I was a very small child when my curiosity about self started. I found my inner voice fascinating, how I could visualize scenes in my mind, all the while looking out into the world, seeing outside and inside almost simultaneously.

The adults around me spoke of souls when they talked about people’s true selves. My grandfather would laugh at this, and whisper, “we are what we are.” He was not a soul believer, nor am I.

Yet, this feeling of self, the idea of being is fascinating. In my years of meditating and reading Buddhist ideas, I have discovered useful methods of  observing thoughts, feelings, reactions, and have seen how these combinations of mental processes create a powerful sense of self, of sense of being.

Currently, from my own observations, I don’t agree with the Buddhist idea of mind. In Buddhist literature, it is said that mind is limitless, expansive. Some schools even go on to say it is beyond body. That’s not been my experience. No, I admit my mind is limited.

There are a lot of popular theories out there about how we are all part of one mind, or our minds encompass everything, but our perspective makes it seem like it’s confined to just our perceptions, that mind goes beyond the body, and is infinite.

I have not experienced any of what those theories suggest. But that’s not to say I have not experienced mind things are that difficult to explain. I have my own theories about those events, but getting back to the every day experience of self and mind . . .

Recently, I read this fantastic book called Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction. It’s fantastic because it enlightened me in a new way. I have been experiencing how my inner subjective thoughts and feelings create a sense of self. I can see that there is no solid, stationary self inside me, but instead a sense of self is continually being created in each moment. The Buddhist concept of no-self makes perfect sense to me.

What I had not realized, until I read this book, is that there is no mind either. Mind is simply the label we attach to that subjective inner experience we all have. Mind is a label for how we internally experience these multitude of processes at work inside our heads, and include how we interpret body sensations as well. Mind is not separate from body. Mind is simply what we experience internally, in the head.

After I read about theories of consciousness and mind, I began this book called Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are, and it all fell together for me. This book is the nuts and bolts of how the brain creates this illusion of a self, why it’s necessary, and how we compare to other animals.

There is self, but self is created from the trillions of synaptic connections of the neurons that make up our brains. Even a banana slug has some sense of self. It’s this illusion, sense of being, that causes us to feed and protect ourselves, even if only through an automatic reaction of pulling in one’s antennae.

People with all their extra gray matter capabilities have the capacity to delude ourselves even more than animals. The more primitive the animal, the more realistic it’s view of self. Kind of ironic, isn’t it?

Yet, even though we have this powerful illusion in our heads that we are a single self, making all the decisions, running the show, and have such difficulty imagining all of that coming to a dead halt one day, we are a person, a unique individual. In addition, we are truly dynamic, our brains, in reaction to our external environment and internal environment,  creating a new self every moment of our existence.

If you think you have a static self inside, you may be limiting yourself in huge ways. The statement, “That’s just the way I am,” is ignorant. So much is dynamic and will change. That’s not to say there aren’t regular patterns going on, but the brain is plastic, changing in reaction to our external experiences.

Realizing you are nothing but change makes for  a limitless person. Perhaps that’s what the Buddha meant when he said our minds are limitless.

Tags: Self

This entry was posted on Friday, July 31st, 2009 at 10:48 pm and is filed under Buddhism, Concepts, reality, Self. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.