No-self is a core teaching across Buddhist traditions. Yet what does it look like to actually live without a self? In How to Lose Yourself: An Ancient Guide to Letting Go, scholars Jay L. Garfield, Maria Heim, and Robert H. Sharf present a series of accessible and engaging translations of key Buddhist texts on why we are selfless persons—and why this insight leads to greater freedom and compassion.

In a recent episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sat down with Garfield to discuss why our preoccupation with the self causes us so much suffering, how dismantling the self is a project of moral development and spiritual freedom, and what it means to be a person without a self.

You begin the book with a series of words and phrases we hear every day—finding yourself, self-consciousness, self-promotion, and so on—and you say that as a culture we seem to be self-obsessed. Can you say more about this preoccupation with the self? It seems so ubiquitous in our language and our culture that we don’t even notice it. Yeah, and I think we’ve got to be specific about what we mean by “our culture” here. I think what we mean is a culture that’s generally inflected by the Abrahamic religious traditions. It’s a central idea in the Abrahamic religion traditions that fundamentally we are souls or selves. Of course, that gets articulated in different ways by different sects and different philosophers, but a really deeply held view that permeates all of those traditions is that at bottom there’s a core me, that I’m not my body, I’m not my mind, I’m the thing that has that body and mind, I’m the thing that’s going to be eternally rewarded if I’m good, eternally punished if I’m bad, and so on and so forth.

Especially in a largely secular age when many people do not see themselves as especially religious, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that so much of our ordinary way of taking up with the world is conditioned by the religious traditions that have shaped our cultures, and we have been shaped by these traditions. As a result, we reflexively think of ourselves as selves, and as a result, when we start wondering about what it is to lead a good life, we wonder, “How can I improve myself?” When we start thinking about justice, we start thinking about “Are we treating every self equally? Is this something that I would want for myself?” And so our moral lives, our political lives, our epistemological lives, and our emotional lives tend to all get refracted by this conviction that we exist as selves and everything else is alien.

Now, I don’t want to entirely blame the Abrahamic tradition for this. The very fact that the Buddhist tradition has to argue so strenuously for the no-self position indicates that there’s something pretheoretic about this. It’s not that there’s an explicit doctrine that teaches us that we have selves, but there seems to be what we call in the Buddhist tradition an innate self-grasping, an innate tendency to see ourselves as selves, even if that’s not reasonable. We’re susceptible to the self illusion in the same way that we’re susceptible to perceptual illusions, like the Müller-Lyer illusion. And so when you take the illusion and then you ramify the illusion by religious and philosophical speculation, we get a pretty strong sense that we are selves, and so dislodging that becomes a really complicated philosophical project.

You write that this preoccupation with the self is at the root of our suffering. How so? Sure. This is a central tenet of every Buddhist school. When we think about what grounds Buddhist thought, Buddhism is all about solving a problem, and that problem is the ubiquity of suffering. That’s the first noble truth. But the first noble truth only sets the problem. The second truth—that is, the truth of the cause or the origin of suffering—is the one that really gets us thinking about our selves. We’re told in the second truth that suffering is conditioned by attraction and aversion and that attraction and aversion are conditioned by a primal confusion about the nature of reality, and part of that primal confusion is the illusion of the self, or the idea that the world basically revolves around me.

There are a lot of different ways to get at this, but here’s one way that I like to think about it. When I take myself to be a self, I take myself to be a subject and everything and everybody else to be my objects. The moment I do that, I take myself to be a subject standing over and against the world rather than a more dependently originated, causally open sequence of processes. I take myself to have a very special role because now I’m the only subject. What that does is it gives me a kind of ontological pride of place, and it’s at least a prima facie reason to take my own interests, desires, and values more seriously than I take other people’s and to think that satisfying my own desires and my own preferences and acting on my own beliefs is prima facie rational.

Now, of course, we can then qualify that and say, “Oh yes, but I’ve also got to consider other people, and my preferences should concern their preferences as well,” but it still comes back to my preferences and that I should have this kind of concern for other people, and that puts me at the center of my moral universe.

We are not subjects for whom other persons are objects; rather, we are members of co-constituted societies in which we and other persons are in open causal interaction.

The moment I do that, I have a problem, because you’re probably doing the same thing. We can’t each be the center of the moral universe, and it can’t be that each of us has got onto the right preferences and the right goals and the right desires and the right political views and so forth. And so conflict arises: Attraction arises to people who share my views; aversion arises to people who thwart my interests or who have different views; and the whole mass of suffering gets going. So unlike optical illusions like the Müller-Lyer illusion illusion, this is an illusion that has real practical consequences, and the practical consequences are moral conflicts and strife and war.

It also causes us personal damage, because the moment we think of ourselves as selves and the moment we take seriously the fact that that self is going to die, the fear of death overtakes us, and we end up with a life that’s entirely inframed by the fear of death. Those who are familiar with the bhavachakra, the wheel of life icon, will recognize this because what that icon tells us is that we live our lives inframed by the fear of death. The Yama that is framing the entire icon is what’s determining the entire wheel of cyclic existence, and we’re constantly cycling from emotional state to emotional state to emotional state without any control. All of that is dependent on the self illusion.

You put forward losing ourselves as an antidote to finding ourselves. What do you mean by “losing ourselves,” and how does losing ourselves allow us to actually see more clearly? The first thing to say, of course, is that it’s kind of a shorthand because you can’t lose something that you never had, and my view is that self is something that you never had in the first place. But what I mean is losing our sense of self, or losing the idea that we are a self. Once we lose the idea that we’re selves, we can ask the question, “Well, what kind of thing are we?” Then we can begin to answer that question in a revealing way. The way in which the Buddhist tradition leads us to answer that is that we’re not selves, we’re persons. And what are persons? Persons are conventionally constructed as individuals, as any kind of collectivity is. We arise as a collectivity of constantly evolving, open-ended streams of causally interacting psychophysical processes. If we take the Buddhist classification, that means physical processes, sensory processes, perceptual processes, psychological and emotional traits and dispositions, and our consciousness and reflective thought. 

Now, when you pay attention to that, a lot emerges, because then you realize that we are causally and responsibly open to other persons as well. We are not subjects for whom other persons are objects; rather, we are members of co-constituted societies in which we and other persons are in open causal interaction. What that means is that our primary attitude toward people isn’t that of an object for my satisfaction but rather a colleague in co-constituting a world, a language, a way of thinking, and a way of proceeding. That generates the possibility of genuine friendship; it generates the possibility of really caring about others rather than just using them; it generates the possibility of finding pleasure and joy in the success of others; and it generates a more equanimous relationship and more impartial view of other people. In other words, it generates the brahmaviharas. Living in the kind of joy that the brahmaviharas can lead us to requires first shedding the illusion of self and understanding instead the interdependence and interactivity of persons.

Right, as you write, “When we allow our fantasies of self to dissolve, we discover instead the radically interdependent nature of our existence.” Can you say more about this? How is dismantling the self actually a project of moral development and spiritual freedom? It begins with metaphysical development and developing a different understanding of ourselves, replacing the illusion of independence with the reality of interdependence.

If you grew up in the United States, from an early age you probably heard things like “You’ve got to learn to think for yourself,” “You’ve got to stand on your own two feet,” “You’ve got to be independent,” “You’ve got to be creative,” “You’ve got to be author of your own destiny,” and so on. We all hear that kind of language all the time. But when you try to spell it out, it starts sounding really stupid: If I’m going to stand on my own two feet, do I also have to make the shoes that I’m standing in? Do I have to make the dirt that I’m standing on? If I’m going to think for myself, does that mean I should never listen to my teachers or my parents or experts who give me advice? If I’m going to be independent, does that mean that I never rely on anybody else for anything? Does it mean I have to fix my own car? Or build my own car? Or mine the metal that goes into building my own car? It goes on and on.

This is a way of occluding the fact that we are fundamentally and necessarily interdependent. That means we cannot ground our morality on the idea that we are autonomous individual agents who freely decide or don’t decide to associate with one another. We have to understand our existence as that of interdependent beings who owe everybody else an enormous debt of gratitude and whose interests have no priority over those of others. When we do that, we replace talk about autonomy and rights and privileges with talk about cooperation and gratitude. Those are moral attitudes that bring us to a greater maturity and make our societies much better than discussions of competition and survival of the fittest and individual liberties to do whatever I want regardless of whatever anybody else wants.

I think that we only get a genuine moral sense, like the kind that is articulated in the brahmaviharas, when we understand ourselves as interdependent persons, and thinking about ourselves as selves, or as independent, autonomous, substantial beings who are subjects of a world, only gets in the way of moral thought, only gets in the way of moral maturity, and only gets in the way of human happiness.

This excerpt has been edited for length and clarity.