"You" Don't Exist: Why an Enduring Self Is a Delusion
Mindfulness practice increases our capacity to ride the waves of pleasure and pain.
By Ronald Siegel / Psychotherapy Networker
What if our therapeutic goals of improving self-esteem, developing a stable and coherent sense of self, and identifying and expressing genuine, authentic feelings all turn out to be symptoms of delusion? And what if the current mindfulness craze—if we take it seriously enough—changes who we think we are and what we’re trying to do in therapy [or in trading]?
Like atomic energy in the 1960s, mindfulness is lately being seen as the cure for everything. Depression, anxiety, alienation, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, financial difficulties—you name it and there’s a mindfulness-based remedy for it. And while it’s true that reducing stress and giving us respite from our incessant thoughts can make almost any condition feel better, serious engagement with mindfulness practice is likely to produce an unexpected, often unwanted effect: it can lead us, and our clients, away from our comfortable constructs and toward a radical reappraisal of who we are and what our life is all about, upending our psychotherapy practices in the process.
In the Buddhist traditions from which many contemporary mindfulness practices derive, mindfulness techniques evolved as tools for deconstructing our usual view of ourselves and the world, for waking up from conventional, socially reinforced fictions about who we are and how to find happiness. This awakening occurs to the degree that we no longer believe in the self. It involves realizing what’s called in Pali—the language in which the Buddha’s teachings were first recorded—anatta, or non-self.
The mindfulness practice that leads to recognizing anatta is deceptively simple. It begins with cultivating concentration—choosing an object of awareness, such as ambient sounds, the breath, or other body sensations, and returning attention to that object every time the mind wanders from it. Once some concentration is established, we open the field of awareness to attend to whatever predominates in consciousness. Throughout the process, we try to accept whatever arises, whether pleasant or unpleasant.
If we engage in this simple practice long enough, we discover that our sense of being a separate, coherent, enduring self is actually a delusion maintained by our constant inner chatter, which generally features “me” at its center. From mundane decisions (“I think I’ll get the salmon with wilted spinach tonight”) to existential fears (“What’ll I do if the lump is malignant?”), this chatter fills our waking hours. Listening to it all day long, we come to believe that the hero of this drama must exist.
But if we practice mindfulness long and often enough, this conventional sense of self can start to unravel. By repeatedly bringing our attention to sensory experience in the present moment, we see that what arises in consciousness is a kaleidoscope of sensations and images [including price movement], regularly narrated by subvocal words, which themselves arise and pass. Attention goes from the sensations of breathing, to a sound, to an itch on the scalp, to an image of a client, to remembering an upsetting email. We never actually find the little homunculus, the heroic man or woman inside, the stable and coherent “I” so regularly mentioned in our passing thoughts. Rather, there’s just a continual flux of changing mental contents. more . . .
Mindfulness practice increases our capacity to ride the waves of pleasure and pain.
By Ronald Siegel / Psychotherapy Networker
What if our therapeutic goals of improving self-esteem, developing a stable and coherent sense of self, and identifying and expressing genuine, authentic feelings all turn out to be symptoms of delusion? And what if the current mindfulness craze—if we take it seriously enough—changes who we think we are and what we’re trying to do in therapy [or in trading]?
Like atomic energy in the 1960s, mindfulness is lately being seen as the cure for everything. Depression, anxiety, alienation, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, financial difficulties—you name it and there’s a mindfulness-based remedy for it. And while it’s true that reducing stress and giving us respite from our incessant thoughts can make almost any condition feel better, serious engagement with mindfulness practice is likely to produce an unexpected, often unwanted effect: it can lead us, and our clients, away from our comfortable constructs and toward a radical reappraisal of who we are and what our life is all about, upending our psychotherapy practices in the process.
In the Buddhist traditions from which many contemporary mindfulness practices derive, mindfulness techniques evolved as tools for deconstructing our usual view of ourselves and the world, for waking up from conventional, socially reinforced fictions about who we are and how to find happiness. This awakening occurs to the degree that we no longer believe in the self. It involves realizing what’s called in Pali—the language in which the Buddha’s teachings were first recorded—anatta, or non-self.
The mindfulness practice that leads to recognizing anatta is deceptively simple. It begins with cultivating concentration—choosing an object of awareness, such as ambient sounds, the breath, or other body sensations, and returning attention to that object every time the mind wanders from it. Once some concentration is established, we open the field of awareness to attend to whatever predominates in consciousness. Throughout the process, we try to accept whatever arises, whether pleasant or unpleasant.
If we engage in this simple practice long enough, we discover that our sense of being a separate, coherent, enduring self is actually a delusion maintained by our constant inner chatter, which generally features “me” at its center. From mundane decisions (“I think I’ll get the salmon with wilted spinach tonight”) to existential fears (“What’ll I do if the lump is malignant?”), this chatter fills our waking hours. Listening to it all day long, we come to believe that the hero of this drama must exist.
But if we practice mindfulness long and often enough, this conventional sense of self can start to unravel. By repeatedly bringing our attention to sensory experience in the present moment, we see that what arises in consciousness is a kaleidoscope of sensations and images [including price movement], regularly narrated by subvocal words, which themselves arise and pass. Attention goes from the sensations of breathing, to a sound, to an itch on the scalp, to an image of a client, to remembering an upsetting email. We never actually find the little homunculus, the heroic man or woman inside, the stable and coherent “I” so regularly mentioned in our passing thoughts. Rather, there’s just a continual flux of changing mental contents. more . . .
