No-Self - What Does it Really Mean?

Firstly, lets look at what I mean by a ‘self’.

A baby has no sense of who they are when they are born. They are simply undifferentiated from the environment. They cannot even discern inside or outside. 

They are essentially an unconscious vegetative slob, oozing fecal matter, snot and ear matter. They have absolutely no ability to reflect upon their own experience. They are totally absent, driven only by the demands of the nervous system: eat, sleep and shit.

However, since they are dense and mindless, the baby arrives with a susceptibility to view themselves as an individual (a kind of latent persona). It’s the people they meet that will help invigorate and grow these latent faculties, which will later form part of their personal and seperate identity.

Without getting too complex, the baby is primed to form an identity structure around universal human themes like safety, survival, group dynamics and so on, but they will ultimately have their own unique personality that runs alongside collective conditions. 

Yet a baby does not have sensory consciousness. It cannot discriminate things, and it cannot discriminate itself from other things, either. It’s about as conscious as a door knob. Even a really stupid and witless adult has more consciousness than a baby.

To stand on its own two feet, to survive in the world, it needs to separate things, and that includes separating itself from the world by becoming an individual. It doesn’t choose to do this; the demands of the world force it to take that course. 

Therefore, it has to break that undifferentiated wholeness, and venture upon a lonely journey through the various themes humanity likes to entertain. It breaks out of the vegetative slobby state in order to interface itself with the dangerous, outside world.

In fact, their personal identity and their worldly conditions later become one and the same, at least in dualistic terms. That’s where the mechanism of identity emerges - it splits reality into two sections and develops a persistant tale-chasing attitude upon its own internal parts.

It’s mind goes round in circles, like a merry-go-round, but a really crappy one where you get proverbially hit in the face. These two parts (the knower (the ‘I’) and the known (the world)) loops back onto itself to create a permanent trap; one seamless identity based upon a feedback loop of dualistic notions. 

All through this process, (from child to adult) the mind measures and compares itself against various social norms in order to try to validate its existence. This feedback loop becomes existence itself, at least in the conditioned, sensory planes (eyes & seeing, ears & hearing, nose & smelling, tongue & tasting, body & feeling and mind & thinking).

Critically, the construction and the final inception of their identity all happens within their own mind - nobody else sees it. You may see the symptoms of their inside world, but not its ongoing continuity, for that belongs to the person.

By the time they are an adult, there is a full-on movie playing in their mind called ‘Me & Them’ that does not correspond to the outside world - yes, like a delusional person. That movie becomes personified and is cemented as ‘who they are’.

That movie is actually a bundle of collective neurotic noise happhazardly cobbled together - nothing more, nothing less. It has no personal essence whatsoever.

If the psychological mechanism of ‘selfhood’ in the way I describe above wasn't so prevalent in the world, people would absolutely be diagnosed with a severe dissociative or delusional disorder. It fits perfectly within the definition of a delusion.

It’s not in the diagnostic manuals because 99.99 percent of people suffer from it - which is somewhat laughable. It is essentially the normalization and collusion of suffering.

The idea of this website is to see through that identity, and recover from its symptoms - that’s what the term No-Self points to.