Learning to Live Without a Self with Jay Garfield
Tricycle Talks
The Importance of Rejecting the Concept of a Self
A person is, in some sense, a substitute for the self. So I'm kind of urging people through reading this book to come to reject the notion that their identity is that of a self and to accept that it's the identity of a person. The analogy that I run throughout the book is that if we think about an actor playing a role, persons are more like roles than actors. That doesn't make them unreal. Hamlet is a real role, but Hamlet could be played by Sir Lawrence Olivier or by Benedict Cumberbatch. We don't suddenly have two different Hamlets except in some metaphorical sense. But as persons, we're governed by complicated sets of conventions and interpret
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