Tao without Self

© Igor Morski

Following the Abhidhamma analysis of the five aggregates of subjective experience, the search for a Self come out empty handed, with the following consequences for cognitive sciences:

The Aggregates without a Self

It might appear that in our search for a self in the aggregates we have come out empty handed. Everything that we tried to grasp seemed to slip through our fingers, leaving us with the sense that there is nothing to hold on to. At this point, it is important to pause and again remind ourselves of just what it was that we were unable to find.

We did not fail to find the physical body, though we had to admit that its designation as my body depends very much on how we choose to look at things. Nor did we fail to locate our feelings or sensations, and we also found our various perceptions. We found dispositions, volitions, motivations-in short, all those things that make up our personality and emotional sense of self. We also found all the various forms in which we can be aware-awareness of seeing and hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, even awareness of our own thought processes. So the only thing we didn't find was a truly existing self or ego. But notice that we did find experience. Indeed, we entered the very eye of the storm of experience, we just simply could discern there no self, no "I."

Why then do we feel empty handed? We feel this way because we tried to grasp something that was never there in the first place. This grasping goes on all the time; it is exactly the deep-rooted emotional response that conditions all of our behavior and shapes all of the situations in which we live. It is for this reason that the five aggregates are glossed as the "aggregates of grasping" (upadanaskandha). We – that is, our personality, which is largely dispositional formations-cling to the aggregates as if they were the self when, in fact, they are empty (sunya) of a self. And yet despite this emptiness of ego-self, the aggregates are full of experience. How is this possible?

The progressive development of insight enhances the experience of calm mindfulness and expands the space within which all experiential arisings occur. As this practice develops, one's immediate attitude (not simply one's after-the-fact reflections) becomes more and more focused on the awareness that these experiences - thoughts, dispositions, perceptions, feelings, and sensations - cannot be pinned down. Our habitual clinging to them is itself only another feeling, another disposition of our mind.

This arising and subsiding, emergence and decay, is just that emptiness of self in the aggregates of experience. In other words, the very fact that the aggregates are full of experience is the same as the fact that they are empty of self. If there were a solid, really existing self hidden in or behind the aggregates, its unchangeableness would prevent any experience from occurring; its static nature would make the constant arising and subsiding of experience come to a screeching halt. (It is not surprising, therefore, that techniques of meditation that presuppose the existence of such a self proceed by closing off the senses and denying the world of experience.) But that circle of arising and decay of experience turns continuously, and it can do so only because it is empty of a self.

We have seen not only that cognition and experience do not appear to have a truly existing self but also that the habitual belief in such an ego-self, the continual grasping to such a self, is the basis of the origin and continuation of human suffering and habitual patterns. In our culture, science has contributed to the awakening of this sense of the lack of a fixed self but has only described it from afar. Science has shown us that a fixed self is not necessary for mind but has not provided any way of dealing with the basic fact that this no-longer-needed self is precisely the ego-self that everyone clings to and holds most dear. By remaining at the level of description, science has yet to awaken to the idea that the experience of mind, not merely without some impersonal, hypothetical, and theoretically constructed self but without ego-self, can be profoundly transformative.

Perhaps it is not fair to ask more of science. To borrow the words of Merleau-Ponty, the strength of science may lie precisely in the fact that it gives up living among things, preferring to manipulate them instead. But if this preference expresses the strength of science, it also indicates its weakness. By renouncing a life amid the things of experience, the scientist is able to remain relatively unaffected by her discoveries. This situation has, perhaps, been tolerable for the past three hundred years, but it is fast becoming intolerable in our modem era of cognitive science.

If science is to continue to maintain its position of de facto authority in a responsible and enlightened manner, then it must enlarge its horizon to include mindful, open-ended analyses of experience, such as the one evoked here. Cognitivism, at least at the moment, does not seem to be capable of such a step, given its narrow conception of cognition as the computation of symbols after the fashion of deductive logic. It would do well to remember, then, that cognitivism did not emerge ready made, like Athena from the head of Zeus. Only a few of its exponents are sensitive to its roots in its earlier years and to the decisions that were subsequently made about which avenues of research to explore. These earlier years, however, have once more become a source of inspiration to a new and controversial approach to cognition in which the self-organizing qualities of biological aggregates play a central role. This approach sheds new light on all of the themes we have touched so far and takes us into next part of our exploration.