Nothing But No Self

"You can imagine yourself without legs, or without arms, because you have the experience of having legs and arms and can therefore imagine yourself without the experience. You can imagine yourself as being blind or being deaf because you've had the experience of sight and of sound and can therefore imagine yourself without those experiences.

Likewise, it's not possible to imagine yourself without a self because you've never had the experience of being a self in the first place to imagine being without. Apart from the experiences of the body and the experiences of the senses, there is no discrete, discernible experience of a self. You cannot imagine what it's like to be without a self in the same way that the person born blind cannot imagine what it's like to be blind. Being blind is all that they have ever known and there is nothing to contrast it with.

You cannot "have" an experience of no self, because you are nothing but the experience of no self. There is nothing that it can be compared with. The sense of self is never separate from any experience that takes place and therefore, not being separate from experience, the idea of a self is simply a convenient way to place experience.

Thus the frustration of the search for an experience that we've never been without." - Lex Lissauer·Saturday, April 6, 2013