The Self That Isn’t
Most of my years of Buddhist meditation practice were spent on discovering the “Self that isn’t”. And I did find it. In the process I found:
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That the “Self that isn’t” is a product: what we became.
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That the “Self that is” is a process: we are a bonded, dynamically stable, self-organizing process.
Not long ago I had what I call the “BART Illusion”. I had just walked from the Downtown Berkeley BART station to the Northridge BART station, and was going to ride the BART back downtown. I went up to the gate, however it was closed for construction. So I walked around to the other side of the building, through the turnstiles, down to the platform, and over to the Downtown Berkeley platform. Something was wrong! The sign said Richmond! I felt it so strongly, so strongly, that I had walked to the Downtown Berkeley platform. Yet I knew the sign had to be right, so I walked across to the Downtown Berkeley side. Once on the train I sat next to a window on the side where the bay would be when we came out of the tunnel – if I we were going to Richmond, as I so strongly felt we were. We came out of the tunnel. There were the hills! Bang! The illusion collapsed and I felt like we were going to Berkeley, just as the sign said.
The illusion was so strong! I KNEW that I had an almost perfect sense of direction! My sense of direction depends on my keeping a reference to north and accounting for all turns. However the BART building was round: there were no sharp easily remembered turns. I thought I had just gone half way around and would be facing the opposite way: so my mind made a decision on the direction. Actually I had gone almost all the way around, so my direction conclusion was wrong.
I know how real it can feel when you have convinced yourself that something is true.
So, what is this “Self that isn’t”? It is what the Buddhists call a Sankara, which usually translated as Mental Formation. Carl Jung called it a complex. It is the way we were formed by our experiences.
We have many Sankara’s, mental formations. We are a loving parent, a diligent worker, an avid hiker. Each of these is something we became, a way that we were formed. And we feel as if they are us. That is an illusion.