Intro

When we’re confronted with an entirely novel idea — like that of no-self (anatta) — no two responses are alike. One person may outright reject it because it contradicts commonly held beliefs about personhood or an eternal soul. Another may feel indifferent as it doesn’t concern the mental model of the world they’ve constructed. Or a person unruffled by paradoxes, might come to the logical conclusion, “Of course this idea that no self exists must be true, because it’s simply an inversion of what I’ve known to be true.”

Anattā is a view derived from the Pali Canon, a catalogue of the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama who became known as the Buddha. The Canon was created by about 500 Theravadan bhikkhus (monks) who convened four centuries after the Buddha’s passing for the Fourth Buddhist Council between 29 and 17 BC to transcribe teachings passed down orally for over four centuries. They feared, after nearly 12 years of famine in Sri Lanka, that the remaining reciters would die and with it, the Buddha’s lineage. Anattā is translated as the perspective that nothing of the world has an independent, eternal essence. We could consider the various reactions to anatta proposed above to construct a complete thesis: through anattā, each moment can be viewed as the confluence of conditions that allowed it to come to be.

Let’s begin with the first reaction a Westerner indoctrinated thus might have to hearing about anattā: rejecting the notion outright. This person has likely been invested in the conception of a personal identity since childhood, having it iterated in the most prominent religions, philosophy classes in school (unless they included the work of Hume), and in the discipline of Western psychology. They’ve witnessed how personal brand and popularity can be a means to derive a livelihood, and they’ve likely only encountered individuals who have operated within this shared framework. When they hear “there is no essential self,” it might cause a gut-level rejection with a retort like, “There is a self. I can show you the many ways in which it is real!” This reaction is sensical given the conditions in which the individual’s consciousness has existed prior to encountering the idea. They react to a statement that seems wholly inaccurate based on the preponderance of their lived experience.

The second reaction, that of indifference, might come from an individual who is cultured, well-read, and broadly versed in various ideas about reality. They’ve encountered so many different conceptions of what’s true, this is just another idea to add to the stack of ideas they’ve heard over time. They’re not particularly committed to or motivated by any one of these ideas because they find their narrators unreliable; Their life has been mostly transient, jumping from one social milieu to the next, making it challenging to go deep into and fully embody any single idea.

The final reaction may come from someone well-versed in the experience of holding firm to one concept of reality, only to see it unravel once presented with credible contradictory evidence.. They’ve encountered paradoxes before, and felt the internal monologue of “I” supplanted by another voice altogether; controverting the idea of one, eternal self. The conditions of their life made them open to the idea since they’ve encountered paradoxes before, and predictably, have been confronted by another.

Each perspective is a natural extension of the experiential conditions from which it emerged. Viewing each response from this multi-perspective approach is the gateway of anattā, wherein one sees all phenomena as a confluence of unique conditions. By attending to those conditions in real time, we are more likely to perceive the morphing nature of “self” as it responds to the changing moment.

This essay offers an expanded view of anattā that extends beyond meditative concepts from the Pali Canon into a framework for understanding shared consciousness. I will first trace the phenomenological basis of this view to my own experience, then move to a formal logical defense of anattā, and finally propose a transdisciplinary research agenda for studying the ‘networked psyche’ — which ultimately dissolves into emptiness when attended to over time.

Anattā or Empathy?

Before I knew the word for it, I first encountered anattā while coming down from a night of heightened empathy encouraged by a generous helping of an empathogen offered by friends. After the long, sleepless night, we chose a grocery-store bought lunch over eating out.
As we munched on the delicious veggies, I became conscious of the urge to use the bathroom. No sooner had I done so, my friend seated across from me on the floor stood up and announced they were headed to the bathroom. There was an intense wave of incredulity, followed by an eerie intuition that we were feeling the exact same thing at the exact same time not out of coincidence, but rather, out of conjoined sensation. One might claim “well that’s just empathy.” But the shared experience wasn’t intentional. We weren’t paying attention to each other until my friend acknowledged our simultaneous call of nature. Because this happened “under the influence,” my default egoic mind wrote the experience off as an empathogen-induced anomaly. But I later came to recognize that what occurred in that moment planted a seed that would take time to mature.

You’ll never be alone

That seed awakened again at a particularly low and lonely point in my life while on the phone with a friend whom I had reached out to for support. As I expressed my sense of alienation from being misunderstood, she said with a curious inflection, “Oh Stephen, just remember that you’ll never be truly alone again.” I felt a strange, swirling presence around me as she spoke, and the image of visionary artist Alex Gray’s piece “Net of Being” came to mind. The confidence she tapped when making that statement made me sincerely question if the idea of a separate self was the delusion, and reality was more like the “net of being” that Gray depicted.

Liminal Visions

The seed really began to propagate when I committed to a regular meditation practice in 2013, and the porosity of phenomenal reality came into full effect. I had recently sat my first meditation retreat, which seemed like the longest (but also incredibly rewarding) six days of my life to date. In attempting to be of greater service to my community I connected with a talented local web designer to learn CSS. In exchange, I offered nutrition advice and instruction for a home yoga practice. Sitting in a liminal meditative state one night during my apprenticeship, an image of broccoli being washed in a steamer arose, along with a distinct sense of the presence of my web designer friend. When we convened the next day for yoga practice, I couldn’t hold back and asked, “Did you have broccoli for dinner last night — and did you wash it in the sink?” His eyes widened as he looked at me with a mixture of incredulity and curiosity and uttered,“Yes, how did you know?” I proceeded to recount the liminal glimpse of what, retrospectively, seemed to be a shared, first-person experience of making his meal. He was a bit spooked and insisted I not monitor him remotely in any way. I assured him that the experience was unintentional; it arose spontaneously and without my volition. But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that the experience had piqued my imagination at what was truly possible in this blended psychic web of humanity.

Can you adjust?

About four years later I was in a workshop for yoga teachers on hands-on assists. We were working in pairs with other teachers to learn the adjustments. The class consisted of instructor demos at the front of the class and pairing off to practice the demonstrated adjustments. During the demos, participants were taking pictures of the teachers for their notes. Recognizing the good idea I took out my phone to take some too when my partner squatted in front of me to take a picture, obscuring the line of sight and staying to jot down notes. Unable to get the picture and debating whether to ask her to move or just let it be, an idea arrived. I pictured our instructors in their current pose from her perspective from a couple feet in front of me. I was squatting in a similar position and imagined what it felt like to scoot to the right; deliberately innervating the muscles I would use to move, and as I did so, my partner scooted herself to the side providing a clear shot. Considering that it might have been a coincidence, another opportunity arose shortly thereafter at a different position relative to the teachers. Picturing the teachers again from my partner’s perspective and mock intending the move once more “moved” my partner to open the line of sight for the photo. I was exhilarated to find the discovery repeatable! Testing the idea that this was a newfound aspect of reality, I tried again in new situations with various other people — but with little success. I wondered why the workshop was fertile ground for this phenomenological experience, and speculated it had to do with having a shared, focal point on which everyone’s attention was concentrated: the instructors at the front of the studio. This provided an obvious point of connection between our subjective phenomenal worlds. Furthermore, it’s probable that yoga teachers have higher-definition somatosensory maps of our physical bodies, and a shared attunement to the subtle energy body. Having this in common could have made my fellow yogis more receptive to the intention and energy with which I sent my silent concerns.

Phenomenology

When I was finally introduced to the concept of anattā through Buddhist teachings, my mind flashed back to these extraordinary lived experiences. It put a name to the inexplicable. Anatta is conventionally introduced to meditators as the antithesis to the Western psychological concept of ego. For me, the concept had an immediate phenomenological network of memories and associations, and I was spurred to learn more. My experience of anattā had a veneer of novelty; it was compelling and complex. My growing interest in understanding it drew me to the works of contemporary thinkers and ancient Buddhist monks alike. And in no small way, it shaped who my heart would be drawn to; one day, while perusing the books at the UNC Asheville library, I met a philosophy student we’ll call Joy, at that time, was studying phenomenology. She introduced me to the lineage of phenomenologists of modern philosophy and so happened to be reading “The Phenomenology of Perception” by French philosopher Merleau-Ponty. She happily shared the highlights, and oriented me to language and context that helped bridge the gap between the time of the Buddha and my recent interest in the subject.

Joy was also a yoga teacher with subtle body awareness, which was made not-so-subtle after a 10-day silent meditation retreat we embarked upon with friends. Sitting together on the patio of our post-retreat, decompression rental, we experimented with attuning to a subtle field of energy that we intentionally moved between us. We discovered a shared ability to describe its location and palpate its movement without visible gesturing or eye tracking. This experience seemed to confirm my theory that such deep somatic attunement can be facilitated by a shared, concentrative event — like our meditation retreat, or the 1-day yoga workshop mentioned earlier.

Of Like Mind

The phenomenon of simultaneous perception has become more routine since committing fully to an intimate partnership in the years since. Many who have wholeheartedly poured themselves into union, whether in romance, as a mother or father, a twin, or deep friendship have likely experienced the occasional completion of each other’s thoughts. Personal experience leads me to believe that being of one mind is directly correlated with the level of transparency, intentionality, attunement, and shared rituals (like a regular meditation practice) I cultivate with my partner. There are times when accomplishing things together becomes like a wordless dance, each person naturally and effortlessly fulfilling a flow of shared intention. Frequently, very few words convey a great deal of meaning because the shared contextual associations are so rich. These moments no longer have quite the same salience because they have come to feel natural and expected. Prior to that level of intimacy, they felt like rare comet sightings, upending preconceived ideas about what’s possible in reality.

But what happens when the full experience of anatta is explored not just between two lovers or a classroom of yogis — but rather, among the entire universe?

The Lifestream of Phenomenon

At first pass, Anatta or No-Self can be perceived as a witnessing of the phenomenal world, what we call life, streaming through us. When awake, our sensory embeddedness in this body and our place in time can seem like the totality of our reality. It’s human nature to be tuned into and moved by that which is in our immediate grasp; the acuity of that perception fades with geographic, temporal or psychic distance. However, it is also true that the totality of reality extends well beyond the sense experience of our body situated in our surroundings.

The Lifestream as Discrete Moments

Another way to view the lifestream is as a series of discrete moments. Each moment is reified by the predominant sense on which we place our attention; although the moment would be incomplete without the countless, lower-resolution senses that go unnoticed. The first step towards expanding into anatta is to perceive sensory input as interdependent and interconnected with other beings. This phenomenon can be observed when we remember an experience from our past. We predominately notice the first-person felt experience, but we may also perceive details for which we were only peripherally conscious of when the memory consolidated. We may even observe qualities from other perspectives who were present at the inception of the memory… and even those who weren’t present. How can this be?

We’re starting to understand how the phenomenological experience as a life stream e.g. breathing, walking, ducking, bending, wanting, feeling, thinking is shared with other humans as well as the sentient beings who inhabit the more-than-human expanse. A clear and stable mind can, in real-time or upon reflection, recall an experience from the perspective of a sentience other than the one who “experienced” it — especially if the other being senses the world in a similar way. It will be the same mind moment, however, from a different perspective. This could be revelatory, an “Aha!” moment where one’s perception of reality expands to include the information from the perspective of other living beings. As we open to this possibility, it’s important to be curious and ask questions about the experience of others, thereby testing the accuracy of our intuitions about their perceptions.

The Interdependence of the Senses

The Entangled Mind

Consciousness as a Confluence: Multi-perspectival Sensing

If we begin to understand consciousness as that which illuminates a stream of sense phenomenon, we can extrapolate that we are one confluence of the stream… among many; what are the other currents of experience in relation to us? Could we experience ourselves from the multiple perspectives of those with like-sentience, especially those with whom we are intimately connected and physically present? Maybe too those with whom we are intimately connected but geographically distant. We may begin to realize that the connection doesn’t depend on physical proximity. That everything we think, say, and do is inextricably interwoven with all life, and ultimately affects the whole. By extension, we can deduce that the attention is not under one person’s control. It is influenced by the quality of attention of those with whom we are connected, as well as the ability of each connected individual to mindfully direct their attention. This is why gentle, positive feeling states correlate with open, expansive attention, while intense positive or negative states tend to “stick” our attention compulsively long after the stimulus has passed. Proximity, feeling tone, similarity of symbolic representations, and relative intimacy all play a role in determining which phenomenological streams converge.

A Spirit Infused Organism

In the chapter The Grammar of Animacy in her book Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes that the word for “bay” is essentially a verb meaning “spirit becoming bay.” Other phenomenological philosophers like Merleau Ponty and Thomas Nagel in “What is it like to be a bat” also point this out: There’s an experience of being a human, but there is also an experience of being a plant, a snake, wolf, rabbit — which is unlikely to be characterized, even remotely, by objective measures of these various conscious experiences. However, because we share many senses with the organisms of this world, it’s likely that consciousness is more permeable than we may initially conceive. Stories involving “shamanic flight” have long been interwoven in myth and cosmology of indigenous cultures.

Because the very functioning of our human existence depends on relationships with other beings of plant, fungi and animal kingdoms, it follows that reciprocal relationships fundamental to one’s existence necessitate shared forms of communication that generate knowledge. Accordingly, we can perceive our actions, words, and thoughts from an array of varied perspectives — human and more-than-human that allows us to start to appreciate the full extent of what we might be.

Monarchs and Milkweed

The concept of co-arising can be an entryway into a wider appreciation of no-self. Co-arising describes how phenomena, including living organisms, often exist with mutual dependence on one another, or interdependently. The mutual reliance between monarch butterflies and milkweed serves as a powerful metaphor for this concept of co-arising, revealing a fundamental interdependence essential for their shared existences. The monarch butterflies are biologically tethered to milkweed, relying on the plant as an exclusive host for their eggs and caterpillars. Our own existence is similarly anchored in a reciprocal relationship with the plant kingdom wherein our life depends on the continuous gaseous exchange we share with plants to convert the CO2 we exhale into the oxygen we inhale. Together, these relationships illustrate that the self is not an isolated, independent entity, but rather a part of an extended, interconnected body that encompasses the natural world.

Ripples in the Lifestream

The nervous system of a given being functions as a receiver and synthesis organ at a particular confluence of the lifestream. This idea was first proposed by Henri Bergson in “Matter and Memory” in 1911 and I first encountered it in Aldous Huxley’s “The Doors of Perception.” Our responsibility is to tend what we receive from many angles wisely. Everything we do with our minds within the moment contributes to the whole, whether we’re aware of it or not. Any desire, thought or feeling creates karmic ripples, or in other words, has consequences – known and unknown. How that ripple collides with the field of value comprises the life of each expression. Each expression evolves through re-interpretation that continues to ripple in the stream and in so doing, changes its characteristics. All the sounds and images that emanate from our being forming in the minds of others generate feelings and thoughts that people attribute to our likenesses (the sounds and images) — which constitutes an extended lifestream that exists well beyond the physical body.
When we attend closely to memories, we can notice that they are often vague and tend to fade with time. In turn, the associations in this extended lifestream made by others are also fallible and lensed through individual agendas. In this way, there is no singular soul in the sense of one being going on to become the same being somewhere else. There is just the lifestream continuing to ripple as phenomenological imprints, which return and reabsorb back into the lifestream, metamorphosing in the process. The stream flows onward, even as the physical body as a vessel of consciousness dissolves into other things. The more imprints we leave on the lifestream, the greater the worldly wake we will leave, for better or for worse.

The Earthen Echo Chamber

The mere ovoid shape of this planet suggests we live in a kind of infinite reverberation chamber. All the electromagnetic waves within the atmosphere of the earth, bounded by two polar reflection points, rippling in all directions. And light from the sun, our star and from other stars – reflects off of us and travels infinitely into space unless otherwise obstructed. The fiber optic foundation of the internet is webwork for carrying the light of that lifestream, moving it about directionally, rapidly. We would do well to take time with the vibration of intentions before we act them into the world, and to reflect on what returns from the world when we do. When we let them reverberate around in our minds for a while, considering them from many perspectives, we can glean invaluable feedback and better weigh potential consequences. Likewise, when we do offer something up into the vast lifestream, we’re well to listen into the space for cues on how best to refine and calibrate what we continue to offer.

Operationalizing this Ontology

Practically speaking, this metaphysical truth is useful for trying to understand cause and effect. We generally operate within a paradigm that assumes the closer one is to an event in the lifestream, the more responsibility one has for it. I invite you to consider that we’re responsible for the well-being of all life, human and non-human, regardless of biological, geographic or even temporal proximity. This gradual shift in perspective is one way by which consciousness grows towards greater understanding. It’s a sound decision to seek stillness, setting aside one’s agenda, and listen to the lifestream rippling by, especially when considering actions with great karmic weight – usually identified by the felt sense of gravity one can feel in the gut.

Opening to the Vastness

When we embrace the notion that consciousness extends well beyond this one bodily experience and its senses, the entire world opens up in unexpected ways. Opening to the totality of life — the one experienced in human form and beyond — can be awe-inspiring. To recognize that each being is a microcosm of the macrocosm, no less than the sum total of the universe, spiraling out in all perspectives, is simultaneously boundless and utterly humbling. John Muir described this simply:

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”

Bibliography

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