Man with camera looking in mirror

Removing the Mystery of Losing the Self

In the context of explaining what it means to lose the illusion of the self, this post highlights certain parts, brings in knowledge from other sources, and shares my experience.

In Selflessness and Mindfulness Where Y O U are the Target, I covered why you care about losing the illusion of the self. However, we didn’t go deep into what it really means to lose the self. “What is the self we’re talking about?”, you might ask.

The various definitions of self throw everything off. Coming from multiple sources, here are some key points on the topic of the “self”:

  • People are real.
  • Your body and mind are continuously changing.
  • The subject / object relationship is an illusion.
  • Meditation can help you see that the subject / object relationship is an illusion. There really is no subject.
  • Everything that is noticeable appears in consciousness.

You can see objects. You can hear sounds. Consciousness holds all of these things. You’re not identical to what you see, hear, and think. If you drill down into all the senses and realize that they are just things that become known to consciousness then you just say “OK. It’s all perception that becomes known in consciousness.”

When meditating, you can identify that all things are just appearances. These appearances are just recognitions of stuff existing. When you try to explore who or what is holding consciousness, you realize that what you thought was holding consciousness is really just more stuff that can be observed in consciousness. Sam adds to the five senses proprioception. According to Wikipedia, proprioception is the “sense of the relative position of one’s own parts of the body and strength of effort being employed in movement.” It’s all just raw data.

If all five senses plus proprioception are just raw data that can be observed, we’re left with nothing else. The sense of self drops away and everything else remains.

By “everything else remains”, it means that experiences are still known through all the senses. You still see, hear and so on. However, you’ve lost the subject / object sensation. There’s a true sense of complete integration with everything. You also recognize everything changes which includes what you normally would call your body and mind.

So, in short. You have a feeling of self. When you look closely into all the sensations of what it means to be a self, you end up just observing lots of sensations through your senses. There’s nothing beyond what you’re sensing. The sensations continuously change over time. The sensations reveal the world. There’s nothing beyond the senses that you can sense. Thus, you are the world. Meditation helps you see / observe / know all of this.

As I mention in Selflessness and Mindfulness Where Y O U are the Target, you can make a difference in life in a more impactful way without as much concern. That’s a huge benefit of dropping the illusion of the self.

You can optimize your actions in life and not be held back by the illusion of the self. You can just focus on giving to the world by being a continuous stream of action. You become just action in motion. With this, I can be a verb as opposed to a noun.

There isn’t anything that is consistently you as an unchanging entity. Just like all of life, all of you is changing over time. You can be free of the feeling of a “self” and reap the benefits for the betterment of all.

Man with camera looking in mirror

Cloud in a Blue Sky

Selflessness and Mindfulness Where Y O U are the Target

Selflessness. Free from suffering. Free from the continuous dissatisfying aspects of life. These are the things you end up hearing about when deeply exploring meditation and mindfulness. Selflessness is an advanced and confusing topic. So, what’s so great about selflessness and what do we mean by selflessness?

The great thing about selflessness is you realize there’s not as much at stake in life as you thought there was. As the phrase goes, you don’t take things personally. On a related note, there’s a good Psychology Today article, “Don’t Take It Personally.” The common thought with the phrase “don’t take it personally” is that you are not the intended target. Someone is not zeroing in on trying to hurt you..this time.

Even with keeping things in perspective with the “don’t take everything personally” frame of mind, there are still some things that could be taken personally. If you don’t know how to loosen up, you are an easy target for your enemies and careless people. To spell it out, that target’s name is Y. O. U., Your Own Universe, your self.

“I want to live and don’t want to get rid of myself!”, you might exclaim. Don’t panic. I understand. We’re not talking about your destruction. There’s more than one concept of self and you’ll get a small flavor of it here.

What’s so Great about Selflessness?

For the sake of discussion and to move things forward, pretend you’re like Casper, the friendly ghost. Just like a sentient cloud, pretend the thing that is really you, your consciousness, cannot be hurt no matter what.

Cloud in a Blue Sky

However like Casper the ghost, you can interact with things when you need to and have an impact on the world. That’s really useful, right? You can make a difference and you have nothing to lose.

Steve Jobs tried to get across this notion of “nothing to lose” in his Stanford commencement address. You can checkout the text of what he said in the Stanford news article ‘You’ve got to find what you love,’ Jobs says. A sample is available in the video Steve Jobs talking about Big Choices in life – Stanford Speech 2005 as shown here:

Thanks, Mr. Steve Jobs. Although potentially grim, that’s helpful. However, we can do even better than that. It’s time to describe what we mean by selflessness.

What is Selflessness?

If you want to go deep into this, there is a podcast episode to listen to called The Path and the Goal, A Conversation with Joseph Goldstein. If you jump straight into it (“Waking Up with Sam Harris #4 — The Path and the Goal”) (1:48:20), you will hear a remarkable conversation between two friends who are highly experienced meditators, Sam Harris and Joseph Goldstein. Sam has a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA. Joseph Goldstein is a meditator instructor, cofounder of the Insight Meditation Society, and helped bring meditation into the USA in the 1970s.

Sam Harris lays out the concept of a meditator (he uses the term yogi) trying to continuously take note of everything around him or her. The meditator notices when they get lost in thought and then goes back to observing phenomenon aka all-the-things.

There are a couple of insightful lines plus followup discussion about one hour and 17 minutes into it. Here’s a quote of Sam Harris from the podcast:

Consciousness actually isn’t harmed by whatever crappy experience you were just having dualistically a moment ago before you were mindful. The moment you actually pay attention, there’s just consciousness and the energy of its expression.

That is so powerful! It’s the secret to how one can thoughtfully respond to events as opposed to thoughtlessly reacting.

He goes on to point out that mindfulness is the “remedy” to suffering. In this context, suffering is also sometimes known as the dissatisfying aspects of life. The sensation of being angry, feeling ill, or sadness doesn’t disappear, but it doesn’t have the same kind of impact when one is in a state of selflessness.

Joseph Goldstein supports that mindfulness can help one get into that selflessness state. Sam’s further reality check with Joseph and using the experience of sadness helps to explain further (1:18:43):

..if you are being mindful of sadness say and in that moment sadness is still a problem, that’s not mindfulness. Mindfulness contains its own equanimity. If you’re going to spend two seconds of truly being mindful, those are going to be two seconds of relief from the suffering.

Joseph Goldstein absolutely agrees. With that said, they go on about how not to attain selflessness. I encourage you to listen to the podcast past the quote to truly understand. The whole two hours of the podcast is also definitely worth it. However, how to obtain the state of selflessness is out of the scope of this article.

Taking a step back, this is advanced stuff. If you are just starting out, this is just a glimpse into what’s possible by having a serious commitment to the practice of mindfulness and meditation. Experiences such as selflessness are real. The scientific causes of these experiences and their impact on the brain are being studied.

Scientists are continuously uncovering interesting things about the effects of mindfulness on the human brain such as this 2017 article titled Buddhist researchers seek to reveal link between heart, mind and my blog post from a couple years earlier titled Meditation Yields a Better Brain.

So we’ve given you a glimpse into selflessness and why one might care. Regardless of your feelings about selflessness, there’s no doubt that mindfulness meditation can improve your life and the lives of those you interact with. I wish you well on your journey.

Lose Negative Self Talk By Losing Yourself

Daily, I remind myself that the negative self talk ends now. Even though it’s common to hear people be “tough on themselves” and think that it helps, it serves no-one in the long run.

As George Mumford taught in the 10% Happier app in “The Yips” section, negative self talk feeds the fear wolf. Even though it adds a sense of urgency, it drains you and causes you to procrastinate long term. The Fear Wolf idea comes from the Cherokee.

So, pull yourself together and champion your noble cause. Lose yourself in the cause. Since you came from the earth which came from the stars, you are nothing and also everything. You can let the energy flow through you and be like water. Go for your aspirations and joyfully lose yourself in your journey.