Subjectivity: mind, self and soul

[Ninshub]

A few quick thoughts:

- Who is watching the interplay of chaotic thoughts you see? Who is reflecting on this supposed disunity?

- While there is a strain of Buddhism that says there is no self,

In relation to the first thought, the answer that comes through the non-dual teachings is: awareness. That's the real you. (Or presence, or pure consciousness, however one wishes to label it.) That's the whole point and goal of the method of self-inquiry: Who am I?

In relation to the second point, in original buddhism the Buddha simply teaches that it's not useful to take an ontological position towards the self or the world, so he simply didn't answer such questions. One should attend to addressing the cognitive faculties, not aim towards a metaphysical understanding. The doctrine of anatta, "not-self", was interpreted by some later Buddhists as well as scholars as meaning that no self exists, but more recent scholarship reveals that the Buddha was not denying that people have selves, but denying that anything attributed to "the self" exists independently. There's nothing permanent or independent about selfhood, but it does not follow that it doesn't exist. This is closely related to the theory of dependent origination, which doesn't say that nothing exists but that nothing exists independently. (I'm relying here on the short book by Sue Hamilton, Indian Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction, pages 50-51 especially, that I've reread in the past weeks, and that's also what comes across in Peter Harvey's textbook on Buddhism.)