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Learning to Live Without a Self with Jay Garfield

Tricycle Talks

CHAPTER

The Paradox of No Self or Non Self

To regard ourselves as selfless persons is not to denigrate, but to recognize that our lives are only possible and can only have meaning in the context of a world. That's a far less lonely understanding to me than this self that I'm so attached to. One of the paradoxes of the self illusion is that we're kind of driven to it in order to give our lives meaning or substantiality to make us something worth caring about. The cruel irony is that nobody would care about a completely independent, inaccessible being outside of space and time that's unrelated to everybody else. We build something that's totally fictional, but also not even desirable as that bulwark.

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