GISH JEN: In the West, we feel that we must
differentiate ourselves from others, endlessly. We have a model of self where the self is
kind of like an avocado. We have a pit inside of us. The pit is our self, our essence, our identity. It is the thing to which we must above all
be true. And of course, very importantly, we see that
pit as unique. So that everything we do we want to show,
to reflect that pit, to reflect that self. And we want it to be unique. In Asia, people frequently have a flexi-self,
so it's a different kind of self. It is a self that's oriented more to duty
than to rights, for instance. And very importantly, it is not, it does not
have a cultural mandate to be different and to be unique. So if you ask, are they individuals? Of course they're individuals. Are they different? Of course they are different. But of course, for them, it's like, well of
course I'm different, why would I make a big deal of that, right? The difference is, how much significance do
we attach to that difference? In other words, do we think it's very important
to differentiate ourselves from others? So one of the ways that we do that, of course,
is through choice. Choice in the West is very, very important. Everyone is always making choices. And honestly, a lot of those choices make
us a little anxious. If you do a study where you are just sitting
in an empty room, and you're making a choice, and you come from a more individualistic culture,
you actually show signs of a little anxiety. Every little choice that you make, even in
private, because it's defining of who you are, is a little loaded. They feel like, they just choose. When they make those choices it doesn't have
this overlay. And that's one of the reasons they feel that
actually we are less free than they are. So they think that we are the ones who are
kind of in this prison where, like I say, every moment we must define ourselves. Well, isn't that awful? And of course the way that we live, we feel
that, we want to be freely electing to live the way that we live. And so even when we're doing things like taking
care of the elderly, for example, we want to feel that it's an extension of our great
love, and the nature of our being to be able to take care of the elderly. Well, the other day I was having dinner with
somebody who said, I just don't feel that. And it's just very, very hard. So somebody from a more flexi-self, or interdependent
culture, would say, it's just your duty. And so for them, it's like, they help their
elderly parent. They just go take care of the elderly parent
because that's their duty. For them, this is really liberating. You just go do it and you don't expect it
to be an expression of yourself. It's just what people do. From their point of view, we have made things
very, very hard for ourselves to demand that everything should be an expression of our
inner nature. MICHAEL PUETT: We often like to think that
the way to become a good person is to look within, find one's true self, the sort of
natural self that we have. And once you've found that self, that natural
thing that you are, the goal is to be sincere and authentic to that true self. So if we stick to what we naturally are meant
to be, the gifts that we're naturally endowed with, that's how we can be a sincere, authentic
person. Now, a lot of our Chinese philosophers would
say, that sounds good, but is on the contrary extremely restraining—and constraining—to
what we could do. The fact is, if we're messy creatures, as
many of them would say, what we perhaps are in our daily lives are simply people whose
emotions are being pulled out all the time, by people we encounter, interactions we have. And over time, those responses fall into kind
of ruts and patterns that can just be repeated endlessly. So someone does something, it makes me angry,
and not even because of what they immediately did, but because for some reason it brings
back say, someone from my childhood yelling at me. And I just have a patterned response to a
certain action, being done in a certain way, by anyone, that brings out a certain response. So if they're onto something in this, and
I might add lots of psychological experiments show that they really are, then what that
means if you try to look within and find your true self, this thing you think you naturally
are, what you're probably finding are just a bunch of patterns you've fallen into. Many of which could potentially be dangerous,
for you, for those around you. And if that's the goal, you should be trying
to break those patterns, alter those patterns, change the way you interact in the world. And if you're simply saying, I should be who
I naturally am meant to be, well, what you're probably doing is simply continuing to follow
a bunch of patterns, probably destructive to yourself, and almost assuredly destructive
to those around you. The idea is it's constant work working through
these patterns we're falling into, altering these patterns, breaking these patterns, creating
different patterns. And it's an endless work of every situation,
from the very mundane to the very, very large scale, of constantly trying to shift these
patterns for the better. And the vision is that, and really only that,
is what the good life is. The good life is a world in which as many
of us as possible, ideally everyone, is flourishing. And you'll never get there, but it's a lifelong
process of ever trying to create worlds within which we can flourish. MARK EPSTEIN: There's this notion in Buddhist
psychology of egoless-ness or no-self. And most people misinterpret that, as Freud
actually did, most people misinterpret it to think that, oh, Buddhism is saying, we
don't need the ego at all, or we don't need the self at all. Like get rid of it, and then we're one with
everything, and that's it. And I think that's wrong. Obviously, we need our egos. A good friend of mine, Robert Thurman, who's
a professor of Buddhism at Columbia, professor of religion at Columbia. He had a Mongolian teacher in the 1960s who
used to say to him about this topic of egoless-ness or selflessness: "It's not that you're not
real. Of course you're real, you have a self. But people like you, secular people who don't
really understand, think that they're really real." And what Buddhism is teaching is that that
belief in your own really realness is misguided. We take ourselves more seriously than we need
to. The self is not as fixed as we would like
to think. The ego is born out of fear and isolation. It comes into being when self-consciousness
first starts to come, when you're two or three years old, and you start to realize, oh, there's
a person in here. And you're kind of like trying to make sense
of everything, who you are, who are those parents there. The ego is a way of organizing oneself, and
it comes from the intellect as the mind starts to click in. And for many people it stays in a kind of
immature place where our thinking mind, our intellect, is defining for ourselves who we
are. Either taking all the negative feedback, like
I'm not good enough, and the ego fastens onto all the negativity. Or the positive, the affirmation, like oh,
I'm really something. And the ego likes certainty, it likes security,
it likes repetition. And so it's always reinforcing its own vision
of itself. And that starts to restrict. It starts to restrict us, to confine us, to
make us think that we know ourselves better than we actually do. SAM HARRIS: One of the problems we have in
discussing consciousness scientifically is that consciousness is irreducibly subjective. Consciousness is what it's like to be you. If there's an experiential internal qualitative
dimension to any physical system, then that is consciousness. And we can't reduce the experiential side
to talk of information processing, and neurotransmitters, and states of the brain in our case. And people want to do this. Someone like Francis Crick said famously,
you're nothing but a pack of neurons. And that misses the fact that half of the
reality we're talking about is the qualitative experiential side. So when you're trying to study human consciousness,
for instance, by looking at states of the brain, all you can do is correlate experiential
changes with changes in brain states. But no matter how tight these correlations
become, that never gives you license to throw out the first-person experiential side. That'd be analogous to saying that if you
just flipped a coin long enough you would realize it had only one side. And now it's true you can be committed to
talking about just one side. You can say that heads being up is just the
case of tails being down. But that doesn't actually reduce one side
of reality to the other. I'm not arguing that consciousness is a reality
beyond science, or beyond the brain, or that it floats free of the brain at death. I'm not making any spooky claims about its
metaphysics. What I am saying, however, is that the self
is an illusion. The sense of being an ego, an I, a thinker
of thoughts in addition to the thoughts, an experiencer in addition to the experience. That the sense that we all have of riding
around inside our heads as a kind of a passenger in the vehicle of the body, that's where most
people start when they think about any of these questions. Most people don't feel identical to their
bodies. They feel like they have bodies. They feel like they're inside the body. And most people feel like they're inside their
heads. Now that sense of being a subject, a locus
of consciousness inside the head, is an illusion. That is, it makes no neuroanatomical sense,
there's no place in the brain for your ego to be hiding. We know that everything you experience, your
conscious emotions, and thoughts, and moods, and the impulses that initiate behavior, all
of these things are delivered by myriad different processes in the brain that are spread out
over the whole of the brain. They can be independently erupted. We have a changing system, we are a process. And there's not one unitary self that's carried
through from one moment to the next, unchanging. And yet we feel that we have this self that's
just this center of experience.
I am curious to get peoples thoughts on Mark Epstein. I must confess I only discovered him through watching this video (because it had sam in it)
SS - Sam appears on the video, and all the guests discuss this relevant topic