The Buddhist rejection of a real self

I tried writing out a comparison of the Buddhist rejection of a single self with how that would apply to a case of multiple personalities, related to Dissociative Identity Disorder.  It really split into two different posts, because it required so much background about what Buddhist teachings are doing in rejecting a permanent, real self.  So I'll post it as two parts, with that DID related part following later.

Discussing Buddhism in relation to inner experience of reality can be difficult.  I'll keep the Buddhism resume limited here, but it is relevant, since I have experienced four significant contact points with the subject.  I studied Buddhism on my own for about decade, starting in my early 20's, initiated by a life change starting me on looking into the nature of experienced reality, what it's all about.  Later on that led to going back to school to study Buddhism as religion and philosophy in two academic programs, getting a BA and MA, but stopping short of the phD step that would've enabled pursuing that as a career.  

Then I also ordained as a Thai Buddhist monk at one point, for a limited time, for a bit over two months.  I have since lived in a Buddhist society in Thailand for over a decade, as part of a Thai Buddhist family, engaging in the routine religious practices they do.  To be clear to me Buddhism, at its core, is really a form of practical psychology, designed to serve a function of adjusting perspective and internal life experience, so the ceremonies and religion forms are kind of beside the point.

with a cat I now see as my oldest daughter, Nong On, at the end of 2007

Keoni ordained at that same temple, here with Kalani offering alms (food for the day)

It's not simple to summarize the core Buddhist teaching that rejects the existence of a real self, and different people could easily take that in completely different ways, even with significant valid exposure.  All of this is my own opinion and interpretation, which I'm not going to support by citing early core teachings or later religious school references.  It maps fairly directly to ideas from the Thai Theravada Buddhism forest monk tradition, but I wasn't really a part of that while I was ordained.  I was a "city monk" instead.  I did do a week long meditation retreat outside of Bangkok at one point, but it wasn't with that sub-group.

Buddhist rejection of a permanent, real self

Taken one way this main teaching relates to rejecting the existence of a soul, so it's all about rebirth versus a heavenly afterlife.  I really have no idea what happens after we die, and speculating about that isn't of interest to me.  I am agnostic about it, only really focused on what goes on in this life.  In religious scope this is really most of what it's typically taken to mean, that someone will return as a different person, and they should be selfless while "here," because we are all inter-connected.  That kind of works, to encourage ethical behavior, but I think it's not the main point.  Ethics / morality does support the rest, it is one part of the Eightfold Path. 

Taken another way it's a philosophical position, relating to the discussion of realism versus nominalism or idealism that occurs in that realm.  I've studied some academic philosophy metaphysics (not the same as use of the term to mean spirituality related, in fortune telling practices or crystal shops), but this is also not of interest to me.  It's really too long a story to explain how that works out, how academic philosophy never really completely connects to someone's form of experienced reality (most typically), and it's not actually supposed to.  That probably sounds more judgmental and like more of a slight than it's really intended.  Most of my professors tended to just take that as a clear starting point, that we working on "problems," not sorting out the nature of reality for practical purposes.  If we were doing that instead we would've been working towards wisdom, not knowledge, or at least that's how they sometimes put it.

Let's skip ahead to what I take the rejection of a real self to mean, versus crossing off the list of everything it might possibly mean.  I take it to be a practical point, something that ties to actionable practice.  It doesn't mean that a lot of internal reality is invalid in some sense, but only that upon examination a good bit of patterns in processing reality can be adjusted; they aren't as fixed as they seem.  This rejection is not part of a negative model, it's about a starting point for introspection.

Put in summary terms, experienced reality itself is a construct.  

It's something that we create through interpretation.  We experience everything as real, as objectively the same for everyone, from inner and outer reality, but even external objects are interpreted through the lens of our own experience.  Of course those external objects do tend to be fixed; if I see an apple you would see and experience the same apple in the same ways, beyond potential food taste preference difference.

Our inner self isn't completely different.  That seems like a fixed, objectively real thing, even though of course it's not tangible in the same way a book or whatever else would be.  If two people pick up the same book they have the same physical experience (essentially; philosophers love splitting hairs about everything, but it's the same).  The meaning of the book could be different, a feeling towards it, it's going to degrade a little over time, but it's still about the same.  We tend to see our internal interpretation of external events in a similar way, that something positive like a vacation experience or sports event, or negative, like a dropped ice cream cone, or mass killing we would all interpret in generally similar ways.  Of course those aren't objects, in any sense, they are events instead.

That self, and the related perspective and worldview, is really a set of habits, assumptions, and internal processes, the experience of continuity of experience itself, tied to personal history.  

All that occurs on a subconscious level, mostly.  It can be changed; it's not even difficult to do so.  Having a very bad experience changes the experience of an internal self very quickly.  Moving from one city to another or changing jobs also does, or having children, and so on.  Changing ideas enough would change the experience of self, for example, joining a cult, or even the military, or going back to college.  Taking up a religion is a different thing; it would be easy to not put that into deep enough practice to really make significant difference, to just trade out some ritual forms and personal connections.

Why would the Buddha tell us that self isn't real?  It's completely practical and functional, as I take it.  Per my understanding everything taught in Buddhism is, or else it's not a genuine part of it.  That serves as one idea and basis for re-examining the form of reality, and what is contributed internally.  Taken alone it would change nothing, but with significant introspection related to one's personal form of experienced reality even taken alone it might.  Other ideas support it, and other process, practices of mindfulness (developed awareness of momentary reality) and meditation (a tool for developing a capacity to understand your own experience, for dropping out some noise, or for seeing what the noise is, and other ordinary base forms).

It all tends to get oversimplified in common portrayals of Buddhism.  One form of that is suggesting that mental clutter is the issue, that we can sidestep that, and drop internal chatter, judgements, worries, and self-obsession simply by setting it all aside.  There's a lot to that.  Another form interprets impermanence as a central key, really a different idea scope, but it all tends to link.  The dropped ice cream cone works as an example; just after that occurs how one relates to it can be a personal choice.  It could linger as a negative bias to inner reality or let go of.  Hopefully someone wouldn't experience a bad day over something that trivial but experience does tend to cascade a bit, with us slipping into one type of context and not necessarily slipping right back out of it.  It's not experienced self in the same form as self-image, but perspective framework and internal self are parts of a whole.

One might confuse hearing that the self is not real with the idea that the experienced internal self is a bad thing.  There is no need to make that connection.  Continuity of personal experience is a pre-requisite for living as a person; that depends on some scope one could interpret as an inner self.  "Selfishness" is something else, and it's as well to not get too caught up in English word forms saying things that they really don't speak to.  Ego and self are two separate things, in different models, varying depending on what the related framework of ideas is set up to do.  It's easy to adopt parts of a Freudian internal model without necessarily thinking all that through (ego, id, superego), probably mapping parts to other terms, just assuming that it's all meaningful and real enough, or put another way is functionally descriptive.  That works, with some limitations; it works better if you are aware of what you are assuming in the first place, and what role that then plays in interpreting or framing reality.

Everyone is self-interested; they kind of have to be.  If you find your own self or your own life experience uninteresting or unpleasant things probably aren't working out well for you, and it's an impractical assumption.  Self-development would almost certainly work on developing positive life skills, not furthering some illusory image or agenda.  Materialism or focus on a broad range of negative sensory experience, like drug use, is kind of something to be avoided, but those are not exactly the point here either.  What is the point then?

Let's use self-image as an example (again without getting too caught up in that term including something that Buddhism seems to be rejecting).  It's not a negative thing, taken alone, to see yourself or present yourself a certain way.  As a social being it's necessary.  But it could be very beneficial for someone to consciously understand how and why they are putting energy into this pursuit, of adjusting external image, and tying expectations and planned future direction to all sorts of related patterns.  For that to go unexamined for someone's whole life would kind of be a shame, as Socrates kept saying.  

For someone succeeding at meeting a social norm (here used to describe a complex image, not one individual pattern), or even excelling at that, it may be the case that too much energy is going into that, with life unbalanced due to focus on appearance, clothing, ownership of items that frame an image, even something apparently healthy like focus on physical fitness.  Social status tied to wealth and career success, or image, is as significant as any of that, or potentially more so.  It would be easy to experience a severe crisis in your 40s when you realize that the pursuit you have been so successful at has robbed you of capacity to pursue other directions, and aging is going to take away a lot of what you have accomplished.  At least material success can span a duration of time, but expectations can make that kind of accomplishment a continually moving target.  

A different kind of negative side could be just as bad, related to gaps in expectations coming up.  Someone could focus a lot of their energy or attention on dislike of appearance or self-image aspects, which might not even relate to positive change themes, and life might just seem continually not so good.  No need to cite examples; people can get stuck in all sorts of loops related to identifying most with what they see as personal gaps in their own life experience.

It might seem like I'm just saying that one should be self-aware, and lead a balanced life.  That's definitely part of it.  Maybe moving further and examining changes that are possible beyond that could help frame the general point.  These really relate to the kinds of changes that happen once you start to unpack how you build up your own image of your self and your life, and what tends to change once you start making adjustments.  The process of that unfolding is complicated, and it would work out in different ways for different people.  Explaining the outcome rather than the process itself, the actual tools, might seem a little counterintuitive, out of a normal rational order, but it still makes sense.  Everyone's approach and what they turn up through forms of introspection would be different, just as the resulting changes would also be different.

Changes to experience of self

I'll use things I have experienced as an example.  It's not a claim to "success at practicing Buddhism," because that's not how it works.  It's not a contest, and there aren't really clear and specific goals.  Things get removed in practicing Buddhism, forms of error, or approaches, practices, or perspective that are flawed, not added.  There is no final positive model for reality or experienced form that one is striving for.  Removing most error would be pleasant, but that can't be interpreted as a positive goal, to win at being most enlightened, or even conventionally self-less.  That kind of goal--a concept or model of enlightenment itself, for example--would be rejected along the way as part of the practice, as just one more form of excess internal perspective baggage to be discarded.

It can be hard to relate this to internal perspective and form, to turn up specific examples.  I experienced something in a strange range once while meditating, that led to a change in experienced form of inner reality.  No need to add experiential details; those don't make much sense.  My internal voice essentially dropped out.  Later it resumed in a much quieter, less pronounced form, but it took time to, weeks or months.  Really it would be more conventional for anxiety and internal doubt and noise to gradually diminish over time, and this is a good example of removing error or forms that don't work.  Radically and suddenly re-working perspective of an internal self isn't how that normally goes, and probably in general it wouldn't be advisable.

Dropping out materialism would be an example of relatively lower-hanging fruit, and a more typical process.  Aiming for severe psychological change would seem strange, and is probably counterproductive.  

As consumers who are the subject of continual advertising we are more or less programmed to feel like we lack something, all the time.  We really should have those new clothes, a new watch, or phone, or car, etc.  Then when you acquire those things, or even just experiences, travel and such, there is a limited degree of satisfaction, but the process continues, and it's next something else.  In a lot of cases owing that new thing would bring up extra perceived lack, instead of fulfillment, since things that go along with that material item would then be desirable.  Owning one really nice watch could easily bridge into collecting nice watches, and so on.  Based partly on being poor at one earlier stage of life I got out of the habit of collecting or buying material things, and never really got back into it.  It really did help examining the role that material things were playing in my life to make peace with breaking that cycle.

Back to mental space--not that owning physical things isn't mostly about that--the experiences of anger, regret related to the past, anxiety in relation to the future, can all be interpreted and to some extent resolved by better understanding the nature of experienced reality.  One part is that we only really directly contact the present moment.  Our minds are not typically firmly grounded in present experience, and it's not so easy to even notice that, never mind adjust for it.

One might think all this is sort of related to "self" but it's really something else, just about the form of experienced reality.  Self is at the core of that.  Self-image grounds all of it.  Every personal connection we experience, every plan, and reaction, or goal, all tie back to who we see ourselves to be.  Even that relationship to a nice watch is more about self-image than anything else; how we present our external image to others, how we see it ourselves, what status issues tie to material ownership, and so on. 

That self isn't exactly an illusion, it's just not real, in the same sense that a book is actually real.  

Again it's a set of habits, assumptions, aspirations, internal connections, external associations, life practices, and so on.  All of those can be understood and adjusted.  You can't change your past or who your parents were but you can most definitely change your interpretation of your past, and how it relates to your present and expected future.  And your relationship with your parents, to some extent even after they are dead.  That's the kind of thing that isn't obvious; it would require sorting through your own sub-conscious framework for reality to really see what it means.

There is a conventional error or misunderstanding that Buddhism is about wiping out self, cleaning the slate, dropping all of it.  In a very limited sense this can relate to a range of some forms of Buddhist practice, but that is definitely not what Buddhism is.  Zen is about self-discovery through setting aside some of the internal noise and connections, but it's not valid practice unless it relates to reworking that experience to some form that's different but still related.  That kind of transition would be impossible without sorting out the prior definition of self and experience of reality; there is absolutely no chance of just dropping it all.  Anyone making that kind of claim shouldn't be taken too seriously.  Embracing quiet moments and more direct experience are something else; of course that can be useful, and pleasant.

Of course someone could easily protest that I've just made a related but conflicting claim, one based on personal authority, of how one should interpret Buddhism properly.  But I really haven't, as I see it.  The teachings of the Buddha tell us to examine our own life experience and internal reality, and that's what I'm advocating.  There is limited guidance for approach (not so limited for range; there's a lot of "Buddhism," maybe too much).  A lot of teachings relate to what will perhaps relate to specific forms of perception or worldview framing error, but it's not mostly about that.  

There is no positive description of a final end state (enlightenment, moving clear of problematic attachments), and not even much for what kinds of errors to try to remove, as much as one might expect.  Introspection turns up what is problematic within everyone's own case.  It's easy to use broad strokes as examples, for example drug and alcohol use act as hindrances, or too much focus on materialism, external image, or social status can be negative.  Those things aren't necessarily inherently bad though, taken in appropriate ways, except maybe for the drug and alcohol use.  Why that's an exception is complicated.

In my own case I consumed a lot of alcohol and drugs in the past.  It can seem pleasant, and can help to bring people together in social activities.  There's not always a steep price to be paid in terms of side effects or direct consequences.  But it does pull focus towards the experience of altering reality, and over time that naturally becomes more and more negative.  Even maintaining a low level turns out to come at a cost.  In my 40s I would most often drink one large beer a week, as a Friday evening ritual, an aid to unwinding from a work-week.  To some extent on Monday through Thursday I was experiencing not drinking alcohol in a negative sense, minor enough that I barely noticed it, but it did set up a faint underlying sense of lack.  It's nothing to worry about; the point here is that it still comes at a cost, so that limited drug or alcohol experience comes at a low cost.

Dropping self, or at least part of what relates

Is this possible, experiencing reality with no sense of self?  I want to keep this moving, originally towards getting back to tie-in with DID, about if it should be possible to adjust experience of multiple selves instead of just a single one, but this only finally starts to connect after considering "dropping self."  My own answer:  not really.  We continue to experience being grounded in a body, and we continue to experience continuity of a social self, that is, others expect us to be the same person we were yesterday, when they have social ties to us.  We take up roles, like that of an employee, or parent, or son or daughter.  That last roles we were granted before birth; we don't tend to pick it.  We could reject the role; that would work, or change the form of it.

An odd aside related to that:  my father and grandfather had a falling out, and in the end each decided to put aside their connection with the other.  In the end that rejection and that gap probably came to define them as much or more than the original relationship had, even though it didn't tie to an active interpersonal relationship.  They could never step aside from the rest of the family's self-definition as including that role, or completely resolve their own internal experience of a gap.  Of course they weren't so open with me about it that I knew of their internal experience, but one gets a sense.

One might wonder, am I also carrying around an internal experience of being separated from attachment to material things, a negative form or lack experienced as a restriction or special condition?  Maybe.  I tend to not see it that way; I just don't buy much.  For monks it's most definitely that; their lives are defined by a set of over 100 rules and restrictions that are set up to simplify their lives, but it turns into an ideological and functional code of conduct, a positively defined form of a negative, not a simple removal at all.  

It might be helpful to consider what other forms of removal we tend to carry around as negatives, not so much to link to Buddhist practices or definition of self, but just to see how these things do shape our reality.  Divorced people can come to define themselves through that prior connection that no longer exists, as widows can.  Being retired really should be about enjoying the lack of work demand, but it might also be experienced as a gap in definition of self.  It was interesting hearing about two work contacts' experiences in the past with losing weight, two people who were not overweight, who both confessed to me that they once were.  They seemed to carry this image of changed self with them, and even years later had trouble completely identifying beyond experiencing that lack (of a negative condition, to be clear, as they saw it).  Recovered alcoholics can be like that, can't they, prone to self-definition as what they see themselves to not be.

It's definitely possible to "thin out" experience of a self by dropping the parts we see as negative, I guess to some extent without retaining the lack.  Just doing that requires a high degree of introspection and "work."  Plenty of parts are always going to remain in place.  Personal preference across a broad range isn't really problematic.  There would be no need or benefit in eliminating all food preferences, for example.  If someone loves to live on McDonald's food that's an exception; there may be huge benefit in letting that completely drop.  The way to get there would be to take up an enjoyment of healthy food.  Or seemingly less balanced people giving up normal food entirely is an option, that Soylent meal replacement theme, but that also works as an example of why extremes don't work.  

For sure long term avoidance of food in place of drinking some complicated meal replacement shakes is a very bad idea.  That would be like embracing some body hack where you only sleep for 4 or 5 hours a day; it won't end well.  We really need to work within the constraints of having a physical body and being a social creature, not to drop related parts of that out.  This is common sense that we don't need Buddhist wisdom to recognize and accept.

Radical changes in forms of experience are possible.  Practicing moderation in terms of even considering those is probably advisable.  Original Buddhism absolutely doesn't advocate for people to give up their life and go sit in a cave, and re-emerge in a completely different form, although that context can come up in later stories, and that sort of was the Buddha's own approach.  A bit of Zen practice might be fine, or for the right person at the right time that social-isolation cave theme could be just the thing.  But in general that's just not Buddhism.  Don't take my word for it; read the core teachings, translations of the original received words of the Buddha himself.  Translation errors tend to skew meaning, with even the most basic core concepts not typically presented consistently or well (like that of attachment, self, or suffering), but one can read past that, while putting the ideas into practice within the context of their own life.

At the start it's as well to just think of Buddhism as introspection.  The more you notice what is going on in your inner reality the more problems and potential positive changes will become evident.

Conclusion

This kind of just ends, without really developing any one theme too far, doesn't it?  I've not started into methodology, about how it really works, so touching only a little on a starting point and end point seem all the thinner.  Maybe some of that will come through in writing further about DID, if it also applies as directly to multiple selves, but that won't be written as a "how-to" for Buddhism either.  I've never done a lot with that theme, even though I've had plenty of exposure to Buddhist practice, in addition to the background.  It seems like the kind of thing other subject experts might address better.

Then again the way that works in practice people would tend to pass on one person's worth of experience most often based on exposure within one narrow school.  That's fine, that's completely relevant, but it still seems to trade out depth of exposure to breadth.  It's back to a generalist versus specialist theme that comes up a lot in tea experience; it's hard to have it both ways.  From a distance greater specialization and in-depth exposure to narrow range should provide a lot more insight, since one could "get further," but in practice it's not that simple.  Related to both Buddhism and tea it would probably be nice to be able to split the difference, do the impossible, and cover both, to specialize in a narrow range and also have exposure to a broad range of ideas and experiences.

I'll take these ideas a little further in more practical application in that next writing, just not necessarily towards Buddhism in practice guidance.  Maybe eventually I will get around to saying more about that.