‘Selflessness’ in this sense can be seen as an insight and a liberation of the burden of
attachments to name, body, and personality, leading to a freer way of being in the
world. But the perception of this ‘selflessness’ in a Western sense is often frightening.
We can think, for example, of experiences of therapy clients who indicate that they
have ‘no self’, no personality or identity, who have the feeling that all they are is a
reaction, a response to others. As a particular client said, about a cork as well: ‘I feel
like a cork floating in the ocean, I’m only going with the waves and the stream, I have
no individuality.’
In this way, I think of a client, Ella, who always describes herself in comparison
with others; she does not know who she is. Yes, she’s ‘kind of nice’ and she gets on
with her father better than her sister; and she is more shy than her brother, and she
gets jealous quickly. Ella is beginning to recognize that the members of her family
are never addressed as individual personalities. In conversations within the family
they always talked, as it were, ‘through others’. ‘I would like to become a person of
my own, a true me,’ she states.We might say that Ella experiences her suffering in terms of a missing function in
her personality: the ability to sustain the experience of being an individual subject.
A Buddhist and a psychoanalytic perspectiveIn the Buddhist perspective, major psychological problems result from our attachment
to the image of the self as fixed and independent: fixed as opposed to transitory,
impermanent, changeable; and independent, separate, as opposed to connected and
dependent on everybody and everything. We have no anchorage outside of this
personal identity, which is always moving, always changing. Under these
circumstances images about the past are ‘adapted’ to how we feel at the moment, and
images of the future are inspired by present wishes and fears. As to the idea of being
independent, in the West we speak of a developmental process of
separation-individuation. In other cultures, among them those where Buddhism
developed, one could better speak of separation-integration into the family or group.
In a multicultural approach to subjectivity we recognize that personal identity always
depends on a context. Multicultural society comments on the idea of a Western
separate self in a cultural sense; Buddhism does the same in a radical way in an
existential, spiritual sense.
Connection and unity do not exclude the perception of subjectivity; subjectivity
is not bound to separation-individuation. In Buddhism, for example, a form of
non-self-centered subjectivity is cultivated, which is characterized by clear, open
attention, and tuning in to the other as well as to oneself.
The Buddha did not say, ‘You don’t exist,’ but rather, ‘You have no self.’ His point
was not to deny or reject the self, but to recognize the self-representation as
representation, as a concept without existence of its own. The Zen master helps the
student to gain the invigorating and broadening experience of no-self. Tenzin Gyatso,
A MINDFUL SELF AND BEYOND 93