PHANTOM SELF

It was Krishnamurti who said, “Could it be that you identify yourself with a merely abstract ego, based on nothing but memories?”  There is this physical body, this happening, sure enough, Alan Watts said, but that is all there is.  Moreover, there is no self separate from the rest of existence as our minds would have us believe.

Hormones contribute to the illusion of the self, the lie of hormones. For example, it is not until testosterone begins to recede in aging men that they see the extent to which they have been viewing the world through a veil.  Fluctuating hormones in women have the same effect.

There is the lie of symbolic thinking, thinking about thinking and the problems that thinking creates, plus the lie of language, words about words and problems that words create.  We do not know what we are looking at half the time and then go on to talk and write about it using symbols that are only approximations of what we mean.  

The semantics scholar Alfred Korzybski noted, “Whatever you say something is, it isn’t,” with Alan Watts adding, “nothing is really describable.”  Yet, we identify ourselves with our thoughts.  We think we are our thoughts.

There is the lie of feeling states.  When we are lonely we miss our family, friends, and God.  Loneliness, though, like all other feeling states, comes from thoughts, Krishnamurti explained, and thoughts are impermanent, transient, and unreliable.  Feelings, likewise then, are impermanent, transient, and unreliable.  

Still, we identify ourselves with our feelings.  We feel we are our feelings.  We feel we are our moods.  Our lives are just these smoke and mirrors, called maya in Buddhism and Vedanta, meaning to be enchanted, spellbound.  What we actually are is just consciousness.  We are a conscious body. 

All the individual is, Buddhism teaches, "is a temporary collection of momentary events that are constantly in flux in their causal relationship to each other, with a consciousness that expires when the individual expires."