I speak not from experience here, but according to my limited understanding, the idea is that most or all ideas of the “self” are more-or-less arbitrary abstractions like the Ship of Theseus.
Via western philosophy of mind you can gain some understanding of this idea and convince yourself that it is probably true, but via meditation AFAIU it becomes possible to observe this directly in your own mind.
The benefits of “transcending” the concept of self, I believe, is that you suffer less and become happier.
The denial of a self has long seemed to me a kind of delusion. I am very clearly having a particular stream of consciousness. It’s not an arbitrary abstraction to say that it includes some experiences and does not include others. To say there is a self, is just to say that there is a being experiencing that stream of consciousness. Would you deny that, or are you saying something else?
I’ve got an idea what meditation people might be talking about with doing away with the self. Once you start thinking about what the lower-level mechanics of the brain are like, you start thinking about representations. Instead of the straightforward assertion “there’s a red apple on that table”, you might start thinking “my brain is holding a phenomenal representation of a red apple on a table”. You’ll still assume there’s probably a real apple out there in the world too, though if you’re meditating you might specifically try to not assign meanings to phenomenal experiences even at this level. Now you also have a straightforward assertion “I’m a person who’s awake, aware and feeling experiences”, and you indeed are, but out there, in the physical world, and your awareness is actually the whole substrate of your phenomenal world. But then in your everyday view you also have as part of your world representation the representation of your body, with the sense that thoughts and feelings go on in the representation. And normally you just identify the representation-self with the real physical body and brain out there in the world, like you identify the mind-picture of the red apple with the red apple out there on a table.
But the representation “me, in this body here which I’m aware of” within your sensory landscape isn’t the same thing as your actual physical brain out in the world generating your whole world of awake awareness any more that the impression of an apple in your mind is an actual physical apple. Maybe the idea with the meditation is to become aware of this and realize that consciousness goes on even when you stop paying attention to your representation of yourself and it falls out of your space of perception.
I don’t the experience of no-self contradicts any of the above.
In general, I think you could probably make some factual statements about the nature of consciousness that’s true and that you learn from attaining no-self, if you phrased it very carefully, but I don’t think that’s the point.
The way I’d phrase what happens would be mostly in terms of attachment. You don’t feel as implicated by things that affect you anymore, you have less anxiety, that kind of thing. I think a really good analogy is just that regular consciousness starts to resemble consciousness during a flow state.
I speak not from experience here, but according to my limited understanding, the idea is that most or all ideas of the “self” are more-or-less arbitrary abstractions like the Ship of Theseus.
Via western philosophy of mind you can gain some understanding of this idea and convince yourself that it is probably true, but via meditation AFAIU it becomes possible to observe this directly in your own mind.
The benefits of “transcending” the concept of self, I believe, is that you suffer less and become happier.
This is correct.
The denial of a self has long seemed to me a kind of delusion. I am very clearly having a particular stream of consciousness. It’s not an arbitrary abstraction to say that it includes some experiences and does not include others. To say there is a self, is just to say that there is a being experiencing that stream of consciousness. Would you deny that, or are you saying something else?
I’ve got an idea what meditation people might be talking about with doing away with the self. Once you start thinking about what the lower-level mechanics of the brain are like, you start thinking about representations. Instead of the straightforward assertion “there’s a red apple on that table”, you might start thinking “my brain is holding a phenomenal representation of a red apple on a table”. You’ll still assume there’s probably a real apple out there in the world too, though if you’re meditating you might specifically try to not assign meanings to phenomenal experiences even at this level. Now you also have a straightforward assertion “I’m a person who’s awake, aware and feeling experiences”, and you indeed are, but out there, in the physical world, and your awareness is actually the whole substrate of your phenomenal world. But then in your everyday view you also have as part of your world representation the representation of your body, with the sense that thoughts and feelings go on in the representation. And normally you just identify the representation-self with the real physical body and brain out there in the world, like you identify the mind-picture of the red apple with the red apple out there on a table.
But the representation “me, in this body here which I’m aware of” within your sensory landscape isn’t the same thing as your actual physical brain out in the world generating your whole world of awake awareness any more that the impression of an apple in your mind is an actual physical apple. Maybe the idea with the meditation is to become aware of this and realize that consciousness goes on even when you stop paying attention to your representation of yourself and it falls out of your space of perception.
I don’t the experience of no-self contradicts any of the above.
In general, I think you could probably make some factual statements about the nature of consciousness that’s true and that you learn from attaining no-self, if you phrased it very carefully, but I don’t think that’s the point.
The way I’d phrase what happens would be mostly in terms of attachment. You don’t feel as implicated by things that affect you anymore, you have less anxiety, that kind of thing. I think a really good analogy is just that regular consciousness starts to resemble consciousness during a flow state.