The Enigma of No-Self

by Robert Brumet

The history of Western civilization is fundamentally the story of the evolution of the self. If you lived in Europe around 1500 CE you would consider yourself as being a link in the Great Chain of Being originating from God to the angels to humans to animals to vegetation to minerals.

Within the human dimension this was reproduced as a chain-of-command from the pope to the king to the nobility to the landlords to the peasantry. This chain was repeated inside the home as a hierarchy starting with the father, then mother, then male children, then female children then the animals. The term “A man’s home is his castle” (which I often heard growing up in the 1940’s) alludes to this medieval notion that a man was king in his own home.

In the early16th century, Europe saw the emergence of global exploration, of artistic expression, and of challenges to the spiritual authority of the Church. In the 17th century we see the emergence of scientific empiricism, of philosophy, and of mathematics. In the 18th century we see the resurgence of democracy in a more robust form than in ancient Greece; democracy blossomed in France and America almost simultaneously.

With the rise of democracy, the self becomes supreme, and a government was created to protect the rights of the individual. Government was to serve the people, the converse of what had been throughout most of recorded history. The individual was commissioned master of his own destiny.[1]

But now in the 21st century Western world many have adopted a spiritual practice that teaches there is no self. This can be difficult to swallow if we don’t understand the true meaning of no-self (anatta).

The Buddha taught there is no permanent entity that we can call a “self.” The word “anatta” is a Pali [2] word that means “no soul.” He taught that an essential part of the Dharma is to “not cling to (identify with) anything as the self.”

When I first read about this teaching, it seemed absurd. It certainly seems as if there is a self. This self makes choices, generates ideas, and is necessary for survival in the physical world. We experience life on this planet from the perspective of the self. All of this seems self-evident.

But experience and reality are not the same. The Buddha would say that the self is a construct created by the mind’s identification with experience. We believe that every experience must have a subject that has the experience. But the Buddha says, “Not so.” Contrary to the prevailing belief of our time, experience does not require a self.

Through clear observation we can see that we have many types of experience: thinking, hearing, seeing etc. but we will never experience the self that is having them. Try looking at who it is that is looking. The self is always the subject and never the object.

Awareness does not require a subject in which to be aware. When we say, “it’s raining,” what is it that is raining? The rain is raining. There is no self-making it rain and there is no self who decided that it will rain. Nature happens. No one makes it happen. Only in the human world do we believe that “Nothing happens until someone makes it happen.”

However, if I am stopped by a police officer for speeding, it may not work to try to convince him that “it just happened” and that there is no one responsible. We live in a world where it is necessary to have a self—or at least pretend to have one.

A skillful means might be to consider self as an activity rather than an object—a verb rather than a noun. Like a river, self may be considered a noun — an entity — even though we know that it is a verb — an activity. Another example is fire. Fire is a phenomenon of nature that occurs under certain conditions and ceases to exist when those conditions are no longer present. Fires “live” and “die” based on certain conditions. All of this could apply to the self as well.

We are bi-valent beings. And in the world, we are responsible for our decisions and our actions. We live as if the sun rises in the east and sets in the west — although we know that it doesn’t. We can do something similar with the self. We are playing an enigmatic game called “being human.” We are spiritual beings having a human experience — and it’s important to acknowledge both aspects of our nature.

[1] To be clear, “Individual” typically meant white male.
[2] Pali is a dialect of Sanskrit that was spoken by the Buddha.