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.
In: Other
*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.
Latest Answers