Sam Harris’s Vanishing Self
Are you thinking about Margaret Thatcher right now? Well, now you are. Were you thinking about her exactly six minutes ago? Probably not. There are answers to questions of this kind, whether or not anyone is in a position to verify them.
.. The basic claim, common to both traditions, is that we spend our lives lost in thought. The feeling that we call “I”— the sense of being a subject inside the body — is what it feels like to be thinking without knowing that you are thinking. The moment that you truly break the spell of thought, you can notice what consciousness is like between thoughts — that is, prior to the arising of the next one. And consciousness does not feel like a self. It does not feel like “I.” In fact, the feeling of being a self is just another appearance in consciousness (how else could you feel it?).
.. Granted, Buddhism and Hinduism have very crowded pantheons, and a fair number of spooky and unsupportable doctrines, but the core insight into the illusoriness of the self can be found there in a way that it can’t in the Abrahamic tradition. And cutting through this illusion does not require faith in anything.
.. If you turn consciousness upon itself in this moment, you will discover that your mind tends to wander into thought. If you look closely at thoughts themselves, you will notice that they continually arise and pass away. If you look for the thinker of these thoughts, you will not find one. And the sense that you have — “What the hell is Harris talking about? I’m the thinker!”— is just another thought, arising in consciousness.