You don’t have to go to a meditation retreat to get this kind of experience. People who are more natural meditators than me can get it via daily practice as guided by a local teacher, or by an online teacher, or even by a good meditation app, like Headspace or 10% Happier. Or, if you don’t want to invest even that much time, try this: Next time you’re feeling sad, sit down, close your eyes, and study the sadness. Accept its presence and just observe it. For example, you may notice that, though you’re not close to actually crying, the feeling of sadness does have a strong presence right around the parts of your eyes that would become active if you did start crying. This careful observation of sadness, combined with a kind of acceptance of it, can make it way less unpleasant. And, more to the point, less a part of your self.

Granted, sadness, like stress, is just a small part of you—so small that touting this experience as a step toward the elusive, transformative experience of not-self may sound ludicrous. And yet, if you look at the canonical text on the subject—that discourse on not-self delivered by the Buddha—you’ll find some validation of this touting. In that sermon the Buddha chips away at the notion of self bit by bit, chunk by chunk.

He does an inventory of the categories that constitute human experience: feelings, perceptions, “mental formations” (a big category that in Buddhist psychology includes thoughts and complex emotions), and so on. With each category he raises the same questions: Is this particular part of you, when examined closely, really under your control? And doesn’t this part of you sometimes make you suffer (precisely, he suggests, because it isn’t under your control)? The answers are of course no and yes, respectively: We can’t magically control all the thoughts, feelings, and perceptions that dominate our experience, which helps explain why they often cause us pain.

Well, then, does it make sense to think of these things as “self”? The Buddha’s answer is unequivocal. Feelings, thoughts, and all the rest—even your physical body—“must be regarded with proper wisdom, according to reality, thus: ‘These are not mine, this I am not, this is not my self.’ ”

Note how pragmatic, even therapeutic, this argument sounds: If you want relief from suffering, quit identifying with the things that make you suffer, the things that are beyond your control. This kind of guidance is very much in the spirit of “mindfulness-based stress reduction”—which, in fact, is what my little triumph over overcaffeination basically was.

And yet, according to the logic of Buddhism, if you follow this pragmatic, therapeutic—even, you might say, self-serving—logic far enough via meditative practice, you can get to the point where it feels as if there is no self at all. And a big reason for this apprehension is that everything in your field of experience—feelings, thoughts, perceptions, everything—can be seen, on close inspection, to not really be under the control of some “inner you.” It’s just stuff happening. Stuff you don’t have to identify with.

This may sound crazy. Surely there are some things under our conscious control? Well, maybe, but modern psychology has challenged that assumption. One famous series of experiments seems to show that by the time someone is consciously aware of “deciding” to do something—pushing a button, say—the brain activity that initiates the pushing is already well under way. Other experiments suggest that people are often not aware of what their actual motivations for doing things are—but that, even so, they generate explanations for their behavior and actually believe the explanations.

This doesn’t mean science has “proved” that we’re on autopilot, and that the conscious mind is just a passenger under the illusion that it’s flying the plane. There are questions of interpretation surrounding some of these experiments, and lots more experiments to be done. Still, there’s no doubt that modern psychology has cast serious doubt on the intuition that your conscious “self” is your CEO.

Which gives modern psychology something in common with ancient Buddhist texts. And something in common with modern meditation teachers. I’ve heard more than one of these teachers assert that “thoughts think themselves.” Thoughts may feel like things we generate, but when viewed mindfully, with “non-attachment,” they are seen to be things that just float into our awareness. They aren’t generated by the conscious self but, rather, come from somewhere beyond it.

This image—of thoughts being received by your conscious mind rather than created by it—makes particular sense in light of a conception of the brain that has gained many adherents in recent decades: the “modular model.” The basic idea is that the brain consists of lots of different systems that have different specialties and may have competing agendas.

So, for example, one system may be focused on getting you to eat while another is focused on getting you to impress someone you’re talking to with your knowledge of politics. The conscious mind might be unaware of the competition between these systems and unaware of the thoughts they’re championing—except for the thought that wins. As the neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga has put it, “Whichever notion you happen to be conscious of at a particular moment is the one that comes bubbling up, the one that becomes dominant. It’s a dog-eat-dog world going on in your brain, with different systems competing to make it to the surface to win the prize of conscious recognition.”

In this scenario, the conscious mind tends to identify with the winning thought, the one that bubbles up, even to the point of taking ownership of it—thinking of itself as the thought’s generator. But highly adept meditators actually see the bubbling up part, and for them the identification, the sense of ownership, never kicks in.

Personally, I find it harder to get this kind of perspective on thoughts than on feelings. Whereas I might succeed in viewing anxiety or sadness as “not-self” during my daily practice, I don’t generally view my thoughts that way until well into a weeklong meditation retreat—if then. But the point is just that this perspective on thoughts is part of the logical progression of mindfulness meditation and a way station on the path to the experience of full-fledged “not-self.” It’s an experience commonly reported by those few meditators who, having logged thousands and thousands of hours on the meditation cushion, say they’ve gotten to the point of “not-self” and even stayed there—day in, day out, on the cushion or off.

So what does it feel like to be one of these people? Unfortunately, if you ask them that question, they tend to say things that are a bit opaque. One such meditator, describing life without a sense of self, said to me, “If you’re nothing, if you disappear, you can then be everything. But you can’t be everything unless you are nothing.”

I guess we’ll have to take his word for that. Still, even someone like me—someone who meditates 30 or 40 minutes a day and occasionally goes on meditation retreats—can have glimpses of what he means. I’ve gotten to the point, deep in meditation, when a tingling I felt in my foot seemed no more a part of me than the singing of a bird I heard outside. And both, by the way, were wonderful, as was everything else; I felt utter peace and serenity. I also felt very favorably disposed toward that bird and to living things in general.

I had to go on a meditation retreat to have that particular brush with not-self. Still, there’s a sense in which the experience wasn’t that far removed from my daily practice. One reason it was hard to see a clear line between the tingling in my foot and the singing of the bird is that I wasn’t identifying very closely with the tingling in the first place. The disaggregation of my self made its contents seem more like the contents of the world beyond me; the diffuseness of my self made its bounds less distinct. And this sense of the diffuseness of self begins with workaday mindfulness meditation: looking at any part of your experience—stress, physical pain, tingling in foot—from a more objective standpoint than usual. So objective that experiencing it is kind of like experiencing a bird’s song.

Indeed, I think the reason I felt so favorably disposed toward other beings when the bounds of my self dissolved wasn’t just the dissolution per se. A big factor was that all the self-centered preoccupations that keep us from appreciating other beings—and sometimes make us envy, resent, even hate other beings—were not part of my self at that moment.