Deconstructing the "Self"

By Reginald Ray

What’s this “thing” we call the “self” really made of? Reggie Ray breaks it down.

In my previous column, we saw that the “self,” the source of all our suffering, arises as a fearful response to the unfathomable, groundless awareness of our inherent essence, our buddhanature. We also saw that our “self” does not arise once and for all, but is radically impermanent, needing to be continually recreated, moment by moment. Our impression that we are or possess a “real” self—meaning an apparently substantial, continuous entity within—is thus a delusion, a false attribution superimposed on our discontinuous experience. There is, in fact, nothing there corresponding to our idea.

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