What is the ‘self’? The 3 layers of your identity.

In the West, we feel that we must, you know, differentiate ourselves from others endlessly. We have a model of self where the self is kind of like an avocado, right? And we have a pit inside of us. The pit is our self, our essence, our identity. It is a thing to which we must above all be true. And of course, very importantly, we see that pit as unique so that everything we do it, we want to show, to reflect that pitch, to reflect that self and we want it to be unique. In Asia, they people frequently have a flexi self. So it's a different kind of self. It is a self that's oriented more to duty than to rights, for instance. And, and very importantly, it it is not, it does not have have a cultural mandate to be different and to be unique. So if you ask, you know, are they individuals? Of course they're individuals, you know, are they different? Of course they are different. But of course for them it's like, oh, of course I'm different. Why would I make a big deal of that, right. The difference is how much significance do we attach to that difference? In other words, do we think it's very important to to differentiate ourselves from others? So one of the ways that we do that, of course, is through choice. You know, choice in the West is very, very important. Everyone is always making choices. And honestly, a lot of those choices make us a little anxious. If you do a study where you are just sitting in an empty room and you're making a choice and you come from a more individualistic culture, you actually show signs of a little anxiety. You know, every little choice that you make, even in private, because it's, it's defining of you, you who you are. It's a little loaded. They feel like they just choose, you know, in other words, when they make those choices, it doesn't have this overlay. And that's one of the reasons they feel that actually we are less, less free than they are, you know, So they think that we are the ones who are kind of in this prison where, you know, like I say, every moment we must define ourselves. Well, isn't that awful, right? And, you know, and of course, the way, the way that we live, we feel that, you know, we want to be freely electing to, to live the way that we live, right. And so even when we're doing things like taking care of the elderly, for example, you know, we want to feel that we that an extension of our great love and the, the nature of our being to be able to take care of the elderly. Well, you know, the other day I was having dinner with somebody said, you know, I just don't feel that. And it's just, it's just very, very hard, you know, so somebody from a more flexi self or interdependent culture would say, you know, it's just your duty, you know. And so for them, it's like, you know, they have their elderly parent, they just go take care of the elderly parent because that's their duty for them. This is really liberating. You know, you just go do it and you don't expect there to, you know, do expression of yourself. You know, it's just what people do from their point of view. We have made things very, very hard for ourselves to demand that, you know that everything should be an expression of our inner nature. We often like to think that the way to become a good person is to look within, find one's true self, the sort of natural self that we have. And once you've found that self, that natural thing that you are, the goal is to be sincere and authentic to that true self. So if we stick to what we naturally are meant to be, the gifts that we're naturally endowed with, that's how we can be a sincere, authentic person. Now, a lot of our Chinese philosophers would say that sounds good, but is is, On the contrary, extremely restraining and constraining to what we could do. The fact is, if we're messy creatures, as many of them would say, what we perhaps are in our daily lives are simply people whose emotions are being pulled out all the time by people we encounter, interactions we have. And over time, those responses fall into kind of rats and patterns that can just be repeated endlessly. So someone does something, it makes me angry and not even because of what they immediately did, but because for some reason it brings back, say you know, someone from my childhood yelling at me and I just have a patterned response to a certain action being done in a certain way by by anyone that brings out a certain response. So if they're on to something in this, and I might add lots of psychological experiments show that they really are, then what that means if you try to look within and find your true self, this thing you think you naturally are, what you're probably finding are just a bunch of patterns you've fallen into, many of which could potentially be dangerous for you, for those around you. And if that's the goal, you should be trying to break those patterns, alter those patterns, change the way you interact in the world. And if you're simply saying I should be who I naturally am meant to be, well, what you're probably doing is simply continuing to follow a bunch of patterns, probably destructive to yourself and almost assuredly destructive to those around you. The idea is it's constant work working through these patterns. We're falling into altering these patterns and breaking these patterns, creating different patterns. And it's an endless work of every situation, from the very mundane to the very, very large scale of constantly trying to shift these patterns for the better. And the vision is that, and really only that is what the good life is. The good life is a world in which as many of us as possible, ideally everyone is flourishing and you'll never get there, but it's a lifelong process of ever trying to create worlds within which we can flourish. There's this notion in Buddhist psychology of egolessness or no self, and most people misinterpret that, as Freud actually did. Most people misinterpret it to think that, oh, Buddhism is saying we don't need the ego at all or we don't need the self at all, like get rid of it, and then we're one with everything and that's it. And I think that's wrong. Obviously, we need our egos. A good friend of mine, Robert Thurman, who's a professor of Buddhism at Columbia, professor of religion at Columbia, he had a Mongolian teacher in the 1960s who used to say to him about this topic of egolessness or selflessness. It's not that you're not real. Of course you're real. You know, you have a self, but people like you, secular people who don't really understand, think that they're really real. And what Buddhism is teaching is that that that belief in your own really realness is misguided. We take ourselves more seriously than we need to. The the self is not as fixed as we would like to think. The the ego. The ego is born out of fear and isolation. You know, it comes into being when a, when self consciousness first starts to come when you're two or three years old, you know, and you, you start to realize, oh, I'm like, there's a person in here and you're kind of like trying to make sense of, of everything, who you are, who are those parents there? You know, the ego is a way of organizing oneself and it it comes from the intellect as the mind starts to click in. And for many people it stays in a kind of immature place where our thinking mind, our intellect is defining for ourselves who we are. Either taking all the negative feedback, like I'm not good enough and the ego fastens on to all the negativity or the positive, the affirmation, like, oh, I'm really something, you know, And the ego likes certainty, it likes security, it likes repetition. And so it's always reinforcing its own vision of itself. And that starts to restrict, starts to restrict us, to confine us to make us think that we're that we know ourselves better than we actually do. One of the problems we have in discussing consciousness scientifically is that consciousness is irreducibly subjective. Consciousness is what it's like to be you. If there's, if there's an experiential, internal, qualitative dimension to any physical system, then that is consciousness. And we can't reduce the experiential side to talk of information processing and neurotransmitters and, and states of the brain in our case, because, and people want to do this, someone like Francis Crick said famously, you're nothing but a pack of neurons. And that that misses the fact that that half of the reality we're talking about is the qualitative experiential side. So when you're trying to study human consciousness, for instance, by looking at states of the brain, all you can do is correlate experiential changes with changes in brain states. But no matter how tight these correlations become, that never gives you license to throw out the first person experiential side. That'd be analogous to saying that if you just flipped a coin long enough, you would realize it had only one side. And now it's true, you can be committed to talking about just one side. You can say that that heads being up is just a case of tails being down, but that doesn't actually reduce one side of reality to the other. I'm not arguing that consciousness is a reality beyond science or beyond the brain or or that it's it floats free of the brain of death. I'm not. I'm not making any spooky claims about its its metaphysics. What I am saying, however, is that the self is an illusion, the sense of being an ego, an IA thinker of thoughts in addition to the thoughts, a an experiencer in addition to the experience that the sense that we all have of riding around inside our heads as a kind of a passenger in the vehicle of the body. That's that's where most people start when they when they think about any of these questions. Most people don't feel identical to their bodies. They feel like they have bodies. They feel like they're inside the body, and most people feel like they're inside their heads. Now that sense of being a subject, a locus of consciousness inside the head is an illusion. That is, it makes no neuroanatomical sense. There's no place in the brain for your ego to be hiding. We know that, that everything you experience your, your conscious emotions and thoughts and, and moods and the, the impulses that initiate behavior, all of these things are delivered by, by myriad different processes in the brain that are spread out over the whole of the brain that they can be independently erupted. There's, we have a changing system. We are a process and there's not one unitary self that's carried through from one moment to the next unchanging. And yet we feel that, that we have this, this self. It's just this kind of center of experience.