Nonduality and the Ego with Jake Orthwein
Host Michael Taft talks with Jake Orthwein about the self as a construction, the distinction between no-self and emptiness, the crucial difference between having a functional ego and being identified with it, psychedelics and meditation and ego dissolution, the Buddha-nature vs. the True Self, dereification vs. defabrication, Taft’s distinction of nondual one vs. nondual two, and the importance of a healthy ego.
Jake Orthwein is a filmmaker based in Brooklyn, NY, and a dharma student of Michael Taft’s. His most recent film, “Unraveling the Dream,” was produced in collaboration with the Waking Up app and focuses on the history and neuroscience of psychedelics.
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Full Transcript
Michael Taft:
Welcome to Deconstructing Yourself, the podcast for metamodern mutants interested in meditation, awakening, Vajrayana, tantra, the end of the world, love, compassion, nonduality, and so much more. My name is Michael Taft, your host on the podcast, and in this episode, I’m being interviewed once again by Jake Orthwein. Recently, I made a short video addressing some basic points about the ego or the sense of self, especially in regard to spiritual practice. Jake had some further questions on the topic, and so we recorded our conversation, and you’re listening to that conversation here. Jake Orthwein is a filmmaker based in Brooklyn, New York, and a Dharma student of mine. His most recent film, “Unraveling the Dream,” was produced in collaboration with The Waking Up App and focuses on the history and neuroscience of psychedelics.
And so now, without further ado, I give you the episode that I call, Nonduality on the Ego. With Jake Orthwein. Jake, welcome back to the Deconstructing Yourself podcast.
Jake Orthwein: Thank you, Michael. It’s nice to be here.
MT: It’s nice to have you here. Now, like we did last time you were on the program, this is going to be one of those reverse switcheroo’s where you do the interviewing and I do the answering of the questions. Before we get into it though, I just want to give a little hat tip or a salute to you for the amazing video of yours that came out recently. Do you want to just briefly give that a shout-out?
JO: Sure, yeah. So, this is a film that I produced in collaboration with the Waking Up app about the neuroscience of psychedelics and awakening—gets into many topics of interest to Deconstructing Yourself, listeners, predictive processing, and some of what we’ll be discussing today, which is how psychedelics can be a little bit misleading with respect to the question of, you know, is there a self? Is there no self? Do you want to dissolve the self? And it’s not out yet, although maybe by the time this podcast goes up, it will be out, so.
MT: Fabulous. Well, I’ve had a chance to see it, and it’s really cool and quite an achievement, so great work, man.
JO: Thank you. Thank you.
MT: Okay, so why don’t you prep us? What are we going to talk about today?
JO: Yeah, so this is slightly inspired by a recent video you put out on your YouTube channel, but also just something that I’ve had a lot of conversations about with dharma friends, which is confusion that comes up with respect to this question of self. The Buddhists say that there’s no self, or sometimes the self is illusory. Another way it sometimes gets put in something different, is the self is constructed, or the self is empty.
Psychologists—Western psychologists—will tend to say you need to build a healthy self. Advaita Vedantins will say there’s a true self, and that’s what you need to recognize. And I think the equivocation about these different terms, or different meanings within different traditions, gets people very hung up, where they’re often trying to destroy something that they should be building up. And anyway, I’m hoping that this podcast can just be an excuse to disambiguate all that stuff for the benefit of your listeners.
MT: And for the benefit of myself, hopefully in answering the questions, I will disambiguate a little bit of it for myself as well. So let’s see. Let’s hop right in.
JO: Cool. So maybe the first place that would be helpful to start is to just go with the basic Buddhist claim that there is no self, Anatta. What do you understand the Buddhist to mean by that? And what sort of practice context or experience does that claim emerge from?
MT: Right. So in order to understand this, we have to understand Anatta, which of course is Pali language and is the Prakrit of the Sanskrit term Anatman. And so that’s no Atman, right? Atman is what is normally translated as soul. And here we have Anatman or Anatta, no soul. And I think it’s interesting. We have to, in this case, make a strong distinction between what in the West we would call a soul, and what is being called a soul when we use the word Atman.
In my opinion—and this does start to get into opinion, and I’m sure I’ll be roundly criticized by various speakers for putting it this way—but I don’t think that early Buddhism is saying there’s no soul in the way that a Western practitioner would think of it. I think they’re saying that the soul as such, or we could say, in this case, more to the point, an ego, a sense of self, is not an entity, right? It’s not a being, it’s a construction. And so when people say, oh, no self, you have no self, you have no soul, I think a much more appropriate way to say that in English is the sense of self is a construction, right? And you can’t rely on that construction to be permanent over time.
You developmentally saw it come together, or we see it come together as children grow. They start out without one, and little by little, put one together by hook or by crook, happen-chance, maybe some biology, some determination in there. But we have very reliable models for how people construct a sense of self. And so the idea that that is somehow a permanent entity that will cohere over time, like between lives or something, is just a non-starter. Of course, that won’t cohere lifetime to lifetime. We saw it get constructed. We can see how it needs to be sort of fed and watered and shored up and re-put together on a daily or even hourly basis in life.
And so I think it’s this happenstance kind of slap-dash-together construction that early Buddhism is talking about. And most of us in the West, and I’m sure, let’s say, most people in ancient India, given what the Buddha was saying, go right ahead and identify with that construction. We can see it being constructed in others. We might even remember it being constructed in our own past. But we still, on a day-by-day basis, in kind of a naive way, identify with it as a soul, as some kind of permanent entity. That is us. And we respond to the ego being threatened as if we were threatened with destruction or death. And we respond to the ego being flattered or fattened up as if we were going to live forever. And so this is the basic fundamental illusion—or misapprehension—that I believe early Buddhism is trying to point to when it says it’s very important to see no self.
JO: Okay. Let me see if I can recapitulate what you said there. So there’s a tacit sense we have that we are some continuous, as you say, permanent thing. In an early Buddhist context this would be tied to something that transmigrates across lives, something that’s carried through sort of from the beginning to the end. And that’s the self that the claim of no self is negating. That doesn’t negate, as you say, the self as a construction. And indeed, the fact that we’ve seen it constructed, over the course of a life, points to the fact that it wasn’t one single unitary thing carried through from the beginning of her life to the present moment. Do I have you right?
MT: I think so, yeah. I think you got the main points there.
JO: Cool. I guess one other thing that might be helpful here is to connect this to the idea of emptiness, because I’ve sometimes heard the Anatman claim, this not-self claim equated to the Asvabhava claim, or the claim that emptiness amounts to, which is that things don’t have inherent or independent existence. Maybe you could clarify how those two things are related.
MT: I think that it’s important to understand that early Buddhism doesn’t have emptiness in it, right? It has sort of the precursors to emptiness, which is anatta, no-self and impermanence and suffering, right? Anatta, anicca, dukkha. And so it’s hard to make an equal sign across those, although of course we can do that. But I feel like the idea of emptiness is much more general, and applies much more deeply than the idea of no-self, or the concept of no-self.
And so they don’t really equate, because what the asvabhava, or spontaneously self-arising, no spontaneous self-arising, no spontaneous separate existence for a soul, what that’s talking about more deeply, is the sense of any separate existence of any kind, right? And that’s pointing much more deeply to the root of emptiness, which is that all beings are arising out of consciousness, or out of awareness. And any idea that they are somehow separate is not understanding this deep, deep, deep union. Even if they are different, they are non-separate. So that’s a slightly different point, I think.
JO: Would it be fair to say that to call the person empty is the same thing as saying the person lacks the self, but then emptiness generalizes that?
MT: Well, I’m going to back up and say, the thing about early Buddhism is they’re not animists. They don’t think that rocks have souls or trees have souls or something like that, or that they have a sense of self. And so when they’re talking about Anatta, they’re talking specifically about human beings and only human beings. Anatta is about people. Emptiness is about rocks and is about trees and is about everything, right? Everything can be empty, whereas to talk about the Anatta of a rock or the Anatta of a tree or a cloud doesn’t really make sense.
And so for me, this is further proof of the way I’m analyzing this, which is we can say that a rock or tree is empty in the sense that it is not separate. It may be different, but it’s not separate, whereas most people would not even bother saying that a rock has no sense of self or a cloud has no sense of self, right? There’s no need to even say that for most viewpoints.
JO: There’s an interesting thing that I guess emerges in later Buddhism, which sort of points to this weird thing that they’re meaning by self, which is you’ll sometimes see, like Mahamudra instructions that say the selflessness of the person and then the selflessness of phenomena. And you’re like, what do you mean? I didn’t think that phenomena had a self. It’s this emptiness, the selflessness of phenomena, is emptiness applied to the sort of objects of experience.
MT: That’s right. And I think that, as I was saying, that’s a later development of Buddhism, that is really kind of a deeper insight than the Anatta insight.
JO: Maybe just to anchor it a little bit in people’s experience, so sticking with the Theravada context, how do people feel at the beginning? Because very often, especially in a modern Western context, people will be like, I know the self is constructed. What are you talking about? Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I don’t think I have a soul or something like that. I know it’s constructed, but maybe they don’t notice the extent to which they feel that way, moment to moment, or acting as though that’s true. So maybe like, how do people feel like, how might they notice that they are kind of acting as though there’s a self? And then how does an early Buddhist method reveal that not to be the case?
MT: Well, I want to argue by analogy here. If you go to Wikipedia and you type in cognitive biases, you get a list of like 150 cognitive biases, right? Ways that our brain has expectations or inequalities in the way it perceives or reacts to things. And we know about these. These have been tested over and over and over again. And so we know brains have these cognitive biases.
But the fallacy that I see repeatedly is people believing that if they know those biases, they’re somehow immune. Like, if I know there’s a cognitive bias, then somehow I’ve inoculated myself and it won’t affect me. And nothing could be further from the truth. If we think of it as a stack, the layer upon which the cognitive biases occur is much, much lower than the layer upon which the intellectual understanding of the bias occurs, right? So the fact that you’re aware of it doesn’t affect it at all. That’s not enough. Otherwise, just reading a book on developmental psychology would be enough to realize no self, right? And we know that doesn’t work.
And why doesn’t it work? Because it’s happening at a much, much more fundamental primitive layer of our experience, so to speak, than the understanding of it is. So it’s much more intuitive and primitive and in the guts, right? Especially because so much of the developmental part of ego happens when we’re one and two and three, you know, it’s all way, way, way down in there, the very basis of our processing. So the intellectual understanding is, of course, important, but it doesn’t even scratch the paint on the thing.
And in terms of actually beginning to notice that in practice, well, OK, so what you wanted first is how people can tell that they’re still identified with the ego. OK, well, just go into a situation on purpose where you embarrass yourself in public or embarrass yourself in front of people whose opinion you really care about.
JO: The high stakes experiment, you’re asking people to run.
MT: Right. It’ll happen every day no matter what. Right. So it’s high stakes, but it’s very easy to run this experiment. Do something stupid or embarrassing in public. And if you notice you have a big reaction about that, that’s because you’re identified as this egoic being, right? The one who is embarrassed. So the extent to which that embarrassment is coming up, okay, that could just be, we could say that would happen no matter what. You could make an argument that would happen no matter what. But the extent to which the embarrassment really bothers you, that’s the being identified.
JO: Okay.
MT: And if you want to run the experiment in a pleasant way, just do kind of the opposite. Notice if someone praises you publicly, does that make you feel good? Okay, it should. That’s normal. There’s no problem. But if you actually crave that feeling and want it again, and it matters to you and so on, you are identified. There it is. The tight linkage to the health and well-being of that ego is being demonstrated.
JO: Yeah, I’m sort of interested in seeing if we can’t zero in on what the core of this distinction between being identified and not is. I’ll give you some examples of things that seem functional, that will be a part of having a functional sense of self, that don’t go away when identification goes away. Like maybe some emotional reaction related to your autobiographical memory and your history and your experience, all of that can still come up in the mind of the Arhat, right?
MT: Well, I don’t know. I would say I’m not an expert on Arhatship. And I think that there are claims for Arhatship that you would have no emotions at all of any kind, except maybe peace and compassion or something. But you’re right. The things I just said about being embarrassed or being proud, that could happen even in a very highly developed awake person. And the difference that makes the difference, the identified part, is the key there.
And what does it mean to be identified is your question. And I think in this case, being identified is what I was trying to point at. You know you’re identified—I might not be able to define identification down to the bare metal—but you know you’re identified if the bite of these emotions gets you. It’s one thing to have them arise, which is completely fine and totally functional. It’s another to then strongly avoid the embarrassment because it hurts so much or strongly feelings of pride because it feels so good. If the grasping is occurring after those emotions, that’s, let’s just say, proof of the identification.
JO: Right. Okay. There can be various experiences, including emotional experiences, that arise. Those emotional experiences might take advantage of self-related cognition, the kind of thing that would be built up in a developmental psych story. But if you feel like you’re separate from those experiences in relationship to them, and they’re embattling you like, oh no, they have implications for you as the separate thing, that’s the identification. Whereas if they just arose not to anybody or for anybody, then there wouldn’t be a problem.
MT: Or we could say if they arise and are seen as empty, no problem. I think this is important. You’re kind of asking me about an early Buddhist context, but I’m answering in a later Buddhist way, because I feel like we want to have fully functional egos. We just want to not be identified with them. And maybe this is a point that you want to get to later in our talk, but I kind of have to bring it up here.
JO: Yeah, yeah. Well, okay, we’ll make this the transition point. Part of the reason that I wanted to isolate the early Buddhist thing is I do feel like the thing the early Buddhists are negating is actually also being negated by the later Buddhists. It’s just that it doesn’t imply a whole bunch of things that the early Buddhists thought it implied—some visions of Arhatship that they thought it implied.
MT: It’s interesting parallels between early Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta. And they do have different philosophies. They believe different things. In a way, they’re kind of mutually yucky to each other. And yet they have some very deep similarities that are interesting. And one of them is the idea that when the ego is seen through, it will literally disappear.
Now, both of them would claim that it wasn’t there to begin with, right? The whole thing was some kind of illusion, some kind of misapprehension. And all it takes is seeing it clearly for it to just kind of vanish. And they will say, it’s no mystery that it vanishes because it wasn’t there in the first place. What’s the cure for a disease you don’t have?—Kind of thing. But what does disappear is the misapprehension or the delusion that it was there in the first place.
And we get these really interesting descriptions from people doing those kinds of practices of what that feels like. For example, in the Advaita Vedanta tradition, there’s plenty of people from the 1950s all the way through the 1990s, talking about what that moment—and it is a moment for them—feels like. Where they, in a flash, go from still being an ego, maybe less and less strongly, but still being there, still being there. And then it drains out of them, like water out of a pond, or some water out of a swimming pool down the drain. Like, it’s just gone. And then it never returns. So that’s what that feels like. And then from then on, they’ll say some mysterious power just does everything after that, takes care of life.
But the weird thing there—and this is part of the complexity of this question—and interesting wrinkles in this question is, but they will still display having quirks, personal quirks and preferences, and ways they do things that are kind of individual. Even though we would say personality types, they demonstrate having personality types. Even though from inside that experience, that’s all somehow just happening, and it’s not affecting their own experience, to put it simply, their own experience of themselves. So even in that case, I would claim still some kind of functional ego, functional process chugging along, they’re just completely disidentified with it.
JO: Right, yeah, so the experience of ignorance in both the early Buddhist case and the Advaita case is that you have some phenomenological sense of “I” that you’re walking around with, to which all these narrative and emotional conceptions of self kind of adhere, where you feel like, yeah, that feeling of “I”, of being the center of my head or whatever it is, is also what it feels like to be with this history and all this stuff. And then the transition can be that sense of “I” either disappears or it shifts just like the ground of being, but all of that other stuff that was adhered to it now arises as something that is within you, but not what you are.
MT: Yeah, it’s still happening, just like you’re still breathing, you’re still going to the bathroom every once in a while, you’re still eating, and these thoughts and emotions that previously were identified as me are still arising, but they’re not me anymore, and can be seen as almost like existing on the same plane as the weather or forces of nature or something. It’s just stuff that’s happening. And the experience of this is apparently, let’s say, quite pleasant.
JO: I think it’s an Advaita analogy, but maybe the Buddhists use it too, of the rope and the snake makes sense, where it’s not like when you discover that the snake is actually a rope, there’s no rope. You were just confused about what the rope was. And then the analogous things would be like, the rope is all your phenomenal experiences of autobiographical memory and emotions and so forth, that you were confusing for being a self in this essence sense.
MT: That’s right. But they don’t go away. They just are revealed to be what they actually are. So let’s say I see a snake over there. I feel in danger I’m going to die. I get poisoned to poison the snake, or I get a gun to shoot the snake, or all these ways to try to overcome the snake. And all of them are unnecessary, right? They’re all completely delusional, because we just have to see that it’s a rope, not a snake. But there is a rope there.
And to come back to a very similar analogy, I just always like this one that Shinzen uses. He would always say—probably still does say it—imagine you had a handful of thread, and a bunch of the thread was red and a bunch of the thread was white and they were intermingled. There would be this perception of pink. If you get far enough away from it, you just perceive pink. But there isn’t actually any pink there. There’s zero amount of pink there. And so it’s a very similar analogy. This is the status of the ego as an entity.
JO: Got it. Okay. Maybe now would be a good time to transition to this Advaita, or—I actually don’t know how much the nondual Shaiva Tantras use this idea of a true self. I guess they do. But self with a capital S or you have a true self, how does that relate to this Buddhist terrain we’ve just sketched?
MT: If I was concerned that people were going to be tarring and feathering me for what I was saying before, now I’m 100% certain as I now continue speaking that I will be tarred and feathered. But it’s how I see it, and this is not a new point. It’s something that’s been noted for at least a thousand years and that is the Buddhist concept of the Buddha Nature and the nondual Shaiva Tantra of concept of the true self are pretty hard to distinguish.
I think because people are people, human beings are human beings, or let’s just say beings are beings. In fact, they are the same thing just talked about in a slightly different way. And I will say the traditions talk about them differently, although dualistic tantra—dualistic Hindu Tantra—does talk about it differently. Advaita Vedanta talks about it differently, but by the time we get to nondual Shaiva Tantra, the way that the self is being talked about is very, very similar to the way, let’s say, Dzogchen talks about it.
And so, this is a different level, right? This is ontologically on a different plane than the sense of self, right? The capital S self—and I’ll just dive in all the way and commit and say—the capital of self or the Buddha nature are, in fact, existence itself, not existence as a body, not existence in the material sense. But remember, this is consciousness first kind of conception. You know, awareness itself is the fundamental groundless ground, and the Buddha Nature or the true self is pointing to that. That fundamental—dare we call it an essence.
JO: Yeah. There’s an interesting thing too. I think it’s Hareesh that I’ve heard use this phrase. I guess it’s probably from nondual Shaiva Tantra, where what they’re preoccupied with in practice is the referent of the I cognition. And there’s this interesting thing where like, they’re negating all the same things that the Buddhists would negate if you’re doing Vipassana and being like, I’m not this, I’m not this, not self, not self, not self. But they’re following the thread of the sense of I while they do that, and just like noticing that I always referred to awareness. It just got confused with all these things.
MT: Yes, just to quote Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, we could say, that is Rigpa: the Buddha Nature present in all sentient beings, which is none other than Samantabhadra. It is also called space and awareness, or unobstructed empty cognizance. That unobstructed empty cognizance, it’s not even manifest yet, it is potential. The word in Tibetan is Lomaten, forgive my mispronunciation, but Lomaten. This unobstructed empty cognizance, I think, is exactly what is being pointed to in nondual Shaiva Tantra as well, when they say Shiva, you know, or the Self. So this is the awakeness itself, right? The awakeness itself that is unobstructed, that is empty. If we can call anything foundational, it’s the foundation.
JO: So in a way, it has the attributes, although calling it something that has attributes is kind of confusing. It has the attributes that you were mistaking all these transient appearances when you thought you had a permanent, continuous self.
MT: It’s the thing that all of those are borrowing that from, right? The thing that gets confusing when we talk about the sense of self, we’re usually restricting it conventionally to things like our thoughts about ourselves and our feelings about ourselves within us, so to speak. And if we kind of stretch it out to the furthest dimension, and maybe things in culture and society that we relate to, like our sports teams that we love, or whatever, this could all be thought of as a sense of self. But when we’re talking about unobstructed empty cognizance, the awakeness as the groundless ground, that applies to everything. The sky comes from that, the trees come from that, the rocks come from that, right? It’s all appearing as an ornament or some kind of expression of this basic awake space.
JO: I guess what I’m wondering is why experientially there’s this insistence, at least in nondual Shaiva Tantra, on that being what you are. I mean, it’s true in Dzogchen too, right? It’s your true nature. Like, why shouldn’t that just be the thing out of which what you are arises, but predates you, you know?
MT: I think the answer is because that’s the way it is. That’s what you discover. But because when you examine the sense of self, it falls apart, whereas when you examine the sense of unobstructed empty cognizance, it’s empty, but it doesn’t fall apart into something more fundamental.
JO: Right. So being confused, there are two ways it goes. One is it seems like transient appearances borrow from the stability of the ground, but also it seems in an ignorant state like the ground is bound by all the things that bind transient appearances. Like I’m actually this small thing.
MT: Yeah, it appears that way, and it is one of the interesting, let’s call it siddhis or powers of Rigpa or of the Buddha Nature or of self as deity. It can delude itself. It can pretend to be small. It can pretend to be impermanent. It can pretend to be breakable, and then believe that provisionally. It’s the power of self-delusion, and what that arises out of, in different traditions, is different, how they talk about where that comes from and so on. But the idea is the same. And it’s logical because if we are, in fact, Buddha Nature, if we’re going to take seriously the idea of true self being none other than Shiva, then what could possibly delude you? Nothing is powerful enough to delude you. The only way it can happen is if you, for whatever reason, for fun and profit, decide to delude yourself. And of course, this is not happening on the level of an ego, right? This is happening at a much, much, much deeper level.
And that is interesting, but it’s also why one way of looking at it, in kind of the absolute view, there’s no ground to traverse in exactly the same way that there’s no poison or gun or machete needed to kill the snake that is actually a rope. There’s no technique or meditation or purification or devotional ritual required to see one’s true nature. Just the decision to see it at a deep enough level and it’s done.
JO: And even if you don’t ever discover—this is the weird Samsara is Nirvana thing—even if you don’t ever discover that the seeming snake is just a rope, the rope’s not gonna bite you, or something like that. You know, like it’s like, on your way. Yeah.
MT: And so that’s a little trickier because of course we do feel the suffering of the imaginary sense of self, right? We actually feel the suffering of it. And so even though we never get bit by the illusory snake, in a way we at least feel bit by the illusory ego, the illusory sense of self. Now again, in the absolute view, even the bites are seen through and are empty and nothing is ever harmed, right? It’s another really important thing. Nothing can ever be harmed on a true level. But we don’t want to negate the suffering of beings.
JO: Yeah. Okay, I want to pivot a little bit to the psychedelics question, because people often talk about the connection between meditation and psychedelics as being that psychedelics give this experience, or can give this experience—especially at high doses—of ego dissolution. And that’s the term of art that they’re, they use in psychedelic circles. But I think, I’d be curious to see if you agree, something more goes away in the psychedelic experience than needs to in just this recognition that we’ve been talking about.
MT: Sure. So now we’re talking about special states, which is a different subset of what we’ve been talking about. It is certainly the case that egos just happen and thoughts arise and feelings arise and they get woven together into senses of self or into egos. And that can be done in such a way that we’re identified with it or such a way that we’re not identified with it. A different thing can happen—different but related thing—under the influence of psychedelics or—just as a shout out to Jeffrey Kreipel—during traumatic experiences, or in many other ways where the weaving together of the sensory experiences gets interrupted. There’s not even a woven together sensory experience to identify with in the first place.
So an example of this would be doing special sorts of meditation to the place where—I’ll just give a simple example, there’s many other ways this can happen, but let’s say all internal dialogue ceases. Temporarily, it just stops. And it is not there anymore in any way. And for many people that’s a major component of the sense of self. If we’re weaving together various strands of sensory experience into a sense of self, one of the main thick strands of that thing we’re weaving together is the internal dialogue. And let’s say our internal dialogue just stops. Wholesale. There is no internal dialogue there temporarily. It’s a pretty common meditation experience, and a pretty common psychedelic experience. Then it becomes really hard to even talk about identifying with an ego, because you’re not able to weave one together in the first place, because one of the strands is missing. Or at least what you’re weaving together is greatly reduced in its impact. There’s not a lot there.
And this can happen with other things too, like using certain drugs, the sense of having a body disappears. And people can be very, very identified with the body. I am the body is maybe the most egoic phrase possible. And so when the actual sensory experience of having a body at all either becomes so different that it’s alien and doesn’t feel like our body experience normally would, or just stops, then, again, there’s nothing to identify with.
So you’re right, this is a different thing, right? This is different than having a functional ego that you’re not identified with. This is called not having a functional ego, which is why it’s good that these states don’t last, and why it’s important and helpful that the ego, the strands of experience of a normal, healthy ego, reboot after a while.
JO: Right. It’s interesting you say that it’s good, because I’m sure many psychedelic practitioners would say, that’s the whole bummer, when you come down from the trip, the walls of the ego rebuild themselves. It can seem that the freedom that you get when this actually dissolves is contingent on it going away, and then you can try to make it go away again or something.
MT: Yeah, yeah. And you know, it does feel that way, and it can be very pleasant, but I’ll tell you, it can also be very unpleasant, and that is called psychosis, right? Where you can’t find enough of a functional ego to even do anything or even hang together as kind of an experiencing entity.
And so in one way, that can be very pleasant and point to awakening or even be an awakening experience, sometimes a very deep awakening experience, can also be psychotic and really unpleasant. And I think almost all psychedelic trips are helpful and pleasant, but there is some percentage that aren’t. And the ones that really aren’t, aren’t usually because of this reason. The person has trouble reassembling the sense of self and getting it to come back on line.
Now, when it’s good, when the experience leaves a lasting impact, when the psychedelic experience of the dissolution of the sense of self leaves a lasting impact in a positive way, it’s because the sense of self went away. And, just to put it in a simple way, you were still there. The sense of self completely or partially disappeared, and you didn’t die. And so you now have a gut level, intuitive experience of disidentification with the ego. Oh, I’m not the ego. And that is the beginning of awakening. That’s an awakening experience. I am not the ego. There’s further to go. There’s more to understand, but that’s a very, very important moment. And so these ego dissolution experiences of the kind we’re describing can be really, really helpful. But we do want some kind of functional person to re-arise after that so that we can walk around in society and do things.
JO: I guess also you were mentioning, like, it can happen short of full ego dissolution too, where like just the sense of self can change. And then if you have the right view, it can be analogous to Deity Yoga, where if this thing you were taking to be fixed and permanent and stable just shifts a little bit, that might be the doorway opening to disidentifying from it.
MT: That’s right. On this point, this is why both in psychedelics and in powerful meditation experiences, usually in retreat—and in trauma, because trauma mimics this as well. Sometimes we just get injured in such a way that we can’t put together an ego experience. In all of these, the first reaction is almost always, not always, but almost always, is terror, extreme terror. And it’s extreme terror, because why? Because we’re identified with the ego and the ego is gone. So we’re dying, and it really feels like we’re going to die. For real, I am dying. That’s the biggest fear. The fear becomes huge. And this is the same fear that then vanishes from one’s life.
If you wait it out just a little bit, you realize, oh, the ego dissolved and I’m still here. The ego vanished, and whatever I am, which clearly isn’t the ego, is still awake. So again, that’s why something I relate to in the descriptions of first path and early Buddhism, where the fear of death is gone. That’s what they’re talking about. And it really does do that. It’s very surprising how powerful that can be.
JO: Yeah. I guess just to make sure that you don’t get fully crucified by the doctrinaire.
MT: It’s too late.
JO: It’s too late for that. This is the final podcast you will record. We’ll see. We’ll throw them a little bit of fun. Is the way that they would describe that, that you’re seeing, not that you’re immortal exactly, but that the whole paradigm of birth and death was wrong. It’s not that you were born and will live forever. It’s that you were never born and therefore will never die, something like that.
MT: Yeah. Or it can be, I don’t know how to put it, but I’ll just say smaller than that, a little more parochial than that, where you just say the thing that you thought you were and you thought you had to defend, you realize doesn’t even exist. Or, to put it differently, is just a construction. And the falling apart or holding together of that thing, which previously was the most important thing in the world, actually doesn’t matter that much.
JO: Is a corollary of that, that one can be protected from the truly harrowing parts of these negative psychedelic experiences by just not being identified? Like, you could go all the way into psychosis and be fine if you are sufficiently free.
MT: That’s a little above my pay grade. I’m not a psychologist. I’m not sure if you could even define that as psychosis the way you’re talking about it. But I would just say—at least my experience of that, which has been pretty extreme—was that the minute you realize you’re not the ego, it’s no longer harrowing. And when I say no longer, I mean going from the worst possible experience to actually quite an intense, pleasant experience in the blink of an eye.
JO: Without some sense of coherence necessarily reassembling, like, oh, I now can feel the boundaries of my body again. So it’s on a different dimension than the ego reconstituting.
MT: 100%. 100%. Very different dimension. And this is why the understanding that, again, it’s all kind of a misapprehension really resonates for me because I can see how when you really see clearly, the problem just vanishes. It doesn’t need to be resolved. It doesn’t need to be worked out. It’s just gone because it was, in the deepest way of understanding it, imaginary.
JO: One more thing on this topic. People are often sort of worried when they’ve heard this idea of it being important to have a healthy sense of self, that they might not be sufficiently robust to actually undertake a meditation practice. Is there some minimum bar of well-constructed egohood that you think is necessary to start doing these emptiness practices?
MT: Absolutely. I mean, even the traditions recognize this, that you do need a functional ego in order to be able to handle the dissolution of the ego. If mental health is compromised to the point where it’s hard to hold an ego together, literally psychotic or you’re borderline psychotic or other conditions that are like that, where the ego has a very hard time maintaining healthy coherence, doing practices that disrupt healthy coherence is a really bad idea.
And—this is just an interesting sidebar—and that is that in the long history of meditative practice and so on, there hasn’t been a lot of work on what to do for those kinds of folks. But in the last 30 years or so, there has been some work done on that. And so things like dialectical behavioral therapy have arisen, have been developed, which actually boils down to meditation for people who have a problem maintaining a healthy ego. So there are practices that are appropriate for those folks. But I would say this is exactly the population who should never do psychedelics. Like if you or even if anyone in your genetic family is schizophrenic or psychotic, psychedelics are definitely not to be done.
JO: Wrong direction.
MT: Wrong direction. You’re already good at that. You’re already good at that. You have a deep ability to do that. And you need to work on getting a little better at maintaining healthy ego coherence.
JO: Okay. Just now you mentioned that there are meditation practices that can disrupt the coherence of the sense of self or the ego rather like psychedelics do. So maybe we could disambiguate the ones that are just concerned with seeing through this confused identification, and the ones that actually are deconstructing something.
MT: Yeah. So let’s take an example of the Vipassana way of doing this. My experience of doing this in a Vipassana way is mainly via Shinzen, which is already kind of unusual, right? It’s not a typical Vipassana way, but it’s related. And, he was close friends with Bill Hamilton. And so this is going to be very recognizable to anyone from sort of the hardcore Dharma world, where you start looking at the individual sensory strands of experience.
So we start, let’s say, looking at body sensation and noticing its phenomenological qualities, describing it phenomenologically, feeling, this is hot, this is cold, this is tight, this is loose, this is pleasant, this is unpleasant, really getting into it on that level. And then eventually noticing the impermanence of that.
And then you do the same thing with emotional sensations, eventually noticing them as just streams of vibrating impermanence. And then you do the same thing with, let’s say, self-talk, eventually going from the level of understandable semantic content to just a sort of vibratory sound in the head. And maybe the same thing with mental images, pictures of our own body and stuff at first seeming to represent things, but eventually just being seen as dots of light and color. And all of that eventually just being like a flowing stream of impermanent squiggles.
That’s very hard to weave together into a sense of self. And so that’s the direction of using Vipassana to go into dissolution of egoic experience. Right? At that point, I’m not even describing that deep of a level of it. That’s already pretty transformative though. You see how it would be pretty hard to put together some kind of sense of self to identify with. When all you’ve got are these streams of vibratory impermanence at this kind of microscopic level, micro-phenomenological level.
JO: This is sort of analogous to like zooming in with a microscope on something until you can’t even tell what the thing is anymore.
MT: I don’t know if anyone is old enough to remember what newspaper photographs used to look like. But newspaper photographs used to be half tones, which essentially means they were black, white and gray dots. And so, you know, here you are looking at a picture of someone scoring a touchdown, but then you zoom in on it, zoom in on it, zoom in on it, and eventually all you’ve got are some dots. And you’re still looking at the same photograph, but this greater sense of what it quote unquote is or what it constellates together as is just completely gone.
JO: And I guess like the later Buddhists reading on what you’re actually trying to do there, is not to stay that zoomed in, but to realize that it’s printed on paper or something.
MT: Right. And this is what I mean. Emptiness is related to this, but is something that we can apprehend more directly. You don’t have to see it. You don’t have to experience these various streams separately, and you don’t have to zoom in to this micro phenomenological level, we just can directly recognize that they are “dreamlike,” that they are indefinable, and so on. Now those sound like intellectual qualities or intellectual cognitive constructions, but it’s just a way of talking about it.
The experience is just almost like seeing through them. They’re still there, but they’re not giving rise to a construction in the mind of an idea about it. And so that’s possible to do, again, that’s possible to do with no technique at all, and a path of zero millimeters. Most people, of course, can’t do that. It does take time and it does take a path, but what’s happening there is not a special state of highly concentrated zoomed-in-ness. It’s just directly recognizing the whole thing as a show.
JO: Yeah. It’s interesting. I’m getting a picture now of almost all these early Buddhist methods or many of the early Buddhist methods, and Jhana, and so forth and psychedelics are all different versions of special states that can make realizing what’s beyond special states easier.
MT: Much, much easier. But they’re also not that easy and hard to get to, hard to create, and require special circumstances, special life circumstances, and in some cases, special concentrative abilities that you literally have to be born with for some levels of Jhana, and so on. Whereas emptiness, again, one of the most common ancient metaphors is, seeing how all experience is like a city reflected in a mirror. All the detail is there, all the color is there, the information is there, but there’s no city there. A much more modern metaphor would be like looking at a city on a screen. It’s there but not there.
JO: And maybe you press your eyes really close to the screen and look at the pixels until it becomes clear it’s a screen, or in this emptiness analogy, you just knock on the screen and suddenly it becomes clear.
MT: Yeah, or you just get it, right? Like, oh, I see the screen. And so, yes, that’s a great way of unpacking that metaphor, or going more deeply with it. That’s exactly right.
And because people do have, again, just due to being sick, due to violent trauma, due to special circumstances, taking drugs, all kinds of stuff, people will have dissolution type no-self experiences. That can seem to be like the only way. And most of the early practices are sort of like trying to induce a similar path. Whereas I think the later practices, the much more Vajrayana or nondual Shaiva Tantra type practices, I think are much more sophisticated and are just like, hey, you don’t have to twist yourself into a pretzel and go through these tremendous austerities. You just have to see clearly.
That’s a massive improvement. Now, just have to see clearly, that’s still hard. But it’s why when you hear a Dzogchen teacher, they really are saying something fundamentally different than, let’s say, a Theravada teacher. It’s not just, quote unquote, all Buddhism. They are trying to get you to notice something, I think, different and via quite a different method.
JO: And for the Michael Taft heads to connect this to another theme of yours, this is the same distinction that you make with de-reification versus unfabrication, de-fabrication.
MT: Yeah, that’s right. I feel like it’s really common for people to mix up reification and fabrication, where reifying something or conceptualizing it is seen as necessary for there to be the perception of a world at all. That would be more of an early Buddhist kind of view. You see that view epitomized in the book, Seeing that Frees, right? It’s like in there, Rob Burbea talks on and on again, where he equates, “the fading of perception” with de-reification, right? So if you’re not seeing something in a reified way, the senses start to shut off.
And that’s not necessarily the case. That’s going in the direction of dissolution. That’s saying that to reify is to fabricate. But it turns out you can fabricate a world without reifying it. That’s the insight of later Buddhism and also Hindu Tantra, nondual Hindu Tantra.
JO: I’ll speak for concept lovers everywhere and just clarify this point. So you mentioned de-reification, you don’t have to conceptualize. This is the thing that’s been tricky for me in my practice, especially loving concepts as I do. There’s a way that concepts can be reified, but also like you can make use of all the concepts without them necessarily reifying, something like that.
MT: Well, yeah, this is the case. I mean, I give the example of deeply realized Rinpoches in the Vajrayana tradition of Tibet. These people are highly intellectual and really sharp, right? They’re not anti-intellectual stoners sitting around dreaming castles in the air or something. These people are using their intellect with incredible sharpness and perspicacity, right? They’re good at it. And yet presumably, at least the very awake ones are not reifying any of that. So even though we can say that reification is based on concept, that doesn’t mean that all concepts are reified. It’s a deep misunderstanding to take this in an anti-intellectual direction.
Now, of course, what we find in the West is people who are so caught up, so identified–we get back to the ego identification here–they’re so identified with their intellectual conceptual prowess and their ability to move conceptual objects around, that they can’t detach enough to see the emptiness of them. And so it is the case that it’s important to pry their rigid little fingers off their conceptual mind enough so that they can start to see the emptiness of it. In the West, there’s a necessary corrective where we do bop the intellect on the nose there for a while and say, sit down in your corner.
But what happens over time is that people take that into full-blown anti-intellectualism and like, okay, I’m just going to be Hanshan up on my cold mountain playing with squirrels and frogs and give up on the intellect entirely. And it’s like, no, no, no, it’s skillful means, right? It’s stage-based. For a while, you have to give that up, but eventually it needs to come back on full bore. Incredibly important point.
JO: You stop thinking that the boundaries of the concepts sort of inscribe boundaries onto the field of awareness or onto the ground of being.
MT: That’s right. And so in a way, this thing that we’re saying about concepts and the intellectual mind, it can be reflected even larger in the whole idea about the ego, right? It can be an important corrective for a while to be like shut down the ego or set it aside or, or step outside it. But this is not entirely necessary and certainly it’s just a stage. Even when it’s useful, it’s a stage.
JO: Yeah.
MT: And then eventually we want to reanimate that thing with the full force of the Buddha Nature in a completely empty, not identified way. This is why, again, we see this over and over that highly, highly, highly realized people have really powerful, charismatic egos. They’re not sitting around being inscrutable clouds.
JO: Yeah. This connects to our prior conversation about nondual one and nondual two also, which is that in nondual one, you are discovering what isn’t bound by those various concepts, but you’re still creating a distinction between that freedom and all of the appearances.
MT: That’s right. And so again, this is more sophisticated and it’s really deeply understanding the difference between reification and fabrication, the difference between ego dissolution and just simply seeing the emptiness of the ego. I feel like the first one, the earlier one, the dissolution based stuff, as beautiful as that is and as powerful as that is, and as transformative as that is, it’s kind of a brute force method that is mimicking something like trauma or something like a drug experience by shutting things down—and it works. But over time, I feel like the smartest people in Asia for a thousand years or several thousand years working on this came up with much more sophisticated methods that don’t require this kind of extreme sport version.
JO: Yeah, this is good, Michael. We’ve gotten you on record now saying that Buddhism and Advaita are the same thing, but also the early Buddhists really blew it. And this is my secret agenda the whole time.
MT: Right, exactly. Yeah, this could be used against me in a court of Buddhist law.
JO: Okay, yeah. For listeners who haven’t heard our prior conversation, it was about this distinction that you were trying to emphasize between nondual one, which is the nonduality of subject and object, and nondual two, which is the nonduality of emptiness and form. And a theme that sort of runs through our conversation so far is that while ego dissolution experiences or deconstructive experiences can reveal something about what remains, they’re not synonymous with the goal of recognizing the emptiness of self. Is that the same as the distinction between nondual one and nondual two, if you really get why those two things aren’t the same?
MT: Roughly, yes. I mean, we could roughly say that seeing the dissolution of the ego in a deep way, we start to recognize nondual one, where all things are arising in this field of awareness and therefore are non-separate in that field of awareness. But we might still accidentally or via karma or whatever, get nondual two out of that, but we wouldn’t necessarily. Whereas nondual two becomes really much clearer in a non-dissolution experience where we see that it almost has to, it almost requires a non-dissolution experience because the world of appearances needs to be present in order to see its non-separation from the world of, let’s say, the void or the world of pure awareness.
JO: The other thing that made this nondual one, nondual two distinction clear for me was, it’s clearest in the case of like almost like self-inquiry, where you can trace the I back to this rather formless witness and then you’re like, I’m free, but there’s like stepping back from the world posture. And almost like literally, you’re sort of like keeping the world on one side so that you can stay in this free place.
MT: Yeah. And again, stage-dependently, that can be really skillful and really worth doing, but we don’t want to stay there.
JO: Yeah.
MT: Right. We definitely want to move past that into recognizing that, oh, there is never any separation between awareness and the appearance of the world. They’re always nondually, non-separate. They co-arise. That’s, I would say, a much deeper realization. They are a hierarchy, and the one is more powerful than the other, more general.
JO: Okay. So to recap, the no-self idea is correct insofar as there’s nothing that appears that has this quality of permanence and separateness and continuity and so forth that it seems to. But that doesn’t mean either that the healthy ego that we construct through development has to go away, nor does it mean that we’re, you know, nihilistic, unconscious zombies, because there is awareness or something appears. And that is what you are in the true self-language of Advaita or nondual Shaiva Tantra. But that’s consistent with a robust, fully-constructed, fully-healthy self, so long as you don’t confuse one with the other. Or in our nondual one, nondual-two thing, confuse one from being fully-dual, fully-separate from the other.
MT: Yes. Good recap, and we spent some time here to disambiguate all this. Do you think this is helping anybody?
JO: It would have helped me.
MT: It would have helped me, too. So maybe that’s as good as we could do. I just want to make sure we’re not just intellectually spinning our tires in the mud here.
JO: Yeah. I can tell you, you’re wise to not spend too much time on Twitter. I spend a lot of time on Twitter. Every other month, somebody who doesn’t have a serious meditation practice says, I don’t want a serious meditation practice because of course I want to keep my self. I want to know the boundaries of my body. Essentially, they make the case for a healthy sense of self in the Western sense, and therefore say Buddhism bad. So I think we’ve disabused those people of that. But then also, there’s lots of psychonauts who think that they need to get rid of themselves.
MT: Yeah, it’s so fascinating. The whole problem is mistaking a single word as meaning a single thing, right? Just like the word nondual actually ends up being used in very, very different ways in different contexts. The whole idea that there is just one Buddhism that believes one thing is just not true. And so, I heard a Buddhist teacher say X, but this other Buddhist teacher say Y causes huge, huge, huge amounts of misunderstanding. So hopefully, at least some of this is helping people to recognize that different things are being talked about here.
JO: Another way that this frequently comes up, especially in my circles, is our mutual friend David Chapman has a lovely post called Your Self is Not a Spiritual Obstacle. And this is very affirming for people, certainly affirming for me, and also very confusing if you’re doing this move of assuming self to mean the same thing across contexts.
MT: Yes, assuming that what we’re trying to do is dissolution in all contexts and so on. There’s a whole bunch of assumptions that we need to just not assume. All right, Jake, thank you so much for being willing to ask all these questions.
JO: My pleasure, Michael. Always a joy.
MT: That’s it for this episode of Deconstructing Yourself.
