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David Foster Wallace opened his essay This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life (2009, based on a speech given in 2005) with the following joke:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

In The Satanic Bible (1969), the founder of LaVeyan Satanism, Anton Szandor LaVey, wrote:

The Eastern mystical beliefs teach humans to discipline themselves against any conscious will for success so they might dissolve themselves into “Universal Cosmic Awareness” — anything to avoid good healthy self-satisfaction or honest pride in earthly accomplishments!… The Eastern philosophies preach the dissolution of man’s ego before he can produce sins. It is unfathomable to the Satanist to conceive of an ego which would willfully choose denial of itself.

The Satanism that LaVey promoted is a religion of self-fulfillment (“The Satanist believes in complete gratification of his ego. Satanism, in fact, is the only religion which advocates the intensification or encouragement of the ego”). Although I am not a LaVeyan Satanist, I have no qualms with this, but in his comically naive misinterpretation of Eastern thought, I believe LaVey has forgotten or otherwise neglected to answer an important question: What is the ego? What is the self? How is it that we can gratify, intensify, or encourage the self without knowing and understanding what it is?

Many have never bothered with this question because it seems too obvious to bother with, but once the question is considered, one finds that it is anything but obvious.

The first book of religion that I had encountered in my life was the Bible, but I encountered Alan Watts not long after, I think around when I was 12. Alan Watts was a British-American philosopher whose work was published from the early 30’s through his death in 1973, and who played a major role in popularizing Eastern philosophy (or, at least, his particular interpretation of it) in the West. My dad had books of his lying around and I read through them and discovered for the first time the notion that the entire idea of self is illusory.

The Buddhist principle of anatman or anatta is commonly mistranslated and misunderstood. It is often thought to mean “no self,” meaning that the self does not exist. But that seems obviously incorrect: here I am, sitting at my desk, writing this essay. It seems to me very much that I exist. And indeed, anatta does not refute this. Anatta does not mean “no self” but rather “non-self,” and describes a property (one of three) inherent to all existing things: they are not self.

But how is that different than “no self”? If nothing exists that can be called self, would that not mean that the self does not exist?

What anatta means is that, if we point to any one thing and ask whether it is the self, the answer will be no. Rather, the phenomenon that we experience as self emerges from an aggregate of different things. Buddhism traditionally recognizes five things (skandhas) as being the aspects from which self emerges, but those details are not important to this discussion. What matters is that, if you examine any one aspect of yourself (or of anything) and thoroughly inquire as to whether that one thing, apart from anything else, is your true self (and I highly encourage you to do exactly that), you will find that it is not. Not your body, not your brain, not your mind, not whatever soul you may or may not have. There is extensive philosophical literature in both the Eastern and Western traditions on the subject, and for every position one can take on what might be the true self, there is at least a handful of thought experiments and often as well a body of physical experiments refuting that position. Western philosophers (James Giles being the forerunner in that regard) are coming more and more to just give up the question of “what is self?” as an empty one. We may be asking questions of something that simply may not exist at all.

What’s more, it’s possible to realize this, to actually experience this. I’ve done it myself, a few times, under different circumstances. I’ve seen it during drug use, during warfare, during intensive meditation, and on other occasions of remarkable intensity and concentration as well. I spent 15 years training intensively at a Zen temple in order to get a better look at what I had seen before under the influence of cannabis or gunfire.

Nietzsche wrote of this as well, in Beyond Good and Evil:

But now let us notice what is strangest about the will — this manifold thing for which the people have only one word: inasmuch as in the given circumstances we are at the same time the commanding and the obeying parties, and as the obeying party we know the sensation of constraint, impulsion, pressure, resistance, and motion, which usually begin immediately after the act of will; inasmuch as, on the other hand, we are accustomed to disregard this duality, and to deceive ourselves about it by means of the synthetic concept of “I,” a whole series of erroneous conclusions and consequently of false evaluations of the will itself, has become attached to the act of willing — to such a degree that he who wills believes sincerely that willing suffices for action. §19, 1886

Nietzsche, being a disciple of Schopenhauer, would have been familiar with Buddhism, and allusions to (and sometimes criticisms of) Buddhist thought can be found throughout this work.

As much as I’ve been dismissive of Sam Harris, I’ve found that what is useful in his work is very useful (though I maintain that what is not useful is egregious and sophistic). I remain hesitant to quote him at all; his ignorance of religion and his sophist leanings make his entire body of work suspect, but here I want to emphasize that the philosophical exploration of anatta is not merely New Age claptrap but rather an idea taken very seriously even by almost-fanatically secular thinkers:

It is, after all, conceivable that a creature could form a representation of the world without forming a representation of itself in the world… like any other function that emerges from the activity of the brain, the feeling of the self is best thought of as a process… The contents of consciousness — sights, sounds, sensations, thoughts, moods, etc. — whatever they are at the level of the brain, are merely expressions of consciousness at the level of our experience. The End of Faith, 2004

Because Satanism is the way of knowledge, Satanism is the way of negation, and we must negate even the self in order to find the self.

To put it another way, we have a bunch of shit in our head that we think is self, but some preliminary investigation reveals that not to be the case. There are hordes of thought experiments exploring consciousness and the nature of the self, which I urge you to explore. As an example, consider the Ship of Theseus. A ship is built and sailed over a number of centuries, and during this time, repairs must be made. All of the various planks and beams and sails and ropes of the ship degrade or are broken or destroyed and must be replaced. Eventually, enough of these will have been replaced that not one plank nor beam nor piece of cloth nor length of rope, not one single component from the original ship, will remain. Is it still the same ship? What if almost the entire ship has been replaced several times over but the main mast is original. Is that still the same ship? Similarly, few of the cells in an adult human body are the same cells that that person was born with; almost all of our cells replace each other periodically with the overwhelming majority having been replaced at least once by the time a person is an adult (according to this snopes article debunking the claim that all of the cells, without exception, are replaced about once every 7-10 years). One part of the human body that remains with a person from embryo to death is the core of the lens of the eye; if the lens of my eye or even my whole eye was transplanted to another person, would that person then be me? My intuitions say no. What about the consciousness, though? I remember having been myself for quite some time now. But my continuity of consciousness doesn’t extend to my infant self (and there are some pretty large gaps in other places as well), nor would I consider another person to be me if my memories or other neural patterns were somehow implanted in another person’s brain. Whatever true self I must be, must be something that is neither my body nor my mind; one might call such a thing a “soul,” but we have no evidence that such things exist, and even if they did, lacking my memories (which are part of my brain) and personality (again, brain), I’d have a hard time thinking of such a thing as really being me.

If you explore other thought experiments on the nature of the self, you’ll find that they all point in much the same direction, and what conclusive answers we may come to are simply matters of convention. We may have to face the possibility that, not only do we not know what the self actually is, we’ve been completely deluded into thinking it’s something else, and indeed even into thinking that there is such a thing that, by itself, can be called the “self” at all.

So then, by what means can we come to understand the nature of the self, or whatever conglomeration of things we experience as the self?

Drugs are the easiest way, and the most treacherous. Even advanced Zen teachers under whom I have trained have acknowledged that drugs can give us a quick inside look at the world without self. Much as I read in Alan Watts, my teachers said that psychedelic drugs can show one what it is that they’re looking for.

Psychedelic experience is only a glimpse of genuine mystical insight, but a glimpse which can be matured and deepened by the various ways of meditation in which drugs are no longer necessary or useful. If you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope, he goes away and works on what he has seen… Alan Watts, The Joyous Cosmology, 1962

The problem with drugs as a means to experience ego-death is that there is no context.

If one struggles to climb a great mountain, would their view from the summit be different from the view that one would get from being dropped off at the summit after a helicopter ride? Both will be seeing the same thing, but I would never say that both were having the same experience.

Meditation is a long road, but I think an altogether better one, though it may be lightened by the glimpse at the destination that is offered by psychedelic drugs. A discussion of the complete path of meditation that will lead one to samadhi (the particular experience of consciousness in which one can realize anatta) is far beyond the scope of this writing, but I will offer these instructions by way of getting you started.

To see the truth of conscious experience, those things which we mistake for self must be stilled. The first of these is the body. The postures of meditation have been perfected over millennia in order to facilitate stable stillness of one’s physical form. If no other resources are available to you, you may sit in a chair or on a pillow, but it would be best to purchase a proper meditation cushion. The full lotus position of both feet resting on both knees is not necessary, but the knees must rest on the ground such that the body is fully supported without effort. Straighten your spine as if a thread was extending from the crown of your skull up into the sky, gently lifting your form. Place your hands in whatever position keeps them from just flopping somewhere (the traditional Zen mudra, with the left hand placed over the right in one’s lap and the thumbs barely touching, is a good option, but is not strictly necessary). And then attune your concentration to your breath. Don’t control your breath, just watch it. And when you notice that your attention has drifted from your breath, gently bring it back.

Your thoughts, your inner monologue, are one of the false selves that stands in the way of your seeing your true self. But you cannot force it away, by any means, because that’s just more thinking. The effect would be much like trying to remove waves from a pond by pushing them down. You have to let your thoughts settle on their own, and this takes a great deal of time and effort, but the view from the summit is well worth it.

If you wish to commit to this path, if you are so dedicated to the fulfillment of the ego that you would understand intimately exactly what it is, the best course would be to seek out a Zen training center and begin attending. Most Zen practice that I’ve seen in the West maintain only the trappings of religion, with an emphasis on the practice and on self-awakening. Other forms of Buddhism may be viable as well, though the emphasis in Pure Land Buddhism, for example, is on praying to Amitabha Buddha to gain favor and secure a place in a better world where enlightenment is easier, rather than on waking oneself up. In any case, lacking access to a training center, the book Zen Training by Sekida (1985) is an excellent starting place:

Kensho [a form of samadhi discussed in Zen] is nothing more nor less than your recognition of your own purified mind as it is emancipated from the delusive way of consciousness. It is rather seldom that one notices the inner man, because the reflecting action of consciousness is not at work in the most exalted moments of existence. But when your mind is projected to the outside world in the form of, say, the sound of a stone striking bamboo, or the sight of blossoms, and the sound or the sight strikes the door of your mind, you are then greatly moved by this impression, and the experience of kensho occurs. You seem to see and hear beautiful things, but the truth is that you yourself have become beautiful and exalted. Kensho is the recognition of your own purified mind in a roundabout way.

And is it not the goal of the Satanist to exalt the self?

Thanks much for reading. I hope you’ve found this piece interesting and informative. If you enjoyed it, I encourage you to look at some of my other essays. And if you find my approach to philosophy and religion at all valuable, I hope that you’ll stop in at my Patreon page, which features bonus content for patrons, and that you’ll stop back by to check on my new content. I’ll be publishing new work every Friday evening. Another great way to support my work is to check out my reading list and click through to purchase the books. There’s a lot of great reading on there and I’ll be adding to the list as my research expands.