-self (and all the ways we're under the influence of natural selection, "mental modules," and so on), I strongly suggest the Robert Wright book I mentioned in an earlier email: Why Buddhism Is True. The whole book has proven invaluable to me. But Chapter Five, “The Alleged Nonexistence of Yourself,” is the clearest and most practical writing I've come across on not-self yet. It's not an answer-delivery mechanism. But it is a cogent exploration of the Buddhist claim—and the many interpretations, questions, and contradictions it generates—through a secular, scientific lens.

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