What does “Illusion of self” mean

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I’m reading Waking up by Sam Harris and I’m not sure I understand the concept of self and illusion of self. Does that mean I’m not this thing inside my head that controls the body, but that I am in fact body and my brain and there’s nothing else?
Why is that important? How can meditation and ego death help with that?
Not a English native speaker but reading in English so I’m little confused.

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7 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Basically “self” is who you are and “illusion of self” is who you perceive yourself to be. For example, you might see yourself as someone who “jokes around” with everyone all the time which is your “illusion of self”, but in reality, you’re just a douche whose mean to everyone for no reason. That’s your “self”

I’m not saying you do that, just an example

Anonymous 0 Comments

I believe it’s a rewording of the concept that we don’t have souls. Maybe he is extending it a bit by saying we don’t even have a ‘self’ that exists ‘above’ our mind and body, there is no separate driver sitting behind our eyes dictating what we think and do. He got there by realizing thoughts just pop into our head and we have no control over that. We don’t even know what we are going to do next, precisely, or when. I didn’t know how this post would turn out before I started writing, but something motivated me to respond to you. If it wasn’t me, myself, I’m not sure how we describe it. Good question.

Anonymous 0 Comments

*Reposting my answer to ‘what is ego death’; it seems relevant here:*

So… it turns out that the self is a fiction. I mean you exist in the sense that there is a body there, and a brain in that body, and electrochemical impulses firing throughout that brain, that’s all (apparently) real. But this whole ‘you’ character, not so much. You don’t exist separate from your body, you don’t inhabit your body, and your body is not separate from your universe.

See the table in front of you? No, you don’t. You fake see a pretend table that your brain made up. That doesn’t necessarily mean there is no table, or that there is no brain. But it does mean that you have no direct experience of anything outside yourself… you only experience the fictional, cartoon versions of things that your brain presents you. That’s why, for example, optical illusions work. They present a reality that your brain is not well-evolved to fictionalize.

So the voice in your head comes from your brain. And the desk in front of you comes from your brain. And the sky out side is all in your head. You’ve never ‘looked out’; in all directions you can only see inside your head. The experiencer and the experience and the experienced are all made of the same stuff, are all the same thing. You are not separate from your room or from your music, and the voice in your head and your memories of your childhood are not less material or more material than the chair you’re sitting on. You are not separate from your universe, you are your universe, and the ego, the “I”, your sense of separate identity is a fiction that that universe has conjured up. But it’s just smoke and mirrors, a trick of the light.

And ego death is a direct, immediate, absolute experience of your own non-existence and your own co-materiality with the entirety of your universe.

Make sense? No, of course not. It’s not really something that can be communicated in a reddit post.

Anonymous 0 Comments

There’s two ideas; the first is that you can break down a lot of how people think into car parts, if you like, see the different functions, how they rely on outside things, and the other is that it’s possible to loose your sense of self, and distinction between “self and other”.

On the basis of the first, and buddhism, he argues that *if* it’s possible to feel two different ways about ourselves, if we can either have a sense of self and other or not, that we should choose second subjective position, because he thinks it corresponds better to reality.

He’s not the first person to argue that ego-death is a better or more accurate state of mind, and perception of reality, he is after all taking on a long buddhist tradition, he’s just using arguments from neurology that he believes corresponds more closely to the second position.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Illusion of self means that who we take ourselves to be most of the time is not what we really are. We all have an image of ourselves in our heads, and this image of who we think we are is constructed out of our memories, future hopes and aspirations, what we’re proud of, and what we’re ashamed of about ourselves. The thing most of us never seem to notice is that this entity that we take to be ourselves literally only exists through thought. It’s a figment of our imagination, and if we open ourselves up to the present moment, we see that what we really are is just an observing consciousness. No more, no less. That person you think you are? They only come into being when you start thinking about them, or when you’re interacting with others and start playing the role of who you think you are. But upon closer scrutiny, it’s really just an illusion, created from thought structures, memories, and beliefs.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Some good, some mostly bad answers here from people that think this is an argument, idea or theory.

**Experientially, that is, from your current first person perspective, reading this text, experiencing life, there is no you. As in zero.**

Let me repeat: **You literally do not exist, right now.**

“Bullshit!” you’ll say. “I’m reading this right now!”

Who is reading this? Literally, look for the one who is able to see words and describe them. There is nobody reading it – your brain is reading automatically. There is no “you” inside the brain either.

The “you” you think you are, never has been, is, or ever will be, because that is a made up construct that your brain fabricates automatically to operate in the world.

You are experiencing, right now:

– Vision (seen automatically)
– Sounds (heard automatically)
– Physical sensations (felt automatically)
– Thoughts (“heard” automatically)
– Emotions (felt automatically)

There is nothing else to the experience of life. Everything is a combination of these things.

So how can there be no “you”, but you are experiencing sensory input?

You are not “the body.” We could take out your insides and put them in a fox and you don’t disappear. You are not “the brain.” You can have a part of your brain removed during surgery and you don’t disappear.

You are “consciousness”, which we have no idea what it is or how it comes to be, but it has no traits at all. As in zero. There is no size, shape, color or description to it. The closest you’ll come is “the empty space in which reality is happening in.”

Of course, there is still a “you” from a third person conceptual point of view – like a car. But what part of the car, is a car? There is no car – just a collection of parts happening together that we slap the word “car” on.

Ego death is helpful because:

* You stop taking things in life personally. Life is not happening “to” you. This frees you of many negative emotions permanently. I would guess this decreases your total waking seconds spent experiencing negative emotions by probably 80%.
* Realize things are happening through cause and effect.
* Realize that everyone is living this way.
* You realize that “you” – that is, the you that is conscious experience are not located anywhere. It was not born. It has no death. It has no color or size. It has no anything. Fear of death? Gone. Why? Because the first person experience is not born, so it cannot die, because a first person perspective is not a living thing. It’s more like a camera angle in a video game.

To achieve ego death, you need to take psychedelics that can often force it occur, or **attempt to locate the one who is seeing and hearing in your direct first person experience.**

Ego death occurs upon the realization you cannot, because it is not there.

This can take minutes, years or never. You have to be radically honest with yourself. There is no you, and never could’ve been, and you need to prove it to yourself one way or the other whether or not I am correct. I invite you.

Anonymous 0 Comments

> this thing inside my head

What thing?