“Myself” is a transient thought, like all other thoughts

Who am I? Who are you? Who is anybody? These questions, which all point in the same enigmatic direction, are central to many different fields.

Psychology. Neuroscience. Spirituality. Philosophy. Sociology. Anthropology.

Broadly speaking — very broadly, really — there seems to be two approaches to answering the Who am I? question. I’ll sum them up as the Hidden Pearl and the Flowing River.

Hinduism is an example of Hidden Pearl. There’s a divine Self lurking within the human psyche, Atman, which, when recognized, is closely related to Brahman, the Supreme Being. Another way of putting it is the true Self of each of us is soul, an eternal drop of the spiritual ocean.

A secular version of this is reflected in the oft-heard imperative, “I’ve got to discover my true self.” Meaning, somewhere within our mind/brain is an identity much more real and permanent than the shape-shifting persona we project to both ourself and others.

Buddhism is an example of Flowing River. Everything in existence, including us, is the product of causes and conditions. As those causes and conditions change, so do we. Thus the Flowing River isn’t moving between solid banks, since there’s nothing that isn’t part of it.

The way this often is phrased in Buddhism is “lack of inherent existence,” which is the basic notion of emptiness. Not the emptiness of the space within a jar; the emptiness of every entity in the universe being interdependent, conditional, interconnected with everything else.

A psychedelic-inspired version of Flowing River is described in my 2007 blog post, “Loosening the bounds of ‘I am…’” I’ve shared this story before, and am doing it again.

I’m no Buddha, that’s for sure. But with the aid of mescaline, or some other psychedelic, I have a distinct memory of a ’60s experience that at least was in the ballpark of what Thurman is talking about.

I was with a group of fellow “stoners” who’d headed off to a San Jose-area park to be high with nature. The path we were on led around a hill.

I felt energetic and forged on ahead by myself. My feet were flying through the northern California landscape. Until I rounded a corner and saw a different sort of group on the left side of the trail a short ways ahead of me.

Bikers. Drinking beer. Next to their choppers. With their equally tough-looking old ladies. At the time San Jose was a headquarters for the Gypsy Jokers motorcycle gang, which had a reputation rivaling the Hells Angels.

I didn’t know anything about the bikers I was walking toward. But my first reaction was that I was an isolated peaceful hippie dude stoned on mescaline with long hair, glasses, and a corduroy coat, and they were cultural near-opposites in almost every way. Not good.

However, something snapped in me the very next moment. As I walked nearer to them I didn’t feel like there was any difference between us. I could see them looking at me. I looked at them. More, I became them.

“What’s happening, man?” someone called out. “Hell if I know,” I said with a smile. They laughed. I laughed. I felt like I could sit down with them, have a beer, and fit right in.

My fear vanished as soon as I stopped thinking “I am…” and “They are…” Sure, it was partly (or mostly) the mescaline talking, but I suddenly felt that I was them and they were me, and we were all in this park getting high together.

Not exactly akin to the Buddha’s enlightened experience of selflessness under the Bodhi Tree. But, hey, I’ll take a speck of understanding any way I can get it.

Passing the biker group I realized that “I am…” can be flexible and boundless, not rigid and restricted.

Some things we always are; some things we always aren’t; but there’s a huge store of being-possibilities available to us moment to moment.

Many Hidden Pearl aficionados like to speak of pure consciousness or pure awareness as being our ever-present True Self that is disguised by all the perceptions, thoughts, and feelings rattling around inside our head.

I used to be in this camp, having spent 35 years practicing a form of meditation that involved withdrawing one’s attention from the outside world and focusing it “within,” thereby supposedly opening the door to knowing ourselves as eternal soul rather than transient mind.

Now I resonate with writers like Robert Saltzman whose first book, The Ten Thousand Things, I’ve been reading. Here’s some excerpts from his “I’m a Different Person Now” chapter. The book is in the form of questions and answers, with Saltzman doing the answering.

Everything is always changing, including myself. That is a powerful idea. But saying that myself is always changing does not mean that myself is nonexistent, as some people like to imagine. Clearly “myself” exists in various ways, but does not have the permanencethat many of us presume.

The myself of yesterday, or even of the last instant, is gone and can never come back again. The arrow of time points in only one direction; there is no going back, no reversing time, except in fantasy or delusion.

Myself is like a river of thoughts and feelings that cannot be controlled, but keeps flowing, like it or not, where and as it must. No one can stop that flow. The myself of the last moment is gone forever — water over the dam. Even this moment — this present “myself” — slips away before we can begin to get a grip on it.

Don’t take my word for this. Look into it. Observe the stream of consciousness you call “myself” — not the content of consciousness, not the details of thoughts and feelings — but the stream itself. Notice how thoughts and feelings morph and change endlessly — one thought or feeling flowing into the next. That flow, I am saying, is “myself” — the only myself one will ever really know.

The seeming continuity of myself is an illusion that arises partly due to cultural indoctrination, but also because the apparent center of awareness always calls itself by the same name: “me.” That unvarying name suggests an identity which also does not change: me, the perceiver of perceptions, the feeler of feelings, and the thinker of thoughts.

However, although the name never changes, that ostensibly unchanging center of existence is flowing along with everything else, in no way separate from perceptions, thoughts, and feelings.

If locked into a point of view that sees oneself as the thinker of thoughts, it will never occur to that myself that “myself” is also a thought, ephemeral and entirely transient like any other thought. Yes, there may be a thought in the next moment also called “me,” along with a presentation of feelings and thoughts about “me,” but it will not be the same “me” as the previous “me-thought.”