The Antibody Network ·Themes
Theme

The Self

The witness behind the witness

Every contemplative tradition arrives, eventually, at the same surprise: the one who looks is not the one who thought it was looking.

Walk this theme as a course: Who Is Asking →

Voices Across the Conversation 4

Keep looking behind the looker, the mystics say. Past the body. Past the thoughts. Past the one who is having the thoughts. There is a point at which the looker disappears and the looking continues.

What is left is the question every tradition deep enough has had to make a vocabulary for. The Upanishads call it Atman, the Self with a capital S, the witness that is aware of awareness, and then, scandalously, identify it with Brahman, the ground of being. Eckhart calls it the Seelengrund and is tried for heresy. The Sufis call its uncovering fana, annihilation, and al-Hallaj is crucified for naming it.

The Buddhist door is interesting because it refuses the noun. There is no Self with a capital S, the Buddha insists. But there is also, read closely, no self with a small s. What is left when you keep looking? Not-self. Not nothing. The open ground that the Hindu tradition reaches for from the other side, and that the Buddhist tradition refuses to let you reify.

Once you can see the move, you start to see it everywhere. Jesus saying I and the Father are one. Lao Tzu’s sage who has emptied himself. Plotinus’s intellect that is one with what it knows. Different doors, the same room, and the room is not somewhere you have ever not been.

Teachings On the Map 38
Buddhism
To Forget the Self
Dogen Zenji, Genjokoan (1233)
Christianity
The Beatitudes
Matthew 5:1–12
Christianity
I and the Father Are One
John 10:30 & 14:10
Christianity
The Kingdom Is Within You
Luke 17:20–21
Gnosticism
I Am the Light Over All Things
Gospel of Thomas, Saying 77
Hinduism
Tat Tvam Asi — Thou Art That
Chandogya Upanishad 6.8.7
Hinduism
The Self in All Things — Aham Brahmasmi
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 1.4.10
Hinduism
The Four States — Turiya
Mandukya Upanishad
Indigenous
All My Relations — Mitakuye Oyasin
Lakota tradition / Black Elk
Mysticism
The Eye Through Which God Sees
Meister Eckhart, Sermons (c. 1300)
Mysticism
On Love — The Pruning
Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet (1923)
Shinto
Musubi — The Generative Weaving
Kojiki / Shinto cosmology
Sufism
Ana al-Haqq — I Am the Truth
Al-Hallaj & Ibn Arabi (9th–13th century)
Taoism
Subtracting Daily
Tao Te Ching, Chapter 48 (Mitchell trans.)
Zoroastrianism
Zarathustra’s Hymns — The Gathas
Yasna 28 (c. 1500–1000 BCE)
Perennial
The Universe Is Peopling
Alan Watts, The Way of Zen (1957) / various lectures
Science
We Are Made of Star Stuff
Carl Sagan, Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1980)
Perennial
The Observer Is the Observed
J. Krishnamurti, The First and Last Freedom (1954) / various talks
Perennial
The Power That Comes the Other Way
Alan Watts, Man and Nature lecture, SMU (1965)
Science
The Double Slit Experiment
Young’s double-slit experiment (1801) / Quantum mechanics (20th century)
Hinduism
Karma: The True Meaning
Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 4 / Upanishads
Stoicism
Amor Fati
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Mysticism
The Process of Subtraction
Meister Eckhart, Sermons
Mysticism
Affliction
Simone Weil, “The Love of God and Affliction” (c. 1942), collected in Waiting for God
Mysticism
The Dark Night of the Soul
John of the Cross, The Dark Night of the Soul (c. 1578–79)
Greek
Hubris and the Fall
Greek tragic tradition: Sophocles, Aeschylus, Homer
Perennial
The Monomyth
Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949)
Perennial
The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966)
Perennial
Ram Dass and the Turn
Ram Dass, Be Here Now (1971); Becoming Nobody (documentary, 2019)
Perennial
You Are An Aperture
Alan Watts, various lectures and writings (1960s–1973)
Sufism
Al-Insan al-Kamil — The Perfect Human
Ibn Arabi — Fusus al-Hikam (The Bezels of Wisdom, 1229 CE)
Christianity
A Son of God — The Added Article
Gospel of John 10:30–34; Psalm 82:6
Buddhism
The Half-Smile
Iconography of the meditating Buddha; Ram Dass on compassion
Hinduism
Nan Yar — Who Am I
Ramana Maharshi, Nan Yar (Who Am I?), c. 1902
Confucianism
A Transmitter and Not a Maker
Analects VII.1, with II.11 and VII.19 — trans. James Legge, 1893
Greek
Hamartia — Some Error or Frailty
Aristotle, Poetics, ch. XIII (trans. S. H. Butcher)
Greek
Icarus — Fly Between the Two
Ovid, Metamorphoses VIII
Greek
Topos and Khôra — The Place and the Placeless
Aristotle, Physics IV · Plato, Timaeus
Dispatches Engaging The Self 4
Sister Themes
The Antibody Network · The Self