You Don’t Exist

It was what would have otherwise been an enjoyable, lazy Sunday, when a thought entered my head. Thoughts are prone to do this sort of thing, so I didn’t think much of it. But soon this thought lead to other thoughts, which in turn led to others. Soon more and more of those little creatures were clawing their way into my noggin, until finally, I realized something: I’m crazy.

Have you ever seen someone talking to themselves in public? When you see someone do this, you instantly think that they are mentally ill. But, just like a mentally ill person, I talk to myself constantly. I just have the good sense to do it inside my head, with my mouth shut.

And I’m not alone in this. If I’m not mistaken, you talk to yourself constantly as well.

Let’s do a little experiment. I want you to sit with your eyes closed, and just relax. Let whatever comes to mind come to mind. But, there is one rule: no words allowed. Simply sit still and don’t let any words into your consciousness. See how long it takes before even a single phrase enters your mind. I’ll wait.

Chances are you didn’t make it even a few seconds into the experiment before realizing that you were talking to yourself.

But here’s a question: Why? Why do we talk to ourselves?

I believe that there are two answers to this question.

The first answer is that talking to ourselves helps us make sense of our experience. As human beings, we are better able to make sense of the world than any other animal we know of. And a large part of how we are able to make such good sense of the world is through language. We use language to give meaning to our experience, and so it makes sense that we are constantly narrating our experience with language inside of our heads. This allows us to make sense of our lives, and so it is good.

The second answer is more complex. The second answer is that we talk to ourselves because we suffer from an illusion. We talk to ourselves because we suffer from the illusion that we exist.

Think about it this way. When you talk to yourself, who are you talking to? The obvious answer is that you are talking to yourself, but that is exactly the illusion. Because I would argue that there is no “yourself.” I would argue that the feeling of being a “you” is an illusion. It exists as a feeling, of course, but not as a pointer to a deeper reality. In other words: it feels like you are a you, but that doesn’t mean that you actually are one.

Imagine, for example, that you notice that you are thirsty, and so you think to yourself “I’m going to get a glass of water.” In this situation, you already know that you are thirsty. And you have already decided that you are going to get a glass of water. So who are you announcing it to? No one. And yet you still announce it, as though this were useful.

We feel as though there is “someone home,” so to speak, that we have to announce things to. But the truth is that there isn’t anyone there. We narrate our experience as though we are somehow outside of it. But the truth is that we are our experience, and that we are incapable of ever being anything else. We feel like we are a self experiencing our experience, but we aren’t. We simple are the experience.

This means that the self is an illusion. It means that you don’t exist.

If all of this seems a little confusing, allow me some time to elaborate.

Consider, for example, the statement “I feel sensations.” On the surface, this statement seems perfectly fine. But realize that it is redundant. A sensation is by definition something that you feel, and in order to feel something there must by definition by sensations. The way that we use language biases us toward thinking about on the one hand a feeler who is feeling the sensations, and on the other hand sensations that are being felt. However, this split between the feeler and the felt is an illusion. There are sensations happening in consciousness, but there is no mysterious “feeler” who is feeling them. They are simply arising in consciousness.

Think about it this way. There is no “I” who chooses to feel the sensations I am experiencing. They are felt whether I choose to feel them or not. In other words: they are the ones doing the feeling. Sensations don’t need a feeler. They feel themselves.

This is true, not just of sensations, but of all experiences. And that’s all that life ever has been or ever will be: experiences.

If you are still confused, I don’t blame you. Realizing that there is no experiencer, only experiences, is not something that can be done in the ivory tower. It has to be a direct experience. You have to, in the words of the philosopher Sam Harris, “look for what is looking.” And then you have to see that there is no one looking. Or, to put it another way: you have to see that there is the experience of looking, but that there is no looker causing it. There is just the experience of looking, and nothing more.

If you have no idea what is meant by “look for what is looking,” then perhaps you could think about it another way. Consider that the only life you have ever known is experiences happening in consciousness. And then consider that you don’t need any extra ingredients to make this make sense. It is possible for experiences to just happen in consciousness, and you do not need to add the extra ingredient of an experiencer having these experiences. The experiences can just happen on their own, and that can be the whole story.

Just as sensations feel themselves, experiences experience themselves. And the stream of consciousness that these experiences experience themselves in is not a separate self, but it is the experiences.

A river is not separate from the water flowing through it. The river is the water.

I understand that certain people’s only reaction to this post will be “he must have smoked something a little too strong.” But I remain unfazed. After all, there’s no “me” to be fazed in the first place.