Crisis in Consciousness Chapter Sixteen

Self or Non-Self?

If the present writer were asked to deal with the question, self or non-self?--he would begin to say that in one sense there is a self, but, paradoxically, it would also be true to say that in another, there is no self; it all depends on what level we are thinking.  

Superficially there is a self because:

1. Thought has associated and identified itself with the apparent           permanence of the body, as well as with the terms “me” and “mine”.

2. Thought, which is transient and impermanent, has created the thinker so that it can run away from the Void, the realization that it is totally nothing. 

    So the idea of the thinker, the “I”, exists within thought, and is therefore also transient, but it is given the appearance of continuity by Memory.  This deceptive mechanism, creating duality, may perhaps be demonstrated by way of an analysis of a simple act of perception.  Let us consider in a slightly different the example given on p. 85* in which the eyes are looking at a sunset.  There is perception of the sunset by a human observer, so that there is an “experiencing” of the sunset.  As long as this is a fact, there is no entity that reflects on its experiencing, that sees itself “seeing” (for as soon as this happens there is an end of the seeing of the sunset, and the replacement of the sunset by the “seer”; and we may then say that during this experience there is no entity that reflects on the seeing of the “seer”! And so we could go on, of course, ad infinitum). 

   The analysis of this simple example clearly demonstrates that perception is always a non-dual “event” which in retrospect we call an “observer-object relationship” but in which there is in actual fact neither an observer nor an object, as a separate entity. The sunset would not exist but for the observer, now would the observer exist but for the sunset.