The Invention of the Self
For me, it became crucial to notice what is in fact "illusory" about the self. It's not an illusion in the sense of being a completely useless, even malignant, deception. It's a complex of narratives, judgments, and strategies that developed to help me maintain some relatively reliable social-emotional standing. It served, and serves, a purpose.
Waking Up - A New Operating System for Your Mind
This is because the so-called self is a construct of words and memories, of fantasies which have no existence in immediate reality.
Alan W. Watts • Become What You Are: Expanded Edition
What we experience as the “self” is an aggregate of familiar thoughts, emotions and patterns of behavior. The mind binds these together, creating a story about a personal, individual entity that has continuity through time. Everything we experience is subsumed into this story of self and becomes my experience.
Tara Brach • Radical Acceptance
Taking over identity-conferring messages from different others invariably creates a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces don’t quite match up. That’s why we are perfectly capable of having a dialogue with ‘ourselves’. I can be angry, pleased, or disappointed with ‘myself’, because the ‘I’ that is judging ‘me’ is based on a different identification from the ‘
... See more