Excerpt: Where am 'I'?
Let's imagine that you suddenly tell somebody, 'Could you please get angry,
very angry, right now?' Nobody will get completely angry- no one can do that,
except maybe a really good actor who can mimic anger at will for a relatively
short time. But if you say to the same person, 'You are a scoundrel; you are
such a disgusting person,' then you don't have to wait very long. That person
will immediately get angry. Why this difference? Because you targeted the 'I.'
Since this notion of there being a self seems to be at the source of all
emotions, it follows that if no one wants to work with emotions, one has to
investigate in depth this notion of 'I.' Does it stand up to anaylsis as a
truly existing entity?
So there's a very deep approach in Buddhist philosophy and practice to try to
examine if that 'I' is just an illusion, just a name we attach to that stream
and flux in continuous transformation. The past thought is gone, the future one
has not yet arisen. How can the present 'I' truly exist, hanging between
something that has passed and something else that has yet to arise? And if the
self cannot be identified in the mind or the body, nor in both together, nor as
something distinct from them, it is evident that there is nothing we can point
to that can justify our having such a strong feeling of 'I.' It is just a name
one gives to a continuum, just as one can point to a river and call it Ganges
or Mississippi. That's all.
by Daniel Goleman,
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