Non-Self (Anatta)

Buddhism is about looking outside the box with the eye of wisdom. It is about seeing how our rich emotional lives, though providing good material for Italian opera, keep us constantly on edge, perpetually dissatisfied and trapped inwardly in a drama from which we cannot get free, all the while thrashing about outwardly in a world of our own fabrication in horribly harmful ways. It is about transforming this unbounded insanity that we all seem to be endowed with and to live in the midst of, and instead to live worthwhile, satisfying and harmless lives, by liberating our actions from our basest emotions, by developing skill in our actions, turning away from our untutored emotional reactiveness. This is growing up fully, to let go of the tyranny of the fabricated self, which is, after all, hardly more real than a donut hole, a shadow, a cloud or a lump of foam.

The most unique innovation of the Buddha was his insight into the delusive nature of what we think of as the Self. Yet this insight is one of the most difficult for the Buddhist practitioner to ‘get.” This series tries to help along by looking at this insight from a variety of perspectives.